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NEW BOOKS. 423 of imagination, Dr. Ambrosi next notices the Atomists, Plato and Aris- totle. He points out that the Stoics, while regarding imagination as a synthetic activity, limited its functions to the reproduction of the data of sense, and that Plotinus first recognised it to be an intellectual func- tion, and creative. After St. Augustine, St. Thomas and Dante, Descartes marks a new era by his psycho-physical view of imagination, and Spinoza takes a step backwards in regarding it as merely passive. Malebranche attempts to confine it within narrow limits and to regard it mainly as a source of error. Gassendi has the merit of breaking down the barriers between different faculties. There is not much to be said about Locke and Leibnitz, but with Wolff imagination takes its place as a separate branch of psychology, which no psychologist can venture to neglect. Wolff was the first who ventured " to confine within the limits of exact laws a faculty apparently so capricious " (p. 540). So far the chronological order is maintained ; but here a classification according to nationality becomes necessary, and Dr. Ambrosi turns first to the Italian philosophers. Vico laid the foundations of a psychology of collective imagination ; Muratori, Soave and Galluppi regarded the subject from an ethical and practical standpoint ; De Grazia's view was psychological, Kosmini's physiological, Gioberti's aesthetica! In a simi- lar manner the author deals with the psychologists and philosophers of Scotland, England, France and Germany, ending with Wundt, Schopen- hauer, Hartmann, and lastly, Frohschammer, of whom he writes : " While others have given us the metaphysic of the idea, of the will, of feeling, of consciousness, of the unconscious, he has attempted a metaphysic of imagination. The attempt has had a happy issue " (p. 559). This does not mean that Frohschammer's theory of an all-embracing world-phan- tasy, which is objective in its lower, and subjective in its higher forms, is to be accepted. Dr. Ambrosi indicates its weak points and remarks that no monistic system (dynamic monism is the phrase he prefers) can be founded on any one function of the mind. But he regards imagina- tion as " a function which, perhaps more than any other, embraces the whole mental life " (p. 123). What he commends in Frohschammer's doctrine is the great importance attached by him to this " modest faculty mediating between the senses and the reason," which Schelling's aesthe- tic transformed into a true creative power (p. 364), and also the fact that his philosophy is based on a principle of activity. Throughout the book Dr. Ambrosi makes prominent his conviction that the human mind must be regarded as essentially personal and active, and vindicates the claims of imagination to consideration. Hence he sometimes appears to judge the authors whom he criticises not so much by the accuracy of their conclusions as by the place which they assign to imagination, or, in other words, the sense in which they use the word. Die Phantasie als Grundprincip des Weltprocesses was published in 1887. It is, possibly, because no writer since then has included so much under the terms " phantasy " or " imagination " that Dr. Ambrosi makes no reference to any more recent work. Having treated of imagination in mythology, psychology and metaphysics, he concludes with imagination in poetry, and gives an interesting review of the long poem L' Imagination, written by Jacques Delille amid the horrors of the French Kevolution. E. F. STEVENSON. RECEIVED also : A. K. Rogers, Modern Philosophy, New York, Macmillan, 1899, pp. viii., 360. F. Hoenig, Tactics of the Future (translated by H. M. Bower), London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1899, pp. xxiii., 363. (15s.)