the ones most fully presented, and the tone of the book is against submission to prejudices, and favors the recognition of whatever good there is in every institution, opinion, or person.
Studies in Hegel's Philosophy of Religion. With a Chapter on Christian Unity in America. By J. MacBride Sterrett, D. D. New York: D. Appleton & Co. Pp. 348. Price, $2.
Hegel, the author says, is recognized as a thinker whose comprehension of thought and its method no student of philosophy can fail to acknowledge as great among the greatest. He was radically and throughout a theologian. All his thought began, continued, and ended in that of divinity. He tried in his Philosophy of Religion to satisfy man's demand to know what there is in religion; to discover and state its speculative idea. "But with him the speculative was both vital and practical—the very life of the spirit throbbing through all the tangled mass of varied religious phenomena in the world's history." His whole logic is interpreted as being but "his explication of the nature and activities of God immanent in the actuality and order of the world, and transcendent as its efficient and final cause." Agnosticism, both atheistic and Christian, is repudiated throughout. "God knowable because self-manifesting, and man in duty bound to study this knowledge, are with Hegel self-evident and demonstrable principles." While he is regarded as a pantheist, in the Christian sense, his doctrine of God is the Christian and not the deistic or pantheistic doctrine. "In him all finite beings find, not lose, their reality." Hegel's philosophy at his death had pervaded universities, state, and church, and for ten years afterward remained the foremost intellectual phenomenon of the time. But the interpreters of his system, each seeking in it his own dogma, and finding it, have succeeded in dismembering it into parts whose various aspects have seemed to various types of mind to be the whole system. While in Germany it has almost ceased to exist as a professed system, its spirit and method have become inextricably entangled with the whole thought and culture of the country, and are the leaven at work in its current philosophy. In Great Britain it has also greatly influenced philosophic thought, though accepted and expounded as a system by none. In England and America the interest in Hegel is chiefly owing to the relation of his thought to religion and to Christianity. His thought attracts Christian thinkers seeking for intellectual comprehension of religious experience, faith, and fact3. They are drawn to him "because they find him thinking weightily on the same" subjects; and yet the chief opposition to the study of Hegel "comes from the odium theologicum of Christian teachers." But the students of the Hegelian philosophy disclaim being what the term Hegelian, either in the popular or scientific sense, would imply, for they are mastering and using his method, rather than accepting all the results which that method yielded to him. In Dr. W. T. Harris's opinion, no other work better deserves translation into English than the Philosophy of Religion. But any real translation of it would be inadequate, and would need a further translation into expository paraphrase. Dr. Sterrett, therefore, instead of a translation, offers "studies" of his system. The purpose of the volume throughout is apologetic. "It is written with faith and in the interest of 'the faith,' though demanding an almost antipodal orientation or point of view to that of both deistic orthodoxy and ecclesiasticism." Pertinently to the latter feature of his course, the author well says that "it is mere time-serving to manufacture evidences when there are none. It is as useless as it is wrong to attempt the 'hard-church' method of overriding reason and conscience with the mere weight of an uncriticised authority. It is both anti-theistic and anti-Christian to profane the secular in the interest of the sacred."
Organic Evolution as the Result of the Inheritance of Acquired Characters according to the Laws of Organic Growth. By Dr. G. H. Theodor Eimer. Translated by J. T. Cunningham. London and New York: Macmillan & Co. Pp. 425. Price, $3.25.
The translator of this work explains, as his reason for presenting it to the English-reading public, that he had become dissatisfied with the "uncritical acceptance" accorded to Prof. Weismann's theories of heredity and variation by many English evolutionists. He was inclined to attach more
