Appendix

Appendix

Plates belonging to the article “The Nervous Ganglia of Insects.” (In No. 1 of this volume.)

VOL. III. OCTOBER, 1892. NO. 1.

THE MONIST.

MAN’S GLASSY ESSENCE.

In The Monist for January, 1891, I tried to show what conceptions ought to form the brick and mortar of a philosophical system. Chief among these was that of absolute chance for which I argued again in last April’s number.[1] In July, I applied another fundamental idea, that of continuity, to the law of mind. Next in order, I have to elucidate, from the point of view chosen, the relation between the psychical and physical aspects of a substance.

The first step towards this ought, I think, to be the framing of a molecular theory of protoplasm. But before doing that, it seems indispensable to glance at the constitution of matter, in general. We shall, thus, unavoidably make a long detour; but, after all, our pains will not be wasted, for the problems of the papers that are to follow in the series will call for the consideration of the same question.

All physicists are rightly agreed the evidence is overwhelming which shows all sensible matter is composed of molecules in swift motion and exerting enormous mutual attractions, and perhaps repulsions, too. Even Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, who wishes to explode action at a distance and return to the doctrine of a plenum, not only speaks of molecules, but undertakes to assign definite magnitudes to them. The brilliant Judge Stallo, a man who did not always rightly estimate his own qualities in accepting tasks for himself, declared war upon the atomic theory in a book well worth careful perusal. To the old arguments in favor of atoms which he found in Fechner’s monograph, he was able to make replies of considerable force, though they were not sufficient to destroy those arguments. But against modern proofs he made no headway at all. These set out from the mechanical theory of heat. Rumford’s experiments showed that heat is not a substance. Joule demonstrated that it was a form of energy. The heating of gases under constant volume, and other facts instanced by Rankine, proved that it could not be an energy of strain. This drove physicists to the conclusion that it was a mode of motion. Then it was remembered that John Bernoulli had shown that the pressure of gases could be accounted for by assuming their molecules to be moving uniformly in rectilinear paths. The same hypothesis was now seen to account for Avogadro’s law, that in equal volumes of different kinds of gases exposed to the same pressure and temperature are contained equal numbers of molecules. Shortly after, it was found to account for the laws of diffusion and viscosity of gases, and for the numerical relation between these properties. Finally, Crookes’s radiometer furnished the last link in the strongest chain of evidence which supports any physical hypothesis.

Such being the constitution of gases, liquids must clearly be bodies in which the molecules wander in curvilinear paths, while in solids they move in orbits or quasi-orbits. (See my definition solid II, 1, in the “Century Dictionary.”)

We see that the resistance to compression and to interpenetration between sensible bodies is, by one of the prime propositions of the molecular theory, due in large measure to the kinetical energy of the particles, which must be supposed to be quite remote from one another, on the average, even in solids. This resistance is no doubt influenced by finite attractions and repulsions between the molecules. All the impenetrability of bodies which we can observe is, therefore, a limited impenetrability due to kinetic and positional energy. This being the case, we have no logical right to suppose that absolute impenetrability, or the exclusive occupancy of space, belongs to molecules or to atoms. It is an unwarranted hypothesis, not a vera causa.[2] Unless we are to give up the theory of energy, finite positional attractions and repulsions between molecules must be admitted. Absolute impenetrability would amount to an infinite repulsion at a certain distance. No analogy of known phenomena exists to excuse such a wanton violation of the principle of continuity as such a hypothesis is. In short, we are logically bound to adopt the Boscovichian idea that an atom is simply a distribution of component potential energy throughout space, (this distribution being absolutely rigid,) combined with inertia. The potential energy belongs to two molecules, and is to be conceived as different between molecules A and B from what it is between molecules A and C. The distribution of energy is not necessarily spherical. Nay, a molecule may conceivably have more than one centre; it may even have a central curve, returning into itself. But I do not think there are any observed facts pointing to such multiple or linear centres. On the other hand, many facts relating to crystals, especially those observed by Voigt,[3] go to show that the distribution of energy is harmonical but not concentric. We can easily calculate the forces which such atoms must exert upon one another by considering[4] that they are equivalent to aggregations of pairs of electrically positive and negative points infinitely near to one another. About such an atom there would be regions of positive and of negative potential, and the number and distribution of such regions would determine the valency of the atom, a number which it is easy to see would in many cases be somewhat indeterminate. I must not dwell further upon this hypothesis, at present. In another paper, its consequences will be further considered.

I cannot assume that the students of philosophy who read this magazine are thoroughly versed in modern molecular physics, and therefore it is proper to mention that the governing principle in this branch of science is Clausius’s law of the virial. I will first state the law, and then explain the peculiar terms of the statement. This statement is that the total kinetic energy of the particles of a system in stationary motion is equal to the total virial. By a system is here meant a number of particles acting upon one another.[5] Stationary motion is a quasi-orbital motion among a system of particles so that none of them are removed to indefinitely great distances nor acquire indefinitely great velocities. The kinetic energy of a particle is the work which would be required to bring it to rest, independently of any forces which may be acting upon it. The virial of a pair of particles is half the work which the force which actually operates between them would do if, being independent of the distance, it were to bring them together. The equation of the virial is

(Transcriber’s Note: Italics have been removed from the formulæ for readability.)

½Σmv² = ½ΣΣRr.

Here m is the mass of a particle, v its velocity, R is the attraction between two particles, and r is the distance between them. The sign Σ on the left hand side signifies that the values of _mv_² are to be summed for all the particles, and ΣΣ on the right hand side signifies that the values of Rr are to be summed for all the pairs of particles. If there is an external pressure P (as from the atmosphere) upon the system, and the volume of vacant space within the boundary of that pressure is V, then the virial must be understood as including ³⁄₂_PV_, so that the equation is

½Σmv² = ³⁄₂PV + ½ΣΣRr.

There is strong (if not demonstrative) reason for thinking that the temperature of any body above the absolute zero (-273° C.), is proportional to the average kinetic energy of its molecules, or say aθ, where a is a constant and θ is the absolute temperature. Hence, we may write the equation

aθ = ½m̅v̅²̅ = ³⁄₂PV̅ + ½ΣR̅r̅

where the heavy lines above the different expressions signify that the average values for single molecules are to be taken. In 1872, a student in the University of Leyden, Van der Waals, propounded in his thesis for the doctorate a specialisation of the equation of the virial which has since attracted great attention. Namely, he writes it

aθ = (P + (c⁄V²))(V-b).

The quantity b is the volume of a molecule, which he supposes to be an impenetrable body, and all the virtue of the equation lies in this term which makes the equation a cubic in V, which is required to account for the shape of certain isothermal curves.[6] But if the idea of an impenetrable atom is illogical, that of an impenetrable molecule is almost absurd. For the kinetical theory of matter teaches us that a molecule is like a solar system or star-cluster in miniature. Unless we suppose that in all heating of gases and vapors internal work is performed upon the molecules, implying that their atoms are at considerable distances, the whole kinetical theory of gases falls to the ground. As for the term added to P, there is no more than a partial and roughly approximative justification for it. Namely, let us imagine two spheres described round a particle as their centre, the radius of the larger being so great as to include all the particles whose action upon the centre is sensible, while the radius of the smaller is so large that a good many molecules are included within it. The possibility of describing such a sphere as the outer one implies that the attraction of the particles varies at some distances inversely as some higher power of the distance than the cube, or, to speak more clearly, that the attraction multiplied by the cube of the distance diminishes as the distance increases; for the number of particles at a given distance from any one particle is proportionate to the square of that distance and each of these gives a term of the virial which is the product of the attraction into the distance. Consequently unless the attraction multiplied by the cube of the distance diminished so rapidly with the distance as soon to become insensible, no such outer sphere as is supposed could be described. However, ordinary experience shows that such a sphere is possible; and consequently there must be distances at which the attraction does thus rapidly diminish as the distance increases. The two spheres, then, being so drawn, consider the virial of the central particle due to the particles between them. Let the density of the substance be increased, say, N times. Then, for every term, Rr, of the virial before the condensation, there will be N terms of the same magnitude after the condensation. Hence, the virial of each particle will be proportional to the density, and the equation of the virial becomes

aθ = PV̅ + c⁄V̅.

This omits the virial within the inner sphere, the radius of which is so taken that within that distance the number of particles is not proportional to the number in a large sphere. For Van der Waals this radius is the diameter of his hard molecules, which assumption gives his equation. But it is plain that the attraction between the molecules must to a certain extent modify their distribution, unless some peculiar conditions are fulfilled. The equation of Van der Waals can be approximately true therefore only for a gas. In a solid or liquid condition, in which the removal of a small amount of pressure has little effect on the volume, and where consequently the virial must be much greater than PV̅, the virial must increase with the volume. For suppose we had a substance in a critical condition in which an increase of the volume would diminish the virial more than it would increase ³⁄₂_PV̅_. If we were forcibly to diminish the volume of such a substance, when the temperature became equalised, the pressure which it could withstand would be less than before, and it would be still further condensed, and this would go on indefinitely until a condition were reached in which an increase of volume would increase ³⁄₂_PV̅_ more than it would decrease the virial. In the case of solids, at least, P may be zero; so that the state reached would be one in which the virial increases with the volume, or the attraction between the particles does not increase so fast with a diminution of their distance as it would if the attraction were inversely as the distance.

