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VI. CEITICAL NOTICES. Outlines of the History of Ethics for English Eeaders. By HENKY SIDGWICK, Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Cambridge. London : Macmillan & Co., 1886. Pp. xxiv., 276. The publication in a handy shape of the article " Ethics " from the Encyclopedia Britannica is a boon to the student ; but the present manual is far from being a mere reprint. A judicious revision (with occasional rearrangement) has resulted in an extension of the essay to nearly twice its original length, but with little alteration of the original proportions. Of these addi- tions there may be specified under the head of ancient ethics an excellent resume of the Nlcaniachi'iui Ethics, an account of the Roman moralists, with more detailed notices of Plato and Epicurus; while in the modern period, besides a fuller analysis of Butler, we get a few (perhaps too few) words on the topics of free- will, evolution and pessimism. The new matter now incorporated will not fail to make the handbook more serviceable to those for whom the requirements of modern life include an acquaintance with the rudiments of moral science. But alike for the academic and the general reader Professor Sidgwick's Outlines <>f tin.'. ///.*- /i>/-;/ i >f El It if* will commend itself as the work of a master in the subject, who in a few pregnant pages has sketched out skilfully and judicially the history of Greek, of mediaeval, and of English reflections on the aims and laws of human conduct. The unity of the work is expressed in the qualification of its contents as meant for " English readers . It is addressed to a public which may be assumed to wish a knowledge of the larger outlines of speculation on the ideas of right and wrong, good and evil, but which -at the same time will probably take faint interest in those moralists whose theories do not form an integral part or an indispensable pre-requisite of the current stock of ethical ideas. Mr. Sidgwick confines himself accordingly to the old story yet as important as old which traces the origin of our modern civilisation. As it specially chronicles the ethical development this record begins with the Greek thinkers, proceeds through the transformation-period in which their conceptions were modified by theological dogma, and concludes in Mr. Sidgwick's pages by tracing with critical observation the course of English moralising from Hobbes to the present day, when the ideals of ordinary no less than of speculative thought seem to be threatened with absorption in the swelling flood of realistic science. Outside that historical march of theory there are isolated movements of ethical reflection, running in narrow grooves of religious creeds