Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 6.djvu/267

 ii s. vi. SEPT. u, i9i2.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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on Hooks.

The People's Books. (T. C. & E. C. Jack.)

WE are glad to welcome another batch of "The People's Books " a batch which includes one or two volumes of importance, even above the average of the series.

Dr. Taylor's Aristotle is certainly one of these. No thoughtful person who has but so much as one spare sixpence can henceforward bring any excuse for having nothing more than shadowy notions about " the golden mean " and " purifica- tion by pity and fear " attached to the mighty name of the Stagirite. Dr. Taylor gives first a brief, but sufficient account of Aristotle's life and works ; and then takes his classification of the sciences, in which the paragraphs on logic and on the theory of knowledge the latter with the contrasted doctrine of Plato struck us specially as admirably set out. Chap, iii., again, on the ' First Philosophy,' is an excellent piece of " popularization " : not in the least meagre, yet rapid enough in treatment to give the reader some taste of that intellectual excitement and pleasure which seems more truly characteristic of Greek philosophy than of any other. The chapter on ' Physics ' has, of course, interest of another kind : curious rather than actual, and for us literary rather than scientific. The final chapter, on ' Practical Philosophy,' gives us again, in a clear and attractive way, part of Aris- totle's permanent contribution to human thought. On one point only did we find ourselves somewhat out of sympathy with Dr. Taylor. Surely, from the universal standpoint of the philosopher, and in regard to those things which in the end matter most we had almost said alone matter the " world-empire " plan is still on its trial. We do not see that Aristotle deserves anything but applause for refusing to be dazzled by the dreams and conquests of Alexander, and grounding his scheme of the ideal system of human life on the city state.

As Dr. Jones very truly says in the Preface to Eucken, the philosopher's works are often " laboured and obscure, diffuse and verbose." Yet they cannot well be neglected by any one who cares to keep abreast of the thought of the time, and they are profoundly modifying the general outlook upon questions of religion and philosophy. Dr. Jones here brings out in a very satisfactory way what are the main points of Eucken's philosophy of life. It will be seen that it is more fully worked out as a practical than as a theoretical philosophy, and that there are certain fundamental questions upon which Eucken has so far kept silence. But this reserve, where he has no certain voice to utter, gives all the more weight to what he does tell us ; and his silences and utterance are alike well indicated and interpreted in this volume.

Mrs. Besant's Theosophy attempts to overcome the difficulty which has always beset mystics that of the practical impossibility of effectively communicating the incommunicable. Considered as it stands, and merely intellectually, the theory of life and the world here set forth, ancient though its essence is, appears little less than a wild extravaganza : its statements have no evidence behind them that the ordinary man can

apprehend, and yet in themselves they are made positively and without qualification, as but few scientific statements could be made. They represent, of course, intuitions into spheres beyond the physical, and in a sense are not fairly made amenable to criticism from the physical standpoint only. The point here is simply whether or not Mrs. Besant has set out what she wanted to say addressed to ordinary intelligences as intelligibly as it was possible to do. We should say her work is unequal, and in some places at once too slight and too dogmatic, especially, for instance, in the chapter on ' Theo- sophy and Social Problems.'

Mr. Goodrich says most truly in his Preface that, within the limits of this little volume, it would be scarcely possible to deal with the vast subject of organic Evolution from all points of view. Indeed, one of the two complaints we would make against an otherwise satisfactory resume of the theory as a whole is that it attempts to include too much. The questions of the origin and nature of life itself, and of the relation of mind to brain, are neither left on one side nor clearly and effectively dealt with ; and we should also have been glad of more illustrations in place of the rather cloudy answers to different objections brought against different parts of the theory, e.g., natural selection. Mr. Goodrich is not among Darwin's detractors, and he has a hit now and again at " an eminent foreign philosopher." Our second complaint concerns his use of technical terms without explanation, the promise that these will be found in the Index being but imperfectly fulfilled. On the other hand, the explanation of " Mendelism " is well done, and on the whole, for the present moment, that is the most important factor in Evolution to get properly understood.

Miss Hilda Johnstone's Oliver Crormcell is a good piece of work : planned and kept in satis- factory proportions so far as events are con- cerned, clear and well connected in its presenta- tion of the salient points chosen, and written in a pleasant, lucid style happily diversified by not too lengthy quotations. The point of view taken is that of the impartial historian, with some personal, but entirely discreet, sympathy for Cromwell. It is, perhaps, due to this discretion that the hero of the biography hardly stands out boldly enough from amid his surroundings.

The Heroic Age. By H. Munro Chadwick. (Cambridge University Press.)

THIS is a comparative study of the Teutonic and the Greek heroic poetry, considered from the point of view of anthropology, as evidence for a certain state and degree of culture. Separated from one another by some fifteen centuries, the Northern and the Hellenic heroic ages have many obvious features in common, which again they share with the heroic ages of other peoples. These latter the author by no means ignores except, indeed, that we found no reference to India or the Far East but on the whole they lie beyond his scope. He sums up thoroughly and effectively, though in a manner somewhat dry and prosaic, the constituents of the two lite- ratures with which he mainly deals, and then gives us four or five chapters on their common characteristics, and those of the two similar ages of which they are the expression. The work is,