Almost contemporaneously with Van der Waals’s paper, another remarkable thesis for the doctorate was presented at Paris by Amagat. It related to the elasticity and expansion of gases, and to this subject the superb experimenter, its author, has devoted his whole subsequent life. Especially interesting are his observations of the volumes of ethylene and of carbonic acid at temperatures from 20° to 100° and at pressures ranging from an ounce to 5000 pounds to the square inch. As soon as Amagat had obtained these results, he remarked that the “coefficient of expansion at constant volume,” as it is absurdly called, that is, the rate of variation of the pressure with the temperature, was very nearly constant for each volume. This accords with the equation of the virial, which gives

dp⁄dθ = a⁄V̅ - dΣR̅r̅⁄dθ.

Now, the virial must be nearly independent of the temperature, and therefore the last term almost disappears. The virial would not be quite independent of the temperature, because if the temperature (i. e. the square of the velocity of the molecules) is lowered, and the pressure correspondingly lowered, so as to make the volume the same, the attractions of the molecules will have more time to produce their effects, and consequently, the pairs of molecules the closest together will be held together longer and closer; so that the virial will generally be increased by a decrease of temperature. Now, Amagat’s experiments do show an excessively minute effect of this sort, at least, when the volumes are not too small. However, the observations are well enough satisfied by assuming the “coefficient of expansion at constant volume” to consist wholly of the first term, a/(V). Thus, Amagat’s experiments enable us to determine the values of a and thence to calculate the virial; and this we find varies for carbonic acid gas nearly inversely to (V)⁰˙⁹. There is, thus, a rough approximation to satisfying Van der Waals’s equation. But the most interesting result of Amagat’s experiments, for our purpose at any rate, is that the quantity a, though nearly constant for any one volume, differs considerably with the volume, nearly doubling when the volume is reduced fivefold. This can only indicate that the mean kinetic energy of a given mass of the gas for a given temperature is greater the more the gas is compressed. But the laws of mechanics appear to enjoin that the mean kinetic energy of a moving particle shall be constant at any given temperature. The only escape from contradiction, then, is to suppose that the mean mass of a moving particle diminishes upon the condensation of the gas. In other words, many of the molecules are dissociated, or broken up into atoms or sub-molecules. The idea that dissociation should be favored by diminishing the volume will be pronounced by physicists, at first blush, as contrary to all our experience. But it must be remembered that the circumstances we are speaking of, that of a gas under fifty or more atmospheres pressure, are also unusual. That the “coefficient of expansion under constant volume” when multiplied by the volumes should increase with a decrement of the volume is also quite contrary to ordinary experience; yet it undoubtedly takes place in all gases under great pressure. Again, the doctrine of Arrhenius[7] is now generally accepted, that the molecular conductivity of an electrolyte is proportional to the dissociation of ions. Now the molecular conductivity of a fused electrolyte is usually superior to that of a solution. Here is a case, then, in which diminution of volume is accompanied by increased dissociation.

The truth is that several different kinds of dissociation have to be distinguished. In the first place, there is the dissociation of a chemical molecule to form chemical molecules under the regular action of chemical laws. This may be a double decomposition, as when iodhydric acid is dissociated, according to the formula

HI + HI = HH + II;

or, it may be a simple decomposition, as when pentachloride of phosphorus is dissociated according to the formula

PCl₅ = PCl₃ + ClCl.

All these dissociations require, according to the laws of thermochemistry, an elevated temperature. In the second place, there is the dissociation of a physically polymerous molecule, that is, of several chemical molecules joined by physical attractions. This I am inclined to suppose is a common concomitant of the heating of solids and liquids; for in these bodies there is no increase of compressibility with the temperature at all comparable with the increase of the expansibility. But, in the third place, there is the dissociation with which we are now concerned, which must be supposed to be a throwing off of unsaturated sub-molecules or atoms from the molecule. The molecule may, as I have said, be roughly likened to a solar system. As such, molecules are able to produce perturbations of one another’s internal motions; and in this way a planet, i. e. a sub-molecule, will occasionally get thrown off and wander about by itself, till it finds another unsaturated sub-molecule with which it can unite. Such dissociation by perturbation will naturally be favored by the proximity of the molecules to one another.

Let us now pass to the consideration of that special substance, or rather class of substances, whose properties form the chief subject of botany and of zoölogy, as truly as those of the silicates form the chief subject of mineralogy: I mean the life-slimes, or protoplasm. Let us begin by cataloguing the general characters of these slimes. They one and all exist in two states of aggregation, a solid or nearly solid state and a liquid or nearly liquid state; but they do not pass from the former to the latter by ordinary fusion. They are readily decomposed by heat, especially in the liquid state; nor will they bear any considerable degree of cold. All their vital actions take place at temperatures very little below the point of decomposition. This extreme instability is one of numerous facts which demonstrate the chemical complexity of protoplasm. Every chemist will agree that they are far more complicated than the albumens. Now, albumen is estimated to contain in each molecule about a thousand atoms; so that it is natural to suppose that the protoplasms contain several thousands. We know that while they are chiefly composed of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen, a large number of other elements enter into living bodies in small proportions; and it is likely that most of these enter into the composition of protoplasms. Now, since the numbers of chemical varieties increase at an enormous rate with the number of atoms per molecule, so that there are certainly hundreds of thousands of substances whose molecules contain twenty atoms or fewer, we may well suppose that the number of protoplasmic substances runs into the billions or trillions. Professor Cayley has given a mathematical theory of “trees,” with a view of throwing a light upon such questions; and in that light the estimate of trillions (in the English sense) seems immoderately moderate. It is true that an opinion has been emitted, and defended among biologists, that there is but one kind of protoplasm; but the observations of biologists, themselves, have almost exploded that hypothesis, which from a chemical standpoint appears utterly incredible. The anticipation of the chemist would decidedly be that enough different chemical substances having protoplasmic characters might be formed to account, not only for the differences between nerve-slime and muscle-slime, between whale-slime and lion-slime, but also for those minuter pervasive variations which characterise different breeds and single individuals.

Protoplasm, when quiescent, is, broadly speaking, solid; but when it is disturbed in an appropriate way, or sometimes even spontaneously without external disturbance, it becomes, broadly speaking, liquid. A moner in this state is seen under the microscope to have streams within its matter; a slime-mould slowly flows by force of gravity. The liquefaction starts from the point of disturbance and spreads through the mass. This spreading, however, is not uniform in all directions; on the contrary it takes at one time one course, at another another, through the homogeneous mass, in a manner that seems a little mysterious. The cause of disturbance being removed, these motions gradually (with higher kinds of protoplasm, quickly) cease, and the slime returns to its solid condition.

The liquefaction of protoplasm is accompanied by a mechanical phenomenon. Namely, some kinds exhibit a tendency to draw themselves up into a globular form. This happens particularly with the contents of muscle-cells. The prevalent opinion, founded on some of the most exquisite experimental investigations that the history of science can show, is undoubtedly that the contraction of muscle-cells is due to osmotic pressure; and it must be allowed that that is a factor in producing the effect. But it does not seem to me that it satisfactorily accounts even for the phenomena of muscular contraction; and besides, even naked slimes often draw up in the same way. In this case, we seem to recognise an increase of the surface-tension. In some cases, too, the reverse action takes place, extraordinary pseudopodia being put forth, as if the surface-tension were diminished in spots. Indeed, such a slime always has a sort of skin, due no doubt to surface-tension, and this seems to give way at the point where a pseudopodium is put forth.

Long-continued or frequently repeated liquefaction of the protoplasm results in an obstinate retention of the solid state, which we call fatigue. On the other hand repose in this state, if not too much prolonged, restores the liquefiability. These are both important functions.

The life-slimes have, further, the peculiar property of growing. Crystals also grow; their growth, however, consists merely in attracting matter like their own from the circumambient fluid. To suppose the growth of protoplasm of the same nature, would be to suppose this substance to be spontaneously generated in copious supplies wherever food is in solution. Certainly, it must be granted that protoplasm is but a chemical substance, and that there is no reason why it should not be formed synthetically like any other chemical substance. Indeed, Clifford has clearly shown that we have overwhelming evidence that it is so formed. But to say that such formation is as regular and frequent as the assimilation of food is quite another matter. It is more consonant with the facts of observation to suppose that assimilated protoplasm is formed at the instant of assimilation, under the influence of the protoplasm already present. For each slime in its growth preserves its distinctive characters with wonderful truth, nerve-slime growing nerve-slime and muscle-slime muscle-slime, lion-slime growing lion-slime, and all the varieties of breeds and even individual characters being preserved in the growth. Now it is too much to suppose there are billions of different kinds of protoplasm floating about wherever there is food.

