Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/258

 VI. CBITICAL NOTICES. Naturalism and Agnosticism. By JAMES WARD, D. Sc. Gifford Lectures delivered before the University of Aberdeen, 1896- 98. London : Adam & Charles Black, 1899. Two volumes, pp. xviii., 302 ; xiii., 291. Price 18s. ONE may assert without much fear of contradiction that Prof. Ward's Gifford Lectures are the philosophical book of the last year. Naturalism and Agnosticism is not a work to be hurriedly skimmed or lightly appraised in a page or two of review ; it is emphatically a book to be read and re-read and then re-read again a true storehouse of brilliant and suggestive metaphysical and psychological discussion. Indeed the very excellencies of these lectures make the task of the reviewer a difficult and, at times, an ungracious one. When a philosopher of Prof. Ward's eminence publishes a treatise dealing with questions of the first importance in every branch of philosophical science, he is sure to say much which all students of the subject must welcome with thankfulness, and sure also to say some things in which any individual student will be unable to concur. And when, as in the case with the present writer, the acceptance extends to all or almost all the main principles at stake, while the points of diffi- culty or difference affect the details of the argument, the critic must be constantly tempted to emphasise these minor points of disagreement in a way which may tend to obscure the essential similarity of his own philosophic position to his author's. Not to speak of the probability that, when one is so unfortunate as not to be able to follow Dr. Ward in a matter of epistemology or psychology, the mistake will turn out to be with one's self. Hence, as I shall be forced in what follows to speak more than once of points where Dr. Ward's argument appears open to criti- cism, I should like to say once for all at the outset that nearly all these points are, in my judgment, of secondary or less than secondary importance, and that the main argument of Natural- ism and Agnosticism seems, to one reader at least, as conclusive in its results as it is felicitous in its arrangement. No more valuable contribution has been made to an " idealist," or as Prof. Ward prefers to say, a " spiritualist " philosophy since the publi- cation of Mr. Bradley's Appearance and Reality seven years ago, and no more damaging exposure has ever been given of the base- less and uncritical assumptions which materialistic and agnostic