This is a reprint of the original edition, published three years earlier, without change save for the addition of a preface and several appendices. In the appendices, which deal with "Truth," "Consciousness," "Being," and "The Soul and Freedom," the author undertakes to restate in more compact form some of his fundamental positions, and at the same time to answer sundry objections of his critics.
That a book on so forbidding a subject as the Nature of Being should so soon reach a second edition is in part no doubt a tribute to the excellent qualities which the book possesses—to the weight of the argument, and to the author's pleasing manner of presenting it—but also in part, I think, to the timeliness of the discussion. If there is one characteristic of recent philosophical discussions more striking than another it is the general reaction against idealism, the tendency to regard that philosophy as inevitably leading to subjectivism or nihilism, and as being fundamentally inconsistent with the recognized methods and the accredited results of science. From many sides we hear the cry that the great desideratum is a new view which shall do justice alike to the demands of philosophical reflection and to the results of scientific investigation. In so far as the book before us would satisfy this end, it makes common cause with our modern realisms and anti-intellectualisms, or at least anti-absolutisms, but our author pays more respect to the historic tradition than most reactionary philosophers of the present day. He speaks with more respect of Berkeley, and feels himself called upon to answer Berkeley's question as to "how it is possible to predicate anything of that which is other than consciousness."
Since the publication of the first edition Professor Read has discovered that others, notably Professors Strong and Paulsen, had independently reached a similar view, that indeed his view had been in the world long enough to have been christened pampsychism,—a misfortune, he adds, that could not have been foreseen and must be endured, though, we are assured, the view is not so bad as the abuses of its name might imply.
Having reviewed the first edition at some length in this journal (Vol. XV, p. 324), I shall take the liberty of referring to that review for a completer account of the plan and contents of the book, and shall here confine myself to a consideration of its central doctrine in the light of the further discussions contained in the appendices. Professor Read holds that all philosophers are driven to a belief, tacit or confessed, in the thing-in-itself, although many philosophers endeavor to blind themselves
