Page:Philosophical Review Volume 8.djvu/558

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
540
THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
[Vol. VIII.

as beauty. Hutcheson, at least in his earlier works, defines it as benevolence. Hence Shaftesbury, like Socrates and Descartes and every other many-sided father of philosophy had 'incomplete' followers.

Ira Mackay.

The Ethics of Intellectual Life and Work. Thomas Fowler. Int. J. E., IX, 3, pp. 296-313.

Intellectual life is the "habitual desire and effort to discover the truth for ourselves in matters rising above the sphere of our ordinary interests and occupations." Intellectual work is the process of coördinating and affiliating these truths, and of communicating and explaining them to others. The primary virtue of intellectual life is the love of truth, a virtue more common in ancient than in modern times. A second is intellectual honesty, and, closely allied to it, is intellectual tolerance. With regard to the communication of opinions, no one has a moral right to misrepresent his own views, but, on the other hand, we are not bound to obtrude our opinions, and should not do so, if we think they would not benefit others. Intellectual work, especially that which results in publication, should be thorough, honest, and clear, and should regard the rights of others.

Grace Neal Dolson.

The New 'Ethical' Philosophy. By John Watson. Int. J. E. IX, 4, pp. 413-444.

This article is directed against those writers who maintain that the Hegelian type of idealism is too abstract and intellectual, and must be superceded by an 'ethical' idealism which shall take more account of the life of feeling and action. The author takes Professor A. Seth's essays recently published under the title Man's Place in the Cosmos, as typical of this tendency, and maintains that so far from being an advance to a newer and truer theory, the so-called 'ethical' idealism is nothing but disguised scepticism. He sho thatws the objection brought against Hegelianism of making experience coextensive with knowledge of objects, and thus neglecting the subject, overlooks the fact that for the Hegelian there is no object without a subject. The demand for a philosophy which shall do justice to feeling and volition is similarly based on the failure to recognize that knowing, feeling, and willing are simply aspects of the concrete unity of spirit.—Philosophy as a science, however, as opposed to philosophy as a set of working principles, is 'intellectual.' For its end and content is truth; "and truth, while it can have no existence except for a self-conscious subject, who at once thinks, feels, and wills, has its home only in the medium of thought." When it is asserted that 'thought and reality are identical,' it is not meant that there is no difference between them, but that reality is rational, that it contains no irreducible element which cannot be comprehended by thought. Philosophy, indeed, is not experience, but