Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/125

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No. 1.]
REVIEWS OF BOOKS.
109

Person of the Trinity with the world, instead of making it the Processio of the Holy Spirit. "Nevertheless, freedom and immortality in the most. concrete way are held by Hegel." It is to be regretted, in view of the different opinions on this point, and the different schools which have claimed Hegel as master, that Dr. Harris has not favored us with a fuller treatment of this question.

J. E. Creighton.
A Short History of Greek Philosophy. By John Marshall, M.A., LL.D., Rector of the Royal High School, Edinburgh. London: Percival & Co.; New York: Macmillan & Co. 1891. — pp. viii, 253.


The author's purpose in the volume before us was, as he explains in the preface, to give, "within strict limits of brevity," an "authentic" and "interesting" account of Greek Philosophy. Both of these purposes have been fairly realized. The book is intended for University students, and is drawn chiefly from Ritter and Preller's Historia Philosophiæ Græcæ. The general plan of the book is excellent, and students will find in it, as the author intends, a serviceable commentary to R. and P.'s work. All readers of the book will agree that this account of Greek Philosophy from Thales to Stoicism is clear and vigorous, the use of sources discriminating, and that the various schools of doctrine are handled with excellent critical judgment.

In speaking of the book more in detail, we should like to call attention to certain minor defects. The characterization of the periods of Greek Philosophy by political parallels (p. 82 seq.) is not felicitous. To call the Ionic philosophy "kingly" and that of Pythagoras "aristocratic," does not tend to elucidate the character of the two philosophies, although the philosophical order or school of Pythagoras may well be characterized as aristocratic; nor can we see what force the author means to give to "domination in the theory of Nature" (p. 83) in application to the Eleatic school. There is, indeed, ground for associating democracy with the Individualism of the Sophists, though to attempt to carry out such analogy in the development of philosophy is quite as futile as Hegel's application to it of the categories of pure thought or Boeck's employment of Plato's theories in Epistemology for the same purpose. The space alloted to Empedokles seems unduly large in proportion to that given to Anaxagoras, even though Ritter and Preller have done the same thing. The proportion is not good from the standpoint of the relative importance of the two philosophers. Elsewhere in the work proportions appear to have been carefully regarded. The date 479 (p. 34) is of course a misprint (vide p. 103). On page 136 the author, who regards Euthyphron as a transition dialogue, includes it in