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PARTISAN REVIEW
and they reveal each other. This is my sense of Longinus' primary in–
sight," says Mr. Tate-and in these words he points to a conception of
criticism which heals the breach in Cartesian nature.
In
The Forlorn Demon
Mr. Tate has made a distinct advance on
his earlier criticism without sacrificing any of the ground he had pre–
viously gained. Mr. Tate writes not only as a critic but as a Catholic,
and his book inevitably raises the question of the relation between
religion and contemporary intellectual life. It seems to me that the
practical critical demonstration he has provided offers as much il–
lumination on the problem as we have a right to expect. I suspect that
Mr. Tate would see the relation between intellect and religion in some–
what the same way as he has seen the relation between style and sub–
ject in the passage quoted above.
Marius Bewley
BENTHAM REVISITED
BENTHAM AND THE ETHICS OF TODAY. By David Baumgardt.
Princeton University Press. $9.00
It took a Dr. Metz to write
A Hundred Years of British
Philosophy
and Halevy to "do" the Philosophical Radicals and now, in
the same vein, a former professor of philosophy at Berlin and presently
Consultant in Philosophy at the Library of Congress-Dr. Baumgardt–
has produced what is surely the most prodigious work on Bentham's
ethical theory. In these days of philosophical insularity one must admire
a scholar who is willing to lavish such German care on an Englishman
who is so English and, what is even more surprising, to defend
him
against his own countrymen. Poor Bentham and John Stuart Mill were
sacrificed during both Germanic invasions of nineteenth-century Britain,
but even after the spell of Kant and Hegel had been broken by Bertrand
Russell and G. E. Moore at the turn of this century, neither Bentham
nor Mill were remembered as national heroes. On the contrary, the
young philosophical Turks continued to treat them as cruelly as the
invaders had. Mill was pilloried for his views on mathematics (ex–
cessively empiricist for the early Platonic Russell) and utilitarians were
accused by Moore of having committed the so-called "naturalistic
fallacy," the mistake of supposing that "good" is a descriptive or natural
predicate.
Dr. Baumgardt's book is written in the shadow of Moore and the
