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in the University of Berlin. Edited and translated, with the Author's sanction, from the fourth revised and enlarged edition, by Frank Thilly, Professor of Philosophy in the University of Missouri. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons; London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner &
Co., 1899.—pp. xviii, 723.This admirable translation of Paulsen's important work on Ethics ought to receive a warm welcome from the reading public of England and America. So successful has Professor Thilly been in rendering the German into English that the reader is hardly conscious of the fact that he has only a translation before him; yet the ease and fluency of the English is not attained at the expense of the German expression. Only a practised hand, guided by infinite patience, could have produced such a result. One is particularly grateful for it because the work itself is so well calculated to interest and inform a circle much wider than that of the professed students of philosophy, dealing as it does with many of the most important practical questions of our time, and dealing with them in no pedantic or scholastic fashion, but in a way that the man of ordinary culture can have no difficulty in understanding. The author tells us, in his preface to the second German edition, that he has been "unwilling to ignore the questions which are moving our age." "The books that have nothing to say to the times, and therefore fill their pages with untimely logical quibbles, or with endless historical-critical discussions, are plentiful enough as it is, and there has, thus far, never been a lack of tiresome books in Germany. There are books that are timeless because they are written for all times; but there are also timeless books which are written for no time. This book does not belong to the first class, nor would it like to belong to the second."
According to Professor Paulsen's view, the function of Ethics is a thoroughly practical one. "Ethics bears the same relation to general anthropology as medicine to physical anthropology. Based on the knowledge of corporeal nature, medicine instructs us to solve the problems of corporeal life, to the end that the body may perform all its functions in a healthy manner during its natural existence; while ethics, basing itself on the knowledge of human nature in general, especially on its spiritual and social side, aims to solve all the problems of life so that it may reach its fullest, most beautiful, and most perfect development. We might, therefore, call ethics universal dietetics, to which medicine and all the other technologies, like pedagogy, politics, etc., are related as special parts, or as auxiliary sciences" (Introd., p. 2). And it is in the practical application of ethical principles, rather than in these principles themselves, that
