Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/227

Rh be thought as one, Monism is apt to appear as somewhat otiose philosophy, and, as the outcome of philosophizing, hardly a pronounced step beyond the expression of the postulate with which all philosophy begins — that the world must be one. Nor, in this very regard, do I think does Dr. Carus help us much. His chapters show us how many so-called oppositions or dualisms are reconcilable with each other, but there is no evident connection between his chapters, which thus become a series of sketches [and there is an artistic play of light about them] rather than the logical development of a theory of knowledge and reality. It is easy to see how ideas and ideals and facts, how reason and sense, causation and free will, hedonism and asceticism, can all, and in fact all do, exist in the same world; how in fact the universe is God, and God is the universe; but what we want to say of a completed philosophy is one of two things, or perhaps both of them: either to know what aspect of reality is for us the highest aspect of reality, or to know what are the different points of view that the mind must take about the world, and how they can be logically connected. While the author has done wisely, it seems to me, in discarding the subjectivistic conclusions of the critical philosophy, I think he sinks too much the idea of criticism into that of realism, which latter idea too he carries out at the expense of what one might call a legitimate nominalism. The ethical outcome of Monism would, I fear, be indifferentism; what would save the system from that would be a tenable theory of individuality and of teleology. I do not mean to imply that a metaphysic should play into the hands of an ethic, but rather that the ethical facts should become at least part of the data of a philosophy. On the whole, the side of ethical showing that interests Dr. Carus is what is expressed in the Schliesse dich an ein Ganzes of Goethe, rather than in the In suo esse conservari of Spinoza or, for that part, of the evolutionist. His book, though, deserves study at the hands of all who have an interest in the development of philosophy.

. The ten pages of platitudes, which serve as introduction to this so-called "Study" of Greek Philosophy, awaken in the reader at the outset an unfavorable prognostication of the book. In the further reading of the volume this unfavorable impression receives some modification; though with a half-dozen reasonably good handbooks already on the market, it is not easy to find a justification for the appearance of this