55. net.

(3) Eine Untersuchung über Raum, Zeit und Begriffe vom Standpunkt des Positivismus. By Eberhard Zschimmer. Pp. 54. (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1906.) Price 1s. 6d. net. (4) Beiträge zur Einführung in die Geschichte der Philosophie. By Rudolf Eucken. Pp. iv + 195. (Leipzig: Verlag der Dürr'schen Buchhandlung, 1906.) Price 3.60 marks.

(5) Apollonius of Tyana, and other Essays. By Thomas Whittaker. Pp. 211. (London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co., Ltd., 1906.) Price 3s. 6d.

ET this much is conceded by most," writes the author," that Herbert Spencer was an unusually keen intellectual combatant, who took the evolution-formula into his strong hands as a masterkey, and tried (teaching others to try better) to open therewith all the locked doors of the universe-all the immediate, though none of the ultimate, riddles, physical and biological, psychological and ethical, social and religious.'

It is from that standpoint that his work is here viewed, and the subject could not have fallen into better hands than those of Prof. Thomson, who writes clearly, argues cogently, and never fails to leave his reader interested and informed.

A fourth of this volume deals with Spencer's life and characteristics; the rest discusses and criticises his chief contributions to several scientific and philosophic problems. Prof. Thomson notes, of course, his want of indebtedness to previous writers, e.g. the fact that he read nothing of Locke and Mill, and that when he borrowed the term "social statics" from Comte he knew no more of the great positivist than that he was a French philosophical writer; he notes, on the other hand, the great influence exerted on Spencer by von Baer's formula "expressing the course of development through which every plant and animal passes the change from homogeneity to heterogeneity." The main criticisms passed on Spencer in the course of the work are these:-(a) In accepting the von Baer formula, Spencer thought of the germcell and other lowly structures much too simply; for

the germ-cell is far from being homogeneous, and as for the spermatozoon, students of physics "tell us that the picture of a Great Eastern filled with framework as intricate as that of the daintiest watches does not exaggerate the possibilities of molecular complexity in a spermatozoon, whose actual size is usually very much less than the smallest dot on the watch's face." (b) Spencer does not prove his case that sperm-cells and germ-cells do not possess powers fundamentally unlike those of other cells at any rate, they may be very unlike them. (c) Spencer argued, No inheritance of acquired characters, no Evolution."

Prof. Thomson thinks the transmission of acquired characters is not proven, that there is a strong presumption that they are not transmitted, and that the scientific position should remain one of (d) As active scepticism, leading on to experiment. to the general philosophic position of Spencer, he holds that he was not a materialist, but was at the same time guilty of gross materialisms, e.g. in his universal evolution-formula, which is wholly in terms of matter and motion.

con

(2) Mr. Alliston wishes to rouse us all from our dogmatic slumber, and here submits to the play of his dialectic a number of ordinary beliefs too hastily accepted. Thus, for example, in his essay on traries, with which this volume opens, he assails the common practice of distinguishing contraries as positive and negative, and so establishing what proves to be a false precedence among them. He contends that any one of two contraries always refers by implication to its opposite and depends on it for point. With some contraries, he goes on to say, no mean is possible. Aristotle is wrong in making courage the middle term between rashness and timidity.

"Rashness is really opposed to caution, and not to timidity, of which courage is antonym; and in short, in any example from this source of three chosen terms, it will be found that one of them is not strictly in the same category as the other two, but expresses differences of another kind."

The essay on the limits of determinism elaborates the thesis: " Everything that happens, happens necessarily; but it has got to happen first," i.e. before an event happens there is a real choice of possibilities, and thus "before a man has come to a decision, the motive or adequate cause necessitating it cannot be present, or as adequate it would have already brought about the event." Other essays deal with eventuality, the perversity of the will, force, personal credit, the abstract idea, and the like. Mr. Alliston is always acute, ingenious, and convincing so far as he goes, and one wonders only how a complete metaphysic from his pen would read.

The later part of the volume contains a number of disconnected paragraphs and aphorisms, more or less paradoxical, on a number of topics that seem to interest Mr. Alliston. So long as he does not take himself too seriously, and so long as he remembers that Mr. Chesterton is our one chartered acrobat, there is no harm in his indulging the cacoethes scribendi in this fashion.