The frequent liquefaction of protoplasm increases its power of assimilating food; so much so, indeed, that it is questionable whether in the solid form it possesses this power.

The life-slime wastes as well as grows; and this too takes place chiefly if not exclusively in its liquid phases.

Closely connected with growth is reproduction; and though in higher forms this is a specialised function, it is universally true that wherever there is protoplasm, there is, will be, or has been a power of reproducing that same kind of protoplasm in a separated organism. Reproduction seems to involve the union of two sexes; though it is not demonstrable that this is always requisite.

Another physical property of protoplasm is that of taking habits. The course which the spread of liquefaction has taken in the past is rendered thereby more likely to be taken in the future; although there is no absolute certainty that the same path will be followed again.

Very extraordinary, certainly, are all these properties of protoplasm; as extraordinary as indubitable. But the one which has next to be mentioned, while equally undeniable, is infinitely more wonderful. It is that protoplasm feels. We have no direct evidence that this is true of protoplasm universally, and certainly some kinds feel far more than others. But there is a fair analogical inference that all protoplasm feels. It not only feels but exercises all the functions of mind.

Such are the properties of protoplasm. The problem is to find a hypothesis of the molecular constitution of this compound which will account for these properties, one and all.

Some of them are obvious results of the excessively complicated constitution of the protoplasm molecule. All very complicated substances are unstable; and plainly a molecule of several thousand atoms may be separated in many ways into two parts in each of which the polar chemical forces are very nearly saturated. In the solid protoplasm, as in other solids, the molecules must be supposed to be moving as it were in orbits, or, at least, so as not to wander indefinitely. But this solid cannot be melted, for the same reason that starch cannot be melted; because an amount of heat insufficient to make the entire molecules wander is sufficient to break them up completely and cause them to form new and simpler molecules. But when one of the molecules is disturbed, even if it be not quite thrown out of its orbit at first, sub-molecules of perhaps several hundred atoms each are thrown off from it. These will soon acquire the same mean kinetic energy as the others, and therefore velocities several times as great. They will naturally begin to wander, and in wandering will perturb a great many other molecules and cause them in their turn to behave like the one originally deranged. So many molecules will thus be broken up, that even those that are intact will no longer be restrained within orbits, but will wander about freely. This is the usual condition of a liquid, as modern chemists understand it; for in all electrolytic liquids there is considerable dissociation.

But this process necessarily chills the substance, not merely on account of the heat of chemical combination, but still more because the number of separate particles being greatly increased, the mean kinetic energy must be less. The substance being a bad conductor, this heat is not at once restored. Now the particles moving more slowly, the attractions between them have time to take effect, and they approach the condition of equilibrium. But their dynamic equilibrium is found in the restoration of the solid condition, which therefore takes place, if the disturbance is not kept up.

When a body is in the solid condition, most of its molecules must be moving at the same rate, or, at least, at certain regular sets of rates; otherwise the orbital motion would not be preserved. The distances of neighboring molecules must always be kept between a certain maximum and a certain minimum value. But if, without absorption of heat, the body be thrown into a liquid condition, the distances of neighboring molecules will be far more unequally distributed, and an effect upon the virial will result. The chilling of protoplasm upon its liquefaction must also be taken into account. The ordinary effect will no doubt be to increase the cohesion and with that the surface-tension, so that the mass will tend to draw itself up. But in special cases, the virial will be increased so much that the surface-tension will be diminished at points where the temperature is first restored. In that case, the outer film will give way and the tension at other places will aid in causing the general fluid to be poured out at those points, forming pseudopodia.

When the protoplasm is in a liquid state, and then only, a solution of food is able to penetrate its mass by diffusion. The protoplasm is then considerably dissociated; and so is the food, like all dissolved matter. If then the separated and unsaturated sub-molecules of the food happen to be of the same chemical species as sub-molecules of the protoplasm, they may unite with other sub-molecules of the protoplasm to form new molecules, in such a fashion that when the solid state is resumed, there may be more molecules of protoplasm than there were at the beginning. It is like the jack-knife whose blade and handle, after having been severally lost and replaced, were found and put together to make a new knife.

We have seen that protoplasm is chilled by liquefaction, and that this brings it back to the solid state, when the heat is recovered. This series of operations must be very rapid in the case of nerve-slime and even of muscle-slime, and may account for the unsteady or vibratory character of their action. Of course, if assimilation takes place, the heat of combination, which is probably trifling, is gained. On the other hand, if work is done, whether by nerve or by muscle, loss of energy must take place. In the case of the muscle, the mode by which the instantaneous part of the fatigue is brought about is easily traced out. If when the muscle contracts it be under stress, it will contract less than it otherwise would do, and there will be a loss of heat. It is like an engine which should work by dissolving salt in water and using the contraction during the solution to lift a weight, the salt being recovered afterwards by distillation. But the major part of fatigue has nothing to do with the correlation of forces. A man must labor hard to do in a quarter of an hour the work which draws from him enough heat to cool his body by a single degree. Meantime, he will be getting heated, he will be pouring out extra products of combustion, perspiration, etc., and he will be driving the blood at an accelerated rate through minute tubes at great expense. Yet all this will have little to do with his fatigue. He may sit quietly at his table writing, doing practically no physical work at all, and yet in a few hours be terribly fagged. This seems to be owing to the deranged sub-molecules of the nerve-slime not having had time to settle back into their proper combinations. When such sub-molecules are thrown out, as they must be from time to time, there is so much waste of material.

In order that a sub-molecule of food may be thoroughly and firmly assimilated into a broken molecule of protoplasm, it is necessary not only that it should have precisely the right chemical composition, but also that it should be at precisely the right spot at the right time and should be moving in precisely the right direction with precisely the right velocity. If all these conditions are not fulfilled, it will be more loosely retained than the other parts of the molecule; and every time it comes round into the situation in which it was drawn in, relatively to the other parts of that molecule and to such others as were near enough to be factors in the action, it will be in special danger of being thrown out again. Thus, when a partial liquefaction of the protoplasm takes place many times to about the same extent, it will, each time, be pretty nearly the same molecules that were last drawn in that are now thrown out. They will be thrown out, too, in about the same way, as to position, direction of motion, and velocity, in which they were drawn in; and this will be in about the same course that the ones last before them were thrown out. Not exactly, however; for the very cause of their being thrown off so easily is their not having fulfilled precisely the conditions of stable retention. Thus, the law of habit is accounted for, and with it its peculiar characteristic of not acting with exactitude.

It seems to me that this explanation of habit, aside from the question of its truth or falsity, has a certain value as an addition to our little store of mechanical examples of actions analogous to habit. All the others, so far as I know, are either statical or else involve forces which, taking only the sensible motions into account, violate the law of energy. It is so with the stream that wears its own bed. Here, the sand is carried to its most stable situation and left there. The law of energy forbids this; for when anything reaches a position of stable equilibrium, its momentum will be at a maximum, so that it can according to this law only be left at rest in an unstable situation. In all the statical illustrations, too, things are brought into certain states and left there. A garment receives folds and keeps them; that is, its limit of elasticity is exceeded. This failure to spring back is again an apparent violation of the law of energy; for the substance will not only not spring back of itself (which might be due to an unstable equilibrium being reached) but will not even do so when an impulse that way is applied to it. Accordingly, Professor James says “the phenomena of habit ... are due to the plasticity of the ... materials.” Now, plasticity of materials means the having of a low limit of elasticity. (See the “Century Dictionary,” under solid.) But the hypothetical constitution of protoplasm here proposed involves no forces but attractions and repulsions strictly following the law of energy. The action here, that is, the throwing of an atom out of its orbit in a molecule, and the entering of a new atom into nearly, but not quite the same orbit, is somewhat similar to the molecular actions which may be supposed to take place in a solid strained beyond its limit of elasticity. Namely, in that case certain molecules must be thrown out of their orbits, to settle down again shortly after into new orbits. In short, the plastic solid resembles protoplasm in being partially and temporarily liquefied by a slight mechanical force. But the taking of a set by a solid body has but a moderate resemblance to the taking of a habit, inasmuch as the characteristic feature of the latter, its inexactitude and want of complete determinacy, is not so marked in the former, if it can be said to be present there, at all.

