the wish that the mass of exegetical writings should only be reproduced when dealing with important points, and even then only that in it which is really valuable. The beginner would even then be still unable to use the Commentary on account of embarras de richesse. An attempt to do so would inevitably call forth from him the complaint of the student in Faust:
"I feel so stupid from all that's said
As if a mill wheel ran in my head."
Vaihinger's method of interpretation deserves the greatest praise. It is almost always sound, unprejudiced, free from artificialities, and allows the text to speak for itself. The fact that the author always quotes or refers to the entire parallel passages from Kant's writings, or at least the most important of them, is especially deserving of thanks. Such a correlation was hitherto given with any completeness only in Mellin's writings, which are difficult of access. Vaihinger knows how to use these parallel passages very skillfully and carefully. The ambiguity of most of Kant's technical expressions, their different shades of meaning, the problems of the most various nature which are crowded together in them, the contradictions they contain—all these are explained in a masterly manner. Vaihinger himself rightly calls it "a separation of the different threads of thought." Important results are obtained in this way. I shall now pass on to the most interesting of these, and to the most important outcome of the other investigations.
The ambiguous expressions: Erkenntniss (p. 2), Gegenstand (p. 4, 6-7, 17-18), a priori (p. 80 ff., 268, 272-274), Raum and Raumanschauung (p. 88, 224 ff., 254-261), Begriff (p. 157-160), Erfahrung und Möglichkeit der Erfahrung (p. 173 ff.), Transcendental (p. 350-354, 463-464), are analyzed into their elements. In agreement with B. Erdmann, Vaihinger shows very clearly that the assumption of a plurality of things-in-themselves affecting us is an unproven assumption of Kant's. But he admits, of course, the result of his own essay "Zu Kant's Widerlegung des Idealismus " in the Strassburger Abhandlungen zur Philosophie (1884), in which he maintained that Kant postulated an empirical affection through phenomena in space, in addition to the transcendental affection through things-in-them-selves. In the essay devoted to this question, "Die afficierenden Dinge" (p. 35-55), the passages in which this position had been previously advanced have been more fully elaborated. But here the form of the Commentary is very confusing, for the author finds
