Page:Philosophical Review Volume 8.djvu/227

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
211
NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.
[Vol. VIII.

lehre, we see that even the Anstoss can be deduced from the Ego. As compared with Kant's, Fichte's doctrine of knowledge represents a Copernican revolution: Kant seeks to deduce self-consciousness from the possibility of experience; Fichte, to deduce experience from the possibility of self-consciousness. If we interpret Kant as making the thing-in-itself and the Ego-in-itself wholly independent of each other, we must admit the wide difference between him and Fichte. But if we assume that his "transcendental subject and transcendental object are somehow united in a higher unity"—and we must do so, if we are to explain their interaction without the hypothesis of a preëstablished harmony,—then we have to admit that the likeness between the thing-in-itself and the Non-Ego is 'unmistakable.'

Ellen Bliss Talbot.
A Mechanico-Physiological Theory of Organic Evolution. Summary. By Carl von Nageli. Translated by Professor F. A. Waugh, and Mr. V. A. Clark, of the University of Vermont. Chicago, The Open Court Publishing Co., 1898.—pp. 53.

This is a translation of the summary which is appended to Nageli's Theorie der Abstammungslehre. Its purpose is to draw the attention of American students to a writer "who has received such comparatively small notice in this country." The translators have added an appendix which gives a brief but clear and comprehensive statement of Nageli's characteristic doctrines. This renders the text much more intelligible to the general reader, but since it serves the purpose of an introduction it ought perhaps to have been placed before, instead of after, the translation. The pamphlet is a modest but well-executed and useful piece of work.

David Irons.
Metafisica, Scienza e Moralita, Studi di Filosofia Morala. Di Francesco de Sarlo. Roma, Tipografia di Giovanni Balbi, 1898.—pp. xlv, 143.

This volume contains an interesting and noteworthy contribution to some of the vexed questions of metaphysical and ethical philosophy. In its scope and purpose, it bears a certain resemblance to Balfour's Foundations of Belief, but it is stronger in thought, more cautious in criticism, and less ornate in style, than that popular but somewhat amateurish production. Signer de Sarlo stoutly maintains the claim of metaphysics to be the necessary complement to natural science; while he holds that both metaphysics and science rest on assumptions that are essentially ethical. The conception of values, a conception thoroughly intrinsic to thought itself, underlies and determines our whole interest in knowledge. Reason apprehends the real through and by means of its ideals, without which we cannot think things at all. And as science comes from the need we feel of idealizing the actual, so morality springs from the need we feel of actualizing the ideal—both needs being fundamental and of the very essence of human nature. The ideal implies the notion of value, hence the teleological point