Coleridge and German Idealism (review)

104 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ever an author published more than one work concerned with Kant, Adickes usually listed all works by that author under the year of publication of the first work. Thus the numbered items about Kant actually published before 1804 are considerably less than 2832. However, there are also an unknown number of entries bearing a number and in addition a letter of the alphabet which (discounting those cases where such entries serve as duplicating cross-references) probably come close to equalling the number of items by Kant or later than 1804. Hence, even if we take a ridiculously conservative figure for the number of items about Kant published outside of Germany during his lifetime, probably a total figure near the seemingly incredible 2832 is correct. If it appears that we are currently being inundated in a flood of philosophical writings, no doubt it would also have seemed so at any time since the invention of printing. We are deeply indebted to Professor Beck for this work. Let us hope he takes up the at least equally arduous task of carrying the account of German philosophy down into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This later period, although it may appear mined to exhaustion, is as radically in need of reassessment as the earlier epoch. There is perhaps just as much continuity as change between pre- and postKantian German philosophy----certainly so in the case of Hegel. (For example, what connection is there between the semi-Ramist Herborn encyclopedists and systematists of the early sixteenth century and Hegel, the author of several more or less successful attempts at a system of philosophy and of an encyclopaedia of philosophy which, like the earlier works, trades on the notion of a circle of knowledge. Lambert knew Ramus, and Kant refers to Ramus in the Critique of Pure Reason. Similarities and apparently deliberate contrasts between Hegel's System of Logic and Ramist themes and notions do not seem accidental. The evidence of Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy is inconclusive: everything Hegel says about Ramus there he could have read in Bayle or elsewhere, including the famous mistranslation of the title of Ramus's supposed M. A. thesis. Hegel and his contemporaries may not have known these earlier writers directly. Nevertheless apparent signs of their influence are visible in Hegel and also at least in Fichte.) A continuation of Early German Philosophy (would one volume be adequate?) could show how German idealism and its successors did not step parthenogenetically from the brow of Kant. Moreover, there are a number of sound academic German thinkers who are unjustly neglected because they fail to fit the usual from-Smith-toJones type of historiography devoted to documenting the development (usually conceived as an advance) of one single trend. Among these worthies, Adolf Trendelenburg perhaps deserves rediscovery as much as anyone. PHILIP W. CUMMINGS Trenton State College Coleridge and German Idealism. By Gian N. G. Orsini. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. Pp. xii+308. $10.00) This is basically a disappointing book. It is so not only because the subtitle--"A Study in the History of Philosophy with Unpublished Materials from Coleridge's BOOK REVIEWS 105 Manuscripts"--leads the reader to expect that more hitherto "unpublished material" is included than is actually the case, but also because some of the interpretations are in crucial respects inaccurate and misleading. Moreover, despite the author's announced aim--to determine what Coleridge derived "from Kant and the post-Kantians"--the bulk of the book (pp. 57-171) "consists of an exposition of Kant's critical philosophy in simple language" (p. vii) and is therefore more concerned with Kant than with Coleridge. Professor Orsini regards the "Treatise on Logic," a manuscript of "about six hundred pages" as Coleridge's most sustained effort in pure philosophy; for "it is not a miscellany like The Friend"; neither does it "break down in the middle, like the Biographia Literaria," nor does it "lose itself in a mass of quotations from another writer, like the Aids to Reflection" (p. 247). But we shall have to take Professor Orsini's words for this--as we have to take his word also for...