(3) Herr Zschimmer here discusses some of the fundamental conceptions of philosophy from the standpoint of positivism, the principle of which is "first facts, then words." There is nothing very novel in the statement or argument of the volume, much of which is occupied with criticism of isolated points in Kant, Schopenhauer, and others. Time and space, it appears, are severely actual, and when a clock strikes the hour of four, and we remember the strokes as distinct though they are identical in tone, what causes this "ist eben das mit ihnen verschmolzene, Mitgegebene Zeittatsächliche." Consequently "pure,' "a priori," "forms of perception," and many other beloved formulæ become unnecessary nonsense.

Towards the end of the book there is a somewhat elaborate account of the formation of concepts (Begriffe). The author defines Begriff as "die im Vergleich von Vorstellungen hervorgebrachte Verknüpfung eines Gemeinsamen Bestandteiles mit anderen Elementen (Merkmalen des Individuums) zu verschiedenen individuellen Systemen." The relation between the triangle before me and the concept of triangle is not badly discussed, the question, e.g., as to what prevents me from regarding the essential and conceptual elements in my perception of the triangle before me as the concept of triangle generally. Causality and similar problems are rather hastily dealt with, and no part of the book displays remarkable depth or insight.

(4) Prof. Eucken's writings are all so excellent and stimulating that to commend him is needless and gratuitous. The present volume is a second and enlarged edition of "Beiträge zur Geschichte der neuern Philosophie," which appeared in 1886. In its newer form it contains, unaltered, some essays on old German philosophy, e.g. on Paracelsus and Kepler, and one "Über Bilder und Gleichnisse bei Kant. Two other essays, one in commemoration of Adolf Trendelenburg, and another on the various schools of philosophy, have been considerably changed; altogether new are those entitled "Bayle and Kant" and "Gedanken und Anregungen zur Geschichte der Philosophie. Bayle (of dictionary fame) and Kant seem to our author very similar in their outlook on life; according to Bayle, he writes, "a great contradiction has been set up in human nature: truth and virtue are demanded of us, and the demand finds an expression in the laws of conscience and of thought, but it cannot have its own way and produce a corresponding reality: knowledge entangles itself in irresoluble contradictions: moral judgment, it is true, is saved from these, but in man it cannot overcome the natural force of the instincts and the passions.' How very similar this is to much Kantian doctrine will be at once apparent.

(5) Three of the six essays in this volume are historical, and deal with Apollonius of Tyana, Celsus and Origen, and John Scotus Erigena. They consist for the most part of a running analysis of some works, not too widely known, of patristic and scholastic times, and as their author has studied the neo-Platonists to some purpose, his account is not lacking in subtlety.

The other three essays are constructive. One of them, entitled "Animism, Religion and Philosophy," seems cast in a Comtean mould, and elaborates the thesis that man's thinking on the causes behind or immanent in the visible order of things goes through three stages, the animistic, the religious, and the philosophical. The author has apparently no faith in religion as the satisfaction of a permanent and legiti mate craving of human nature. He confidently believes that philosophy has transcended the historic religions, and that, though it is the height of rashness to forecast the future of religion, whatever form religion may take, it will be the right and duty of philosophy to maintain its independence. essay, on the classification of the sciences, reprinted from the pages of Mind, amends Comte's well-known list of positive sciences, e.g. by omitting astronomy, by inserting animal psychology and human psychology, and by offering, as preferable to Comte's linear series, a circular scheme, in which one may, proceeding according to the didactic order, start with formal logic, go round the objective sciences, come back to the subjective sciences, and end with metaphysics.

Another

The last essay, "Teleology and the Individual," is the most suggestive in the book. The author concludes that "the strength of the ancient and modern philosophies derived from Plato and Aristotle lies in their having retained the teleological point of view, conceived in a scientific sense, within a highly speculative system, but not at the summit "; that we may conceive the possibility that permanent individual subjects may have successive lives through which may be seen a teleological order; and that, though there are systems of ends, mutually adapted so as to form one system, this system has no end, and there is. therefore, no evolution of the universe as a whole.

There is a great deal of strenuous thinking in this book. Its merits will, we trust, not be obscured by its strong anti-theological bias.

(6) This work professes to be no more than an introduction or an overture to a music which has still to be composed. Its author writes in an excellent style, and is very well informed on a great variety of subjects, from modern views of matter and electricity to the aesthetic ideas of William Blake and Mr. Walter Pater. The philosophies that have chiefly influenced him are those of Plato, Kant, and Mr. Houston S. Chamberlain (the author of a German work on Kant), whose name is probably not so familiar in this country as those of the other two; but this fidus Achates lauds him on almost every page. That the book is laid down with no distaste for the author or for Mr. Chamberlain is creditable to both.

