Handbook of the History of Philosophy.  By Dr. Albert Schwegler.  Translated arid annotated by James Hutchison Stirling, LL.D.  New York:  Putnam.

Spinoza teaches that “substance is God;” but, says Mr. Matthew Arnold, “propositions about substance pass by mankind at large like the idle wind, which mankind at large regards not:  it will not even listen to a word about these propositions, unless it first learns what their author was driving at with them, and finds that this object of his is one with which it sympathizes.”  There is no way of getting the multitude to listen to Spinoza’s Ethics or Plato’s Dialectics but something is gained when a man of science like Dr. Schwegler happens to possess the gift of fluent and easy statement, and can pour into a work like the present, which is the expansion of a hasty encyclopaedia article, the vivacity of current speech, and the impulse which gives unity to a long history while it excludes crabbed digressions.  It happens that the American world received the first translation of Schwegler’s History of Philosophy; and it may be asked, What need have Americans of a subsequent version by a Scotch doctor of laws?  The answer is, that Mr. Seelye’s earlier rendering was taken from a first edition, and that the present one includes the variations made in five editions which have now been issued.  Even on British ground the work thus translated has reached three editions, and the multitude of “mankind at large,” hearing of these repeated editions in Edinburgh and of twenty thousand copies sold in Germany, may begin to prick up its ears, and to think that this is one of the easily-read philosophies of modern times, of which Taine and Michelet have the secret.  It is not so:  abstractions stated with scientific precision in their elliptic slang or technicality are not and cannot be made easy reading:  the strong hands of condensation which Schwegler pressed down upon the material he controlled so perfectly have not left it lighter or more digestible.  The reader of this manual, for instance, will be invited to consider the Eleatic argumentation that nothing exists but Identity, “which is the beent, and that Difference, the non-beent, does not exist; and therefore that he must not only not go on talking about difference, but that he must not allude to difference as being anything but the non-beent; for if he casts about for a synonym, and arrives at the notion that he may say non-existent for non-beent, he is abjectly wrong, for beent does not mean existent, and non-beent non-existent, but it must be considered that the beent is strictly the non-existent, and the existent the non-beent.”  Such are the amenities of expression into which an eloquent metaphysician, trying his best to speak popularly, is led.  Yet the book is readable to that orderly application of the mind which such studies exact, and is the firmest and strictest guide now speaking our English tongue.  Its steady attention