REVIEWS OF BOOKS.
M. Pillon resumed last year the publication which in 1872 was merged in that larger enterprise the weekly, and later the monthly, Critique Philosophique, which M. Renouvier and he carried on with such signal ability and energy for eighteen years. The plan of the Année Philosophique is to publish a small number of original articles, each making some fundamental application of the principles of the "criticist" school, and to follow them by short notices of all the important works on philosophy published in France during the previous year. The works thus noticed by M. Pillon are seventy-one in number, classified under four heads, viz. Metaphysic, Psychology, and Philosophy of the Sciences; Moral and Religious Philosophy; Philosophy of History, Sociology, and Pedagogy; and History of Philosophy. These notices average a page and a third in length, are readable, since most of them combine critical appreciation (or depreciation) with their reporting function, and, taken together, give a fairly adequate picture of the intellectual movement of the year in France, so far as it deals with the more universal questions. Works of minute detail in psychology, e.g. fall outside of M. Pillon's scope. It is hardly necessary to say that the attitude consistently held by M. Pillon in his critical strictures on the various works is the pluralistic and phenomenistic one of M. Renouvier.
The articles de fond of the volume are three in number. I subjoin a word about each.
In sixty-six pages, entitled La Philosophie de la Règle et du Compas, the veteran Renouvier rallies once more to the defence of the ultimate character, for us, of the principles of the ordinary geometry, and combats the "transcendental" speculations of certain geometers of the day. The article has the solid texture of all this author's writings. He discusses in detail Euclid's axioms and postulates, applying to them the distinction of analytic and synthetic judgments, and proposing to distinguish hereafter as postulates only such propositions as unite two distinct conceptions, and may consequently be denied without contradiction in terms. That two straight lines cannot enclose a space is no such postulate, for it follows analytically from the notion of straight line. But M. Renouvier finds involved in Euclid's geometry four
