Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/591

 E. FLINT'S vico. 579 " the fundamental unity of subject and object, inner and outer; to do so would be to set up two Gods. As a matter of fact, however, the movement of creation exists in a direniption, and our business is done when we have exhausted our analysis of experience" (p. 48). The position laid down on pp. 149-50, and again on p. 163, is hardly distinguishable from the monistic idealism with which Hegel's name is generally associated. But it is in keeping with the modest and sober spirit of the whole book that the Monism is presented more as a belief, or, if the expression may be used, as a necessary faith, than as an ascer- tained certainty. More especially does faith preponderate over knowledge when we pass into the moral sphere and contemplate the great fact of the existence of evil. So that the author freely admits that, in one sense, his treatise exemplifies afresh the old saying, " Omnia exeunt in mysterium". But it is far from being written in a mystical or " misological " spirit, and the qualified dualism which the writer professes, is a position which would probably be shared by many who now occupy a more ambitious platform, if they distinguished with Like carefulness between their metaphysical knowledge and their metaphysical faith. ANDREW SETH. Vico. By EOBEKT FLINT, Professor in the University of Edin- burgh ; Corresponding Member of the Institute of France, &c. ("Philosophical Classics for English Readers.") Edin- burgh and London : Blackwood, 1884. Pp. 232. Students of philosophy in this country owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Flint for his very learned and interesting little book on one of the least known (to us) of great philosophers. Yico stands apart from what, through German influence, we have become accustomed to regard as the main Line of European speculation ; so that, as Michelet puts it, he seems to address himself rather to our age than to his own. The widespread enthusiasm for the mathematical and physical sciences, and the admiration for their methods, in the seventeenth century, had tended to withdraw attention from the philosophical study of human history. The new metaphysics of Descartes and his followers, the psychology of Locke, the opposing idealisms of Spinoza and Leibniz 1 are characterised in common by an absence of any adequate sense of the significance of history whether the history of institutions or of ideas. This shows itself 1 Of course this remark is least applicable to Leibniz. Leibniz was a historian, and he knew more of various philosophies than any of the other great thinkers from Descartes to Kant, but he did not bring his historical and philosophical studies to bear on one another. Professor Flint (The Philosophy of History in France and Germany, p. 345) says Leibniz's " was the first philosophy which was profoundly historical in spirit " ; yet he