An analysis of the first two chapters will show the point of view. The author discusses some of the vain attempts to introduce unity into our view of the universe; the relations of different forms of force to one another, e.g. the impossibility of bringing gravitation into relation with electricity; the difficulty of arriving at consistent views of æther. In the end he comes to the conclusion that matter, force, and life are three ultimate and distinct categories for

thought; it is impossible, for example, to resolve life and matter into force. Their unity can only be a formal one, i.e. the unity of law which pervades them and which is apprehended by man. Just as in mathematics "we can from the projection of a very complicated figure, one for example whose extremities may lie in infinity, derive without error the laws according to which it is composed," so we can project the complicated universe on the human mind, and trace the laws which are its formal framework. The second chapter discusses the two great formal schemes of thought, the logical and the mathematical, and a preference is given to the mathematical as being synthetic and not analytic. This leads naturally to a discussion of continuity and "discreteness, " and the relation between these two is compared in a suggestive fashion with that between geometry and arithmetic, perception and thought, being and becoming. From the mathematical standpoint there is given also a new expression for life, which represents it as the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle of which the two sides are matter being and force becoming.

Later chapters discuss the problem of spirit and the large question of freedom. An epilogue asks, What

is truth? and it appears that in the existence of an abstract, objective truth our author has no faith. Amid much fancifulness and some obscurity there is not a little that is instructive and highly interesting.

(7) The main conclusion of the work before us is that man does not live by consciousness alone. "The processes of perception of the external world," writes the author, "are in the ordinary use of our faculties as typically sub-conscious as conscious in their mode of functioning." This is revealed in many ways; there is, for example, the well-known experiment in which two equal lines have added to them pairs of shadowy strokes, divergent and convergent respectively, the result being that the one line appears considerably longer than the other.

"Now reduce the shadow-strokes to such a degree

of faintness that the eye fails to detect their presence, and continue to judge (naturally with diminished confidence) which seems the longer, and it will be found that the undetected shadows incline the judgments in accord with the illusion which their observed presence induces."

Further, when we talk of crystal-gazing, thoughtreading, dissociated consciousness, and the other phenomena so often exploited by charlatanism, we have to remember that, obscure and weird as at first sight they appear, they often reveal themselves on analysis to be but "the exaggerated elaboration of possibilities inherent in every human mind."

Prof. Jastrow discusses all these problems in a very sane and convincing manner, and his work is a valuable contribution to the subject. Occasionally the treatment is a little prolix. The first part deals with the normal aspect of the subconscious, the second with the abnormal, and the closing chapters discuss the theory of the matter. Dissociation is explained as "the partial presence, with impaired relations, of factors normally fully associated and integrally coordinated "; and to show precisely in what such

impairment of relations is seen, he defines the three privileges of mature psychic procedure as "incorporation, orientation and initiative." The theory which meets with his most vehement opposition is that of the subliminal self, which he finds to be "but slightly restrained by exacting allegiance to the large body of normal data," and which further indulges in all manner of mediaval epicycles whenever facts refuse to fit themselves to it. His main objection to the subliminal self lies in the difficulty of accounting for its maintenance amid the evolutionary conditions under which our consciousness has reached its present form.

SEA-FISHERIES ADMINISTRATION AND

RESEARCH.

British Fisheries. Their Administration and their Problems. A Short Account of the Origin and Growth of British Sea-fishery Authorities and Regulations. By James Johnstone. Pp. xxxi + 350. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1905.) Price Ios. 6d. net.

THIS book may be described as a summary and critical analysis of all that has been or is being done for the sea-fisheries of this country by means of legislation and scientific investigation. The first part of the book deals with the history of legislation, and the second part with scientific investigation.

.The history of the early legislation is a record of failure, as was proved by the repeal of more than fifty repressive Acts (mostly relating to herring trawling) at the suggestion of the Royal Commission of 1863. That commission, of which Huxley was a member, took a very optimistic view of "the resources of the sea." The Trawling Commission of 1882 was not quite so optimistic; at least it showed that certain inshore grounds had been affected by too much beam trawling. Finally, the Select Committee of 1893 was definitely pessimistic. It felt "that the subject of the

diminution of the fish supply is a very pressing one, and the situation is going from bad to worse.

