Page:Philosophical Review Volume 18.djvu/235

221 monistic-pantheistic type, as the fundamental and future form of philosophy as metaphysics. After outlining the arguments for such a view, he admits the limited character of our knowledge of the All-One, and leaves to religious faith the function of establishing a moral theology based on faith in the Good as goal and ground of reality. Religion remains the strongest power in life, and to philosophy falls the task of clearing a place for religion by showing the limitations and implications of positive science.

While the various essays in this volume have very unequal value for the trained student, all are interesting as expressions of the views of distinguished German thinkers, and they should bring home to the serious-minded layman a sense of the vital function of philosophy in the life of culture to-day.

The many friends of the authors of this book will be glad to know that it has at length appeared, and that the teaching literature of Ethics has been strengthened by such a thorough-going introduction to the subject. It is of course altogether above the class of the mere compendium and that of the superficial or eclectic manual, being a genuine and successful attempt to present the realities of moral science and conduct in and for themselves, as things as deserving of study and investigation as the facts of any supposed science. It cannot fail to awaken that "vital conviction" at which it aims "of the genuine reality of moral problems and the value of reflective thought in dealing with them." The work consists of three parts, 1) a confessedly sociological and descriptive part dealing with the beginnings and the growth of morality, 2) a theoretical part in which an admirable unification is effected of the teleological and the formal views of morality, and 3) a practical part in which the student is introduced to the "examination" of "unsettled political and economic" problems it being to the authors "intolerably academic that those interested in ethics should have to be content with conceptions already worked out ... rather than with questions now urgent."

Part I consists in the main of a fresh and instructive presentation of the facts and stages of instinctive and customary morality and of reflective (or social and rational) morality, along with illustrations (also very much in the usual manner) of the growth of morality