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 SCO TTISH MET A PB YSICS RECONSTR UCTED. 447 Perhaps the apparently unsatisfactory nature of Prof. Knight's criticism is largely due to the fact that we are not sufficiently acquainted with his own standpoint. The passage which seems most significant as regards his peculiar views is also the most perplexing in the book. In discussing Nominalism (p. 181) he seems to affirm (1) that if all our knowledge were dissolved into a string of particulars, we might still attain to science ; (2) that substance is a gen eric (!) element, distinct from and underlying particular phenomena; and (3) that eternal ideas lie at the root of individual things, and make their "entrance and exit" among the phenomena of sense, unaffected by them. Statement (1) must be due to inadvertence ; (2) and (3) seem to express a form of Platonism which Plato himself in all probability outgrew, and which in the Parmenides he crushingly refuted. Doubtless if Prof. Knight had been permitted by the conditions of his undertaking to give a more detailed, and consequently more advantageous, account of his own views, his criticism of Hume would have appeared more intelligible and more forcible. As it is, the present book does but raise expectant curiosity in regard to the larger work that is promised us. G. F. STOUT. Scottish Metaphysics Reconstructed. By the Writer of " Free Notes on Herbert Spencer's First Principles". Edinburgh and London : W. Blackwood & Sons, 1887. Pp. xiv., 244. On first taking up this work as a reviewer, my impression was that a very few lines of wholesale condemnation would be the most effectual mode of dealing with it ; but as I read on I came to the conclusion that the author had something important to say, if he had only known how to express it. It is not, however, Scottish Metaphysics, but a system much more akin to that of Plato and some of the modern Germans ; and I cannot but regard both the title of the book and the form in which the author has chosen to give his philosophical views to the world as singularly ill-selected. The form adopted is a kind of running commentary on the Lectures of Sir William Hamilton, other authors being only occa- sionally introduced. It is the general opinion of Hamilton's disciples that these Lectures contain neither the latest nor the most accurate exposition of his philosophy ; but the author does not, I think, refer even once to the Discussion^ and makes very few references to the Notes to Reid (in none of which does he state on what page the quotation, or supposed quotation, is to be found). From the Lectures, however, the quotations are suffi- ciently abundant, but they are utterly wanting in any approach to accuracy. He tells us at the outset, indeed, that they are "summary-quotations," which apparently means that they are summaries of Hamilton's doctrine compiled by the author, and