things." This view is excluded, if for no other reason than this, that they contain in their totality only a finite quantity of reality, while he contains an infinite quantity. Mr. Fullerton's "either — or "is therefore too narrow to embrace the depth and subtlety of Spinoza's thought. Nor does he seem to me any more successful in his attack on Spinoza's causa sui. "A thing," he says, "can no more be its own cause than it can be its own neighbor" (p. 189). This is a truly delightful piece of crude realism, on a level with the child's question, "Who made God?" Has Mr. Fullerton ever asked himself what is the cause of the universe as a whole? If he has, surely it has occurred to him that, as the universe has no outside, we can only explain its existence, if we use the term "cause" at all, by saying that it has no cause, or is "self-caused." And this is just what Spinoza, in his effort to find a term fitted to express his thought, has done. The Cartesian causa sui was there to his hand, and he freighted it with his own deeper thought, till it creaked and groaned under the unwonted burden. All this is hidden from Professor Fullerton, who sees in Spinoza's manipulation of the term nothing but an "endeavor to retain a relation between two things where but one thing is assumed to exist." Not thus is a man of Spinoza's quality refuted. The only satisfactory refutation of him is that which history has pronounced in the evolution of his philosophy into a deeper and wider system of thought.
It is with great regret and reluctance that I find myself forced to express so unfavorable an opinion of this book. The excellence of Mr. Fullerton's original contributions to philosophy had led me to expect something very different; and I can only suppose that in a rash moment he undertook to edit an author with whom he was unfamiliar and with whose philosophy his realistic habits of thought unfit him to sympathize.
This volume differs from the rest of the series to which it belongs, in not being a presentation of the views of its author "in extracts," but simply an edition of one of his works. That Reid deserves a place in a "Series of Modern Philosophers" will hardly be questioned in Britain or America, nor will the wisdom of the editor's choice of the Inquiry as Reid's characteristic and most stimulating work be doubted.
