Metaphysics. No satisfactory resume of More's analysis of the eight theses could be given in this brief review, but the conclusion he reaches is that the Dialogue demonstrates the inadequacy of the discursive reason to solve the antinomies of the One and the Many or to establish rationally the Doctrine of Ideas. In spite of this inadequacy of the discursive reason, Parmenides affirms the reality of the ideas "as a necessity of inner experience." The Dialogue is, therefore, not an attack of Plato against his own doctrine, but a defence of it.
The lectures are a very valuable contribution to the literature of Platonism (they are entitled to an index), written with a broad and deep concern for the issues of life, and illuminated by a wealth of pertinent reading. An expectant interest will await the continuation of the series planned by the author.
Cornell University.
This Chicago dissertation contains thirteen chapters: I, Introduction; II, Homer, Pindar, Æschylus; III, The Pre-Socratics; IV, the Sophists; V, Herodotus and Thucydides; VI, Poets of the Later Fifth Century; VII, The Hippocratica; VIII, κατὰ φύσιν and like phrases; IX, περὶ φύσεως; X, φύσις and νόμος; XI, Periphrasis; XII. "Element"; XIII, Plato and Aristotle—A Supplementary Chapter. There are added a bibliography (six titles) and two indices, one of passages, one general.
The request of the editor of this Review for a notice of this dissertation has induced me to return to a subject which I had hoped to have laid aside for good and all. For nearly fifteen years it has been in my thoughts and all pertinent passages in my reading have been noted, with a resulting accumulation of thousands of notes, which I shall never use directly. Probably I have given the matter more consideration than any one else, but I am far from having arrived at satisfactory conclusions on all points. Mr. Beardslee will not take it amiss, therefore, if I feel bound to say that there is much in his dissertation with which I cannot agree; if he is at all like me, he will be his own severest critic, revising his judgments continually as his scope enlarges. This does not imply that his work is poorly done; quite the reverse. The dissertation under review is in many ways exceptionally good. But a work such as this rests ultimately on interpretation, and the work of interpretation is never finished, since it involves, in addition to the constant, which is the text or group of texts in question, the variable
