REVIEWS OF BOOKS.
In these two volumes the new Master of Balliol has given us a worthy course of Gifford Lectures. He has understood his task aright, and interpreted 'Natural Theology' as equivalent to 'Philosophy of Religion' in the strict sense of that phrase. "In these lectures," he says, "it has been my endeavour to explain and illustrate a view of man's life which I believe to be in accordance with the essential principle of religion and of Christianity, and at the same time the necessary result of the best lights of philosophy which have been given to our time." (Vol. II., p. 318.) The result is a book which is not only a notable contribution to the subject, but must also be regarded as its author's most independent and constructive work. Professor Caird has at last got away from Kant, whose philosophy has so long supplied him with material for exposition and criticism; he is here on his own ground, an original investigator, and gives us the fruits of his ripest reflection on the ultimate problems of philosophy and religion. The features which Professor Caird has led us to expect in any work from his pen are conspicuous on every page of the present volume—the ease and grace of movement in the thin air of abstract speculation, the literary skill, the delicate spiritual sensibility, the wide knowledge and cosmopolitan sympathy in the things of the mind.
The "best lights" are, of course, those of the Hegelian philosophy. But so entirely has the whole matter been re-thought by Professor Caird that the philosophical point of view might with greater justice be called Cairdian than Hegelian. The work has the same kind of originality, relatively to the Hegelian view which inspires it, as the late Professor Green's Prolegomena to Ethics.
In stating the characteristic excellences and the central standpoint of these lectures, we have at the same time suggested their