The truth is that though the molecular explanation of habit is pretty vague on the mathematical side, there can be no doubt that systems of atoms having polar forces would act substantially in that manner, and the explanation is even too satisfactory to suit the convenience of an advocate of tychism. For it may fairly be urged that since the phenomena of habit may thus result from a purely mechanical arrangement, it is unnecessary to suppose that habit-taking is a primordial principle of the universe. But one fact remains unexplained mechanically, which concerns not only the facts of habit, but all cases of actions apparently violating the law of energy; it is that all these phenomena depend upon aggregations of trillions of molecules in one and the same condition and neighborhood; and it is by no means clear how they could have all been brought and left in the same place and state by any conservative forces. But let the mechanical explanation be as perfect as it may, the state of things which it supposes presents evidence of a primordial habit-taking tendency. For it shows us like things acting in like ways because they are alike. Now, those who insist on the doctrine of necessity will for the most part insist that the physical world is entirely individual. Yet law involves an element of generality. Now to say that generality is primordial, but generalisation not, is like saying that diversity is primordial but diversification not. It turns logic upside down. At any rate, it is clear that nothing but a principle of habit, itself due to the growth by habit of an infinitesimal chance tendency toward habit-taking, is the only bridge that can span the chasm between the chance-medley of chaos and the cosmos of order and law.

I shall not attempt a molecular explanation of the phenomena of reproduction, because that would require a subsidiary hypothesis, and carry me away from my main object. Such phenomena, universally diffused though they be, appear to depend upon special conditions; and we do not find that all protoplasm has reproductive powers.

But what is to be said of the property of feeling? If consciousness belongs to all protoplasm, by what mechanical constitution is this to be accounted for? The slime is nothing but a chemical compound. There is no inherent impossibility in its being formed synthetically in the laboratory, out of its chemical elements; and if it were so made, it would present all the characters of natural protoplasm. No doubt, then, it would feel. To hesitate to admit this would be puerile and ultra-puerile. By what element of the molecular arrangement, then, would that feeling be caused? This question cannot be evaded or pooh-poohed. Protoplasm certainly does feel; and unless we are to accept a weak dualism, the property must be shown to arise from some peculiarity of the mechanical system. Yet the attempt to deduce it from the three laws of mechanics, applied to never so ingenious a mechanical contrivance, would obviously be futile. It can never be explained, unless we admit that physical events are but degraded or undeveloped forms of psychical events. But once grant that the phenomena of matter are but the result of the sensibly complete sway of habits upon mind, and it only remains to explain why in the protoplasm these habits are to some slight extent broken up, so that according to the law of mind, in that special clause of it sometimes called the principle of accommodation,[8] feeling becomes intensified. Now the manner in which habits generally get broken up is this. Reactions usually terminate in the removal of a stimulus; for the excitation continues as long as the stimulus is present. Accordingly, habits are general ways of behavior which are associated with the removal of stimuli. But when the expected removal of the stimulus fails to occur, the excitation continues and increases, and non-habitual reactions take place; and these tend to weaken the habit. If, then, we suppose that matter never does obey its ideal laws with absolute precision, but that there are almost insensible fortuitous departures from regularity, these will produce, in general, equally minute effects. But protoplasm is in an excessively unstable condition; and it is the characteristic of unstable equilibrium, that near that point excessively minute causes may produce startlingly large effects. Here then, the usual departures from regularity will be followed by others that are very great; and the large fortuitous departures from law so produced, will tend still further to break up the laws, supposing that these are of the nature of habits. Now, this breaking up of habit and renewed fortuitous spontaneity will, according to the law of mind, be accompanied by an intensification of feeling. The nerve-protoplasm is, without doubt, in the most unstable condition of any kind of matter; and consequently, there the resulting feeling is the most manifest.

Thus we see that the idealist has no need to dread a mechanical theory of life. On the contrary, such a theory, fully developed, is bound to call in a tychistic idealism as its indispensable adjunct. Wherever chance-spontaneity is found, there, in the same proportion, feeling exists. In fact, chance is but the outward aspect of that which within itself is feeling. I long ago showed that real existence, or thing-ness, consists in regularities. So, that primeval chaos in which there was no regularity was mere nothing, from a physical aspect. Yet it was not a blank zero; for there was an intensity of consciousness there in comparison with which all that we ever feel is but as the struggling of a molecule or two to throw off a little of the force of law to an endless and innumerable diversity of chance utterly unlimited.

But after some atoms of the protoplasm have thus become partially emancipated from law, what happens next to them? To understand this, we have to remember that no mental tendency is so easily strengthened by the action of habit as is the tendency to take habits. Now, in the higher kinds of protoplasm, especially, the atoms in question have not only long belonged to one molecule or another of the particular mass of slime of which they are parts; but before that, they were constituents of food of a protoplasmic constitution. During all this time, they have been liable to lose habits and to recover them again; so that now, when the stimulus is removed, and the foregone habits tend to reassert themselves, they do so in the case of such atoms with great promptness. Indeed, the return is so prompt that there is nothing but the feeling to show conclusively that the bonds of law have ever been relaxed.

In short, diversification is the vestige of chance-spontaneity; and wherever diversity is increasing, there chance must be operative. On the other hand, wherever uniformity is increasing, habit must be operative. But wherever actions take place under an established uniformity, there so much feeling as there may be takes the mode of a sense of reaction. That is the manner in which I am led to define the relation between the fundamental elements of consciousness and their physical equivalents.

It remains to consider the physical relations of general ideas. It may be well here to reflect that if matter has no existence except as a specialisation of mind, it follows that whatever affects matter according to regular laws is itself matter. But all mind is directly or indirectly connected with all matter, and acts in a more or less regular way; so that all mind more or less partakes of the nature of matter. Hence, it would be a mistake to conceive of the psychical and the physical aspects of matter as two aspects absolutely distinct. Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relations of action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter. Viewing it from the inside, looking at its immediate character as feeling, it appears as consciousness. These two views are combined when we remember that mechanical laws are nothing but acquired habits, like all the regularities of mind, including the tendency to take habits, itself; and that this action of habit is nothing but generalisation, and generalisation is nothing but the spreading of feelings. But the question is, how do general ideas appear in the molecular theory of protoplasm?

The consciousness of a habit involves a general idea. In each action of that habit certain atoms get thrown out of their orbit, and replaced by others. Upon all the different occasions it is different atoms that are thrown off, but they are analogous from a physical point of view, and there is an inward sense of their being analogous. Every time one of the associated feelings recurs, there is a more or less vague sense that there are others, that it has a general character, and of about what this general character is. We ought not, I think, to hold that in protoplasm habit never acts in any other than the particular way suggested above. On the contrary, if habit be a primary property of mind, it must be equally so of matter, as a kind of mind. We can hardly refuse to admit that wherever chance motions have general characters, there is a tendency for this generality to spread and to perfect itself. In that case, a general idea is a certain modification of consciousness which accompanies any regularity or general relation between chance actions.

The consciousness of a general idea has a certain “unity of the ego,” in it, which is identical when it passes from one mind to another. It is, therefore, quite analogous to a person; and, indeed, a person is only a particular kind of general idea. Long ago, in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy (Vol. III, p. 156), I pointed out that a person is nothing but a symbol involving a general idea; but my views were, then, too nominalistic to enable me to see that every general idea has the unified living feeling of a person.

All that is necessary, upon this theory, to the existence of a person is that the feelings out of which he is constructed should be in close enough connection to influence one another. Here we can draw a consequence which it may be possible to submit to experimental test. Namely, if this be the case, there should be something like personal consciousness in bodies of men who are in intimate and intensely sympathetic communion. It is true that when the generalisation of feeling has been carried so far as to include all within a person, a stopping-place, in a certain sense, has been attained; and further generalisation will have a less lively character. But we must not think it will cease. Esprit de corps, national sentiment, sympathy, are no mere metaphors. None of us can fully realise what the minds of corporations are, any more than one of my brain-cells can know what the whole brain is thinking. But the law of mind clearly points to the existence of such personalities, and there are many ordinary observations which, if they were critically examined and supplemented by special experiments, might, as first appearances promise, give evidence of the influence of such greater persons upon individuals. It is often remarked that on one day half a dozen people, strangers to one another, will take it into their heads to do one and the same strange deed, whether it be a physical experiment, a crime, or an act of virtue. When the thirty thousand young people of the society for Christian Endeavor were in New York, there seemed to me to be some mysterious diffusion of sweetness and light. If such a fact is capable of being made out anywhere, it should be in the church. The Christians have always been ready to risk their lives for the sake of having prayers in common, of getting together and praying simultaneously with great energy, and especially for their common body, for “the whole state of Christ’s church militant here in earth,” as one of the missals has it. This practice they have been keeping up everywhere, weekly, for many centuries. Surely, a personality ought to have developed in that church, in that “bride of Christ,” as they call it, or else there is a strange break in the action of mind, and I shall have to acknowledge my views are much mistaken. Would not the societies for psychical research be more likely to break through the clouds, in seeking evidences of such corporate personality, than in seeking evidences of telepathy, which, upon the same theory, should be a far weaker phenomenon?

C. S. PEIRCE.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I am rejoiced to find, since my last paper was printed, that a philosopher as subtle and profound as Dr. Edmund Montgomery has long been arguing for the same element in the universe. Other world-renowned thinkers, as M. Renouvier and M. Delbœuf, appear to share this opinion.

