122 CEITICAL NOTICES : accustomed manner, with the practical outcome of recent aesthetic theories. In France, where the sterner and less poetical side of so-called " Materialism " and evolutionism has been too effusively and somewhat brutally dwelt upon, there seems to be a disposi- tion on both sides to take it for granted that beauty and art have now played out their part in the world, and that utility and science naked utility and harsh science are to have things all their own way in the kingdoms of the future. Against this cruel and monstrous idea M. Guyau emphatically protests. Herein all English thinkers will probably agree with him. Fortunately for us, we see over here no necessary antagonism between science and poetry, between truth and beauty. On the contrary, some of us see even a close and necessary natural alliance. The sublimity of our modern cosmic conceptions must sooner or later affect our poetry and our art : imagination is none the less imagination because it is true rather than distorted. The last topic of M. Guyau's volume, " L'Avenir et les Lois du Vers," occupies a somewhat disproportionate space in his disquisition, as might naturally be expected from the author of Vers d'un Philosophe ; it teems with apt illustrations and just criticism, but offers compara tively little of interest to a philosophical English reader. The pages swarm w r ith the mysteries of French prosody ; and though to those who (like the present critic) have been brought up in France, Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire are full of subtle music, yet to most Englishmen French poetry still clearly presents itself as a mere trackless jumble of utterly lawless and unrhyth- mical syllables. GBANT ALLEN. Erfdhrung und Denken : Kritische Grundlegung der Erkenntniss- theorie. Yon JOHANNES VOLKELT, Professor der Philosophic an der Universitat zu Basel. Hamburg u. Leipzig : Voss, 1886. Pp. xvi., 556. Prof. Volkelt's new work is at once a supplement to his previous treatment of the theory of knowledge, in reference to the Kantian philosophy (Kant's Erkenntnisstheorie, 1879, noticed in MIND, v. 145), and an important contribution to the study of problems funda- mental in Logic and in Metaphysics. Erkenntnisstheorie, or theory of knowledge, is a term so much in vogue, and the distinctions supposed to be implied in it have been made to wear an aspect of so much significance, that an attempt at exhaustive treatment, even of its more general features, deserves cordial recognition and welcome. Any apology, such as Prof. Volkelt alludes to in his prefatory note, for over-elaborateness in statement, seems needless. The difficulties experienced are very largely dependent on the excessive ambiguity of the technical terms that must be employed, and a writer can hardly confer a greater benefit than by subjecting these to detailed analysis and making clear the
