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 NEW BOOKS. lo ( .> sophy, founded on direct study of the original sources. The author is emboldened to the task, which has seemed too perilous to others of his faith, by his conviction that the story of the utter collapse of all modern efforts to arrive at philosophical truth can only serve to bring again int< > repute the " Old-Christian : ' philosophy which grew up within the Church and attained its highest development in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. He divides the history into three periods : the first covering Bacon, Herbert of Cherbury and Hobbes on the one hand, and on the other Descartes and his followers, including Spinoza, with various counter-currents of thought (in Cud worth, Pascal, Huet, &c.) ; the second comprehending the new movement begun by Locke in England and carried out by the D on the one hand and by Berkeley and Hume on the other till Reid's re- action, with the contemporary movements in France and in Germany ; the third taken up with the Kantian philosophy followed out into its various developments, and with the multitude of minor, dependent or independent, starts that have been constantly renewed down to the present time. With particular thinkers, like Hobbes, Spinoza and also Locke, who seem to the author specially representative of the modern spirit, he takes no little pains ; the later German movement, from Kant onwards, is also followed out, even in some of its less familiar directions, with much care. The futility of modern philosophy appears not less manifest to the author in those thinkers who have sought to keep the interests of religion in view ; indeed, some of his severest condemnation is reserved for those members of his own confession who, early or late, have adopted or sought to come to terms with the modern principles. Specially interesting, though brief, is his account of the recent revival in different countries of the Thomist philosophy, now again authoritatively proclaimed to be the sheet- anchor of Catholic doctrine. Scholasticism, he thinks, went down before the rise of modern thought for 110 other reason than because (after Thomas) it became so careless of literary form in presenting its truths to the world, at a time when the classical masterpieces were becoming known. It has now only to become again careful in this respect, to aim at general intelligi- bility and to incorporate what is true in the results of later natural science ; and it will again prevail as triumphantly as ever. It should be added that Dr. Stockl selects for exposition J. S. Mill, Darwin and Bentham as the im- portant representatives of the latest English thought. Of living English thinkers he seems to have heard nothing, and his enumeration of those of the last generation is more curiously faulty than can be forgiven even to a foreigner's unfamiliarity and haste. Das Princip der Infinitesinwl-Methode u. seine Geschichte. Ein Kapitel zur Grundlegung der Erkenntnisskritik. Von Dr. HERMANS COHEN, ordentlichem Professor der Philosophic an der Universitat Mai-burg. Berlin : Diimmler, 1883. Pp. vii., 162. This is a special excursus in Theory of Knowledge or, as the author would rather call it, Critick of Knowledge (Erkenntnisskritik), a name which, he thinks, is not so likely as the other to give the impression that a merely psychological analysis of the apparatus of knowledge is intended instead of a philosophical investigation of knowledge as a fact, reaching its consummation in science as grounded on principles. His object is to show, in the particular case of the notion of infinitesimals, the import of Kant's category of Reality for knowledge. A general introduction (pp. 1-51) defines the problem and shows how the conception of infinitesimals gradually made its way into science ; the properly historical consideration of the notion a.s developed by Leibniz, in relation to Newton, and as variously