Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/148

 132 NEW BOOKS. of jurisprudence in the University of Parma, belongs to what is called in Italy the Positivist direction ; that is to say, he accepts as much of Auguste Comte's system as can be brought into harmony with the modern phenomenist and evolutionary school principally represented by Mr. Spencer. Professor Laviosa is an enthusiastic admirer of things English. " The English nation," he says, "is now at the head of the civilised world. It is the strongest, the most enterprising, the wisest, the most cultivated, the most virtuous, the richest, the most brilliant, and the soundest in the sciences and in useful inventions" (p. 528). Even the severest philosophical critic may confess to a feeling of grati- fication when he comes across such expressions in the pages of a foreign historian, and of one, moreover, not in the least given to rhetorical exag- gerations. But Professor Laviosa has merits which speak for themselves without needing the advocacy of the patriotic bias. His book, so far as it goes, is a thoroughly good piece of work. He seems to have the whole literature of the subject not only English, but German, French, and of course Italian at his fingers' ends. His analyses of the various systems passed in review are copious, lucid, and discriminating. As might be expected, the greater part of his space is devoted to Hobbes, Locke, and Hume ; but justice is done to moralists with whom he is much less in sympathy, such as Butler on the one side and Mandeville on the other. The many excellent monographs and general or special histories that have appeared in recent years have indeed furnished him with ample materials for his construction ; and a well-read English student will perhaps find nothing that is quite new in these pages. But we must remember that the book is destined in the first instance for an Italian public ; and neither the Italian nor any other continental language, so far as I know, can show anything on the same subject to be compared with it for value. Perhaps that part of the work which lays itself most open to criticism is the Introduction. Professor Laviosa attributes far too much import- ance to Bacon and to the Baconian method. It may be doubted whether the great Chancellor did as much for physical science as Mrs. Somerville. For moral science he did absoluteh* nothing. The practical and empirical tendencies of English thought were inherited from a much earlier period than his, as has been shown by Groom Robertson, whose admirable essay on " The English Mind " seems to have escaped even our author's wide reading. And the leading ideas of English ethics are derived not from Bacon but from Greco-Roman philosophy. Neither can the distinction, affirmed by the Introduction, between two streams of tendency, the one English and scientific, the other continental and metaphysical, be main- tained in its full rigour, although of course it contains an element of truth. Among the systematic moralists here discussed Hobbes stands first, and the foreign filiation of Hobbes has been placed beyond a doubt by Tonnies, confirmed on this point by the supreme authority of Croom Robertson. And whether scientific or not, the method of the Leviathan differs as pro- foundly from the inductive method of Bacon on the one side as it differs on the other from the metaphysical opportunism of Locke. Indeed Professor Laviosa, who greatly prefers Hobbes as a moralist to Locke, himself draws attention to the opposition between their points of depar- ture no less than between their conclusions. But he seems to ignore the significant circumstance that Hobbes no less than Locke was simply seeking a speculative justification for political preferences dictated by personal or party considerations a procedure which he very justly stig- matises in his Introduction as a standing mark of the whole metaphysical tradition (p. 40). And the fact that this bias is shared by moralists of