LITERARY NOTICES. 



557 



the ones most fully presented, and the tone 

 of the book is against submission to preju- 

 dices, and favors the recognition of whatever 

 good there is in every institution, opinion, or 

 person. 



Studies in IIegel'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, con- 

 tinued, and ended in that of divinity. He 

 tried in his Philosophy of Religion to satisfy 

 man's demand to know what there is in re- 

 ligion ; 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 inter- 

 preted 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 be- 

 cause self -manifesting, and man in duty 

 bound to study this knowledge, are with 

 Hegel self-evident and demonstrable prin- 

 ciples." While he is regarded as a pan- 

 theist, 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 uni- 

 versities, state, and church, and for ten years 

 afterward remained the foremost intellectual 

 phenomenon of the time. But the interpret- 

 ers of his system, each seeking in it his own 

 dogma, and finding it, have succeeded in dis- 

 membering it into parts whose various as- 

 pects 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 in- 

 extricably entangled with the whole thought 

 and culture of the countrv, and are the leav- 

 en 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 Eng- 

 land and America the interest in negel is 

 chiefly owing to the relation of his thought 

 to religion and to Christianity. His thought 

 attracts Christian thinkers seeking for in- 

 tellectual comprehension of religious expe- 

 rience, faith, and fact3. They are drawn to 

 him "because they find him thinking weight- 

 ily on the same " subjects ; and yet the chief 

 opposition to the study of Hegel " comes from 

 the odium thcologicum of Christian teachers." 

 But the students of the Hegelian philosophy 

 disclaim being what the term Hegelian, either 

 in the popular or scientific sense, would im- 

 ply, for they are mastering and using his 

 method, rather than accepting all the re- 

 sults 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 expos- 

 itory paraphrase. Dr. Sterrett, therefore, in- 

 stead 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 orien- 

 tation 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 

 uncriticiscd authority. It is both anti-the- 

 istic and anti-Christian to profane the secu- 

 lar in the interest of the sacred." 



Organic Evolution as the Result op the 

 Inheritance of Acquired Characters 

 according to the Laws of Organic 

 Growth. By Dr. G. H. Theodor Eimer. 

 Translated by J. T. Cunningham. Lon- 

 don 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 dissatis- 

 fied with the " uncritical acceptance " ac- 

 corded to Prof. Weismann's theories of 

 heredity and variation by many English evo- 

 lutionists. He was inclined to attach more 



