Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/143

132 NEW BOOKS. Die Ttalienische Philosophic des neunzehnten Jahrhundtrts. Von Dr. KARL WERNER. Dritter Band : Die Kritische Zersetzung und speculative Umbildung des Ontologismus. Wien : G. P. Faesy, 1885. Pp. xiv., 424. Vols. i. and ii. of this work were noticed in MIND, Vol. x. 479. The new volume brings down the history of the Italian philosophy of the 19th century to the immediate present. Three more volumes are to follow, dealing respectively with contemporary philosophy as a whole (iv.), with the special philosophical disciplines so far as the thought of the Italian civilisation, has specifically stamped itself on them (v.), and with the specifically ecclesiastical philosophy of Italy (vi.). The divisions of the present volume are (1) The critical decomposition of Ontologism (Giuseppe Ferrari, Ausonio Franchi, Criticism as transition to Christianity in the " teleological objectivism " of B. Mazzarella) ; (2) The pantheistic trans- formation of Ontologism in Italian Hegelianism (Vera, Spaventa, Mariano, d'Ercole, the reaction against Hegelianism in South and North Italy) ; (3) The return-movement of reconciliation of modern Ontologism to the specu- lative Mysticism and Scholasticism of the Middle Age (A. Conti). Assays, Von WILHELM WUNDT. Leipzig : W. Engelmann, 1885. Pp. 386. These Essays, some of which have already been printed, range over a Avide field of psychological and philosophical study. The last three (xii.-xiv.) are applications of the author's ideas to slightly outlying subjects. Two of these ("Der Aberglaube in der Wissenschaft," "Der Spiritismus") are to be regarded as studies of aberrant psychical pheno- mena; the third ("Lessing und die kritische Methode") is intended to illustrate the method of exact criticism from the classical examples of Losing's Laokoon and Hamburgische Dramaturgic. The thought that is expressed in the opening essay on " Philosophy and Science," and that runs 1 hrough the book, is applied in this last essay to literary criticism. Lessing's critical method is here explained to be the development before the eyes of the reader of the exact course of the writer's own thought. Lessing always begins with concrete examples, from these gradually proceeds to general principles, and then ends with the further application of these general principles to details. The method of philosophy, the author maintains, might to resemble this critical method rather tnan the method of abstract deduction. Philosophy should no longer try to hold itself independent of the special sciences as in antiquity ; but, instead of attaching its speculations to the ideas of common consciousne.-s, should r-et <,ut from the critically tested results of special research. In antiquity the special sciences were really branches of philosophy, but this relation has become inverted : they an- now rather its foundation. A movement towards unity following the detachment of science from philosophy, which was effected in the Alexan- drian period, is already perceptible in special science itself. In "The Problems of Experimental Psychology" (v.), Prof. Wundt contends that, while its point of view has long since been passed, ( 'art* -Man dualism has become in modern times a kind of philosophic orthodoxy like the Aris- lotclianism of the Middle Age. Psychology must overcome this traditional doctrine by taking from the hands of mechanical science the weapon of exact experimental research. There are in this essay some interesting remarks on the relations of psychology to comparative mythology and the science of language. Prof. Wundt thinks that in the end more will be gained for psychology from the study of the myths preserved in the litera- tures of ancient civilised peoples than from study of the beliefs of modern