a sensationalistic empiricist made current among us in the 'seventies of the last century by T. H. Green's Introduction to the Green and Grose edition of Hume. It were much to be wished that some competent scholar would do for Hume, a philosopher who has been no less strangely misunderstood, what Gibson has done for Locke. We still need to have it established by a really historical study of the Treatise and the dialogues on Natural Religion that Hume was neither an empiricist, as Green would make him, nor a positivist, as Huxley represents, but precisely what he calls himself, an " academic or sceptical " philosopher, and that the true measure of his intellectual greatness can only be taken when this simple fact is kept steadily in mind. A gap is also filled in our philosophical literature by the appearance of W. R. Sorley's History of English Philosophy (1920), which begins with Alcuin of York and carries the story down to the end of the igth century. The veteran J. T. Merz completed his masterly History of European Thought, a work to which it would be hard to find a parallel in its scope and the accuracy of knowledge in many fields which it displays, by the issue of the fourth volume in 1914. He has since given us an interesting addendum, containing an outline of his own philosophical inter- pretation of experience in A Fragment on the Human Mind (1919), where it is interesting to see how profoundly a thinker at home in all the developments of French and German thought has been influenced by our own Berkeley and Hume. The Fragment is one of many signs that there is possibly a great future before a really critical Neo-Berkeleyanism. Berkeley received scant justice at the hands of the Anglo-Hegelian " Idealists " of the late igth century, who seem to have been under the impression that his best-known doctrine was meant as a kind of " subjectiv- ism." The zoth century seems likely, by laying stress on the very real element of " natf realism " in his work, to arrive at a more intelligent and more generous estimate of its permanent value. We should not omit to chronicle the real service done to philosophical literature by the Open Court Publishing Com- pany in the reissue (1916) of the epoch-making work of Boole on the Laws of Thought, the original edition of which had become very scarce. It is a great misfortune, owing presumably to the deaths of Dr. Paul Carus and Mr. P. E. B. Jourdain, that the complete republication of the logical writings of G. Boole and his great contemporary Augustus De Morgan has not been proceeded with. A reprint of De Morgan's Formal Logic, his contributions to the logic of relatives, and Trigonometry and Double Algebra, if of no other of his works, is badly needed by the student of the history of modern exact logic.
It is gratifying to note that the study of the great Greek founders of science and philosophy is still zealously prosecuted in Great Britain and in other countries, notably in Italy, which has been remarkably fertile in recent years in all departments of philosophical literature. It may be recorded that all through the war the issue of the great Oxford translation of Aristotle provided for by the will of Jowett slowly proceeded, the last part issued up to the middle of 1921 being the revision of Jowett's own ver- sion of the Politics by W. D. Ross. The Aristotelian student may be excused if he feels a little impatient at the continued non- appearance of just those Aristotelian works which are at once the most interesting and the least adequately represented in English, the Organon, Physics, De Caelo, De Generalione and Meteorologica. But for these logical and cosmological writings the English Aristotle was in 1921 well-nigh complete. Another most valuable work which progressed steadily after 1914, and in 1921 needed only one more volume to be completed, is the handsome edition of Kant's works with that indispensable subsidium, a full collec- tion of variant readings edited by the eminent scholar, E. Cas- sirer. If, in binding and quality of paper, the later volumes inevitably fall off to some extent from the high standard of the earlier, this edition is in all other respects what an edition of a great classic ought to be. It was at last possible to read Kant with pleasure to the eye and with full certainty whether what one had before one was what Kant himself actually allowed to be printed or a (good or bad) conjecture of some modern Kant- scholar. We have too long acquiesced, and that not only in
philosophical works, in a standard of textual accuracy where modern writers are concerned which would be rightly deemed barbarous in editions of the Greek and Latin classics. It is to be hoped that this bad practice will not be tolerated much longer by self-respecting scholars.
The changes in the third edition (1921) of J. Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, the most critical and careful study of the beginnings of Greek science, are an interesting indication of the advance our knowledge of classical antiquity had made since 1908. No contemporary work on the primary Greek philosophers is of quite such first-rate importance as L. Robin's important La Theorie Platonicienne of 1908, the one modern work which systematically and in detail begins the investigation of Plato's philosophy with the proper initial question, what Plato was understood to mean by men like Xenocrates and Aristotle, who heard his doctrines from his own lips. J. Burnet's Greek Philoso- phy, Thales to Plato (1914) proceeds on similar lines, but the writer is limited by the facts that Plato is only one part of his subject and that he has perforce to give most of his space to the exposition of the dialogues. His actual interpretation of Plato was deferred to his second volume, not yet published in 1921. But Robin had issued a brief but important appendix to his main work, Etudes sur la signification el la place ae la Physique dans la Philosophic de Platan (1919). Mention should also be made of the admirable Platonic studies of Adolfo Levi, Sulle interpre- tazioni immanent istiche della filosofia di Platone and // Concetto del Tempo nella filosofia di Platone (1920). These are contribu- tions of first-rate importance to the recovery of the genuine tradition of the first generations of the Platonic Academy. It ought to be clear that it is on the recovery of this tradition, for which there is ample available evidence, that our hopes of definitely ascertaining the real meaning of the first and greatest of all philosophical writers must depend.
The Neo-Thomist movement in the Catholic universities of the Continent still continued, in 1921, to flourish vigorously and to show its vitality in the general excellence of the work in such journals as the Italian Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica and the Revue Ne.o-Scolastique de Philosophie issued by the philosophical faculty of the university of Louvain. Among the actual books produced quite recently by the movement, mention may be made of the brief but highly condensed and valuable study of St. Thomas's thought in its entirety, Le Thomisme, by E. Gilson of the university of Strassburg. The English reader will get an admirable introduction to a great philosophy too little known among us by combining the study of this general introduction to Thomism with that of the very sympathetic exposition of Thomist natural theology by P. H. Wicksteed, The Reactions between Dogma and Philosophy Illustrated from the Works of S. Thomas (1920). The appearance of works like this last leads one to hope that it might soon be impossible for the average historian of philosophy among us to write as though nothing of any significance had been thought or said in philosophy between Plotinus (or even Aristotle) and Descartes. Two other recent contributions to the study of ancient and mediaeval thought may be mentioned. G. M. Stratton's Greek Physiological Psychology (1917) is a painstaking and laudable attempt to edit the important fragment of Theophrastus de Sensu with a transla- tion and full explanatory commentary. In Opera hactenus in- edita Rogeri Bacon fasc. V. (1920), A. G. Steele happily resumed the task, interrupted by the war since 1913, of providing a complete edition of Roger Bacon's writings.
In U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf's two large volumes en- titled Platan (vol. i., 1917; vol. ii., 1919), the veteran German professor makes some interesting and valuable suggestions, but he is debarred from acting as a competent interpreter of Plato partly by complete lack of training in philosophical thought, partly by a habit of treating ingenious guesses of his own about the motives of a classical writer and the circumstances in which his various works were composed as certainties, partly by a curious want of finish in verbal Greek scholarship which makes his long series of conjectural emendations, in spite of a few felicities, into a systematic depravation of the Platonic text.
