Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/89

] the very error of that "abstract pantheism" or " Spinozism" against which he so often and so strongly protests. His real bête noire is not pantheism but "monotheism," as he rather quaintly but persistently calls theism; and it is pretty evident that, in his extreme anxiety to avoid this Scylla of what he would call a dualistic or pluralistic view, he has fallen, in spite of himself, into the Charybdis of a pantheistic unity. His "principle of unity" is, it seems to me, a veritable lion's den; all the foot-prints are in one direction. Either it is bare unity, the One which annuls the Many; or it is simply the All, the ununified totality of existence. Professor Caird's criticism of theism, moreover, might be shown to derive its chief plausibility from his pressing into the service of philosophic thought the spatial metaphor underlying such terms as "externality," "relation," "separation," etc. The result of such criticism is a pictorial or spatial conception of the divine unity, rather than an ethical and religious, a spiritual and philosophic interpretation of that unity. Nor do I see how we can get a philosophy of religion from a theory which, by de-personalizing both man and God, so identifies these terms of existence as to preclude any relation between them. Had space permitted, I should have liked further to trace what appear to me to be the defects in Professor Caird's theory, to the exclusive intellectualism of his standpoint, and to point out the effects of this intellectualism upon his treatment of the problems of evil and of personal immortality, and upon his interpretation of Christianity. Taking the book as a whole, I venture to express the opinion that, while we have to thank Professor Caird for much fresh and suggestive thinking on the subject, and no student can fail to derive impulse and elevation from contact with such a teacher, yet our chief debt to him lies in the fact that, through the very defects of his own solution, he has set for us anew, and with a new precision, the problem of the philosophy of religion.

French Platonism has rarely been very profound. In matters of philological erudition the French depend almost wholly on their neighbors beyond the Rhine, and for the philosophic exegesis of Plato they too often content themselves with a quaint mixture of common sense and neo-Platonic mysticism, set off by rhetorical phrases about Plato as the father of idealism and the precursor of