Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/136

 VIIL NEW BOOKS. Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Translated by S. W. DYDE, M.A., D.Sc., Professor of Mental Philosophy, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada. London: George Bell & Sons, 1896. Pp. xxx, 365. THE time seems now fully come when Hegel can be duly appreciated neither blindly followed nor more blindly railed at ; and one sign of this is that his system is being made in different ways more accessible to the English reader. The wonder is that the Philosophic des Rechts has not sooner attracted a translator. It exhibits the application of his principles in the concrete spheres of law, ethics and politics ; in particu- lar it adopts a treatment of ethics in close connexion with law and politics a mode of treatment which at once carries us back to Plato and Aristotle and forwards to the modern conception of a general science of sociology ; and apart from its important place in Hegel's system as a whole, it contains some of his most striking and characteristic dicta. It is, therefore, with great regret that a reviewer finds himself unable to commend this translation. It has evidently been done with much labour, and with a conscientious attempt to " ameliorate Hegel's rigid phraseology ". Long sentences have been broken up into moderate mouthfuls. A brief index of words shows the varied devices to which the translator has resorted in his endeavours to make intelligible English out of such terms as an-sich, an-und-fiir-sich, Bestimmung, Das< ///?, unmittelbar, and a few other technical terms of Hegel's logic. The entries, however, even under the words selected, are by no means complete : and it is curious that no account is taken, either in this index, or in the preface, or elsewhere, of the renderings adopted for terms which belong specially to moral and political philosophy, such as Rerht, Sittlichkeit, burgerliche Gesellschaft, etc. If a translation of Hegel is really to be of use to a reader who has not the German text beside him, surely some note is needed on the adoption of the term " right " in a conventional, but quite un-English, sense, as the equivalent of Recht. Again, it is difficult to get any one English word to represent Hegel's use of Sittlichkeit as opposed to Moralitat, but " ethics " or even " ethical system" as opposed to " morality" surely needs some apology. " Civic community " is not a very happy rendering of burgerliche Gesellschaft, and " city " (p. 194, 190) is decidedly bad : something is needed to bring out the force of Hegel's antithesis between " society " and " the state". The word gesellschaftlich is translated " social" (<'-g., in 194), but no warning is given to the reader that the term Gesell- schaft is here the same as that rendered " community " elsewhere. In three cases only does the translator give in a footnote the German terms of the original: (1) where Hegel plays on the words Gewissen and Gewissheit ; (2) where the connexion between Gesetz and gesetst has to