Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/579

VII NEW BOOKS. Problems of Philosophy ; or Principles of Epistemology and Metaphysics. By JAMES HERVEY HYSLOP, Ph.D., LL.D., formerly Professor of Logic and Ethics, Columbia University, New York. New York : The Macmillan Company, 1905. THE author informs us in the preface that he has here tried to reproduce the results of his own reflexion on philosophic problems. No one who has read any considerable part of the book will dispute Dr. Hyslop's claim to originality either in style or in treatment. From the literary standpoint the arrangement is confused, the form of expression awkward and obscure, and many of the discussions are inordinately lengthened. It is not too much to say that the book might without serious loss have been compressed to one-half its size. In those numerous passages where Dr. Hyslop abandons the main course of his argument to declaim against the " intolerance of the religious mind " he exhibits a real though a somewhat trite and common-place lucidity ; occasionally in this kind of rhetoric he even reaches vigour and force. The style of the more abstract parts of the book may be appreciated from a single specimen. I quote from page 620: "If evolution be the medium for transmitting the achievements of the present intact into the future, whatever sombre hues it may have for those impatient minds who watch in pain its re- morseless course, it will still shelter for preservation more than it allows to perish, and a defensible hope may hover over a limitless horizon which an older view had pictured as a precipice leading into a bottomless gulf ". It would be interesting to examine this jungle of metaphors or to inquire into the problem presented by the phrase ' limitless horizon '. The author at the outset challenges criticism by his tedious and not very illuminating discussions of technical language. It is startling to learn in the preface that * . is to omit many " subordinate ques- tions like personality, unity of consciousness, the ego," etc., because he does not regard them as " in any way conditioning the conclusions upon larger questions ". The reader will surely expect a novel treatment of " Principles of Epistemology " where the problem of the ego is regarded as irrelevant ; but he will scarcely be prepared for the obscurities and ambiguities which actually follow. The function of Theory of Know- ledge is for Dr. Hyslop not primarily to explain how knowledge arises, but to determine its validity it is an " orthological " science a " science of validity in the intellectual activities of the mind " ; yet emphasis is repeatedly laid on the radical character of the distinc- tion between Epistemology and Metaphysics ! The chapter entitled " Analysis of the Problem of Knowledge," to which the reader turns expecting fresh light on the familiar controversy gives us a be- wildering account of the differences between what Dr. Hyslop calls immediacy, certitude, legitimacy and intelligibility. Can anything but confusion result from such treatment as this? Yet the author believes himself to have laid bare the roots of many controversies by calling attention to the equivocal import of fundamental terms ! And