KR. MA1JRICE'S HISTORY OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY.* personal individuality of those

who express them. And these wants Maurice's meditative genius, and is of a kind to exercise a deep if region of thought.

not directly a very wide influence on the history of English philoso- The book opens with a view of philosophy in the fourteenth century,

phy. It is not in any sense a manna!, if by that phrase be under- as presenting a picture of that common dissatisfaction with scholastic stood a résumé or digest of the various systems of -different formals which led some thinkers into the boldest Realism, others into philosophers in their most unique and systematic forms for the the boldest Nominalism. The Church, which had absorbed all the think- use of students preparing for a philosophical examination. It will ing power of Europe, had 'trained the intellects of men into a thorough not teach any man to " sketch briefly the views of Locke on distrust of their own intellectual faculty. In some, this distrust was

abstraction and generalization," or to " distinguish accurately expressed by the Realistic faith, which attributed a diviner substance between the utilitarianism of Cumberland and Paley," or to perform to thong/its than to the thinking powers of the men who entertained

any other of those many feats which examiners in these subjects them ; in others this distrust expressed itself by the denial of all love to impose. But still less is it an enlargement of the alight reality to human conceptions as such ; in 'none did it take a more characteristic form than in the great thinker with a sketch of whom

4 Modern Philosophy : or, a 7realise of Moral and Metaphysital Philosophy from the 14th Oenitav to Me French Revolution, with a Of:wpm-into theL9tii ea:tarry. By the Mr. Maurice's volume opens, William of OCCIIIII. He it was who,

Rev. J. 1). Maurice. Uriffin. maintaining that universal conceptions being mere names in human troduced. Mr. H. Warren has returned to his Eastern subjects in sketch contributed many years ago by Mr. Maurice to the Ency- " The Parting Gift on a first Desert Journey," but with indifferent sac- cloptedia Metropolitana, as a literary contemporary mistakenly cess. Mr. Absolon, on the other hand, shows considerable improve- states. It is a new book, evidently the result of many years' ment in some of his drawings. "Gainsborough's Courtship" is not labour, and of great learning,—the fruits of large reading being one of these, and those who know anything of the :life and character of often condensed in a mere hint ; and it is a book which, of all that painter will find it hard to believe that he was ever so dandified others, ought to be read as a whole, and not to be consulted like a in his dress, or that even in his moments of love-making he could philosophical dictionary under the various heads. Its value consists look so abjectly silly_ " The Match Lego Maggiore" is one of the chiefly in what we may call the dynamics of philosophy—and as we best things Mr. Absolon has ever done. Two lovers are enjoying are aware that that is a hard phrase requiring explanation, we will to light his pipe. The "match" illumines the them, of philosophy figures and the awning There are three springs, as we may 'call proceed to explain our meaning.

effect of water and sky._ " Hastings from East Cliff after Sunset" which certainly lead to very different types of thought—the hunger is another proof that Mr. Absolon can do genuine work when he and thirst for new springs of 'life, whether intellectual or moral; pleases to take the trouble. Mr. Carl Werner is an industrious the practical passion for bringing strong preconceived motions to worker, and contributes several drawings of careful but harsh and bear on the actual arrangements of human life and society ; finally, 'literal execution. That which will probably excite most attention the mere scientific pleasure in classifying phenomena, and so -represents Garibaldi% first bivouac amidst the ruins of a Norman eliciting a new theory. Both the two former springs of phi- church on the shore of Sicily. It contains portraits of the Italian losophy are of the kind which we have called dynamical ; that liberator, Colonel Turr, Captain Peard, Maio, &c. Mr. L. Haghe's is, they either indicate or generate new forces in the human knowledge of architectural detail is well exemplified as usual, but it world; they either spring from a great individual want, or are is to be regretted that he does not bestow more time upon his figures, symptomatic of a great social and political want, or both may be occupying such prominent places as they do in his works. In ' The

true; they may express the want which they are intended to satisfy. Card Tridr," a soldier of the seventeenth century performing a feat of

