of view is both legitimate and indispensable. Thought, moreover, is not a mere epiphenomenon of nature, it is constitutive of reality. The real world is an intelligible system, a world of rational relations, and itself expressive of reason. Thus it is essentially moral, for morality is just reason in action. From this ideological conception of the world, Signer de Sarlo readily passes to a theistic interpretation of the universe. Perhaps he does not quite sufficiently consider what stumbling-blocks may lie in the way of this transition. Nineteenth century idealists have ever been very ready to treat a reference to the Absolute as a solution for any metaphysical puzzle. Signer de Sarlo is most acute in his criticism of the Hegelian doctrine of the relation of the individual consciousness to the Absolute Reason. But is not his own theism open to the objections, so long ago raised by Spinoza and perhaps never adequately met, to the attempt to represent the Infinite, the whole, as being moral in any intelligible sense? His discussion of freedom as opposed to 'physical necessity' does not appear to the present critic to contain anything new or convincing, and the attempt to rehabilitate the doctrine of innate or intuitive moral ideas does not seem satisfactory. As a whole, however, the work is well worth careful study, and should not be neglected by anyone who is interested in watching the currents of contemporary philosophical speculation.
E. Ritchie.
This book is a statement and criticism of Positivism as found in the works of Comte, Mill, Taine, and Spencer. The author is very systematic in his procedure, giving us, by way of introduction to the critical work, three chapters devoted respectively to general outlines and definitions, to the logical evolution of Positivist principles, and to the historical development of the same. There are, says M. Halleux, two kinds of thinking, the Empirical and the Speculative; the first is the method of Observation and deals with the concrete, contingent facts of experience; the second is the method of Reflection upon the abstract and necessary relations of ideas. Now Positivism is Empiricism; but, more than that, it is an Empiricism hostile to Speculation—an Empiricism which denies validity to any element of thought which is not empirical. The central principles of the school are (1) a Sensational Nominalism, which has come down from Teleso, Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, and Condillac, and (2) a Phenomenalism, which may be traced to Kant and Hume. The first of these principles insists upon the 'given' of sense as the only source of knowledge, and denies the validity of all attempts to 'think' it out of its particularity; the second repudiates all reality beyond the conscious state itself, and thus confines knowledge within the world of phenomena. Knowledge, then, has to do only with sense-particulars; its aim is to classify these in their relations of coexistence and sequence; and all attempts to explain or gen-
