Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/420

 406 CKITICAL NOTICES : Lectures and Essays on Natural Theology and Ethics. By WILLIAM WALLACE, late Fellow of Merton College and Whyte's Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Oxford. Oxford : At the Clarendon Press, 1898. Pp. xi., 566. IN Prof. Wallace the University of Oxford has lost one who was on the whole perhaps the most brilliant and distinguished (if not the most widely influential) teacher of Philosophy who has occupied a chair among us since the death of Prof. Green. Up to the time of his death he had published only the Prolegomena to Hegel's Logic (in two forms) and an Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Mind. Although he exhibited extraordinary ac- tivity as a Professor, continually producing quite new and original courses of Lectures, most of these Lectures were usually unwritten, and the present volume probably completes the tale of his per- manent contributions to philosophical literature. It consists of a course of Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology, a series of Essays on Moral Philosophy, and a few miscellaneous reviews. The feel- ing with which most students even those in general sympathy with his point of view will probably rise from the perusal of the volume will be one of immense admiration at the literary perfection of the writing and the power of the man combined with disappoint- ment at their actual contribution to philosophical thought. Such a disappointment is probably not the result of accident : it is not due to the writer's failure to express his own thought or to the sad and sudden termination of his laborious life. It is the necessary outcome of a philosophical position which could hardly find a better or fuller expression than it does in this volume. Prof. Wallace was commonly known as a Hegelian. But it is rather the Hegelian frame of mind than the Hegelian dogmas which the reader will encounter in this book. It is singularly free from technicalities, from all that the profane call " jargon ". It is rarely that he rises (or falls) into the commonplaces of Hegelian rhetoric. He is moreover singularly catholic in his appreciation of other thinkers. He is bent on finding a meaning in great writers whose line of thought is usually considered to be least in harmony with his own. He can appreciate Leibnitz as well as Spinoza, Lotze as well as Hegel. He does not regard the English philosophers as mere instructive targets for their German critics, nor does he assume that a philosopher is necessarily contemptible because he was also a Bishop. He can even mention the name of Mr. Spencer without insult, almost without contempt. Not un- naturally the Master of Balliol who prefaces the volume with an admirable biographical notice finds him " too sympathetic ". His reviews of Lotze and Nietzsche are admirable examples of this quality. Up to a certain point nobody could better represent the Hegelian attitude of mind. Every historical system of Philosophy is represented as a necessary but one-sided tendency. In all