Brief Notices

BRIEF NOTICES L'Existentialisme est un Humanisme. Par JEAN-PAUL SARTRE. Paris: Nagel, 1946. Pp. 141. The word " humanism " is equivocal, ranging from its description of the Renaissance spirit down, through a whole spectrum of meanings, to its more recent applications by Maritain and La Chance. Sartre argues that his existentialism is a humanism because it makes man, unaided and alone, completely responsible for his own destiny and that of all mankind. Man, existing before he acquires an essence according to Sartre's familiar theme, must in his own solitary anguish make an original choice that sets the pattern of his life. Even in seeking counsel, he must choose a counsellor according to the personal, uncounselled decision of his closed self. He is his own legislator. In a fashion described by Heidegger and suggested by Kierkegaard, man awakens to himself in his thrust toward the future, being-as Sartre, following Heidegger, calls him-nothing but a projection of his own self. Sartre, apart from the mention of l'humanite of Comte, nowhere differentiates his humanism from that of more classical philosophies associated with this confusing word. But it is clear that by humanism Sartre means to take man as he finds him. It is a misfortune that Sartre never finds man at all. What results from the existentialist dialectic is not man but a pure subjectivity, with no nature, freedom, or intelligence, with no social relations , with only inert experience that is constantly in the act of being realized. In his typical sophisms, Sartre attempts to establish a social community of understanding on the basis that one man can go through the same experience as others and thus learn what that experience is (pp. 69, 70). However, such a duplication must involve recognizing the other as other (fieri aliud in tantum aliud) -a difficulty that Sartre does not see. This is really a focal phase of existentialism in general. Until it is clarified, existentialism must remain a humanism dehumanized. Robert Boyle Devout Naturalist. By MITCHELL SALEM FISHER. Philadelphia : Oshiver Studio Press, 1945. Pp. 184. The aim of this book is to present Robert Boyle as a chemist of the seventeenth century who sought to reconcile his science with an orthodox philosophy and religion. Boyle is depicted as developing the basic principles of the experimental method. As Mr. Fisher shows with ample 384 BRIEF NOTICES 885 documentation, Boyle had a very definite logic of scientific proof and a very definite, though less clearly formulated, mechanical view of the world which he sought to reconcile with the existence of a personal God, Supreme Author and Designer. Boyle was thus not simply the father of the law that now bears his name. Though Mr. Fisher has succeeded in giving a coherent and commendable synthesis of Boyle's Lebensanschauung, he has perhaps not always kept in mind the circumstances of Boyle's age. The seventeenth century with its political turmoil and the scientific struggles against traditional thought is not an easy century to portray, and Mr. Fisher's portrayal does not provide a full enough setting for Boyle's· work. The incipient deistic currents of this century Mr. Fisher unfortunately neglects, and Boyle cannot be duly assessed apart from such a trend. In fact, Boyle, in his mechanical concept of matter guided by a somewhat Newtonian God, played into the hand of deism since the very nature of mechanism is to seek for matter's explanation within matter, keeping God so far out of the picture that He eventually disappears altogether. If Boyle did not draw this conclusion, others of our own day have finally done so. Mr. Fisher, sketching the intellectual conflicts of the seventeenth century does not see their full meaning and present them meaningfully enough. A devout naturalism can be defined apart from history but can be much more clearly appreciated within history. It must be further remarked that it is an error in perspective to think of Boyle as "the father of the experimental method" (p. 64). Implicitly, it had been formed by such men as Gilbert, Tycho, Kepler, Da Vinci, and Newton, and explicitly it had been stated by Bacon and even by Descartes. Elements de Critique des Sciences...