276 CRITICAL NOTICES : systems ; partly, the political conditions of Germany have made national unity the primary moral necessity (p. 7). With what- ever success Prof. Steinthal has solved the problem he sets himself, his work will be of importance to English readers because it presents a view very unfamiliar in England, that of the school of Herbart. The first half of the book may in fact be regarded as a quite independent elaboration of Herbart's A//(/emeine Praktische Philosophic, but without the scholasticism which still clings to Herbart in spite of his geniality, owing perhaps to the close compression of his work. Prof. Steinthal's book has the rare merit of a real and striking literary style, and is full of additional interest from its application to pressing prac- tical questions. In speaking of so eminent a writer it would be unbecoming to do more than refer to the kindliness and humanity of feeling, and the force of character and conviction, which give every page he writes the stamp of reality, as the writing of a man who has something to say that is worth saying. The Introduction gives Prof. Steinthal's view of the nature of Ethics, which he rightly groups along with Esthetics. Like Esthetics, it deals not with knowledge but with certain modes of judgment ( BeurfheUung ) expressed in words signifying praise or blame, beauty or ugliness, and embodied in certain feelings which are called Objective or Formal Feelings. The former name distinguishes them from ordinary pathological feelings, which are judgments of self, "the consciousness of heightened or lowered enei'gy of life ". These feelings are purely psychological, and admit of no principle : all ethical systems of Hedonism therefore which are based on them are excluded. The objective feelings however are not states of suffering but peculiar activities of feeling which come into existence with the creation of their objects. Their existence is attested by such facts as these : a hexameter is not felt as a series of feet but as a unity, as a single object of feeling ; a building again, say a Greek temple, is seen as a whole without distinct knowledge of its parts, and the whole as a unity gives a satisfaction which it would not if its parts were different, just as a triangle affords a feeling of ease which it would not if two of its sides were not continued so as to meet. Just so it is with the ethical feeling of approval : it is a feeling felt at the same time that its object is judged to be good. What then are the objects of these feelings ? They are not causal connexions among things such as are the objects of science, but relations of pure form : in the case of art, relations of form of the sensible phenomenon ; in the case of moral relations, of will. As such they are most properly called Formal Feelings. Such feelings then are universal : the relations which are their objects are not dependent on the state of the person, nor on mechanical relations of existence of the things in which they are exhibited. The object is an Idea or Picture : in this ideal product lies the meaning of a work of art or of an act of will.
