Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/241

225 read the second book in connection with the others, if, in short, we read the work as a whole, it is possible to maintain that the Essay represents the development in Locke's mind of the view, ultimately announced in the last book, which brings the various aspects of his system into intelligible relation with one another.

The chapters on Hume and Kant show how the different elements of the Cartesian philosophy are destroyed by criticism and finally give place to a more adequate view of knowledge and reality. Hume's criticism of the causal relation refutes the fundamental assumption of Cartesian rationalism, namely, the identification of causation with explanation. His analysis of the self destroys the false spiritualism of Descartes. It must be noted, however, that, while Hume starts with a theory of the ultimate constituents of experience to construct experience, Kant starts from our actual consciousness to discover its conditions. "Hume's method is a priori and dogmatic, and Kant's alone the truly empirical " (p. 257). Kant's transcendental method "is simply the hypothetical method of physical science applied to the explanation of knowledge" (p. 256). Kant, however, takes as the fact to be explained, not experience in all its multiplicity, but the simplest act of knowledge, that which is involved in all knowledge whatsoever, namely, the consciousness of time. "That we possess such consciousness has never been denied by any philosopher, and is therefore the really indubitable fact by the analysis of which Descartes ought to have started."

The main defect of Mr. Smith's book is that he has condensed too much material into the space he allows himself. In the later chapters this does not destroy the lucidity of the exposition, but in the early chapters, where the foundation of the whole is laid, the case is somewhat different. If the author had, in the first part of the book, developed some of his points more fully, and at the same time rearranged his material so that each element of Descartes's system received more continuous treatment, the progress of his argument would have been much clearer. There is, for instance, no adequate account of Descartes's 'spiritualism,' and the reader is left to put things together for himself out of various scattered references. As it is, however, the book has unusual merit. The more one studies it, the more one is convinced that the author has grasped the really constitutive principles of modern philosophy, and has indicated their true relations and historical interactions. He has thus thrown new light on some of the most obscure questions in the history of philosophy. In short, he has succeeded in doing well a task well worth doing.