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 130 NEW BOOKS. Precis d'Histoire de la Philosophie. Par A. PENJON. Paris : Paul Delaplane, 1896. Pp. vii., 381. The author claims for this book that it will be found readable by those who are quite ignorant of philosophy. He has given within a very brief space a lucid and attractive exposition of the doctrines of leading thinkers from Thales to Kant, together with some indication of the nature of post- Kantian developments. The general reader will find the book useful, and it may also serve as a text-book for a course of lectures given to elementary students. It must be said, however, that at some points M. Penjon's exposition and criticism are misleading. The short account of Hegel is almost pure fiction. Plato is represented as a poet rather than as a philosopher. According to M. Penjon the logical outcome of the Kantian system is subjective idealism ; to say this is to ignore the central point of Kant's teaching, the doctrine that thought essentially consists in objective reference ; it would be truer to say that the logical outcome of the Kantian system is the destruction of subjective idealism. Eine Trias von Willensmetaphysikern. Von Dr. PHIL. SUSANNA RUBIN- STEIN. Leipzig : Alexander Edelmann, 1896. Pp. 95. This essay consists of three parts. The first sketches in broad outline the most salient features of Edward von Hartmann's Ethico-Meta- physical system embodied in his Philosophie des Unbewxssten. The second and third present the opinions of his two principal contemporaries, Mainlander and Bahnsen, on the same subject. The doctrines of von Hartmann, says Dr. Rubinstein, are a fusion of the conceptions characteristic of Schopenhauer and Hegel respectively, the will and the idea, (p. 4). Yon Hartmann postulates a primordial unconscious potentiality out of which has emerged consciousness and will. The will is continually striving to satisfy the representations of consciousness, and being perpetually baffled in this attempt there ensues an ever present state of pain, so that consciousness is always an apprehension of pain. Pain and will are the only two modes of reality. On page 47 Dr. Rubinstein sums up the pessimismus of Hartmann as an example of the irony of intellectual culture, presenting as it does the Universe as the theatre of infinite misery designed only to end in annihilation. Mainlander, merchant, poet, soldier, philosopher, was born at Offenbach, Frankfort, with the family name of Batz, in 1841, and died, 18T6, apparently by his own hand. Mainlander seems to have exercised his dialectical skill chiefly in the attempt to reconcile the will of nature, or the cosmic process, with the will of the individual agent, or human volition, the fatalism in the Universe with the autonomy of the monad, or henad, as it seems to be termed in modern German Meta- physic (p. 82). Bahnsen's chief work, Realdialektik, treats of the contradiction between knowing and being; his speculations are com- pletely suffused with the Hegelian logic, with its sterile antithesis of affirmation and negation. Hegel's logic and Schopenhauer's pessimism are not stimulating reading at this end of the nineteenth century ; one wonders how they have had such a long life, and so many able expanders and expounders. T. W. LEVIN.