[2] By a vera causa, in the logic of science, is meant a state of things known to exist in some cases and supposed to exist in other cases, because it would account for observed phenomena.

[3] Wiedemann, Annalen, 1887-1889.

[4] See Maxwell on Spherical Harmonics, in his Electricity and Magnetism.

[5] The word system has three peculiar meanings in mathematics. (A.) It means an orderly exposition of the truths of astronomy, and hence a theory of the motions of the stars; as the Ptolemaic system, the Copernican system. This is much like the sense in which we speak of the Calvinistic system of theology, the Kantian system of philosophy, etc. (B.) It means the aggregate of the planets considered as all moving in somewhat the same way, as the solar system; and hence any aggregate of particles moving under mutual forces. (C.) It means a number of forces acting simultaneously upon a number of particles.

[6] But, in fact, an inspection of these curves is sufficient to show that they are of a higher degree than the third. For they have the line V = 0, or some line V a constant for an asymptote, while for small values of P, the values of (_d_²)P/(dV)² are positive.

[7] Anticipated by Clausius as long ago as 1857; and by Williamson in 1851.

[8] “Physiologically, ... accommodation means the breaking up of a habit.... Psychologically, it means reviving consciousness.” Baldwin, Psychology, Part III ch. i., § 5.

THE FUTURE OF THOUGHT IN AMERICA.

History teaches us the nature of the degenerative and destructive agencies in national life. These are of various kinds, but they may be generally included under the heads of Physical Vices, Superstitions, and Selfish Ambitions. These have become possible through excess of emotional, and deficiency of rational states of the mind. When a large part of a population is influenced by emotional rather than by rational modes of thought, unethical conduct has full opportunity, and suffering and destruction are sure to follow. All races and nations are subject to such disorders, if only in some cases during their periods of infancy and of degeneracy.

The peoples of Europe have difficulties and dangers which are due to their own peculiar situation. The people of North America have to meet certain risks of a somewhat different character, owing to our peculiar position. In Europe we see an accumulation of many races who reached their Ultima Thule at the coast of the Atlantic, and who have had to accommodate themselves to each other as best they could. Speaking different languages and having different political organisations, they have consolidated into separate nations. This result has only been reached after many conflicts, and the result has been the combination and absorption of smaller states into greater, such as we find them to-day. This result has not terminated conflicts; it has reduced their frequency but has increased their scope and importance. To-day the antagonisms of these nations impose great burdens upon them, but they are at the same time productive of great good.

With men as with other animals excellence is the result of use and exercise. With animals this exercise has been compulsory, and has been due largely to the pressure of hunger. Among men intellectual and ethical excellence may be due to compulsion, or it may result from the capacity to develop lofty ideals. In the former case man is driven; in the latter case he is led. Now the organisation of human society is such, that if man will not be led, he is driven. The “mills of the Gods” are ever ready for those who lag behind in the progress of the race. But there are mills and mills, and no mill has yet appeared in human history better calculated to grind out a good grist from an intellectual point of view, than western Eurasia, or Europe. The emulations and antagonisms of so many nations have stimulated men to do their best, and have stimulated governments to aid them in doing it, for several centuries. The result has been modern art, modern science pure and applied, and modern philosophy. To produce all this however, Europe has been under pressure, and the pressure has been in some, if not all of its countries, more or less galling.

The European, in order to escape local tyranny, political, social, or theological, or to better his chances of physical living, has come to America. He has taken possession, and has bettered his condition from a physical point of view, most successfully. The question that interests us now, is whether he has bettered himself in any other way, and whether he is going to continue the mental progress which has so distinguished his history in Europe. Population is rapidly increasing, and the increasing severity of the “struggle for existence” which will follow, will stimulate men to increased excellence in their methods of obtaining a livelihood, but will it develop the mind in any other direction? We have before us in the case of China, the effect of close industrial competition in a dense population, without corresponding intellectual development. What is the outlook for the American? Will the process of natural selection only, the “devil-take-the-hindmost” doctrine of Darwin, be sufficient to develop the higher mental faculties, or having developed them, to enable them to survive and to become general, or not?

In the first place we lack in America the great stimulus to mental progress already referred to, international jealousy and emulation. In this respect we are situated very much like the Chinese, but if anything less favorably. We practically own the continent. We have no fear of Tartar invasions from the west nor Japanese from the north east. The Canadians are of identical race with ourselves, and are almost certain to become identical in nationality with us. We are accustomed to boast ourselves of this, and to look with great satisfaction on our isolated position among nations. But our self-gratulation must be greatly tempered by the reflection that such isolation is only beneficial so long as we can maintain our ideals without external stimulus. And this is something that few nations have so far been able to accomplish. It is true, however, that the Atlantic ocean is not so wide as it was formerly, and we are truly one of the family of the Indo-European nations. But we will miss the effect of the daily stimulus which they afford each other, and the daily contact which transmits so much from man to man.

What is our present intellectual rank among these nations to-day; meaning by this our status in actual production of intellectual work, and leaving aside history? Without any great competence to speak on many branches of such work, I may be not far from correct; if I summarise as follows: In music and sculpture unproductive; in painting and literature (as an art) good, but weak in quantity in comparison with our population. In sciences, feeble in many branches, but very productive in some others. I refer to pure science. In applied science we stand high. In philosophy as a nation, weak.

But we have the future before us. If there is a demand for the products of pure thought in this country, the supply will come. Much may be expected of our race. We will hope that the demand will grow, for at present it is not as large as it ought to be. It is of course easy for thought to “run in accustomed channels,” and many people there are in this as in all other countries, who believe that sufficient is already known, and that he who would disturb current opinions is a “disturber of the peace.” Strange as it may seem, in this comparatively new country we have one special inducement to this habit of mind. This is to be found in our political system, which requires an unhesitating submission to the will of the majority.

* * * * *

Here is our second danger. We are apt to confuse mental submission with physical submission. Physical submission to the will of the majority is generally necessary for physical reasons, with which we are all familiar. Ballots are simply a peaceful representation of bullets, and we anticipate the submission to the latter by submission to the former. But the mind should be free. Current or popular opinions are not always correct. In fact if they were, reform or progress would be unnecessary. A proposal for change always begins with a minority, and much time may often elapse before such change becomes acceptable to the majority. Before the majority accepts a new step of progress the progressive idea cannot govern physically. It must be content to be unpopular for a greater or less time. Now the politician naturally dreads unpopularity, for it is political death. And just in proportion as we are politicians do we share in this unfortunate mental attitude. And how many Americans are not politicians? It is the prevalent ethical disease of Americans. If it becomes general, the progress of this country is ended, and her fate among nations is sealed. Her manhood is gone, and woman may well feel her hand itch to

“Defeat their dirty tricks Confound their politics.”

The prevalence of the habit of submission to what we know to be wrong in this country is simply detestable. Herbert Spencer has given us some excellent advice on this subject, and we will do well to heed it. The habit extends all the way through political, scientific, and domestic economy. The unpopularity of the reformer is expressed in the term “kicker,” which is applied to him among the lower classes in this country. As one of its advocates once said to me, it is the “American System,” and there was a strong element of truth in his assertion. With such people, criticism is identical with quarrelling, for they cannot conceive of any motive for endeavoring to reform some abuse or correct some error, but personal rancor. Such an attitude is a sure mark of intellectual mediocrity and ethical incapacity, and it infinitely increases the pains of the reformer, and readily converts him into a martyr. However, there are a good many men left in this country, and there are agencies at work which will probably keep up the supply.

In the absence of compulsion in the form of external or civil wars and other disasters, the churches are doing a good work in keeping ideals before the people, and in inviting corresponding practical life. It is true that their efforts are more or less retarded by the insistence on erroneous and even absurd opinions about some things, but they do infinite service in teaching that “man shall not live by bread alone,” nor by the mere display of physical possessions. They teach that there are ideals of truth and beauty better worth living for, and that the mind is the greater part of man. It is the churches which make the majority of scientists and philosophers, as they formerly did of painters. Then let the churches flourish. Like the nations of Europe, their emulations and antagonisms bring out the truth. The Presbyterians have to solve the knotty questions of biblical inspiration and divine order. The Methodists will have to study the nature and value of human emotions. The Friends will know what is to be known of immediate divine influence. The Catholics have learned how to restrain in some measure the most thoughtless of mankind. The Unitarians and Ethical Culturists are proving that man may retain and live up to high ideals without much or any theology. So long as there is no philosophy or none to speak of in America, the evolution of thought will come from the conflicts of the theologies; a peaceful war which is far less wasteful than physical wars. Theology has been generally in Europe the parent of philosophy, and so it will be here. From the various stages and conditions of the agitation will spring science and art. By this method man is led into progress by measures which involve the best attributes of his nature, instead of being driven by appeals to his lower motives, or by physical force. In this progress moral courage is not lost, but it is developed; and criticism is truth’s best weapon, and is not a cause of offense. That this progress in the churches is real, is proven by our Woodrow, McQueary, Briggs, and others, and it will go on as long as the love of truth and moral courage exist in those organisations.

