Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/618

602 'power' in moral agency in Book II, ch. xxi. ... The sectional analyses have been removed from the body of the text to the margin, occasionally corrected and enlarged and new ones annexed to sections where they were wanting. The annotations might have been multiplied indefinitely; for almost every question in metaphysical philosophy and theology, as well as in philosophical physics, is suggested by the text, as well as innumerable references to the 'Essay' in the literature of the last two centuries. The annotations offered are for the most part intended to keep the points of view and leading purpose of the 'Essay' steadily before the reader; and the references are mostly to the works of Locke's contemporaries and his immediate predecessors and successors. Occasional side-glances show recent phases of philosophical or theological thought to which the development through controversy of what was latent in the 'Essay' may have contributed. The corresponding portions of the 'Nouveaux Essais' are often quoted in the interest of the contrast and of the speculative insight of the German philosopher. In the Prolegomena Locke's individuality, and the circumstances by which it was modified, are presented in their relation to the 'Essay'; this is followed by constructive criticism of the 'Essay' itself as a 'historical plain' account of a knowledge that, being finite and human, is at last determined by faith; and in the end attention is invited to two opposite directions into which the 'Essay' helped to divert the main current of philosophical thought in Berkeley and in Hume. The portrait of Locke presented in this work is reproduced from the picture in Christ church, so long Locke's home." (pp. xiv and xv.) The Prolegomena is an excellent piece of expository and critical writing. A good deal of the matter contained in these one hundred and forty pages had, of course, been published before; but the critical portion of this introduction (which embraces more than half) gives a much more systematic account of the problems of the 'Essay' than had been possible in either of the writings which I have already mentioned. Professor Fraser's treatment is singularly free from the fault which Locke found with the earlier interpreters of the 'Essay'—that of 'sticking in the incidents' and failing to comprehend the main design of the work. "An answer of genuine worth for human purposes to the questions about knowledge is what is sought for throughout the 'Essay.' ... In fact, the Fourth Book is more in its place when treated as the first with the other three as a supplement. ... The lines of inquiry are then seen to