Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/287

 286 NEW BOOKS. Dublin students are kept, if somewhat irregularly, in pretty close touch with the world outside, and nothing could surpass the liveliness of their teacher's manner as he darts from topic to topic over the whole field of philosophic interest. As he says, with perfect truth, of our contributor, Prof. W. James, he is himself, decidedly, " one of the few writers on. metaphysics who is [are] not lugubrious ". If there is one point more than another which he is concerned to impress, it is the difference between philosophy and psychology : and this it is that more especially gives him occasion to direct his running fire of criticism upon various writers in MIND. It is rather apt to miss its mark from a disinclination or a sort of inability in the critic to fancy that others, from their own point of view, may be just as concerned as himself to establish the distinction. More than once, he gets such comfort from a certain editorial confession (as he takes it) of psychological collapse, that one is almost sorry to have to ask him to note that it was psychologists, not psychology, over whose shortcoming there was a regretful sigh vented in these pages some two or three years ago. Psychology. Three Volumes by ANTONIO ROSMINI SERBATI. Vol. II. London : Kegan Paul, Trench, 1885. Pp. xv., 632. In this second volume of his Psychology, although scholastic distinctions are still very prominent, Rosmini comes more into contact with modern thought than in the former volume, noticed in MIND, Vol. x. 139. He points this out himself, remarking that questions as to the essence of the soul, which were the subject of vol. i., were the first to be asked and belong to the earlier period of philosophy, while questions as to its development, its " becoming," were asked later, because men had grown tired of dis- cussing the greater questions. When questions about " essences " are neglected, as in the last century, philosophy becomes superficial ; but now the period of "philosophical superficiality," of "materiality and sensism," is passing, and it is possible to restore the older truths. Thus in the former volume, as the author tells us, he had to be occupied with what is "almost entirely forgotten in ordinary treatises, refashioning and restoring it in such a way as (we trust) will not offend the taste of our contemporaries". This second volume deals with (1) the "acts, powers, functii ins, habits," that "issue from the essence" of the soul ; (2) the laws of its "continual production and operation". An important place is taken in Rosmini's psychology by the distinction between direct perception and reflective consciousness. This is connected with his metaphysical doctrine of "being". Reflection is defined as "the faculty of applying the idea of being to our cognitions and their objects". The idea of being, as is seen especially in book iv. of the present volume, is derived from the fragments of the Eleatic philosophy ; the difference, as Rosmini explains it, is that in opposition to the pantheism of that philosophy 'he maintains the real individuality of being. Ethical as well as psychological application is made of this idea, and is closely connected with its psychological development. " The supreme law of the practical reason" is declared to be " Recognise being/'. For "if the law of the theoretic, reason says : 'Being is the object, of knowing,' the law of the. practical reason says : ' Hi-ing ought to be the object of practical knowing ' ". The distinction made, between the theoretic, and the practical reason, or "rational principle in action," is not to be con- founded with Kant's distinction, "who divided the theoretic and the, practical reason into two faculties radically different". The practical 11 is directed by a " eosmological law of harmony ". "Divine Wisdom has placed order in the world. But this order is not in and through the world apart from spirit. On the contrary, it is by an order existing in and through spirit that the external world receives that substantial completion