It is interesting to remember that this struggle of opinions has passed through the same stages in Europe wherever the love of truth has had an abiding place. This is especially true of Germany, where also philosophy has had so large a development in relatively modern times. But we need something more than opinions to counteract the dangers which threaten earnestness of character in this country, which I have pointed out. Active organisations are necessary, which shall resist tendencies to crystallisation from both sides. Non-theological people must be stimulated to maintain ethical ideals; and theological people must be restrained from smothering them under useless and obstructive dogmas and practices. It is too true that while some theological dogmas include high ethical ideals, other dogmas discredit them by deriving them from incredible sources, and seeking to sustain them by incredible sanctions. Where such dogmas are sincerely held, true thought is suppressed, knowledge makes slow progress, and ethical life is more difficult.

As already remarked, we cannot yet claim to be, as a nation, distinguished for profound thinking on the subjects of highest human interest; nor yet are we the most thoughtless. Ignorance of the possibilities of mind is not so general as in some parts of Europe, but it is greater than in others. Material objects and interests occupy almost as exclusively the minds of the majority of our citizens whom we are accustomed to consider “intelligent,” as among the unintelligent. Hence our proneness to boast of our material greatness, instead of our intellectual conquests. Hence that weakest of all forms of self-praise, the publication of the dimensions of our country and its rapid growth, as though these were indications of our superiority as a people or as a race. This is repeated ad nauseam, while our real merits, our contributions to the stock of the world’s progress in thought, knowledge, and mental power, are passed by in silence. Our newspaper press reflects this state of affairs, since they generally think it their best policy to follow rather than lead public opinion. There are, however, noteworthy exceptions to this character of the press both in the east and the west, which we owe to the superiority of the men who edit and direct them.

In the conduct of our schools and of our scientific organisations, we have a corresponding exhibition of mediocrity or worse, with a few noble and distinguished exceptions. A mere interest in education and research does not confer competency to direct and sustain them; yet an interest in such matters is generally the only qualification demanded of the directors of such institutions, provided they understand how to buy, sell, and invest money. It is to be hoped that this state of affairs will some day pass away, and that men who are influential in such matters will some time know enough themselves to distinguish between the false and the true, and between men of ability and adventurers who are after the money and position with which our institutions of learning and our scientific enterprises can endow them. This reform will progress exactly in proportion as it is understood how much human happiness depends on true research and on correct thinking, and how little on revelation and on ancient dogma.

It is not, I repeat, sufficiently understood, how much human conduct depends on correct thinking. How much financial dishonesty would be averted by a rational thought as to the inevitable consequences? How much social irregularity would be prevented by a similar treatment of the subject? How much hatred and wasteful antagonism would the world lack, if the ordinary conditions of living were understood and acted on! So the cultivation of the rational mind is of incalculable importance, and if we wish to prosper as a nation we must bend our energies to the pleasant task this problem presents to us. Neglect of our mental powers means degeneracy and decay; while their cultivation means power and happiness. Wealth, except as a means of attaining this end, after physical necessities are supplied, is simply useless.

E. D. COPE.

MENTAL MUMMIES.

If we should name the most important factor in the changes which have gradually widened the contrast between modern science and the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, we might define it as a “progressive recognition of hereditary influences.”

There was a time when each individual of the human race was considered a separate accident, called into existence by an act of unlimited, arbitrary power, and apt to be as suddenly changed, even unto a complete inversion of his former moral being, by a merciful, or revengeful, caprice of the same power.

Biology has since taught us to apply the doctrine of evolution to the problems of our own moral and physical nature, to trace the tendencies of bygone times to their effects in the present age, to consider individuals the outcome of a long series of precedent influences, and to recognise the truth that the length of those influences is proportioned to the persistence of the result.

Intelligent statesmen were the first to appreciate the practical value of those facts. The advisers of Alexander II. did not waste their time in a hopeless attempt to convert the freedom-worshipping natives of the Caucasus into devotees of Muscovite despotism, but at once confronted them with the alternative of exile or death. Our Indian commissioners early realised the impossibility of turning the descendants of a long ancestry of deer-hunters into tillers of the soil, and transferred the survivors of the long race-war to a territory where they could for better or worse, indulge their incurable penchant. The Groot Fontein penitentiary of the Transvaal Republic became the grave of so many Caffirs that the managers at last abandoned the plan of inuring nomads to the restraints of sedentary occupation, and saved the lives, if not the souls of their convicts by sending them about in chain-gangs to mend the irrigation ditches of the border settlements.

Hereditary influences cannot be obliterated by force of rhetoric or of government edicts and it would solve many riddles if we would apply that principle to phenomena of ethical and religious evolution. How else shall we explain the fact that in less than sixty years the doctrine of Protestantism spread from central Germany to the highland hamlets of Scotland and Scandinavia, while in Spain, Portugal, and Italy a very decided progress in general intelligence has failed to lead to a similar result? How shall we account for the success of Christian missionaries in Tasmania and Otaheiti and their utter failure in Burmah and Hindostan? How for the persecution-proof vitality of Judaism, the ready collapse of Mormonism, or the revival of crass mystic delusions in the midst of our realistic civilisation?

There is no doubt that the average Spanish sailor, or village-shopkeeper of to-day possesses a larger stock of general information than the average Brunswick school-teacher of the sixteenth century. Yet one of the least learned of those school-teachers could, by instinct, sufficiently appreciate the significance of the Protestant revolt to celebrate its triumph by a big bonfire and what our western friends would, call a “grand war-dance,” on a height near the little town of Wolfenbüttel. Why does Pedro Gonzales still cross himself at the mention of a heretic, while Peter Jansen would as soon return to the pig-sty hovels of the mediæval serfs as crawl back under the yoke of Jesuitry? How could the bogs of foggy Ireland and the vegas of sunny Spain nourish equally imperishable roots of a plant that failed to get a firm foot-hold in the sands of Brandenburgh?

The solution of those enigmas can be found in the circumstance that the doctrine of anti-naturalism had extended its influence to the character of many European nations, and that the character-traits of a race are less amenable to rapid changes than its intellectual standards. On the soul-organism of the Latin races the thousand years influence of monastic tyranny has left traces which the light of science will fail to efface for centuries to come. The propaganda of a manlier creed has thus been defeated, not only by their ignorance, but by their aversion to mental efforts, by their habitual reliance on miracles, by their incurable indifference to the claims of truth and the merits of intellectual independence, by their hereditary mistrust in the competence of their natural instinct. To their moral palate a doctrine which nauseates their northern neighbors has become a pleasant narcotic; they have been forced to swallow the opium of pessimism till a craving for the repetition of the mind-enervating dose has become a second nature; they hug the cross that has proved a symbol of death to their noblest reformers.

Against that influence of perverted instincts the logic of mental revelations avails but little. “Propositions which would appear self-evident to certain mental constitutions,” says Dr. Carpenter, “are apt to be very differently received by others, according to their conformity or discordance with that aggregate of preformed opinion which has grown up in the minds of each. For just as we try whether a new piece of furniture which is offered us does or does not fit into a certain recess in our apartment, and accept or decline it accordingly, so we try a new proposition which is offered to our mental acceptance. If it either at once fits in or can by argument or discussion be brought to fit in to some recess in our fabrics of thought, we give our assent to it by admitting it to its appropriate place. But if it neither fits in the first instance nor can by any means be brought to fit, the mind automatically rejects it.”

It is true that logical demonstrations may become complete enough to defy dissent, but even from facts which force themselves upon the acceptance of every rational human being, different individuals will draw widely different inferences. That the mind of man may become a receptacle for irreconcilable doctrines is strikingly illustrated, by the simultaneous acceptance of the Old and New Testament of our heterogeneous scripture, and in the same way obstinate bigots manage to associate scientific truth and dogmatic absurdities. Darwin and Moses may occupy adjoining quarters in the fabric of the same cosmogony; the rule of three may become a passive concomitant of Trinitarian dogmas. The torch of truth may be permitted to flicker in a secluded recess of souls which refuse it the privilege of throwing its rays in certain directions. Education may fail to reclaim hereditary bigotry. In the winter of 1559 the rabble of Madrid assembled to witness the death of Don Carlos de Seso, a Spanish nobleman whose ancestors had fought at Granada and Toledo. His brother had been the favorite hunting-companion of Charles V.; one of his uncles had sacrificed his life in deciding the victory of Pavia; Don Carlos himself had acquired renown both as a soldier and a scholar, but in the latter capacity he had confessed his sympathy with certain doctrines of Martin Luther, and the Holy Inquisition had sentenced him to anticipate his doom in the flames of the stake. King Philip II. honored the auto da fé with his presence, and frowned in a way which the condemned freethinker mistook for a disapproval of his sentence. “O King! can you thus witness the torture of your subjects?” exclaimed De Seso. “Deliver us from so cruel a death which even our enemies admit we have not deserved.” “I would help carrying faggots to burn my own son,” replied the King, “if he had incurred your unspeakable guilt.” Yet Philip the Second was one of the best-educated princes of his century. In mathematics, astronomy, ancient and modern languages, geography, and history, he was far better informed than Landgraf Philip of Hessen, who would have risked his own life to save that of a loyal cavalier.

