Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/269

A Simple History of Ancient Philosophy. By W. R. Scott, M.A. London, Elliot Stock, 1894.—pp. ix, 98.

Within the past three or four years four short histories of ancient philosophy have appeared in English, each explaining the cause of its existence and apologizing for its appearance in terms convincing the reader that it is one of the works exactly suited to "fill the long-felt want." They have been small elementary hand-books intended as initia philosophica for young students, and have all had some merit, however microscopic. The thin volume above cited finds its raison d'être (as explained in the preface) in the fact that there is no book in the history of philosophy which "does not demand a previous knowledge of the subject," and this attempt to set forth the history of ancient philosophy presupposes no philosophical training whatever on the part of the reader. However short the author has come of the aim he has set himself, one must say that his book is easily the best of the four brief histories above referred to. In fact, I know no small volume that has appeared on the same subject in the past four years which has equal merit with this production of Mr. Scott. I do not, however, concede Mr. Scott's success in avoiding the termini technici of philosophy and in laying before the young reader or the uninitiated a history intelligible without previous training. One would scarcely consider the following sentence (p. 48) luminous to the philosophical novitiate: "If the older philosopher centred his system in an ideal world above, with its correlate in the nothingness below our own, his pupil, on the contrary, established himself in the everyday life of Change that Plato abandoned as the product of an antithesis." The preface indicates we are to have an A B C account of ancient speculation, but the book is not a primer. It is, however, clear; and this, along with good arrangement, interesting manner of treatment, and judicious selection of problems handled, is as much as one could fairly ask in a treatise intended as a brief introduction to the history of ancient thought. The author treats in outline the whole of Greek philosophy from Thales to the closing of the Athenian Schools by Justinian, and the fact that he presents the salient features of this period of thought in lucid form within a compass of less than a hundred pages is ground for congratulation. The book is equipped with an index of terms and glossary, an index of names, and with diagrams explanatory of the evolution of philosophy within the period treated. Mr. Scott has been successful in presenting a very succinct account of Ancient Philosophy in clear paragraphs that have logical sequence, and the small volume does not carry the appearance of a choppy epitome manufactured out of ill-connected excerpts from larger treatises. The work is excellently adapted to do good service as an elementary text-book. It contains no glaring mistakes, and the proof has been well read. The account of Aristotle's logic is, however, very scant, only a partial statement of Aristotle's criticism of the Platonic ideas is given, and a quite inadequate and inaccurate presentation of Aristotle's theory of happiness (p. 56). Defects