Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/607

No. 5.] particularly men, advance through an indefinite number of stages and develop from their original nature new properties and forces. But this original nature is only an indefinite somewhat out of which the forces must be produced, and what is produced is generally higher and more complex than the stimulus.

The development of memory and the other intellectual powers cannot be supposed to take place at the expense of other vital forces; for if the development has been harmonious, if the body has not been neglected or misused, the individual is physically stronger than before. Further, contact with persons or things calls forth new dispositions and feelings, and deepens those which already exist; i.e. produces new psychical forces without necessitating any loss. Stimuli of a negative character, like cold, hunger, pain, have a similar effect. Painful psychical experiences are most important for the genesis of positive moral qualities. All advance is the result of strain, of suffering, of conflict. If we ask for the source of this additional spiritual force, the question cannot be answered from the standpoint of the prevailing theory of energy.

Three editions of Ernst Platner's chief philosophical work, Philosophical Aphorisms, appeared between 1776 and 1800. The second edition was published in 1784, and, as it was nearly completed before the publication of Kant's K. d. r. V., it does not show any great influence of this latter. The third edition, as a result of this influence, however, was very much modified, and, as P. said in his preface, the work appeared in a completely changed form. Besides the K. d. r. V., Tetens's Philosophical Essays seem to have exerted a great influence upon P. This influence is especially prominent in the modification which the second edition received. It is also shown, when in the third edition P. protests against Kant's separation of sense and understanding. Tetens, although discriminating between feeling and perception, and showing the former to be a passive modification of the mind, while the latter involves a judgment, yet repeatedly insisted that both have one origin. He sought to show that all activities of the mind, feeling, understanding, and will, are of the same nature, and are only distinguished from each other by degree. Schulze's Aenesidemus also seems to have made a great impression upon P. The scepticism of the third edition seems to owe