The Personalist (Volume 1) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A BRITISH ESTIMATE OF DR. BOWNE DR. JAMES IVERACH Former students and friends of Doctor Bowne will be interested in the following estimate upon his work from the pen of Dr. James Iverach, Principal of the United Free Church College in Aberdeen, widely known authority on Theism, of whom Dr. James Hastings in a personal letter to the Editor declares that he "knows as much about modern philosophy as any man in the British Isles." The estimate of Doctor Bowne is in the form of a letter to Dr. Hastings which we are privileged to publish. Aberdeen, 7th Jan'y, 1920. Dear Dr. Hastings: In 1882 a volume of Professor Bowne came into my hands and interested me so much that I kept a sharp lookout for any further writings from his pen. The title of that volume is "The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer." It was the fullest and most able of the criticisms of Spencer which I had met, and it still occupies the first rank. Essays on Theism next attracted me. Afterwards I found his volume of Metaphysics. It was an exceedingly able book, but its dependence on Lotze was obvious. In fact, it might be described as Lotze stripped of his excessive verbiage and done into English. A more independent work appeared in 1887 called the "Philosophy of Theism," and notwithstanding the numerous Gifiord Lectures bearing on Theism, it retains its freshness and its cogency. He has written also an "Introduction to Psychological Theory," a "Treatise on Ethics," both of which I highly value, and which have proved exceedingly useful in my work. After many years of reflection on philosophicalquestions, Bowne in 1898 published a revised edition of his Metaphysics, in which he dealt with metaphysics proper, leaving out all epistemological questions. When one compares the first edition with the revised, one can...