and not transferable. But upon Aristotelian, no less than upon
Platonic, principles the form is "prior to" the "matter." On other
occasions this priority does not create a stumbling-block, owing to
the co-eternity of form and matter, which guards against a temporal
interpretation, but in the case of the soul the temporal succession is
just the datum explicandum. Is it, then, astonishing that Aristotle
should have discovered no better way out of the difficulty, no better
way of harmonizing the strict individuality of the soul with the
priority of the form, which must here be taken temporally, than his
obscure doctrine of the (
Greek characters)? It is true that he ascribes to
it all the attributes he had censured in the Platonic doctrine of pre-
existence; but does he not do precisely the same thing in his doctrine
of the universal after his criticism of the Platonic ideas, and is not
the relation of the (Greek characters) to the (Greek characters) just as obscure as that
of the (Greek characters) to the (Greek characters)? Professor Knauer, who
follows Brentano rather than Zeller in his account of the De Anima,
tries to read modern Creationism into Aristotle, according to which
the immortal part of the soul is created out of nothing and combined
with the body by the will of God. And this in spite of the facts that
Aristotle elaborately refutes the idea (e.g., Metaph., XI, 9) that the
perfect would be in any way conscious of the imperfect, that there is
not the least trace of a conception of creation in Aristotle, and that
the idea of creationism is assuredly no less difficult than that of the
(Greek characters)! Professor Knauer appears to greater advantage in
his treatment of the problem of the One and the Many. He is a
decided opponent of Monism, admires Leibniz and Herbart, and
considers Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel to have added nothing to
Spinoza. Monism, as he rightly insists, is helpless in face of the
problem of change, which begins to be intelligible only when a
plurality of existences has been admitted. But it may not be amiss
to remark that, even according to Herbart, change is only appear-
ance, which does not affect the inner nature of the "reals," and that
the possibility of a real and intrinsic change is what we are concerned
to assert for many scientific and ethical purposes. Moreover, as
already stated, pluralism cannot be regarded as established until the
question of the relation of God to the Many has been discussed, and
such discussion is here entirely lacking. The book concludes with
an extremely eulogistic account of the philosophic writings of the
poet Hamerling, who, however, does not seem to offer anything of
sufficient originality and interest to justify his admirer's claim that
he has for the present said the last word in philosophy.
F. C. S. Schiller.
