Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/264

 250 CKITICAL NOTICES : few who have undergone these immediate religious experiences- they carry their own authority with them, and that therefore all inquiries into their objective validity are useless. That may be the case so long as reflective thought is excluded. But how often does it not happen that to those who have had, or thought they had, this immediate religious insight subsequent intellectual emanci- pation has brought doubt and disquietude ? The very point that they doubt is whether their own emotions, intuitions, even visions were anything but the outcome of subjective wishes or a disordered brain. The world cannot be sharply divided, as Prof. James's wants to divide it, into those who possess immediate and self- sufficing insight and those who have had no religious experience at all. There are thousands who will not and cannot trust whatever faculty of moral or spiritual insight they possess unless they are presented with a creed which satisfies their Eeason. To be told to believe whatever they wish to believe only plunges them into a deeper scepticism. Such minds can only find the satisfaction that they require in a very different philosophy from that which under- lies Prof. James's book. H. EASHDALL. Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy. By NORMAN SMITH, M.A., Lecturer at Queen Margaret College, and Assistant to the Professor of Logic in the University of Glasgow. London : Macmillan & Co., Limited. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1902. Pp. 276. Price 5s. net. THIS book should prove a real boon to the advanced philosoph- ical student. Mr. Smith has most ably and effectively singled out the guiding ideas and assumptions of Descartes' metaphysics, and from their picturesque genesis in Augustine's writings the philosopher and the saint are not confused by Mr. Smith has traced their development through Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke and Hume to the Critique of Pure Reason. It is the story of the Cartesian assumptions sketched with singular freshness and re- spect for facts in a clean, terse style, the one very pardonable defect of which is perhaps an over-readiness to sacrifice ludicity of exposition to thoroughness of treatment. The reader's in- dulgence towards footnotes is somewhat overtaxed (many of them might with advantage have been promoted to the text), but, as though to offset the element of distraction thereby introduced there is a short but exceedingly serviceable index. The opening chapter deals with ' the Problem of Descartes,' the dualism between Self and Nature, which was involved in the general thought of Descartes' day and was the product partly of the individualistic tendencies of Christian Philosophy and partly of the then awakening conception of a despiritualised Nature.