NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.
This new edition of Professor Fullerton's Spinoza is a very great improvement upon the first edition. The errors of translation, which the author explains as due to a misunderstanding, have disappeared, and the book may now be safely recommended as a fair and on the whole forcible rendering of the original. In Part II, I have observed two slips which should be corrected in a subsequent edition, and there may of course be others which I have not observed. The definition of 'God' (I, def. 6) is now correctly given as that of a "substance consisting of an infinity of attributes," but the author has omitted to correct his translation of the proof of Prop, 1, Part II, the last sentence of which reads: "Hence, thought is one of the infinite attributes of God," etc., instead of, "Hence, thought is one of the infinite number of attributes," etc. Also, in the scholium to Prop. 7, Part II (p. 80), the sentence: "For example, a circle existing in nature … that is, the same thing," should surely read: "For example, a circle existing in nature … that is, we shall find the same things in every case following upon one another" (easdem res invicem sequi reperiemus). It may be added that the words "nec ulla alia de causa dixi" which begin the next sentence, are hardly adequately rendered by "I have said": its force would be better brought out by such words as: "And the sole reason why I have said."
The 'Critical Notes' to this edition fill some 150 pages. I frankly confess that to me they seem unsatisfactory. The main function of the editor of such a work, I should suppose, is to enable the student to get at the point of his author. Professor Fullerton's aim rather seems to be to show how very unsatisfactory the system of Spinoza is. To examine all the criticisms he has made, would be to restate the whole doctrine, and I must confine myself to a single point.
Professor Fullerton insists that an "essence" is a "universal," and "a universal is such only in virtue of the fact that it represents what several individual things have in common.… Now, if I take up existence among the other qualities composing an essence, then, no matter what I may mean by the word existence, I must universalize it, I must understand it as exist- ence in general, the mere idea of existence, that which all existing things have in common.… Unless one wholly change the meaning of the word essence, one cannot escape from self-contradiction in speaking of the real
