236 Notices of Books. (April, 
Contemporary English Psychology. Translated from the French 
of Tu. Risor. London: Henry S. King and Co. 1873. 
8vo. 328 pp. 
Ir is always a matter of considerable interest to know the light 
in which our intellectual work is regarded by those who are not 
our own countrymen. The natural bias which causes a man or 
a people to view the literary or philosophical production of a 
fellow-countryman as unsurpassed works is not present in foreign 
criticism. We know how eargely M. Taine’s ‘‘ Notes on 
England,” and on English Literature, were received; and 
although without doubt this was partly due to the eminence of 
the man, the cause mentioned above had also much to do with it. 
We have a powerful school of Psychology in this country at the 
present time, and a comparison and differentiation of the views 
of the more prominent members of it is desirable and important. 
Philosophy was, in the beginning, universal science; it 
treated of ‘“‘the universality of things, the all.” Then came a 
separation of one of its parts, mathematics, some two centuries 
after the time of Pythagoras. But, according to M. Ribot, the 
old philosophy of Plato and Aristotle is still the universal 
science :—Metaphysics follow physics, politics follow morals, 
physiology follows psychology. In the middle ages, medicine 
and alchemy separated from it, and in the eighteenth century 
physics. Then philosophy in its broadest sense began to lose its 
comprehensiveness: nature was wrested from it; God and man 
remained to it. Philosophy once included all things, ‘ principles 
and consequences, causes and facts, general truths and results; ” 
ultimately ‘it will be metaphysics and nothing more.” It has 
been said that ‘‘ metaphysicians are poets who have missed their 
vocation,” and M. Ribot considers the assertion just, but we 
must venture to differ from him. For surely the precise, hard, 
logical mode of thought which the metaphysician must adopt ; 
his cold, lifeless theories and harsh unyielding laws ill consort 
with that warm flow of imagination which spontaneously should 
burst from the poet. Hegel’s logic may indeed ‘border on 
Faust;” but what a thoroughly metaphysical poem Faust is! 
If all poems were like Faust, then indeed the poet and the 
metaphysician would have much incommon. And what of the 
end of all philosophy? Let us suppose all our questions 
concerning God, nature, and ourselves, finally answered. What 
would remain for human intelligence todo? This solution would 
be its death. All enquiring and active minds will be of Lessing’s 
opinion on this point: ‘‘ There is more pleasure in coursing the 
hare than in catching it.” Philosophy will keep up its activity 
by its magical and deceiving mirage. Were it never to render 
any other service to human intelligence than that of keeping it 
always on the alert, of elevating it above a narrow dogmatism, by 
showing it that mysterious beyond which surrounds and presses 
upon it in every science, philosophy would do enough for it.” 
