570 NEW BOOKS. absolute will makes itself most massively felt. The inorganic world, or the things we perceive in it, are merely relative and subjective forms, not existing independently of us. Accordingly, all the knowledge of the -exact sciences cannot bring us a step nearer to the heart of the cosmo- physical problem : this pure knowledge of reality can be won only by "" cosmo-psychological " methods. Can we have or acquire other concepts than those which spring from sensible forms ? Gottschalk answers in the affirmative : " Our experience rests on two distinct substances (sic}, one of which is the relation of the organism to its environment the .-sensibly perceptible, the other on the contrary is the absolute sub- stance, the object of experience in itself". The consciousness of self is uch an absolute substance, and in it we approach to a conception, a supra-sensible conception, of the absolute being. It is the source of the impulse towards truth, which is inexplicable alike by sense-experi- ence, by the biological needs of the organism, and by an external purpose of God. Thus from this point of view also we return to the theory that the love of truth in man is " nothing else than a form of the striving of the absolute being after the highest unfolding of its force, which consists in reaching in all things to the most complete self-expression, self-deter- mination ". The application of these ideas to the history of institutions, of religion, and of morality is interesting. It is the artist, according to the writer, not the statesman or founder of religion, that has both shown truest individuality and has expressed best the truth of humanity. Every God, including the Christian, is a product a " phantom " of the ideas of happiness of his worshippers. " The sacrificial death of Christ removed the weight by which absorption in the once indispensable human god checked the free expanse of thought ; and removed therewith the evil -conscience under which the very Greeks invented the idea of eternal punishment." The chief value of Christianity consists for Gottschalk in its vagueness of form, in which more rapid progress is possible than under a series of definite forms fixed once for all (pp. 31 ff.). All ideas of God are mere " substitutions " personifications of abstract ideas or of personal wishes. " Man would invent no God for himself if in the first concept an absolute self-consciousness were given, a knowledge of man's own mastery over himself, and of his responsibility solely to him- self " (p. 1.62). Religion is thus a transitional form, an unfixed phase of conceptual evolution ; necessary, indeed, in its several phases, but only as a means to the end. Morality, on the other hand (p. 175), is a part -of the primitive or elemental nature. Morality in its true form is there- fore unconscious, not an object of effort ; the false position in which it has been placed is due to the fact that it has remained an appendage of a religion which itself has been left behind. Gottschalk criticises with equal vigour Romanticism and Asceticism, Catholicism and Protestantism. His view of English religion is not flattering to our vanity (p. 214). The God of the Englishman is de- scribed as a Commercial Security : " So long as his business goes well, the Englishman knows that he has a God ". Needless to say, the work was written before our Education Bill appeared. J. LEWIS MclNTYKE. Das Gefuge der Welt : ( Versuch einer kritischen Philosophie). Von HERMANN GRAF KEYSERLING. Munchen: F. Bruckmann. A.-G., 1906. Pp. viii, 382. Count Keyserling's work is one of the most suggestive attempts we have seen in recent years to penetrate the mystery of the All and of man's
