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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXVII. No. 690 



have attracted much attention throughout 

 the country. The formal organization of 

 research laboratories accomplishes much 

 more than the same expenditure of money 

 for uneorrelated investigations by the in- 

 dividual members of the departments. It 

 calls attention to the activity of the insti- 

 tute in this field, raises its scientific stand- 

 ing, attracts advanced students, who are 

 often just as effective research workers as 

 inexperienced assistants, offers facilities 

 and inducements for advanced study and 

 investigation to our younger instructors, 

 and forms a nucleus of development in 

 this important direction. 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS 

 American Philosophy: The Early Schools. 

 By I. WooDBEiDGE EiLEY, Ph.D. New York, 

 Dodd, Mead and Co. 1907. Pp. x + 595. 

 This substantial volume, the fruit of the 

 author's three years' tenure of the Johnston 

 research scholarship in Johns Hopkins Uni- 

 versity, constitutes the achievement of the first 

 and most difficult part of an important under- 

 taking, the neglect of which hitherto has been 

 a reproach to American learning. That none 

 have before attempted, on any adequate scale, 

 the task which Dr. Eiley is carrying through 

 is perhaps partly due to a common impression 

 that a history of earlier American philosophy 

 would necessarily have the brevity of the 

 chapter on snakes in Iceland. The first of 

 the services rendered by the present publica- 

 tion is that such an impression can not well 

 continue to prevail, in view of the evidence 

 now given of the existence of much vigorous 

 and independent activity in speculation and 

 scientific ' inquiry even in the eighteenth cen- 

 tury. But it has always been reasonably ap- 

 parent that some sort of intellectual processes 

 must have been continuously at work in Amer- 

 ican life from the time of the founding of the 

 earliest colleges down to the present. Yet, in 

 spite of a considerable literature of books and 

 monographs on special topics, we have thus 

 far had nothing that was properly entitled to 

 be called an intellectual histqry of America — 



a history based on an extensive collation and 

 first-hand study of the sources, and covering 

 the intellectual movements of all parts of the 

 country. The nearest approach to this hither- 

 to has been the work of a Dominican scholar, 

 written in French. Such a history Dr. Eiley, 

 however, has undertaken to provide. It is 

 (what is still a thing sufficiently uncommon 

 amongst us) an ceuvre de longue haleine 

 that he has proposed to himself; the present 

 volume, which leaves off at the foreshadow- 

 ings of transcendentalism, is designed to be 

 followed by two others. What distinguishes 

 this part of the work is the novelty of much 

 of the material, and the 'thoroughness with 

 which the author has documented himself for 

 his task. He even seems to have read through 

 the whole series of Harvard Dudleian lectures 

 on natural religion since 1755 — a sort of cruel 

 and unusual punishment which one might 

 almost have supposed contrary to law in these 

 mild days. 



The interest of the book is, of course, more 

 historical than philosophical; but it is by no 

 means merely antiquarian. The author has, 

 perhaps, found no American philosopher to 

 whose writings many are likely to resort for 

 the solution of contemporary problems. But 

 he has rescued from oblivion some writers 

 whom it is still possible to read with pleasure, 

 and he has set forth, convincingly for the 

 most part, not merely the vicissitudes of philo- 

 sophical opinion — especially in academic cir- 

 cles — in America, but also the causes of those 

 vicissitudes. A large part of the book may, 

 indeed, be regarded as a record of the rise and 

 fall of the scientific spirit and of intellectual 

 vitality in the colleges. It is, in the main, 

 a melancholy story of the triumph of obscu- 

 rantism and mediocrity, of the suppression of 

 ideas and the defeat of tendencies which were 

 destined, after all, to be recalled from their 

 graves and to exercise a powerful influence 

 upon the university teaching of a later gen- 

 eration. Thus, in the first half of the eight- 

 eenth century there was an interesting devel- 

 opment, in Johnson and Edwards, of philo- 

 sophical idealism, which, like the doctrine of 

 the Cambridge and Oxford Platonists from 

 which it was, in the main, descended, showed 



