his comparison of these two systems on pp. 55-56 and elsewhere. A third guide in the matter of vocalisation he finds in the matres lectionis, or vowel-letters, so abundant in the later Hebrew and Aramaic dialects; and a fourth in the transliterations of JewishAramaic words to be found in the LXX. and other Old Testament versions, in the New Testament and Josephus, in Jerome, and in Arabic writings-thus testifying to the pronunciation at four separate periods. These transliterations, which are so interesting and important in regard to the sounds not only of Aramaic but of ancient Hebrew, are made to do excellent service in the pages on pronunciation. With these aids at his command, our author is able to abandon any dependence on the ridiculous vocalisation of the ordinary Jewish MSS. and editions of the Targums-whose absurdity is shown, not only by its violation of the rules of Aramaic grammar, but by its continual inconsistency with itself.

Besides its thorough treatment of grammar, the book of course contains large contributions to our knowledge of the vocabulary of the Judean and Galilean dialects, in those respects in which they stand contrasted with one another. The general conclusion that one forms from the survey of grammar and vocabulary is that the Judean dialect is nearer Hebrew; while the Galilean-closely akin, as has been said, to the Christian Aramaic of Palestine-is nearer Syriac, whilst containing a number of words and some grammatical features peculiar to itself.

Of course important points still remain unsettled, such as the extent to which Hebrew grammar and vocabulary have affected the grammar and vocabulary of the Targums, making them unlike those of any spoken dialect. And in general we must remember that in most of the extant Jewish-Aramaic literature the dialect employed is a largely artificial "speech of the learned," not the normal language spoken by the people. On another subjectwhich bears on the history not merely of the language but of the exegesis and theology of the later Jews-the relative dates of the different Targums, the last word has not been said. Dalman is in

favour of putting the literal and methodical Targum Onkelos much earlier than the somewhat irregular and uneven Jerusalem Targums on the Pentateuch, which he relegates to the seventh century A.D. But he does not seem to have disposed of the arguments adduced by Nöldeke (Alttestamentliche Litteratur, p. 256 f.), and especially by Buhl (Canon and Text of the Old Testament, Eng. trans., p. 173 f.), to show that the Jerusalem Targums contain at least some strata of an older period, whereas the Targum Onkelos "is rather a learned, and therefore a secondary work" (Buhl, l.c.). But on this very obscure subject our best hope of a solution lies in such careful scientific inquiry as Dalman carries out.

There is no language or dialect, not even ancient Hebrew or Greek, that has greater claims on Christian scholars than the Aramaic spoken by the Jews of Palestine at the opening of the Christian era. Hence our gratitude should be the greater to the author of this grammar, who has accumulated so much helpful material and cleared away so many difficulties.

NORMAN M'LEAN.

A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Lotze: the
Doctrine of Thought.

By Henry Jones, M.A., Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow. Glasgow: James Maclehose & Sons. 8vo, pp. xiv. 375. Price 6s. net.

THE appearance of Professor Jones's volume on the Philosophy of Lotze fulfils a natural expectation of those who have followed the course of recent philosophical discussion in this country. Lotze is in many respects the most serious of the critics of modern Idealism; and his growing influence has made a "critical account" of his philosophy very desirable. His work demands the attention of idealists, not only because his philosophical attitude is one of deliberate antagonism to Hegelian idealism, but also because he has been deeply, though on the whole negatively, influenced by modern scientific points of view, and especially because he has played a vigorous, if somewhat critical, part in the development of scientific psychology.

Lotze's special importance, however, as a critic of Idealism, consists in the fact that he is not by any means a conventional Empiricist. He takes up an independent position, and joins himself to neither of the regular camps; and, while he is thus independent of philosophical parties, he often appears to be no less independent of the human prejudice in favour of definite conclusions. He is thus a formidable, because an inaccessible assailant; for, as Mr Jones says, "no camp can be burned till it is pitched somewhere, and no opponent can be overthrown till he takes up some position of his own": it is certainly not easy to criticise a philosopher who actually glories, as Lotze seems to do, in the discovery and advertisement of a cul de sac.

His ponderous inconclusiveness is no doubt a weakness as well as a strength to Lotze. It gives an impression of intellectual paralysis, which must often alienate rather than convince serious students of philosophy. Lotze's work has neither the sweep and

unity which give charm to Hegel's thought, nor the deliberate and progressive, if somewhat parenthetic, accuracy of Kant's construction. Still it is probably the supremely critical quality of Lotze's writings which is chiefly responsible for their influence-an influence out of all proportion to the number of those who would regard themselves as his disciples. His very detachment from the movements of contemporary thought, and his almost cynical frankness about ultimate speculative solutions, give weight to that conservative tendency which, as Mr Jones suggests, has probably a good deal to do with Lotze's popularity.

This conservative or orthodox" tendency of Lotze's work is not an aspect of it which Mr Jones desires to criticise or to traverse. He regards it as "a positive achievement for a philosopher to be 'orthodox,' provided his orthodoxy is philosophical. For he has not to invent the world of art, or morality, or religion, but to understand it." On the other hand, however, Mr Jones insists that philosophy must hold the common convictions of mankind "in a manner fundamentally different from the ordinary consciousness;' common sense, that is to say, and experience must be re-thought into a synthesis more complete than their own; and it is here that Lotze is found wanting; "for the mere critic is always dominated by an unconscious conservatism which only makes a show of passing its convictions through the crucible of doubt." This introduces the fundamental question for the critic of Lotze-the question whether his work is a real development of philosophy or a departure from its main tradition, and a sacrifice of its real function and only justification; and this is a question which it is all the more necessary to ask in Lotze's case, because his influence affects scientific even more than popular thought: all recent metaphysical discussion is affected, and some of it is considerably leavened by his teaching. While, however, his logical and metaphysical theories have been more or less explicitly canvassed in detail, yet, for the last ten years (with the exception of two suggestive articles in Mind by Mr Eastwood) little has been done in English in the way of criticising Lotze's fundamental positions and the grounds of his divergence from the idealist tradition.