leger-de-main before his fellows, there is little to be found fault with as The third, or merely scientific source of philosophy, in the narrower fair as the guard-room itself is concerned, but its occupants are very tin- sense of the term scientific, issues neither in the expression nor in real, expressionless people, and their tendency to wear garments of the satisfaction of wants so muck as in analysis, theory, and system. the crudest colours is very objectionable. "The Little Gardener," .by Of course, none of these three are entirely separable. No really great Mr. Morin, is one of the most singular-works in thegallery. A child of investigator of the last kind can be mined, who has 'not been stimn- six years old is cuddling a large watering-pot as big as himself, and kited to his investigations by some hunger of his -nature, however walking along a gravelpath. His blasé father reprcls him with an purely intellectual : nor any great 'philosopher of either the Arst or expression of utter vacuity, as much as to sax, " There's nothing in it." second kind, who could take any step at all without that intellectual The same remark might be applied to the picture itself by ill-natured survey and analysis by means of which the human search for truth critics. Mr. J. H. Mole is seen at his best in " The Leisure Hour" can alone be prosecuted. The greatest of all thinkers, Plato, owed

his speculative ardour to all three sources of philosophy, though —a work which contains some tender passages of colour and good could be the case if he cared chiefly has given us a very striking and living picture of the relation between

The subtlety of individual theory, on the contrary, depends mainly on B 0 0 K S. the peculiar gifts of the theorist's own intellect, which need not in.

.—,....__ any way be specially related to the temper of his age. But the deeper manta either of individuals or of societies strike far deeper than the , are realities in the divine nature, or, in other words, ex-

?maid his infinite distrust of the human intellect,—his infinite trust an the reality of those divineprocesses after which men only obscurely -grope. The same disposition to bore right through the heart of human formulas to an infinite divine life which cannot be expressed in formulas at all is very finely sketched in the history of the German mystics ; and, after that term of eclecticism and compromise which usually follows the excitement of deeper thoughts, is reasserted by Nicolaus von Cusa, one of the thinkers to whom Mr. ,Manrice's sketch gives a significance at once personal and social. We cannot choose any better specimen of the special aim of this history than by a short extract from Mr. Manrice's delineation of this great Roman Catholic Protestant of the fourteenth century. His writings, he says, "show tie a man altogether free from the individualizing or national tendencies of the F.nglish or Bohemian reformers, no less free from the heathen classicality which is attributed to the new scholars, a Catholic in the strictest sense of the word, and not a Catholic who ultimately set the collective church above its visible ruler, a man so far from aiming at any refinements of style or eschewing the old Latin that he is positively the writer of the Middle Ages whom Cicero would have found it most difficult to construe, a man who is trying with immense effort to throw off the burden of the old scholasticism precisely because he feels it a weight upon his spirit, a hindrance to true humility and true knowledge of God as well as to all manly thought and freedom ; one who is looking to Greek letters on the one side, to the science of numbers and forms on the other, as instruments of emancipation from the yoke of Aristotelian logic which is crushing the heart out of himself and out of his age. . . . There is the wonder of a child mixed with the ardour of a first love in Cuss's treatment of mathematics. It is as if the sense of proportion, of order, of certainty which the pure science reveals had crushed him almost as the beauty of form or colour in nature may crush an artist or a poet, and had drawn him on to the vision of that which transcends all order and propor- tion such as we can conceive of."

And then Mr. Maurice gives us one passage from his writings ex- pressing the inmost heart of the philosophic cardinal :

"The desire of our intellect is to live intellectually, that is, continually more and more to enter into life and joy. And seeing this Life is infinite, the blessed are continually borne towards it with fresh longing. They are satisfied, therefore, as thirsty spirits drinking from a fountain of life. And because that drinking goeth not into the past, but is in eternity, they are always blessed in drinking, and are always satisfied, and never have finished their drinking or finished their satisfaction. Blessed be God who hath given us an intellect which is not to be satisfied in time ; whose longing, seeing that it is capable of no end, apprehends Himself as above all time, and knows that it cannot be satisfied even with the intellectual life it pants for, except in the fruition of the perfect Good which never faileth, where fruition does not cease, because the appetite does not decrease in the fruition. . . . This, then is the capacity of the intellectual natnre, that by receiving into itself Ike it is converted into that very life, as the air, by receiving into itself the rays of the sun, is converted into light."

This brief extract must suffice as a specimen of our author's method and aim in treating the different writers with whom he deals. Our limits will only farther permit us to give some account of the more striking features of his book.

