To supply the lack of a detailed treatise on the categories in English, Dom Augustine Osgniach has written this substantial book, supplementing his exposition of scholastic doctrine with critical studies of the historical fate of the ideas of substance, quantity, quality, relation. The method is well chosen, since the historico-critical studies bring into play the relevance to the fundamental problems of human thought of the scholastic doctrines in question; whereas a bald exposition modelled upon such Latin text-books as, e.g., Gredt (Elementa Philosophiae Aristotelico-Thomisticae), may indeed lay before readers what St. Thomas and his commentators taught, but will hardly gain access for that teaching into their minds without the support of an oral pedagogy. Not only does the method followed in this book secure the relevance of scholastic principles, but it enables the author to give them accurate development to a point which would perhaps weary’ the most hardy reader if reference to the later developments of philosophy were less constant and less close.

Perhaps the chief source of modern distrust of the categories is the fear, not by any means without foundation in the later developments of scholasticism, that the logical order is usurping the order of reality and imposing upon the real a system and framework of divisions and dependences which properly belong to the mode of our mind’s knowing and not to the mode of existence of things.