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HENRY STUBT, Personal Idealism. 93 Method, it must be admitted, I think, that Sidgwick completely makes out his case against the supposed supersession of Philo- sophy by History or Sociology. The determination of the ultimate End or summum bonum, and with that the establishment of ethical or political science, its vindication and definition, certainly belong to metaphysics and the theory of knowledge. No study of a series of facts in the past will supply us with the ethical point of view or dispense us from passing a direct judgment upon present beliefs and practices in accordance with the ideal of truth and goodness which we at present possess. But when the existence of ethical judgments at all has been explained and justified, it is perhaps well to remember that Sidgwiok's argument does not suggest though he himself would probably not have denied the really trans- forming and vitalising effect of the historical method upon the specific content of the science. Any reader of the present volume who is in danger of forgetting this could not do better than read the two powerful articles on ' The Evolutionary Method as Applied to Morality ' contributed by Prof. Dewey to the Philosophical Review during the past year, in which this function of history is convincingly vindicated. A. SETH PRINGLE-PATTISON. Personal Idealism : Philosophical Essays by Eight Members of the University of Oxford. Edited by HENRY STURT. London and New York: Macmillan, 1902. 8vo, pp. ix., 393. Price 10s. THE eight authors of this refreshing volume are yclept Stout, Schiller, Gibson, Underbill, Marett, Sturt, Bussell and RashdalL I call their book refreshing, first, because ' band-work,' always a cheerful sight, is peculiarly so in a field like that of philosophy where men are usually more given to stickling for their differences than for their points of union ; second, because the style of most of the essayists is unconventional and enthusiastic sometimes frolicsome even; and finally because the philosophy which the writers profess is a sort of breaking of the ice, and seems to- promise a new channel where formerly the only pathways were Naturalism's desert on the one hand, and the barren summits of the Absolute on the other. Here we have Naturalism's concrete- ness without its lowness, and Absolutism's elevation without its abstractness, for human purposes, of result. The human person, according to these writers, shows itself, if we take it completely and empirically enough, to be a force irreducible to lower terms, and an origin both of theoretic perspectives and of consequences in the way of outward fact. "The current antithesis," says the editor, "between a spiritual philosophy and empiricism ia thoroughly mischievous. If personal life be what is best known and closest to us surely the study of common experience will