REVIEWS OF BOOKS.
One by one the works of Professor Wundt are becoming a part of English philosophical literature. To the Human and Animal Psychology and the Outlines of Psychology, we may now add the first two of the four parts of the Ethik. It is to be hoped that this is but an earnest of what is to come, that the writings of the great Leipsic psychologist may exercise the same wide and direct influence upon English and American thought that they have enjoyed in the land of their birth. Professor Wundt is fortunate in the translators which his works find. These two volumes will at once take rank among the best translations of which our philosophical literature can boast. A careful examination has brought to light no error of any importance, while the list of 'Germanisms' is so short that it would be hypercriticism to refer to any of them. The publishers have done their work well, also, and produced two very attractive books.
The Ethik attracted so much attention upon its appearance in Germany twelve years ago, and, moreover, has been so exhaustively discussed, that its contents may be assumed to be more or less familiar to the majority of the readers of this Review. However, the history of psychology during the past twenty-five years should have taught us that the most important problems of the various philosophical disciplines at present are those of method. In view of the author's relation to the reform of psychology we may, therefore, profitably examine the work before us from the point of view of the principles it recommends and employs in the study of the moral life.
The Introduction, with its three sections upon "Ethics as a Science of Norms," "The Methods of Ethics," and "The Problems of Ethics," at once awakens the highest hopes. Indeed no abler presentation of the methods of our would-be science has been made in this generation. The fact that ethics deals with values often causes confusion as to its aims, but we are reminded that "the estimate of the value of facts is also itself a fact, and a fact that must not be overlooked when it is