The sketch of the direction taken by the same reaction against the tyranny of intellectual formula in Italy., and especially in Florence, in the fifteenth century, is equally vivid. There it begins, at least, in the deep conviction that the scholastic intellect has failed to embody the full meaning of human rather than of divine influences.' It begins in the re-assertion of the worth of the classical art and culture, is coloured first with a sort of half Platonist, half Christian idealism which saves the art of the period from a slavish imitation of the classical types, and then passes over, by a verynatural reaction against the resthetic tendency, into the noble episode of Florentine fanaticism under Savonarola. -During the whole of this period, whether in its spiritual or humanistic phases, the rebellion against scholasticism is assuming more and more of a social and political type than it had under the early mystics, and connecting itself with questions of policy and government. It is discovered that the State can no more be fettered by scholastic ideas than the human intellect or human Art itself, and in Italy, Germany, and England the origin of political authority is discussed afresh, and efforts are made to assert for it a higher independent value than it had ever had under the denomination of the "secular arm." In every region of life there is the same discovery that both the divine and human nature is deeper and ought to be freer than scholastic formulas will permit—the same effort of God and Nature to throw off the shackles of the inadequate human conceptions which had so long impeded all fresh study. All this, however, is matter of common remark, and did not need any fresh eye to bring out clearly. The great merit of this history is, that the author sees in each of the great thinkers something deeper than .a mere rebellion against limitations, that he fixes so truly on the positive thought and in- sight which has forced this rebellion on them, even when it is not, as it often is not by any means, the apparent centre of their com- pleted intellectual system. Thus he often draws attention to treatises previously neglected by philosophic critics as comparatively unim- portant for the understanding of special systems, with the most happy effect; and this precisely because not being the most systematic, they display the natural bent of their author's mind and his most living struggles with the world of speculation about him, before he had surmounted, or persuaded himself that he had surmounted, his diffi- culties. Thus, instead of distinguishing Hobbes by his theory that a state of nature is a state of war, or even by his selfish theory of human emotions, which are the Hobbist trade marks, so to speak, of previous critics—Mr. Maurice calls attention to the true key to his thoughts in that strong desire to find an adequate" motive power" to strengthen the state against the anarchy which he saw impending. Hobbes was, as our author shows, rather an inventor of political forces than a searcher after Truth : and, considered from this point of view, his Leviathan assumes a totally different aspect, and a much truer as well as less injurious one, than is usually given to it. The Hobbist philosophy is utterly mistaken when it i , s said, as in Germany we have heard eminent philosophical critics assert, that he laid his foun- dation in a study of the individual man. Rather did he lay it in a study of the problem how to get a strong " enough central force for society and the State in spite of those individualistic forces which he saw and dreaded. No one has ever brought out this central feature of Hobbes's philosophy so well as Mr. Maurice. Again, in the treatment of Spinoza—which is exceedingly able— we get the same advantage from the same mode of procedure. Instead of taking the most elaborate, and, so to say, petrified form of Spinozistic doctrine, in the Ethics, our author begins with connect- ing the life of Spinoza as an excommunicated Jew, with his earlier works, and especially those considerations on Hebrew politics, which prove him to have been yearning not after the overthrow of the human personality and morality, but after the destruction of all that desire for special privilege and selfish monopoly at the basis of political and social and religious life which he thought he saw and had cer- tainly personally experienced in the Jewish politics. Descartes' con- ception of God as Infinite Thought first gave him the clue to a method by which this might be accomplished, and in carrying it out he probably overshot the wants of his own heart and life, and utterly drowned that personality and nationality from which he sought only to extract the e,gotistic poison. But his point of departure was a true and natural reaction against the selfish Jewish interpretation of the Jewish history and law, and not an original hatred of freedom either in man or God.

We have said enough to show how ably Mr. Maurice treats the greater thinkers of what we have called the dynamic class. We have only to add on this department of the subject, that the book would be even more valuable had he named none of the lesser names on whom he has no room to spend power. We hope to return to the book and give reasons why the higher class of the purely intellectual and psychological thinkers might have claimed a fuller study and a deeper criticism. We think that, especially on the ethical, as distinguished from the spiritual and metaphysical side, it has injured,a book of the highest class of merit.