Contemporary Literature [pp. 175-196]

190
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE.
LJanuary,
an accurate statement of all his works, with the origin, genesis, doctrines, and
a critical estimate of each, given more or less fully, according to its relative
importance in the author's system and its development. Then follow notices
of all the authors and works, contemporary or immediately subsequent, that
in any manner grow out of, or circle around, or have helped to make up, to
mould, or modify the school to which he has given birth. This process goes
on till some other great master or leader is reached who in turn becomes the
founder of a school, and originates a new drift in philosophic speculation.
This method carried out in the masterly style possible only to one having
the philosophic genius and insight joined to encyclopediac philosophical
learning which are united in Ueberweg, has great and obvious advantages.
It gives not merely the dates and statistics, or salient features of the times,
life, and authorship of philosophical writers,which form the beginning, middle
and end of so many works on philosophy and literature. This is well as far
as it goes. But it is only the bare frame, or rather scaffolding, worth very
little without the edifice to which it is subsidiary. It is Hamlet with Hamlet
left out. This volume is nosuch empty and shapeless monstrosity. It gives
not only, nor mainly, the biography of philosophers and historical incidents of
their times; but it presents the philosophy itself in its living growth, with its
modes and stages of unfolding, and in its continuous, though often serpentine,
sometimes labyrinthine, cotrse of onward genetic movement. And this is
the especial merit of this work, that it gives us not merely philosophers, but
their philosophy, and the living processes of its growth -together with all the
authors and literature related to, or any way illustrating the subject.
Whoever follows the author in the working out of this method, with reference to the great fontal thinkers of the last three hundred years, will feel new
light and power in his own progress in philosophic knowledge and insight.
Let him begin with Bacon and the development of the inductive system; or
pass to the great continental leaders of thought, their followers and antagonists-Descartes starting with his cogito ergo sum, and such followers as
Geulinx, Mlalebranche and others; Spinoza, with his famous definition of
substance as that "cujus concefitus non indi,et conceZftu alterius rei, a quo
forimari debeat," from which pantheism comes out as freely as yarn from a
distaff; then to Locke giving out afresh, in Britain, a partial but vacillating
sensism which set in motion the currents ending in the idealistic Realism of
Berkeley on the one hand, and the half sensuous, half idealistic Nihilism of
Hume on the other; Leibnitz with his monads and pre-established harmony,
and his wonderful fertility of germinant ideas, some of which have been exploded indeed, while much remains added to the permanent accumulations
of philosophy; notably his marking the grades of Clear, Distinct and Adequate Knowledge, in contrast to their respective faults of Obscurity, Confusion
and Inadequacy. To have demolished the famous aphorism of the Lockian
or sensuous philosophy, ui/ihil est in inttel/ecti quod uonifuerit in sensu, with
the three words, nisi intel/ecius ipse, and sent it down through the centuries
were itself glory enough for one man.
Then passing by others to his analysis of Hume's skepticism, and its