Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/240

226 had no practical value. Posidonius, on the other hand, on the ground that there was no such thing as an absolutely wise man, and that progress in knowledge was constant, found his ideal in the relatively wise man. One feels that in these later Stoics the stern, unsympathetic, yet heroic spirit of the old philosophers of the Porch had departed; that their theories of conduct and life were becoming accommodated to ideals regnant in a political decline; that we have here to do with speculation no longer creative, but partly inherited from predecessors, partly adopted from other systems; that the Stoic philosophy was becoming an eclecticism; and that all living and quickening power had departed from it. We have, however, to express to the author of the Philosophie der mittleren Stoa our gratitude for an extraordinarily clever and painstaking work, which, from the very nature of its subject-matter, will unfortunately have but a small circle of readers, occupied as it is with a somewhat obscure and uninteresting period, when the philosophy of the Greeks, like Greece herself, was rapidly falling into decay.

.

A book like the above deserves our closest study. Whatever fault may be found with it — and it has its defects — one thing may be said without fear of contradiction: Dr. Simmel's first volume is ingenious, subtle, and highly suggestive. It is a keen and exhaustive investigation of a number of ethical concepts, critical even to a fault. We might characterize it as one of the least dogmatic treatments of moral questions in existence, in this respect, resembling Sidgwick's maturer work. Whatever view the enthusiastic dogmatist may take of such productions, the careful thinker cannot but welcome this book as a useful addition to the discipline with which it deals. Its object is a commdenable one, meagre though the positive results may be. The apparently simple concepts of ethics are shown to be far more complicated than would appear on the surface. An acute analysis of such notions lessens one's desire to venture on the high seas of speculation and inspires one with a wholesome kind of doubt, wholesome because of the intellectual vigilance which it begets. The