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124 NEW BOOKS. Drews looks on Hartmann as the greatest of all philosophers, the Bis- marck of speculation. Perhaps the resemblance goes deeper than he thinks. Bismarck was before all things an intriguing diplomatist, a master in the art of securing alliances and of setting declared or sus- pected enemies by the ears. In like manner Hartmann is always playing off the intellectual tendencies of the age against one another, or cleverly combining them in the semblance of a new synthesis, pessimism with evolution, mechanical with teleological causation, Hedonism with self- devotion, religion with materialism. And he interprets nature itself as a result of the same intriguing policy. Reason, without any power to act, sets Will at variance with itself, and is thus conducting it to final self- annihilation. But the weapons of Prussian statecraft are ill-fitted for the investigation of truth, being apt to break in the hands of those who use them for that purpose. Nor can such pure abstractions as ' Will ' and 1 Reason,' or ' the Logical ' be set to do the work of concrete realities, even when they are wired together by a third abstraction and labelled ' The Unconscious '. Even such a phantasmal occupation as ' setting time at right angles with itself ' implies activity and will. And the world-will, to be convinced of its unreasonableness in wanting to be, must have some reason after all (see Beauty and the Beast). But if so it would never have begun to be, and we should have been spared all this misery. The only real necessity for anything of the kind was that the Philosophy of the Unconscious should be written and that was only a necessity for its author. It would be rash to limit the possibilities of proselytism in a country which has produced Hartmann and Prof. Drews. But from a mere English point of view this ponderous volume would seem unlikely to increase the reputation of its hero. As an expositor the author is not to be compared with Kuno Fischer ; indeed for clearness and elegance his style is much inferior to that of the master whom he has undertaken to interpret. Some sections, particularly in the second half of the book, are made nearly unreadable by the extreme condensation of the ideas and the uncouth phraseology in which they are clothed. And where the meaning comes out more clearly the system can only lose by having its self-contradictions brought closer together and exhibited in a more glaring light. A. W. BENN. Psychologic, des Willens zur Grundlegung der Ethik. Von HERMANN SCHWARZ. Leipzig : Wilhelm Engelmann, 1900. Pp. vii., 391. Mr. Schwarz's standpoint is that of Voluntaristic Apriorism, and in- volves two main tenets : (1) The independence of the will ; (2) The authoritativeness of the act of choice. These, in the author's opinion, constitute the indispensable corner-stones of Ethical Theory. Our author's first effort is accordingly directed towards proving by close psychological analysis the independence of the will. This thesis he supports by showing that approval and disapproval, the pure original acts of will, do not, like pleasure and pain, vary in quality ; nor do they vary in strength or intensity ; they vary only in a way that is entirely sui generis, vis., in degree of saturation. In complete consistency with this thesis of the independence of the will, Mr. Schwarz insists further on its ' objectless ' character. The will is indeed directed towards certain values, is not directionless, but these values are not its objects. And yet these primitive acts of will, though sui generis, are not unmotived. The first part of the present book is in fact devoted to elaborating