Page:Philosophical Review Volume 20.djvu/685

671 occasion for the special merits of the plan, receive a pretty satisfactory treatment, though the tendency is more generally apparent than in Vol. I to be a little too encyclopedic. In view of the difficulty of the task, Professor Cushman seems to me most successful in the endeavor to convey a sense of the continued and all-important interpenetration of the scientific motive in modern thought. The latter part of the book, beginning with the chapter on the German Idealists, I should consider the least adequate for the purposes of the inexpert reader. It may perhaps be said that since a text-book account of the Germans is bound in any case to be tolerably blind, it is better to devote to them a few pages of general appreciation than to try to be more detailed while still running the almost certain risk of falling short of clarity. But such a plan to be successful at least demands an excessive simplicity, and a careful avoidance of those highly generalized and subtle motives which come most easily from the pen of the philosopher when he is attempting a shorthand statement, and from which the amateur is likely to get few distinct ideas; and Professor Cushman does not succeed altogether in escaping this danger. The exposition of Kant, it may be said however, is much less open to such a criticism, and as a means of introducing the student to him seems to me to compare very favorably with similar attempts. The period succeeding German Idealism is still more sketchy, and there might easily be a difference of judgment about the relative proportions of space assigned, and the choice of names included. One might question, for example, whether Herbart deserves nearly nine pages to less than one for Comte, and a line or so for Spencer. But it is to be said that a book which is professedly a text book and nothing more, is probably wise in declining to deal otherwise than cursorily with the complications of recent philosophy, and so the choice of material has to be more or less arbitrary.

Of points of interpretation which I have noted, I will call attention to only two or three. The account of Descartes' method as an attempt to derive all other ideas from the original certainty of self, seems to me at least questionable of the major part of his treatment. In Kant, again, the distinction drawn (p. 243) between the conscious individual and the consciousness of humanity is not altogether easy to connect, as is here attempted, with Kant's traditional distinctions; and the statement of Fechner's parallelism (p. 359) suggests a confusion with a different type of theory. Professor Cushman's volumes however are to be approached primarily as essays in the pedagogy of philosophy. Such efforts, intelligently made on principle, are to be welcomed, and I can only repeat my conviction, expressed with reference to Vol. I, that the present attempt has many merits. {{float right|{{sc|A. K. Rogers.}{{gap}}}}

The purpose of this work, as the author states in his Preface, is not to give a history of English philosophy but rather an outline of the development of