Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/669

Rh questions which (as the author claims) precede philosophy, and might better be called a Prolegomena than an Introduction. "The physicists have but poorly concealed contradictions and absurdities by using the concepts of Force, Cause, Change, and Effect. We feel bound to modify those notions which we cannot set aside and yet cannot think, and doubting the validity of all others to put them to the test of consistency. There is need of a science which shall complete all the other sciences by examination and elaboration of their concepts. This science is Philosophy" (p. IX). But the answer to two questions (1) What is a concept? and (2) Of what can we have concepts? must precede any such a science and so form the subject-matter of an introduction in philosophy.

The first part (pp. 1-43) is devoted to these questions which are, as will be seen, mainly logical. The answer to the first question is that a concept is a complication of relations of sense (Empfindungensbeziehungen). The second question is answered in the classification of concepts as Substantive, Attributive, Verbal, and Adverbal concepts. The briefness of Dr. Tausch's book allows of only the most summary treatment even of important problems. One cannot help remarking a tendency throughout the work to reason regarding states of consciousness as if they were things, a tendency which it is hard to avoid but which is to be charged with many of the mistakes and controversies of modern philosophy.

The remainder of the book (pp. 44-72) contains a short encyclopaedia of the subject, in which the author states and briefly discusses the most important problems of Logic, Metaphysics, and Æsthetics. His separation of the real from its relations leads, inevitably, to the position that the reals are unknowable and can only be characterized negatively. The reals are not identical, yet not different, and since they are simple, are unchangeable. The whole book suffers from scrappiness; the discussion of each question raised is of course very slight. It seems to me, too, that the author tends constantly to look at philosophical problems from a mathematical and mechanical standpoint.

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In spite of the telling influence of Critical Philosophy, the Philosophy of History has only reluctantly loosened itself from its dogmatic moorings. Here the Kantian reform has been wholly ignored for a long time, by philosophers who substituted for the old dogmatic metaphysic of nature a kind of metaphysic of historical occurrence. Fichte's attempt to see in