This is one of those books which are no less valuable than delightful to read: the exegesis is lucid, the methodology sound and the material wide-ranging and straightforward. The author brings into play a keen speculative intuition and a precise sense of cultural history tempered by full awareness of the standpoint of other scholars. Although his own position is not an idealistic one he avoids a gratuitously external or unrigorous approach; what he does have in common with Idealism is the (...) insistence on concreteness and a feeling for the variety and dynamism of the Real. (shrink)