being true, is always of higher value than a system which is true without being reasoned. The latter kind of system is of no value: because philosophy is the attainment of truth by the way of reason. That is its definition. A system, therefore, which reaches the truth but not by the way of reason, is not philosophy at all, and has therefore no scientific worth. Again, an unreasoned philosophy, even though true, carries no guarantee of its truth. It may be true, but it cannot be certain. On the other hand, a system, which is reasoned without being true, has always some value. It creates reason by exercising it. It is employing the proper means to reach truth, though it may fail to reach it.” (Sections 38-41) — “The student will find that the system here submitted to his attention is of a very polemical character. Why! Because philosophy exists only to correct the inadvertencies of man’s ordinary thinking. She has no other mission to fulfil. If man naturally thinks aright, he need not be taught to think aright. If he is already in possession of the truth, he does not require to be put in possession of it. The occupation of philosophy is gone: her office is superfluous. Therefore philosophy assumes and must assume that man does not naturally think aright, but must be taught to do so: that truth does not come to him spontaneously, but must be brought to him by his own exertions. If man does not naturally think aright, he must think, we shall not say wrongly (for that implies malice prepense) but inadvertently: the native occupant of his mind must be, we shall not say falsehood (for that too implies malice prepense) but error. The original dowry then of universal man is inadvertency and error. This assumption is the ground and only justification of the existence of philosophy. The circumstance that philosophy exists only to put right the oversights of common thinking — renders her polemical not by choice, but by necessity. She is controversial as the very tenure and condition of her existence: for how can she correct the slips of common opinion, the oversights of natural thinking, except by controverting them?” Professor Ferrier deserves high commendation for the care taken in this volume to set out clearly Proposition and Counter-Proposition: the thesis which he impugns, as well as that which he sustains.

The number of individual intellects, independent, inquisitive, and acute, is always rare everywhere; but was comparatively less rare in these ages of Greece. The first topic, on which such intellects broke loose from the common consciousness of the world around them, and struck out new points of view for themselves, was in reference to the Kosmos or the Universe. The received belief, of a multitude of unseen divine persons bringing about by volitions all the different phenomena of nature, became unsatisfactory to men like Thales, Anaximander, Parmenides, Pythagoras, Anaxagoras. Each of these volunteers, following his own independent inspirations, struck out a new hypothesis, and endeavoured to commend it to others with more or less of sustaining reason. There appears to have been little of negation or refutation in their procedure. None of them tried to disprove the received point of view, or to throw its supporters upon their defence. Each of them unfolded his own hypothesis, or his own version of affirmative reasoned truth, for the adoption of those with whom it might find favour.

The dialectic age had not yet arrived. When it did arrive, with Sokrates as its principal champion, the topics of philosophy were altered, and its process revolutionised. We have often heard repeated the Ciceronian dictum — that Sokrates brought philosophy down from the heavens to the earth: from the distant, abstruse, and complicated phenomena of the Kosmos — in respect to which he adhered to the vulgar point of view, and even disapproved any enquiries tending to rationalise it — to the familiar business of man, and the common generalities of