There are mental mummies who cannot be revived by removing their grave-shrouds and clothing them in modern drapery; the principle of conservatism has penetrated their very veins and the marrow of their bones. It is by no means unconceivable that a popular leader like Garibaldi or Porfirio Diaz should succeed in persuading a million of his countrymen to renounce the yoke of Rome and build Protestant chapels, but the result would be largely limited to a change of nomenclature. Before long the dissenters would march in procession with a wonder-working tooth of John Wesley or kiss a shred from the petticoat of the Holy Maid of Kent. They would groan at the mention of Rome, but exorcise spooks with the initials of Ulric Zwingli, and abstain from work on the anniversary of every Protestant martyr. They would try to redeem drunkards by sprinkling them with consecrated water from the holy rivers of Kansas, and celebrate Arbor Day only by invoking the spirit of Prof. G. P. Marsh, as a patron-saint of climate-improving forests. Under the stimulus of industrial influences, they might transfer the cross from way-side shrines to telegraph-poles, but they would persist in the worship of sorrow.

The creed which has turned the happiest countries of our globe into a grave of their former prosperity, is a medley of miraculism and anti-naturalism, and the experience of the last century has proved that both can survive the repudiation of Rome and even of Galilee. The mania of renunciation, after the abolishment of monasteries and nunneries, continued its dismal rites in Quaker-garb and Shaker temples of celibacy. The miracle-hunger of millions who have learned to scorn the clumsy tricks of the cowled exorcist, gratifies its appetite in the mystic gloom of the dark cabinet. Rustic supernaturalists, deprived of such luxuries, indemnify themselves by retailing the marvels of the serpent-charm and joint-snake superstition.

A curious psychological problem suggests itself in the question how far the charm of the “sour-grape philosophy” may contribute to the persistence of certain forms of moral nihilism. Condemned criminals almost invariably “renounce the vanities” of a life which the Court of Appeals has refused to save, and in a scaffold-speech, quoted in Galignani’s Messenger of May 6th, 1837, the English murderer Joseph Greenacre expressed his conviction that his crime had been the means of saving his soul, because “death on the gibbet was one of the surest passports to heaven.”

For similar reasons degenerate nations, after realising the doom of their national welfare, are apt to renounce the glory of a forfeited world, and to consider misery, poverty, and shame so many stepping-stones to the bliss of a better life beyond the grave. After habitual sins against the health-laws of nature have avenged themselves in cureless diseases, decrepit bigots may find solace even in that most insane tenet of their dualistic creed which teaches them to despise the body as the enemy of the soul.

A natural effect of pessimism may thus, in course of time, become one of its perpetuating causes.

FELIX L. OSWALD.

THE NERVOUS GANGLIA OF INSECTS.

I.

Although the internal structure of the brain of insects has been the object of numerous and important investigations, among which we must place those of Dietl, Flögel, Bellonci, and Viallanes (who have applied the method of sections to the study of this organ), no attention has as yet been paid to the other nerve-centres of insects, and in particular to the ganglia of the ventral chain. Writers have contented themselves with describing the external form of these ganglia, and their anatomical relations to the other organic parts; but nothing has been done to throw light upon their inward structure. All the knowledge which we have on this subject is very meagre and dates far back to the works of the old writers, who, like Newport, had at their disposal no other means of study than the microscopic examination of organs viewed either transparently or in dilacerated preparations. A method so defective could render but incomplete results, and indeed in many cases erroneous ones.

We have sought to supply this much to be regretted lack of entomological knowledge, by applying to the ventral ganglia of insects the admirable method of sectional cutting, which has brought about such marked advances in contemporaneous zoölogy.

I need hardly insist on the interest of this research. We shall only remark that all anatomical study bears an unfinished aspect, up to the moment at which we grasp the meaning of the organs which we describe; physiology is a necessary complement of anatomy, it is that which gives to it a meaning. Therefore, when we dissect an organ, which, as in the case of an insect’s brain, is endowed with the most complex psychical properties of which these animals are capable, we find ourselves in the presence of parts whose functions almost entirely escape us. What is, for example, that peculiar organ to which we have given the name of the “pedunculate” body? Anatomists have described with the greatest care its connections and portrayed its external contour; but we cannot discover, or even conjecture its uses. It would be necessary to understand the habits of thought and the feelings of an insect, to be able to assign a rôle to parts so complex and so delicate as those contained within its brain.

The study of the ventral ganglia seems to us to be capable of conducting us to a better result, for in everything that concerns these nerve-masses, physiology is more advanced, and, in all cases, clearer. The ganglia of the thorax, for example, are in the main motory centres; the principal nerves that are sent out from them are to be found in the wings and in the feet; the study of the terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial locomotion of insects has already formed the subject of quite a number of important scientific works; we are now upon well-known ground, and we may hope that it will be possible to establish some connection between the anatomical structure of ventral ganglia and the functions which these ganglia control.

This hope appears to us to be the more legitimate, because we can make use of all the resources of comparative anatomy to work out the problem. If we consider any particular function, for example, that of flying, we notice that in species which resemble each other this function is exercised under totally different conditions; the same organ acquires different uses, and these variations become singularly instructive when we can trace their relationship to the particular structure of a nerve-ganglion. Thus, one of the large wings of the dragon-fly, which is almost like a bird in the range and power of its flight, becomes the elytrum of the beetle; the elytrum is a stiff wing covered by chitinised matter and serving as a protection to a part of the thorax and abdomen. Sometimes the elytrum is used in flying, as in the case of the cockchafer. In other lamellicorn insects, in the Cetonia for instance, the elytrum is not used in flight; it merely moves aside so as to allow the second pair of wings to unfold. Its rôle becomes still less active in the golden carabus, in Procrustes, in Blaps, and many other Coleoptera, whose two elytra are found on one vertical line, and form but one single and immovable portion; then the second pair of wings disappear; from the physiological point of view, the animal becomes apterous. In another and different order, the order Diptera, it is the second pair of wings that undergo an important modification; they cease to be used in flying, and are transformed into an organ of equipoise: they are used for maintaining equilibrium.

All these physiological variations, taking place in the self-same organ, must in all probability have their counterpart in the internal anatomy of the ganglion that governs the organ, and the comparative study of this ganglion in different species will enable us perhaps to discover the functions of some of its parts. Thus, if we consider by hypothesis, as the nerve-centre of flight, some small lobe which is found occupying this or that place in a thoracic ganglion, the disappearance or modification of this lobe in species not possessing the faculty of flying, might serve to throw additional light upon such an interpretation.

What we have just said with regard to flight is equally applicable to terrestrial locomotion, which also represents in itself many varieties. The typal insect possesses three pairs of feet, whence the name of hexapods, but there are particular species which drop a pair of feet, for instance, the Lepidoptera of the genus Vanessa; in others, the physiological function of the foot varies; in the case of the carrion-beetle (a necrophagus coleopter) it serves as an instrument of tillage, to dig with; for the cricket, the third pair of feet are used for the purpose of leaping; for the Dytiscus, it serves as an oar, and so on. We must also bear in mind the curious fact that there exists in the larvæ of certain insects what are called supplementary feet, having only a transient existence and disappearing at maturity; the caterpillar, the larva of the butterfly, has five pairs of supplementary feet. These notable facts demonstrated by comparative anatomy, cannot fail to furnish us with valuable information concerning the functions of the complex organs found in the ganglia of the thorax.

But this is not all. We have not enumerated all the contributions of comparative anatomy to the problem which we are now about to consider; we may make use of the method of comparison without bringing the different types into juxtaposition, but by viewing the nervous system of only a single animal in its entirety. We know in fact that the body of an insect is formed by a definite number of segments, all constructed on the same fundamental plan and arranged in a linear series. Each one of these segments is joined to a nerve-ganglion, which is all its own and supplies it with sensibility and motility, the two elementary properties of nervous activity. In the course of development, these ganglia have the power of changing their positions; and it is not uncommon to find that the greater number of the abdominal ganglia move up into the thorax; each one, nevertheless, retaining its nerve-relationship to its own segment. Now all the segments of an insect’s body are not called upon to play the same rôle; a division of labor has been effected among them with regard to the functions which they are found to exercise: as we have already seen, the ganglia of the thorax are essentially centres of locomotion; in the head, one of the ganglia, the sub-œsophageal, furnishes the nerves of the buccal portions; the other one, the brain, is connected with particular nerves and becomes the centre of the highest form of psychical activity of which the creature is capable. We have here a number of modifications superadded to the original plan. Yet the original plan should again be met with in the ganglia that have been least differentiated, such as those in the abdominal region; and the comparison between an abdominal and a thoracic ganglion, for instance, is well calculated to show what are the primal and fundamental structures, and what are the secondary ones which have been superadded and have become necessary for the execution of the more complex functions. The study of embryonic and larval forms so easily observed in insects, will most probably conduct us to the same result. And thus perhaps by continuous efforts, all guided by the same governing idea, we shall ultimately arrive at the analogies that exist between the cerebroid ganglia and the humblest ganglia belonging to the ventral chain, and thus finally be able to understand the action of the nerve-substance.

