Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/575

GEORGE SANTAYANA, The Sense of Beauty. 559 Having settled that the essential characteristic of judgment is to posit the copula, or affirm ' being,' and that the ordinary notions of 'possibility,' 'reality,' and 'necessity' are ambiguous, he insti- tutes an inquiry into the meaning of ' being,' in the hope of dis- covering by its analysis, exact notions of its different modalities. His conclusion is that the judgment has two forms, ' Anteriority,' where it affirms a necessary relation, and ' exteriority,' where it simply recognises a sort of ' shock '. His analysis of particular judgments seems to lead to the conclusion that neither of these two forms can be found in its purity. All actual judgments are of a ' mixed form,' and their modality is only possibility. It is in this mixture of the two forms that M. Brunschvicg finds ' the possibility of error ' ; but, on the other hand, in the actual con- sideration of judgments, he frequently uses the fact of possible error as a proof that the judgment is mixed. In fact, though M. Brunschvicg asserts that the true aim of Logic should be to de- termine the legitimacy of the affirmation of being, his definition of judgment as its mere affirmation, and his exclusion of any other means for determining truth than the analysis of judgment in this sense, effectually prevent his ever really approaching the question of validity, which, we agree with him, is the only funda- mental one. In how puerile a spirit he views his main subject, modality itself, may be shown by the conclusion of his third chapter, where he boasts that, whereas Hegel made reality, possi- bility and necessity all equally necessary, his own result is that ' it is necessary there should be an ideal form of necessity, it is real that there is a form of reality, it is possible there should be a form of possibility '. He makes no serious attempt to justify this state- ment, which, if it were true, would surely throw considerable doubt on his own doctrine that all our actual judgments are merely possible. With regard to his distinction of the forms of ' exteri- ority' and ' interiority,' the significance of it is obvious; but, whereas Hegel's attempt to exhibit their close unity, only wins from him the remark that Hegel's system was a dualism, he him- self, while insisting that they have nothing in common, seems yet to consider that they are unified in such a way as never was be- fore, by being merely posited as forms of that intellectual activity, which is warranted as ' one ' merely by our ' profound sentiment ' of its unity. G. E. MOOEE. The Sense of Beauty : being the Outlines of Esthetic Theory. By GEORGE SANTAYANA. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons, 1896. Pp. x., 275. Eine Theorie des Schdnen : mathcmatisch-psychologischc, Studie. Von P. I. HELWIG. Amsterdam : Delsman & Nolthenius, 1897. Pp. viii., 87. THERE are three different ways, Dr. Santayana tells us, in which the study of aesthetics may be approached. We may exercise