Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/575

No. 5.] we have still to ask what was the value and the relation to one another of the stages through which he passed, and of the ideas so occupying him. The history of the struggles of the individual thinker towards a new conception of things may throw much light upon the application of ideas, if the historian is himself a man of speculative insight, but not otherwise; and, in any case, occupation with biographical details is apt to distract attention from the evolution of thought, which after all is the main thing in these remarks. I have had no desire to minimize the value of such an investigation as Dr. Stein has conducted with characteristic skill and judgment, but only to enter a caveat against the abuse of his historical method, and the undue importance which some are apt to attach to it.

We have before us in the present work a complete system of philosophy in outline. Its aim is to construct a modern metaphysic on the foundation of the latest results in science. With a firm faith in the possibility and practical value of philosophical investigations, our author nevertheless admits that it is only by its success in explaining the problems of life that philosophy can be justified. "We may claim that, if the scheme of things is rational at all, it should not mock our reason with puzzles that are insoluble. We must assert that either the human reason is competent to solve all the difficulties that human minds can properly feel, or that in all things it is the plaything of an unknowable, unmanageable and inexorable perversity of things" (p. 136). In Book I the author shows that the logical outcome of denying the validity of philosophic thought is scepticism and pessimism. The chapter on 'Agnosticism' is devoted principally to a criticism of Spencer and Kant as the representatives of scientific and epistemological agnosticism respectively. But if agnosticism were true, our author contends, it cannot stop with itself but must pass into scepticism. "If the Unknowable is at the basis of all knowledge, if all things are 'manifestations of the Unknowable,' how can it manifest anything but its unknowableness? If all our explanations terminate in the inconceivable, are they not all illusions?" (p. 56). In the following chapter on 'Scepticism' all the usual arguments for the general invalidity of knowledge are ably presented. Particular attention is given to the inadequacy and inconsistencies of the conceptions forming the first principles of science: Time, Space, Motion, Matter, Force, Causation, Substance, Becoming, Being. The