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IX. NEW BOOKS. A Brief Introduction to Modern Philosophy. By AKTHUR KBNYON ROGERS, Ph.D. New York : The Macniillan Co. London : Mac- millan & Co., 1899. Pp. viii., 360. As a first book to be placed in the hands of the beginner in Philosophy, this little work is in every respect admirable. The key-note is struck in the first words of the preface : " The following pages have been written with a definite aim in view. This aim has been, in as untechnical a way as possible, and with as little presupposition of previous philosophical training, to show how the problems of philosophy, which are apt to seem to the student on his first introduction to them rather arbitrary and unintelligible and with no very apparent relation to the concrete in- terests of life, in reality are not manufactured problems, but arise of necessity out of any attempt to understand the world and to appreciate the value which belongs to human experience." We believe that Dr. Rogers has succeeded in accomplishing the task which he has set for himself. He begins by pointing out that a Philosophy is simply a connected view of life as a whole, and a certain practical attitude towards it. Its aim is to " do thoroughly and in full consciousness of itself, what in popular thinking we do in a loose and unsystematic fashion ". The author then proceeds to expound and to compare critically the main theories which have been advanced by various philosophers. At the outset he discusses " Dualism, Pantheism and Theism ". Dualism is condemned on the ground .that " any two things which are taken to start with as separate from each other necessarily require some larger con- ception if they are to be brought into relation, for a relation implies that, after all, they do come within some kind of a unity ". Pantheism either "puts the reality back of finite things which are merely its manifestations : or it identifies reality with the finite things taken collectively ". In the first case, it cuts the unifying principle from the things which it is supposed to unify ; in the second it yields " no unity at all, but only a jumble of conflicting particulars ". If a third alternative is adopted and particulars are treated as illusive appearances, Pantheism denies the very facts which it endeavours to explain. The author's own Philosophy is a form of Theism, which is only developed gradually as the book proceeds so as to lead up to the final chapters in which it is explicitly expounded. At the outset Dr. Rogers paves the way for his own positive teaching by a criticism of the form of Theism which passes current in ordinary theology and common-sense theories, as the semi-official philosophy of religion. This leaves us with " three distinct factors material things, conscious beings, and as a third reality which creates and directs them, God". Two difficulties are insisted on. The first is the unintelligible nature of the relation of matter to the Creative Spirit and to other spirits ; the second is that on this view intelligence or design enters into