Mr. Johnstone has a good deal to say about the constitution of the various sea-fisheries committees, and finds that, "on the whole, the system of local regulation of the fisheries, as originally contemplated by the Sea-Fisheries Regulation Acts, cannot be said to be very successful." Where amalgamation has taken place "the administration has been most successful"; but it is generally agreed that the system under which the regulation of the fisheries is obtained by rates levied on the maritime counties is not altogether a fair one."

The author is lavish in his praise of the Fishery Board for Scotland, its administration, scientific work, and "perfect system" of statistics, and has, by way of contrast, some very hard things to say about the English authority, its "inertia," lack of scientific investigation, and imperfect statistics. As for the former body, one's admiration, though genuine enough so far as it goes, is tempered by reflections on the very questionable success of its wholesale closure policy. In regard to the English official

In the second part of this book the life-histories of fishes are dealt with in a chapter of twenty-five pages of large type, and necessarily very briefly. In another chapter, on the metabolism of the sea, an account is given of the work of Hensen and Brandt in regard to the quantitative estimation of the resources of the sea. There are also important and well-reasoned chapters on the impoverishment of the grounds, the destruction of immature fish, and marine pisciculture.

The following contribution to the discussion of that perennial puzzle, "What is over-fishing?" may be worth quoting :

"If a boat (either steam trawler or smack) catches fewer fish in the course of the year, it can mean nothing else than this, that on the portion of the sea-bottom swept by her trawl-net there are fewer fish now than was formerly the case, that is, the density of fish per unit of area in the North Sea fishing grounds is less than it was thirty years ago. This is a real impoverishment of the fishing grounds." The author sums up the present situation as regards the relation of scientific research to legislation in the following words :

"It would appear then that we are not yet prepared to give thoroughly convincing reasons for the adoption of legislative restrictions on those modes of fishing in which small fishes are destroyed to a notable extent. At the same time there can be no doubt that what we do know of the life-histories of fishes does justify us in recommending the adoption, as a tentative measure, of some of the remedies proposedsay the imposition of size-limits on the fishes landed in certain districts," &c., but he thinks that on the whole "it is better to press for investigation on a much more adequate scale than has hitherto been contemplated before recommending any drastic change in the fishery laws."

Students of fishery problems will be familiar with most of the arguments and criticisms in this book. These have appeared before in one form or another, but have never been more incisively stated than in the present volume.

In the heat part appear the following sections:thermometry (Profs. Pernet and Winkelmann); expansion of solid bodies, liquids and gases, thermoelectric and electric resistance, measurement of temperature, specific heat (Winkelmann); thermal radiation and conductivity (Graetz). Throughout there is carried out a very complete system of references to original sources, with critical comments. This is certainly very well done in general; but in the account of constant pressure gas thermometers we look in vain for any reference to the thermometer of Prof. Callendar, and discover no recognition of the work of the same experimentalist in the development of methods of temperature determination based upon the measurement of electrical resistance. We presume that it is intended to recur to this subject in some other portion of this voluminous treatise.

In the electrical part appear the following sections:-electrical conductivity of electrolytes, by Dr. R. Luther; electricity and gases (ionisation and electrification, characteristics of the electrical current, migration of ions, kathode and canal rays, forces on ions, thermal, chemical, and optical actions), by J. Stark; radio-activity, by J. Stark; atmospheric electricity, by H. Gerdien; thermoelectricity, by Dr. F. Braun; thermal effects of currents, by M. Cantor; Pyro- and piezo-electricity, by Dr. F. Pockels; theory of the galvanic cell, by M. Cantor; electrolysis and migration of ions, by R. Luther; electrical endosmose and convection currents, by L. Graetz; galvanic polarisation and accumulators, by M. Cantor.

From this summary it will be seen that many of the sections relate to subjects in which there has been a tremendous amount of work done in recent years. The subject of radio-activity has, indeed, been originated since the previous edition appeared, and so rapidly is progress taking place in our knowledge of this subject that it may be considered a moot point as to what extent it is advisable to introduce such quickly changing matter into a volume which has the stability that a treatise of this kind necessarily possesses. The references extend into the year 1904; but even so it is impossible to praise this section as representing the present state of knowledge.

The

best that can be said is that there is not much recorded which is now known to be untrue. We think this is much as it should be. An encyclopædia should contain little which has not been sifted and sifted again until there is little doubt of it being an established fact. To more protean volumes should the task be left of pourtraying the latest phases of any department of knowledge.

known handbook have already appeared and

been noticed in these columns. The characteristic of the treatise is that each part is written by a specialist

of the branches of physics named above.

The optical portion is probably of more stable character than the rest, although here also have