The Moral Philosophy of George Berkeley (review)

398 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Equally the specialist may feel that the analysis of the Scottish rhetoricians is not everything it could be. That the lectures of Adam Smith and Hugh Blair were far-reaching and of enormous cultural importance goes without saying, as is testified by a number of articles and books on the subject, as well as the transmission of their ideas from one generation to the next by the economical expedient of fathers saving for their sons their own manuscript lecture notes and passing them along. Blair had himself responded to this practice by publishing his lectures and thus setting, as the first Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in Britain, a precedent that may have had unfortunate consequences. Be that as it may, one has to regard the presentation of the new rhetoric in Howell's book as largely invitational and summary. Once again, in a book of this length it would be unnecessarily and uncharitably fractious to ask for an extended inquiry. Basically, then, the faults of this book are much the same as its virtues. One wishes it longer and more comprehensive than it is but at the same time realizes that it is a book and not an encyclopedia. Of necessity, the author has had to digest and to summarize a great deal of information and a great number of ideas. This is percipiently done, and without that numbing enormousness of quotation that tempts most scholars when trying to write in such a manner. It is a tribute to Professor Howell's powers of synthesis and awareness of what is relevant that he is able to make coherent shape out of an otherwise unwieldy mass of material. I suspect that readers of this book will more often be acquainted rather than reacquainted with authors and ideas they are unfamiliar with, and the revitalization of certain reputations and uncertain ideas will owe much to this work. As it is, this book is unique in its field, a point which the author acknowledges. Some other and earlier studies are noted, but no other author has attempted a book of this kind on the subject of logic and rhetoric in eighteenth-century British thought. Inevitably, then, such a book is likely to be regarded as an extremely useful source book and reference work. Just as inevitably, a reader, whether he be experienced scholar or novitiate, is going to expect certain minimum standards of references to be met. In one way the book is most admirable in this respect: the footnotes (all 1720 of them) are precise and to the point, although one does get a little tired of seeing so many Ibid.s. But in a book of this sort and of this length, surely, there ought to be a bibliography. One knows they are tedious and dull things to compile, but how very useful they are for almost any reader. To some extent , the index makes up for this deficiency, and a fairly careful check reveals it to be accurate and thorough. Still, I feel that an index of 24 pages cannot be adequate for a book over 700 pages long. Aside from this minor carping (though the lack of a bibliography I don't regard as minor), I can imagine few books likely to be more useful to the eighteenth-century scholar. The generalizations are sound, the digests to the point, the style serviceable, and the scholarship massive. We are not likely to have an improvement on this book, and Howell has pointed the way for other scholars and commentators. It is a pleasure to conclude by noting that so valuable a book has been so attractively and impressively printed. JOHN VALDIMIRPRICE University o~ Edinburgh The Moral Philosophy o/George Berkeley. By Paul J. Olscamp. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970. Pp, 241. Gld. 34.20) "Banishing Metaphisics etc. and recalling men to Common Sense" was Berkeley's aim, as his philosophical notebooks attest. In the course of striving to achieve these goals, the Bishop managed to outrage common sense as much as any philosopher has ever done, which is saying a good bit. Given his avowed purpose and his religious interests, one might have expected...