Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/339

Rh sketches, the wealth of illustration and happy quotations, all combine to render it a most attractive work.

Professor Royce frankly confesses, and one feels throughout the entire book, that he is most concerned with those problems of philosophy which deal more immediately with the spiritual interests of mankind. "There is, after all," he writes, "no beauty in a metaphysical system which does not spring from its value as a record of spiritual experience" (p. 23). It is no doubt true that these practical questions regarding our "permanent spiritual possessions" must remain problems to which human reason can never be indifferent. Yet the uncharitable strictures which the author places upon writings where this interest does not appear, sound to me suspiciously like cant, and certainly have no justification. A writer's human interests may be not less true and deep because for the time he resolutely keeps them out of sight.

The author's purpose, in the historical section of his work, is to select certain aspects in the systems of the more prominent thinkers which seem to him to be significant and of permanent value. Each philosopher becomes in his hands "a character in a story, an attitude towards the spiritual concerns of humanity." He carries out this purpose in a manner which leaves scarcely anything to be desired, and one cannot help regretting that the plan of his work did not allow him to include Leibniz. The whole history of modern thought is illuminated and vivified by Professor Royce's brilliant and masterly exposition, from which professional teachers of philosophy may obtain many useful hints. It seems to me, however, that Berkeley has hardly received justice in this sketch. Grandly simple as was his thought, it was yet so deep that it was misunderstood by all the philosophers of his time. And although his system may appear one-sided and incomplete when compared with later expressions of idealism, we have still to remember that they are but fuller developments of that principle which he was the first to emphasize. Two points are dwelt upon in dealing with Kant. First, what we may perhaps call his heroic attitude towards life and the demands of the moral law. Secondly, a truth, the consequences of which Kant perceived himself only dimly; viz. that experience implies a relation to a universal or transcendental ego. The problem of philosophy after Kant is to understand the nature of this Universal Self. In the chapter which deals with "The Rise of the Doctrine of Evolution," the author traces the origin of this theory to that historical movement which the thinkers of the Romantic School were led to undertake through their interest in the affairs of the human spirit. The connection is a very obvious one, although it is one that has not often been pointed out. In the same chapter he has also very justly called attention to the fact that