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566 NEW BOOKS. into the style of a feuilleton, or the impertinence to explain to people who had the sea daily before their eyes the things they had known all their lives." On p. 330, note 5, the translation of oiaia by " substance " is rightly defended against an attempt to restrict that term to the sense in which it is used by Herbart. In vol. ii., p. 97, note 3, Zeller points out, like Bonitz, that Aristotle nowhere uses the term vovs TTOITJTIKO? ; but he does not pedantically forbid the use of this convenient phrase to expositors of Aristotelianism from Alexander of Aphrodisias downwards. D. G. RITCHIE. The Disclosures of the Universal Mysteries. By S. J. SILBERSTEIN. New 'York : P. Cowen, 1896. Pp. viii., 298. Mr. Silberstein's metaphysical system is one which it is difficult to take seriously, and yet such is the author's vigour and earnestness of thinking impossible to take in any other way. His problem and phraseology make it natural to compare him to Spinoza, to whose race he belongs ; and, indeed, in his strictly deductive procedure, his confident dogmatism, and the boldness of his intellectual flight, he has something hi common with his greater predecessor. On the other hand, his thought is pervaded by a mysticism and word-worship from which Spinoza was wholly free, and we lay down his book at the first reading with but a confused notion of what his system really is. The volume contains four parts. The first deals with the idea of God, or absolute intellectuality. As when we set out to build a machine we have an image of it in our mind beforehand, so must the intellect of the universe have constructed a mental image of the entire universe before it was formed. But the machine, when built, takes its place in the endless and closed series of physical causes and effects. All the change here is illusory ; the real existence of the physical world is an existence of potential matter or potential essence. This potential matter realises the abstract idea of the universe as a whole that has been framed by the absolute intellectuality or God realises it, just as the machine built realises the idea of the builder. Part ii. is entitled Creation or Absolute Emanation. The universe must be absolute and yet not self-existent. If it were not absolute. God would have existed at some time before it : it would be an accident of his nature. But our conception of him requires that everything related to him be related to him as his essence. If it were self-existent it could not be subject to change, as it is. Its existence was explained by Spinoza pantheistical! y. But (1) not every mental process can be a mode of the universal substance ; for that is pure absolute wisdom, and the imagina- tion, e.g., contradicts itself. (2i The universal substance cannot ever possess the attribute of extension, which implies matter and its modi- fications ; it must be conceived by the one attribute of thought. (3) The substance of extension is active and passive ; the being of intellectuality is neither. We thus reach the conclusion that the creation of the universe is an eternal creation, an eternal emanation of the absolute intellectu- ality : thought is the absolute eternal emanator by its own nature. How then does the non-absolute, how do particularised concrete things, come into existence? The answer is as follows: "Inasmuch as the essence of the universe issues forth from the very light of the mind, as a radiation of the intellectual waves or a photographic image, its absolute emanation becomes a general activity in the universal essence ; and by this general activity the universe is actuated. It vibrates itself in spiritual waves and reveals itself according to time and to place in particularisations."