"The

Mr Jones's book, therefore, which has this for its main purpose, is most timely; and his discussion is as excellent as it is opportune. The book is meant for special students rather than for general readers; and only those who have a robust appetite for logical problems will be able to read, without flagging, the chapters on Theory of Judgment " and " Lotze's Doctrine of Inference and the Systematic Forms of Thought." To the serious student, however, the whole book cannot fail to be interesting. It is brilliantly and powerfully written; and, in Mr Jones's hands, Lotze himself forgets Vol. V.-No. 3.

T

to be dull; while that very concentration of the argument upon certain main issues, which may limit the number of those to whom the book will appeal, is likely to seem one of the chief of its many merits to those who are interested in the problems which it discusses.

Mr Jones finds "the main watershed in modern philosophical theory" in the question whether thought is "receptive" or "constructive"; and the present volume is mainly a criticism of Lotze's relation to this question. Lotze's aim was to strike a middle path between the Scepticism which severs knowledge and reality, and the Idealism which seemed to him to identify them"; and Mr Jones's criticism indicates that, in his search for this via media, Lotze oscillates between the view that thought "is formal and receptive, and its only work is that of reflection," and the view that it "is essentially constructive, the cause on account of which alone there can be either ideas or objects, or connections between them." This oscillation or transition from one view of thought to the other is traced by Mr Jones in Lotze's account of Conception and of Judg ment, and in his passage from Subsumption to Substitution. In each of these cases Lotze is compelled, in the course of his attempt to explain knowledge, to advance from the formal conception of thought, with which he begins, to a recognition of its concrete, synthetic, or constructive character.

Lotze starts from "the assumption that the first datum of knowledge is the subjective state"; but he finds this everywhere inadequate as an hypothesis for the explanation of knowledge; and he is compelled to adopt various expedients in order to evade the difficulties which are created by this original assumption. He exalts the function of feeling and volition in relation to knowledge; he finds in sense the whole content of experience, and contrasts its concreteness with the abstraction of thought; and he makes the validity of knowledge depend ultimately upon an intuition which is itself resolvable into feeling. In pointing out the character and tendency of these expedients, Mr Jones develops a criticism of Lotze, which is chiefly an account of the way in which Lotze's preconceptions are modified by his attempt to explain knowledge. But this, which is a most satisfactory and objective method of criticism, is also determined throughout by a constructive system of philosophy, from which the criticism derives its chief interest. Mr Jones maintains that thought knows reality directly and at first hand. "The genuine object of thought . . . is reality, and reality, pari passu, with our knowledge of it, shows itself as ideal." Lotze's contrast between the concreteness of reality and the abstraction of thought represents a misleading conception of what thought is; for real thought is essentially concrete; and "the emptier a thought is . . . the less it is a thought." Abstraction is a departure from

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real thought just as truly as from real things. The concreteness of reality is thus no ground for asserting its inaccessibility to thought; and, against all Lotze's attempts to explain our knowledge of reality independently of thought, Mr Jones insists that thought is involved in every stage of knowledge, and that the only reality of which we can say anything is reality understood as the object of thought. He shows that thought is essential both to the cognitive value of that Feeling, in which Lotze finds the beginning of knowledge, and to the existence of those Judgments of Value which reveal, for Lotze, the ultimate ground of truth and reality. Thus neither thought nor feeling nor intuition can correct the error of Lotze's original assumption, namely, that knowledge begins with an inner world of subjective states, and then strives to find a way outwards." It is impossible, in fact, to supplement the cognitive work of thought, regarded as purely subjective, by referring to elements in conscious experience which are not thoughts; for these can give no information, and are quite irrelevant. If thought be limited to subjective states, then no way can ever be found of explaining how reality is known; and if thought be not thus confined, then sense, and reasoning, and judgments of worth are all functions of thought, or stages in the development of its constructive work. If the system of reality were not present in knowledge from the beginning, it could never be found in it in the end.

Mr Jones, then, finds Lotze's chief service to philosophy in his having deepened "that Idealism which he sought to overthrow," by showing indirectly "that thought and its data cannot . . . be set in direct antagonism to each other if knowledge is to be the issue of their interaction," and "that the only way to reach reality at the end of the process of thought is to take our departure from it."

The determination of thought by reality is the thesis of the concluding pages; and the prominence of this idea, which gives its "feeling" to his whole work, is one of the most interesting features of the constructive aspect of Mr Jones's criticism. He points out that Kant's criticism of experience leads to a conception of nature according to which "the conformity of cognition to objects is its conformity to objects which are themselves conceived as manifestations of an intelligent or spiritual principle," and that "from this point of view the Idealist may, not less than the Materialist, regard man as a natural product, and not less than the Associationist, regard mind as the recipient of truth, and its activities as governed by facts."

This determination of thought by reality is an aspect of idealistic doctrine which is not generally made prominent. There is indeed more than a suggestion of it in Mr Caird's writings; but it is seldom emphasised or stated so clearly as Mr Jones states it here. Its prominence is a most interesting feature of the present volume,