Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/139

 128 NEW BOOKS. On Small Differences of Sensation. By C. S. PEIRCE and J. JASTROW, Johns Hopkins University. Pp. 11. 'An off-print of a paper in Vol. iii. of the Transactions of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (read Oct. 17, 1884), giving account of a series of experiments on the pressme-sense, instituted with a view to disproving Fechner's hypothesis of discrete increments of sensation. The experiments seem to the authors to "destroy all presumption in favour of an Unterschiedsschivelle ". Essai sur le Systeme philosophique des Sto'iciens. Par F. OGEREAU, Agrege de Philosophic. Ouvrage recompense par 1'Academie des Sciences morales et politiques. Paris : F. Alcan, 1885. Pp. xii., 304. The author divides the history of Stoicism into three periods : (1) the purely Greek period (the 3rd and part of the 2nd century, B.C.) ; (2) the period of its propagation at Rome, during which, however, it remained essentially Greek (the latter part of the 2nd and a considerable part of the 1st century B.C.) ; (3) the Roman period (to the end of the 2nd century A.D., after which it was no longer a living philosophy). In c. i. the " Unity of doctrine among the first Stoics " is demonstrated. Then follows a continuous exposition of the Stoic system (cc. ii.-ix.), treated under the heads of "Being" ; "The World" ; "Man" ; "The Criterion of Truth :) ; "Dialectics" ; "The Sovereign Good" ; "The Sage ; the City" ; "Theodicy and Religion". This exposition is founded as much as possible on the records of the teaching of the earlier Stoics down to Panaetius ; it is unmixed with criticism, but is accompanied by references and ([notations in footnotes. The last chapter (x.) demonstrates the "Preservation of the primitive doctrine among the last Stoics". The result is that, while from the point of view of literary and of general history the most impor- tant position may have to be assigned to the later Stoics, to Seneca, to Epictetus. and to Marcus Aurelius, in doctrine they added nothing to what they had received from their teachers. From the point of view of tin- history of philosophy and of scientific ideas, justice has not yet been done to the founders of Stoicism, to Zeno, to Cleauthes and to Chrysip- pus, who in their physics were the first to indicate "the antinomy of determinism which alone renders science possible and of liberty without which all morality disappears," an antinomy which they solved in the spirit of Leibniz ; who in their logic made "one of the happiest efforts to explain how the existence of error does not destroy all possibility of certi- tude" ; and who in their theory of the summum bonum placed morality, as Kant did afterwards, not in what is done but in the internal disposition, while they had over him "the advantage of being able to give logically a material content to the form in which consists exclusively the morality of our acts". The author seeks to show that, in spite of the paradoxe.- to M Inch it was led by its clean-cut logical distinctions, Stoicism, in aeeord- am-e with its metaphysical doctrine of the continuity of all being, always kept in view the shades by which oppo.-ite things and actions pass into another. Its paradoxes, therefore, art; paradoxes chiefly in form and aie corrected by the spirit of the doctrine. La Morale d'fipicure et ses Rapports avec lea Doctrines contemporaines. Par M. GUYAU. 3me Edition, revue et augmentee. Paris: F. Alcan, 1886. Pp. 292. With M. Ogereau's Sto'iciens, which may now serve as its companion- piece, has to be noted anew edition (substantially unaltered) of M. ( Juyau's Epicure, the value of which, on its first, appeal ance, was duly appreciated in MIND, Vol. iv. 582.