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This is probably one of the two or three most important and original works of general philosophy which have been published in English in the last twenty years. Both its main thesis and the mass of its detailed observations will certainly be a focus of discussion among philosophers for many years to come; and it has the distinction of style and the large simplicity of purpose which have always made the best philosophical writing a part of general literature. The avoidance of technical jargon, and the disdain of footnote and historical allusion, are evidently parts of a design to restore philosophy to common sense in the manner of the eighteenth century; as in Hume, the accepted distinctions of the Schools are very rarely introduced except as subjects for derision, though the derision is generally of a more robust, and sometimes even knockabout, character than was natural to Hume. The thought and the style are indissolubly linked in a manner which constitutes both the strength and, as it seems to me, also the weakness of the book; its strength, in that the reader is carried from beginning to end by a single sustained impetus; its weakness, in that its argument seems somehow to fade and to lose some of its force when, laying the book down, one probes it again in some other and less powerful idiom.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-15418-0_2

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