100 CEITICAL NOTICES I

versy between Mill and Whewell, as to whether conceptions are abstracted from facts or superinduced upon them, the dispute, it is pointed out, turns on a false view of the relation of the mind to facts. " When a conception is said by Mill to be ' abstracted from facts ' or ' from phenomena/ this can only mean that it is abstracted from our observations of facts, from the facts as they are for the consciousness of the person who is supposed to make the abstraction " (p. 291). Such a statement, then, " puts the cart before the horse ; till the phenomena have been connected by such a conception, they have not the character from which it can be abstracted " (p. 292). The gist of the last section, L, on Causa- tion is a refutation of the Humian account of causation, simply by the denial that any idea or object can be "considered in itself". " The * minimum intelligibile ' in the way of feeling (the only expe- rience which amounts to a knowable fact) is a feeling related to another as a changed appearance or affection of something of which the other was an appearance or affection. . . . The con- ception of this something develops, as everything is found to be relative to another, and to derive all that it is or has from that relation, till the ' something' becomes ' nature' (of which Lewes has at last discovered that to say it is uniform is an identical pro- position), which remains the same in all its changes" (pp. 301-2). ANDKEW SETH. Esquisse d'une Classification syst&matique des Doctrines Philoso- phiques. Par CH. EENOUVIEB. 2 Tomes. Paris: Au Bureau de la Critique Philosophique, 1885, 1886. Pp. 490, 420. The historical view of systems that makes up the larger part of these volumes, itself the outcome of some of M. Eenouvier's most original ideas, has enabled him, in his return from history to criticism and construction, to express these ideas with renewed force. Both as a history of philosophy from a clearly denned point of view, and as the latest statement of M. Eenouvier's own philosophical position, the whole work is of the highest import- ance and interest. The history of thought is viewed not as a series of approxima- tions to a final doctrine which includes all truth in itself, but as a process in which antagonisms become more and more definite ; till at length the theses and antitheses of the chief antinomies of philosophy are marked out into two coherent systems, opposed to one another in detail and as wholes. From the beginning of his philosophical studies, M. Eenouvier tells us, he was struck with the inward presence of antinomies in the greater philosophical systems. He found that in a small number of systems, as in those of Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno and Hegel, the attempt was openly made to solve all antinomies by a denial of the appli- cability of the law of contradiction to real being ; and for some