Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/115

Rh addressed itself to his fundamental principle, from which all the rest follows logically enough. Those who hold this principle will accept its results, as set forth by Professor Dewey those who do not, will reject them.

.

The object of this book is perhaps most clearly stated at the close of the second chapter (p. 126), "What is wanted ... is some principle which will enable us to bring about a more perfect connection between the parts of our society, to form new links and ties. . . . We have to overcome individualism on the one hand and the power of material conditions on the other." This Mr. Mackenzie terms "the practical problem" with which we are confronted; he attempts to deal with it by the aid of two ideas, "those of the organic nature of society and the spiritual nature of man," and he continues, "If we can succeed in showing what is their true significance, and in indicating, even in a slight degree, what is their bearing on the practical life of society, we shall have accomplished all that can reasonably be expected from the present inquiry."

The very terms in which Mr. Mackenzie states his problem and the direction in which he looks for light upon it will give an experienced reader the clue to his general position. He is of the neo-Hegelian school, largely indebted to Professor Edward Caird in his metaphysics, to Green in his ethics, and to numerous writers of that school in his political economy. He even goes so far as to identify his neo-Hegelianism with philosophy itself when he asserts that England "begins now for the first time to have a Metaphysic" (p. 365).

The book itself is an expansion of the Shaw Fellowship Lectures delivered at the University of Edinburgh in January, 1889, and published some eighteen months later. This serves in some degree to explain the character of a production of which the author says in his preface, "Little, if anything, of what is now published can be claimed as original"; and again, "It is, indeed, not so much a book as an indication of the lines on which a book might be written." It gives evidence of very wide reading in many fields and the results are brought together with much labor and patience. But they have not been fused or even welded into a whole, and therefore the claim, "that it has brought into close relation to each other a number of questions which are usually, at least in