ples that serve as their foundations." When these principles are regarded as of mere relative value they have lost their power. The masses will have the absolute, and to those who speak of absolute values they will always turn. Hence it is concluded that the elements which are philosophically inferior are, from a social point of view, the most important. While abounding in paradox and contradiction, the work is very interesting and suggestive. It belongs to the literature of illumination, and is a book which no student of human nature should leave unread.
Adelbert College.
Anderson and Ferrier, Edinburgh and London. Charles Scribners'
Sons, New York, 1898.—pp. viii, 158.Anderson and Ferrier, Edinburgh and London. Charles Scribners'
Sons, New York, 1898.—pp. viii, 160.The simultaneous appearance of these volumes is most appropriate, as both Reid and Hume are better understood and appreciated when there is a parallel reading of their lives. Born on the same day of the same month, the 26th of April, exactly one year intervened between the birth of Reid in 1710, and that of Hume in 1711. Thence the lines of life and of thought widely diverged. Hume was by nature a sceptic, and Reid by nature a man of faith; the one the philosopher of empiricism, the other the philosopher of common sense. Hume not only lived in the world, but was essentially of it, a man of affairs, and of strong social bent, historian and diplomat as well as philosopher. Reid, on the other hand, was a simple country pastor in the earlier years of his career, and later, amidst the more complex and distracting activities of a university life in a large commercial city, he preserved that original simplicity to the end. Hume, moreover, came rapidly to the period of mental maturity, while Reid's development was of a slow growth and of a late fruitage. Hume had planned his magnum opus before his twenty-first year, composed it before twenty-five, and had given it to the world before twenty-eight. It was not, however, until Reid was in his fifty-fifth year that he published his famous work, An Inquiry Into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense. These contrasts, which impress us the more forcibly when we study the lives of Hume and Reid together, illustrate most strikingly the bearing of native temperament, education and environment upon one's point of view, and the general nature of one's philosophical convictions.
It is most fitting that the lives of these Scotch philosophers, who were eighteenth century contemporaries, should be written by two distinguished representatives and teachers of the Scottish philosophy, who have labored together with such conspicuous success in their university careers during the latter half of the nineteenth century.
