Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/113

Rh the cosmic conceptions and categories of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the same way generous consideration is accorded to thinkers who are passed over with scant ceremony in the ordinary text-books. Bruno, Bacon and Kepler are instances of this. The same appreciation of the immense importance of science for philosophical inquiry marks the perspective in which nineteenth century workers are placed. Kant, who is more influential for science than any other thinker, receives very full discussion—a discussion, too, which however one may dissent from it, as the present writer dissents, bears everywhere the traits of prolonged study and of first-hand acquaintance with the principal primary sources. Similarly, the English school of Positivists, elbowed out in the country of its birth as it has been by a metaphysicising Hegelianism, is restored to its true importance, and the post-Kantian rationalism, that has ousted it, is bidden come down lower. In a work so extensive there are, of course, many points on which one can not agree with the distinguished author. For example, his conception of the relation between Descartes and Spinoza requires revision; he makes too much of Bruno; he has not reasoned the standpoint of Copernicus out to its logical conclusion; Hobbes and Rousseau get more than their due, and Hume less; the peculiar genius of the English school, particularly as represented by Locke, does not seem to have been caught. But, after all, these are defects which appear to the expert and do not seriously mar the book as a whole. For the scientific man, it is the best presentation of the constructive development of philosophical theory from the Renaissance till within the last twenty-five years.