426 



SCIENCE. 



I Vol. Vll., No. 170 



Incidentally one gets interesting glimpses of 

 English habits. Thus the habit of cutting bank- 

 notes in two, and transmitting the two halves in 

 separate envelopes by post, — to guard against 

 loss or theft in transmission. — still exists. Mr. 

 Rae advises managers not to issue notes to "anyone 

 who, you have reason to suspect, would straight- 

 way cut them in halves, and despatch them by the 

 first post as a remittance to London." And notes 

 of local country banks are sometimes preferred 

 by people in rural parts to Bank-of-England notes. 

 Ignorance and prejudice of this kind on mone- 

 tary matters are possible only in a rather stolid 

 and slow-moving community like that of rural 

 England. Again, the country banks handle depos- 

 its in a way differing from methods in this coun- 

 try. They charge an eighth of one per cent on 

 all transactions, whether of money deposited or 

 checks cashed. On the other hand, they allow 

 to depositors interest on their accounts from day 

 to day, at the rate of from two to two and one- 

 half per cent. No such practice, we believe, 

 exists in London or in this country. The expense 

 of handling an account, and the gain from de- 

 posits, are allowed to offset each other, — a rough- 

 and-ready but simple process. The more punc- 

 tilious arrangement of the English country banks 

 is characteristic of their general business habits. 



F. W. Taussig. 



PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 



The reader who has no previous acquaintance 

 with Von Hartmann cannot be advised to begin 

 with this volume ; but whoever has a moderately 

 good knowledge of the great pessimist's views and 

 methods will find these brief essays both instruc- 

 tive and amusing. Von Hartmann here uses all 

 his well-known dialectic arts, sets his various op- 

 ponents to fighting among themselves with all 

 his old, somewhat trite but always charming in- 

 genuit}', parades for the reader's benefit a large 

 part of his imposing and finely drilled termi- 

 nology, and retells in his pleasing way much of 

 him philosophical romance. The tireless activity, 

 the immense reading, the skilful writing, and the 

 attractive personality of the author are all freely 

 displayed. Nobody else in this generation can do 

 what Von Hartmann has done : so much is clear. 

 Nobody else can make both pessimism and ab- 

 stract metaphysic so popular; nobody else can 

 join such a talent for advertising with such a 

 genuine speculative genius ; and to nobody else 

 has Heaven granted such various talents, literary, 

 commercial, scientific, journalistic, philosophical, 



Pli iltmoph inch r f rayen der yvyenwart. Von Edward von 

 Haktmann. Leipzig and Berlin* Priedrich, ih*5. 



and quasi-philosophical. Whether the result of 

 the use made of these powers in Von Hartmann's 

 case has been to produce a philosophy, every 

 reader must judge for himself as he can. For 

 our part, we can make nothing of the outcome, 

 in so far at least as it is Von Hartmann's. His 

 stubborn insistence upon giving to his account 

 of the absolute the form of an historical romance 

 is his most characteristic and fundamental phi- 

 losophical blunder. One cannot regard even 

 elementary geometry as a story : its truths are 

 contemporaneous. How much less, then, can an 

 incoherent narrative, such as Von Hartmann gives 

 of the ' weltprocess,' exhaust or even fairly begin 

 an exposition of the philosophy of the absolute, 

 in case, namely, there is any philosophy of the 

 absolute possible at all? And as for Von Hart- 

 mann's pessimism, this whole conception of a bal- 

 ance-sheet of pleasures and pains as a test of the 

 value of life seems to us un psychological, and op- 

 posed alike to the common sense of mankind and to 

 the demands of speculative thought upon ethical 

 problems. Deeper truth there indeed is in Von 

 Hartmann's writings, and much of it ; but, so far 

 as our knowledge of his works goes, this deeper 

 truth represents rather the common property of 

 idealists than any creation of Von Hartmann's. 

 But one thing, at least, must be admitted by the 

 unkindest of critics ; viz., that if there is in 

 Von Hartmann, as we must hold, only the spoil- 

 ing of a philosopher, our pessimist still remains 

 one of the best philosophers ever so completely 

 spoiled. 



Of the twelve essays in this volume, all brief 

 and all interesting, the most valuable, to our 

 mind, are the first, ' Die schicksale meiner phi- 

 losophic in ihrem ersten jahrzent;' the fourth, 

 'Uebersicht der wichtigsten philosophischen 

 standpunkte ;' the fifth, ' Zur pessimismus-frage ; ' 

 the sixth, ' Zur religions-philosophie ; ' the tenth, 

 'Die grundbegriffe der rechtsphilosophie ; ' and 

 the eleventh, ' Kant und die heutige erkenntniss- 

 theorie.' Of these, the first is by far the most 

 directly and universally attractive, because it 

 brings Von Hartmann's personality to the front 

 most of all, and is a fine example of his fre- 

 quently used device of joining the methods of 

 autobiography with those of metaphysic, to the 

 great advantage of the general reader, if not to 

 the advantage of his philosophy itself. 



JOSIAH ROYCE. 



There have been but sixty cases of death from 

 hydrophobia in Philadelphia during the past 

 twenty-five years, the largest number, seven, oc- 

 curring in 1869. 



