Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/129

Rh writers we have in the pages of this magazine an authoritative and all-sided presentation of metaphysical questions, such as can be otherwise obtained only by ransacking extensive libraries. An important feature of the magazine is the considerable space it devotes to the criticism and interpretation of the works of art, poetic, dramatic, musical, pictorial, architectural, etc.

The first article of the July number of this magazine is an addition to the voluminous literature of Shakespearean criticism, by D. J. Snider. In an acute and ingenious analysis of "The Tempest" the author aims to show that this drama is a profound philosophical study of two worlds, the real and the ideal. As it is latterly the fashion for lawyers, doctors, and scientists, to find every thing in Shakespeare as fast as it is discovered elsewhere, so the present writer would seem to assume that the poet had anticipated the last results of German metaphysics. Will not this vein at length give out? Daniel Wilson has lately been over the same ground, and devoted a solid volume to prove that in "The Tempest" Shakespeare has anticipated the modern doctrine of Evolution. Among the questions debated by the schoolmen of the middle ages, the following is reported: "Was Adam, while yet without sin, acquainted with the Liber Sententiarum of Peter Lombardus, Bishop of Paris?" It would seem to be an open question with many of our later commentators and schoolmen, whether Shakespeare may not really have been acquainted with the works of Darwin and Hegel! "The Music of Color," the second article, is an ingenious and instructive statement of the analogies of light and sound as explicable on the wave-theory. Many efforts have been before made to find harmonic relations between the spectrum and the gamut, but the results have been regarded as unsatisfactory. The present writer presses the analogy in many particulars, and is confident that it will ultimately be fully established. In the third article Prof. Vera treats of "Ideas as the Essences of Things." He takes the high Platonic ground of independent and eternal ideals, saying: "The force that produces the plant, and according to which the plant grows and dies, is its idea. The real and absolute germ is not the individual and external germ we touch and see, but the idea by which the external germ is created and endowed with the necessary force for its growth and preservation." "Thoughts on the Intellect" is a translation from one of the powerful works of Schopenhauer, in which that pestilent old pessimist puts the entire philosophy of things in the following nut-shell: "The laws and powers of Nature, together with matter in which they inhere, constitute here the given, and consequently the absolute real, taken generally; but regarded specially, as innumerable suns and planets, floating in infinite space. These are therefore, as the result, everywhere, nothing but balls, a part of which are shining, the rest illuminated. Upon the last, life has unfolded itself in consequence of a process of putrefaction, which, in gradual succession, produces temporary organic beings, rising and perishing through generation and death according to the laws of Nature governing the power of life, which, like all the others, make up the reigning (and from eternity to eternity) existing order of things, without beginning or end, and without giving account of themselves. The highest point of this succession is occupied by man, whose existence also has a beginning, in its course many and great miseries, few and parsimoniously-granted joys, and after this, like every thing, has an end; after which, it is as if it never had been."

Mr. Stephen Pearl Andrews contributes a paper on the "Revisal of Kant's Categories." He is the author, as is well known, of an elaborate philosophical system which he denominates "Universology," and one of the features of which is a universal language. Mr. Andrews is a philosophical linguist, and his studies have brought him to the conclusion that there can be no comprehensive and perfected system of philosophic thought that does not include some means of systematic security against the errors which arise from the defects of language and the multiplicity of tongues. In the present paper he takes the "categories" arrived at by the transcendental analysis of Kant, and seeks for those elements and conditions of the structure of language which correspond to these categories. He says: "The three categories of quantity are Unity, Manifoldness, and Universality, which are no