Journal of the History of Philosophy

BOOK REVIEWS 349 "Here he was in error" (p. 27); "Bramhall's opinion was grossly misrepresented by Collins" (ibid.), and so on. If all this is the judicious opinion of an editor, why bother to reprint Collins's work? Did Collins say anything new, influential, or philosophicallyacute in the Inquiry? We look in vain for anything but negative answers in O'Higgins's fifty pages of introduction and dozen pages of notes. A moment's generosity--"his book is a very complete defence of determinism" (p. 44)-is quickly qualified: "How far his synthesis was successful is open to question" (p. 45). It is almost as if, Collins having been pilloried by clerics during his lifetime, O'Higgins feels under some obligation to continue into modern times the process of belittling him. What the editor succeeds very well in showing is how Collins's work has its roots in the freewill debate deriving from Hobbes. What he does not show is that Collins's work has an intrinsic importance. This is a pity. To me, at least, O'Higgins's republication of Collins's Philosophical Inquiry is welcome, just because the Inquiry is intrinsically interesting and contains foretastes of some quite recent discussions of the issues with which it deals. J. C. A. GASKIN Trinity College, Dublin George Berkeley. Philosophical Commentaries. Transcribed from the Manuscript and edited with an introduction and index by George H. Thomas. Explanatory notes by A. A. Luce. Alliance, Ohio: Mount Union College, 1976. Pp. xxxiv + 353. $15.00. George Thomas has provided us with a new and essential tool for Berkeley studies. He has produced a completely new transcription of the Philosophical Commentaries. In addition to his transcription, he has printed the superb explanatory notes from the 1944 edition--notes that A. A. Luce revised for the present edition. Finally, Thomas has provided a useful introduction to the text. It is easy to forget that the PhilosophicalCommentaries, which has been such an essential element in the reevaluation Berkeley has received over the last forty years, was not published until 1871. Thomas points out the serious scholarly flaws in Fraser's two editions 0871 and 1901). G. A. Johnston's edition did follow Theodor Lorenz's ordering of the notebooks, but it was grossly unsatisfactory on scholarly grounds. In 1944 Luce produced a diplomatic edition -together with detailed notes to the entries. When Luce and Jessop produced their edition of The Works of GeorgeBerkeley (vol. 1in 1948), Luce was unable to present a transcription of the Philosophical Commentaries that showed the corrections, erasures, and so on, in the manuscript, and he was obliged to present the notes in a much truncated form. And because the 1944 text had been an edition limited to four hundred copies, students have often had to rely upon the less satisfactory 1948 edition. The real importance of Thomas's work is that we have a new transcription. Although he follows Luce's numbering of the entries, this is not merely a corrected version of Luce's transcription . Thomas painstakingly worked over the manuscript in the British Museum. Only a few water-stained passages (listed in a note to p. xxxiii) proved to be illegible "even with the ultraviolet reader," and in these cases Thomas relied on "the readings of previous editors." The manuscript is not likely to improve! Indeed, this text is as accurate a transcription as we are likely to have. Transcribing a text as complex as this is not an exact science. It requires artistic skills, a sense for the language of Berkeley's thought, ingenuity in construing his hand, and perseverence. Thomas deserves our thanks not only for his scholarly work but also for arranging for its publication. HARRY M. BRACKEN MeGill University ...