420 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



with peculiar difficulties, arising from the 

 vague and indefinable character of the hu- 

 man feelings, which can not be described 

 directly or ace irately analyzed ; it can be 

 approached only by the way of wide com- 

 parison and illustration. The first step 

 taken by the author is to classify the emo- 

 tions common to poetry and the fine arts ; 

 and in this we find at the outset that the 

 lines are hazy and discernible only by the 

 aid of acquired faculties. Next to be studied 

 are the aids to emotional qualities, the com- 

 mon end of which is the evoking of emotions 

 of the pleasurable kind. The conditions of 

 treatment under which they are brought into 

 effect are representative force, concreteness 

 and objectivity, personification, harmony, 

 ideality, novelty and variety, plot, and re- 

 finement. The qualities themselves are 

 designated as strength or sublimity, beauty, 

 feeling or pathos, humor, wit, and melody; 

 of which melody and feeling are perhaps the 

 least ambiguous, while most of the others 

 are liable to complications that make scien- 

 tific precision in the language of criticism 

 very difficult. Under the first head are 

 brought the contrasted emotions of love, 

 tender feeling, and sociability, on the one 

 hand, and irascibility, malevolence, and an- 

 tipathy on the other. It may seem para- 

 doxical to enumerate the emotions of the 

 latter category among the promotives of 

 pleasure, but an analysis of the best literary 

 works will show tliat these darker aspects of 

 feeling are as essential as the shadows in a 

 picture. Feeling includes the varieties of 

 love, friendship, patriotism, compassion, re- 

 ligion, personified feeling, and sorrow or 

 pathos ; humor, the group of qualities cen- 

 tering in the ludicrous. When place is 

 given to all these qualities, there still re- 

 mains a region of effects not fully accounted 

 for — beauty ; the sense qualities ; utility, 

 which can hardly be divorced from the 

 special emotions, but stands to a certain 

 degree remote from any one interest ; and 

 imitation, which lends itself to further the 

 special qualities, but has also an independ- 

 ent charm. Next to the minute and me- 

 thodical treatment of the emotional qualities, 

 the chief peculiarity of the present work is 

 the line-by-line method of examining pas- 

 sages with a view to assigning merits and 

 defects. These passages occupy a consider- 



able proportion of the space, and are repre- 

 sentative, both of the rhetorical qualities 

 which they illustrate, and of the classical 

 authors of all times, including the best- 

 known contemporary authors of the literary 

 nations. This feature, while completing the 

 value of the book for study, makes it also 

 attractive for leisurely reading. 



Realistic Idealism in Philosophy itself. 

 By Nathaniel Holmes. Boston and New 

 York : Houghton, Mifflin & Co. In Two 

 Volumes. Pp. 621 and 499. Price, 



$5. 



Starting with the presumption that man 

 aspires after and must have some theory of 

 himself, of the universe in which he lives, 

 and of life, duty, and destiny in it, the au- 

 thor disposes of all the ancient theories — 

 intuitional systems, he calls them — as vague 

 and not competent to stand the test of a truly 

 philosophical criticism. But the stream of 

 thought and light that poured through an- 

 tiquity, gathering strength from the various 

 ethnic sources by which it was fed, was 

 transmuted " into the learning and wisdom of 

 the Christian era, such as they have been." 

 Exactly how much the knowledge or culture 

 of the present time has been indebted to 

 either of the ancient systems, or how much 

 to those of the Christian centuries alone, it 

 would be difficult and perhaps unimportant 

 to specify. " The one most certain thing of 

 all is that the knowledge of nature, the in- 

 sight into any true theory of this universe, 

 or into any true wisdom in the conduct of 

 life in this world, or into any assurance of 

 life hereafter, that has been gained within 

 the last five hundred years, is of more worth 

 and value to mankind than all the rest put 

 together." The modern speculations of phil- 

 osophical theists are declared to have been 

 too much biased by preconceived notions 

 concerning biblical revelation, by influences 

 gi'owing out of reverence for Christian behefs 

 and popular opinion, or by subjection to an 

 established church, to be of the value that 

 they should be. The class of writers of 

 which Voltaire may be taken as a represent- 

 ative — being mainly literary and iconoclastic 

 — ^have failed to present a statement of uni- 

 versal philosophy or a conception of the Deity 

 that need detain much the critical thinker 

 of this century. Scientific methods deal 



