Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/299

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298 NEW BOOKS. reality." In all actual religions there is a mixture of elements ; moral attributes being ascribed to an external power that claims obedience. They m ust therefore be regarded as compromises between the primitive religion, " the religion of fear," which had no ethical element, and the ideal religion, "the religion of love," in which the ethical element is supreme. Yet although ideal perfection cannot he affirmed of the ground of things, evil being an integral part of the natural order and not a mere accident, we

uv to see in "the Logos that acts and manifests itself in Nature" an effort,

at first unconscious but finally attaining consciousness in man, towards the divine, the ideal. Evolution from lower to higher necessitates a teleological view according to which the process of tilings has an end, the norm, the perfect, the unconditioned, outside itself. The idea of such a teleoi from which all anthropomorphism shall be excluded, is developed in vol. ii., bk. 1, c. 10, and in an essay (" On the End of Nature ") in vol. iv. The latter part of vol. iii. (pp. 195-385) contains the social applications of the author's doctrine. His political as well as his ethical speculations have much interest of detail independently of their philosophic ba lltitriige zur Geschichte dcr nemrn Philosophie vornehmlich der Gesammelte Abhandlungen von RUDOLF EUCKEN, Professor in Jena. Heidelberg : G. Weiss, 1886. Pp. iii., 184. The three German thinkers who have been selected as the subject of the first of these essays are Nicholas of Cusa, Paracelsus and Kepler. The aim is carefully limited at the opening, all Kepler's purely astronomical ideas being excluded, and only one doctrine of Paracelsus being specially studied, ihat of "development" (a view of the whole world as an organism hav- ing stages of life analogous to those of an individual) ; but this method enables the author to give a pretty complete picture of the leading concep- tions that found expression in Germany at the dawn of modern thought. The points which he brings out are that these early German speculations, like the philosophy of the Renaissance generally, derive their impulse from a break with Scholasticism ; that they are built up out of elements to be found in ancient philosophy, especially in the writings of the Neo-Platonista ; and that they are yet essentially original in the direction given to them by the effort to find expression for a new and distinctively modern view of the world. In the second essay (" On Images and Comparisons in Kant <: ) an attempt is made to show that Kant's illustrations (if we take the most important and those that are oftenest repeated) have a character of their own from which the chief characters of his philosophical system mi-lit lie inferred. The next essay gives a balanced estimate of the merits of Treii- delenburg both as a systematic philosopher and as a historian of philosophy. The last of the series is a contribution to the history of Party-names in philosophy. One result of this research is thai the nomenclature of philo- sophic parties ihat is at present in use comes chieily from three sources, (1) antiquity, (2) the beginning of the modern period, (3) the most recent times. It is interesting to learn that "among modern peoples none has been so productive in this field as the English," and that it continues to lie 80 up to the present. From the examples given, the generalisation may be made (although the author does not make it himself) that names with a theological bearing have originated in England, names with a political bea'-ing in France, and names that are strictly philosophical in Germany. Transitions of meaning in the passage from one age and country to another are, of course, an important part of the study. The transitions seem to be such as might be looked for if we generalise as .suggested.