i. B. Translated by Dr. Arthur Fairbanks, Lecturer on the Philosophy of Religion in the Divinity School of Yale University. London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner & Co. ; New York, Chas.
Scribner's Sons.—pp. xvi, 346.Professor Riehl's specific purpose is best indicated by the title set to the whole work of which Dr. Fairbanks has translated the third part. The full title runs, Philosophical Criticism and its Significance for Positive Science. The author seeks to apply to the scientific conceptions of to-day the same critical analysis to which Kant subjected scientific experience in general, and the Newtonian physics in particular. Having traced in his first volume the development of the critical method through Locke, Hume, and Kant, and having, in the first part of his second volume, treated of sensation, perception, and the logical principles involved in scientific experience, he comes in the concluding part, here translated, to a discussion of the results obtained by applying the critical method to scientific and metaphysical problems. It is evident that this third part must suffer when isolated; and in my judgment it would have been desirable to include some material from the first part of Vol. II, even if it had been necessary to omit one or more chapters of the concluding part. Readers not familiar with the German may profitably consult Professor Adamson's extended review in Mind (Jan. 1889), which concerns itself largely with Vol. II, Pt. I.
The standpoint of the author is clearly and uncompromisingly presented in the opening chapter on the Problem of Philosophy. It is the same as that set forth in his inaugural address, Ueber wissenschaftliche und nicht-wissenschaftliche Philosophie. He recognizes a scientific or theoretical, and a non-scientific or practical, philosophy, each with its own categories. Platonism in natural science, and Naturalism in the realm of moral judgments, are alike mischievous. Practical philosophy deals with the concept of purpose as a principle for explaining the conscious life of man. 'Scientific philosophy' has been limited in its sphere, on the one hand, by the separation of the various particular sciences which now seek to solve their problems by the experimental method rather than by philosophical speculation, and, on the other hand, by the recognition of the fact that 'metaphysical questions can receive no scientific answer, that there is no science of metaphysics.' "There remains (sic) for philosophy,
