Benedict de Spinoza (review)

92 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY was not much more than an adolescent in 1660 and Boyle had just reached early middle life; but so many of the figures about whom The Great Instauration turns are either lesser men or else are mentioned with regard to their lesser accomplishments that it is a very different perspective with which we are supplied. We do not think of Wallis and John Wilkins as dominating the age; but certainly the book under review makes them prominent. Gabriel Plattes, hardly a name on everyone's lips nowadays, is accorded a good half-column of references in the index, and his Macaria, a set of proposals for social reform, is reviewed and often recalled, while The Sceptical Chymist (written and privately circulated in the late 1650s) is mentioned but seldom. I believe that this is as it should be, so long as it is borne in mind that many personages in the book appear, in the hindsight of three centuries, to have been gifted stagehands setting up the props for the real stars. Webster has not, I think, come tantalizingly close to writing a definitive history (if such there can be!) of science in the mid-seventeenth century; yet any further author will be obtuse indeed if he takes no account of the many new insights in this complex narration. The fifth chapter, almost a book in itself, is on the general dominion over nature, that is, the applications of science to agriculture, industry, and the welfare of the populace at large. This chapter comes even closer than the one on medicine to more traditional histories of science and technology, but it surpasses them because of its author's refusal to be satisfied with easy generalizations about "influences," "temper of the times," "climates of opinion," and such phrases in place of precise accounts documented with all manner of contemporary citations. (Very few twentieth-century scholars are used at all, though such excellent work as Phyllis Allen's might have proven suggestive or at least corroborative.) The style of The Great Instauration is literal, unadorned, economical, and expresses not so much feeling as assessment when the purpose is not simple recounting of events but an evaluation of their connections . Webster does not paint in vivid colors the living image of an epoch in the history of culture , but he does reconstruct item after item of the historical sequences that collectively make up that epoch--and make it a great one. GEORGEKIMBALL PLOCHMANN Southern Illinois University, Carbondale Henry E. Allison. Benedict de Spinoza. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975. When a brief summary of the life and works of a major philosopher is intended as an introduction for the general reader, various subdued virtues are appropriate. Professor Allison attains these exactly in the present treatment of Spinoza. Opening chapters supply biographical and historical details succinctly. In these, he avoids specious extrapolations and intrusions on the philosophic tasks. The central chapters lead us through the systematic arguments with an exposition that is lucid and direct as well as faithful to the intricate reasoning. Without either popularizing or condescension, this presentation attains an exacting overview of the entire philosophy , which is consistently meaningful and accurate, I think. Traditional perplexities are not slighted, and intelligent reference to divergent interpretations is provided. Indeed, judicious use is made of both present and historical controversy, but always these references are directed toward making lucid sense of Spinoza's own arguments. The same discretion attends references to his more incidental writings. Erudition is not paraded as a scholarly game, but is used for elucidating the whole of Spinoza's thought and for locating puzzles and seemingly odd doctrines as they function in a viable and systematic philosophic viewpoint. F.~pecially commendable, it seems to me, is Allison's extended discussion of matters concerning politics and religion, each of which is given exact location and a functional role in this tight scheme. Modem interest in Spinoza tends to be preoccupied with what we invidiously call "hard" philosophy--with matters epistemological, ontological, and logistic. But without slighting this BOOK REVIEWS 93 framework, Allison attends constantly to its service to the ethical thrust of the whole philosophy . Some might object that...