The importance of this object, which, be it clearly understood, can never be attained except by the united effort of many workers, is well calculated to command our strenuous exertions and to encourage us in surmounting the difficulties of a study which is as yet almost entirely new.

II.

We shall restrict ourselves in this article to the consideration of one particular case; we shall describe a single ganglion of the insect. The type we have chosen, for reasons too lengthy to enumerate, is a Coleopter of the family of Melolonthidæ; the Rhizotrogus solstitialis, a small beetle very commonly found in the southwest of France. We will now proceed to the consideration of the first thoracic ganglion.

The prothoracic ganglion in the rhizotrogus is joined by very short connective filaments to the second thoracic ganglion, and also to the sub-œsophageal ganglion; this latter ganglion, we must note en passant, being situated in the thorax. If with a pair of scissors we sever the head of the rhizotrogus, we find that the remainder of the body contains not only the thoracic ganglia, but also the sub-œsophageal; a peculiarity which, from a physiological point of view, is very interesting.

The ganglion of the pro-thorax, which is greater in width than it is in length, bears a vague resemblance to a cone the base of which is turned towards the sub-œsophageal ganglion, whilst the apex points towards the second ganglion of the thorax. From the lower part spring two large nerves, their starting-point being nearer the ventral than the dorsal surface, a fact clearly comprehended when we find that the fibres of these nerves extend for the most part into the first pair of feet, that is to say, into those organs that lie underneath the horizontal plane of the ganglion. The connective filaments which penetrate the ganglion anteriorly enter it nearer the dorsal surface than the ventral, this last being extremely convex. Dissection throws no additional light upon the anatomy of the ganglion. But by means of a series of sections, we find that it is composed of a mass of fibrillar substance which occupies its centre portion and of a layer of nerve-cells surrounding the fibrillar substance. This fibrillar mass is, owing to its great volume, far the most important, and constitutes in itself alone about four-fifths of the organ. The fibrillary structure can only be satisfactorily analysed by using on it osmic acid, or other equivalent reagents which dissociate it and admit of its being reduced to a certain number of clearly differentiated elements. Whenever osmic acid or a similar reagent has not been employed, or has not sufficiently penetrated the ganglion, owing to the obstacle presented by a thick conjunctival covering or envelope, the fibrillar substance takes on a homogeneous aspect that effectually renders all analysis of it impossible. Everything depends on the employment of a good method of preparation.

When the ganglion has been properly prepared, we perceive a very material difference in the appearance of the fibrillar substance when we compare the dorsal with the ventral region of the ganglion. We can do this very satisfactorily by a longitudinal section, extending through both regions. In such a section close to the median line but not confounded with it (see Cut 16)[9] we perceive that the ventral region is occupied by a cord or string of substance which owing to the action of the osmic acid has become very black, and which is formed of so dense a tissue, that we can with difficulty separate it into fibres and fibrillæ. This cord, which, by reason of its position and shape, I propose naming the ventral column, extends over the ventral surface of the ganglion in a longitudinal direction; at both its anterior and posterior extremities it is carried on by fibres extending into the ventral columns of the other ganglia, in such a manner that the entire series of ganglia are united by one continuous ventral cord.

If we look at a transverse section (see Cut 26), the cord, which is recognised by its dark color and by its position near the ventral surface of the fibrillar substance, will be seen to have the form of two almost perfect circles. The ventral column thus presents a circular section, is duplex and symmetrical: there exist two separate and distinct ventral columns, separate at least for a certain length; a fact which must be considered in connection with the primitive duality of the ganglion.

In every section where the columns remain distinct from each other, they are separated either by fibres and conjunctival cells, or by nerve-fibres emanating from the cells of the ventral region and proceeding in an upward direction between the two columns. At the other points, the two columns join on the median line. This union is effected in different ways, either by the two columns coming directly together, thus merging into a single mass, or by a commissure which describes the arc of a circle underneath the two columns, or else by the inferior ventral lobule.

We give the name of inferior ventral lobule to a small lobule of fibrillar substance, situated beneath the ventral column. When looked at in a horizontal section not passing through the median line (see Cut 17), this lobule presents the appearance of a rounded protuberance, breaking the almost rectilinear contour of the ventral column. As this characteristic peculiarity is repeated in the internal structure of all the ganglia, we may use it to ascertain the number of the ganglia, whenever these present the appearance of being fused into one compact mass; we may see the practical application of this remark by observing the sub-œsophageal ganglion.

In a succession of horizontal sections, the starting point of which is the ventral region, the first mass of fibrillar substance met with by the knife is the inferior ventral lobule, which is formed (see Cut 1) by two rounded fasciculi, placed symmetrically on either side of the median line and joined together by a transverse commissure.

In these sections, we also perceive fibres of the crural nerve, which, after having extended over a certain length of the ganglion, penetrate into the substance of the inferior ventral lobule (Cut 2). In transverse sections (Cut 23) we find the two ventral lobules placed beneath the two columns which they help to support, and into which they gradually merge; and we also perceive the transverse commissure which joins the two. We shall call this the transverse commissure of the inferior ventral lobule.

Let us now pass on to the examination of the upper surface of the ventral column. This surface is covered by a cluster of very fine fibrils rather sparsely disposed; we can clearly follow their course by means of a longitudinal section (Cut 17); we see them again in a horizontal section (Cut 5). To continue the general description of the ganglion we must now consider the dorsal region. It is, as we have previously stated, occupied by a fibrillar substance not so dense as that which composes the ventral column, and we will give the general name of dorsal lobe to this region, reserving the name ventral lobe for the region which embraces the ventral column and its adjoining parts. The dorsal lobe presents as its distinctive characteristic the feature that it is crossed longitudinally by a succession of connective filaments clearly seen in the longitudinal section of Cut 16.

We have already stated that the ventral column receives fibres issuing from the ganglion in front and sends out others to the ganglia in the rear. We shall call the totality of these fibres the connective ventral filaments, and shall call the totality of those that traverse the dorsal lobe the dorsal connective filaments.

The connective filaments which join the sub-œsophageal to the first thoracic ganglion, and which, between these two ganglia, are composed of a dense fasciculus of fibres, distribute these fibres, at the point at which they enter the prothoracic ganglia, in different directions; one set of fibres proceeds towards the ventral column, these are the ventral connective filaments; a second set traverses the dorsal lobe, and are the dorsal connective filaments.

Whilst the ventral connective filaments soon merge into the very dense substance of the ventral column, the dorsal connective filaments, on the contrary, remain distinct from the organs which they traverse, and preserve their individuality throughout. They take directions in three different planes (see Cut 16), consequently they can be subdivided into superior, medial, and inferior dorsal connective filaments.

Newport seems to have observed this distinction of fibres; and he has given the name of sensory column to this first division, and that of motor column to the second. Unfortunately the drawings and figures he has published, though schematically correct, are not clear. We do not adopt his terminology, in the first place because he designates the organs after their supposed functions, and we have made it a rule never to use controvertible physiological suppositions to designate anatomical organs; and besides, though the name of column is applicable to the connective ventral filaments, we cannot apply it to the connective dorsal filaments, which are subdivided into three pairs of fibrous fasciculi and do not in the least resemble a column.

In the study of Melolontha vulgaris, we have been able to establish in the most absolute manner that there exists a considerable histological difference between the connective filaments of the ventral region and those of the dorsal. Though we have not yet noticed this difference in Rhizotrogus in any marked degree, nevertheless it has seemed to us needful to point it out here, because the fact is of such vast importance that it cannot fail to be general. The dorsal connective filaments, whilst they preserve their individuality in their passage across the dorsal lobe of the ganglion, penetrate nevertheless into some small masses of dotted substance which are found in the path of their entrance into the ganglion. The mass annexed to the inferior dorsal connective filament, is above all very important and is directly connected with the ventral column. As the connective filaments are in pairs, each of these possesses a distinct mass of fibrillar substance and both the masses attached to the same pair of connective filaments are joined by a commissure.

Let us now say a few words about the nerves which proceed toward the prothoracic ganglion. There exists here but one single pair of nerves, extremely important and very extensive. This is the crural nerve. To this nerve are attached the organs which are superadded to the primary structure of the ganglion, such as we have described it, and which in consequence renders the primitive structure more complex. We shall perceive the importance attached to the idea of a superadded organ, when we study the abdominal ganglia, where the organs we are about to describe are either completely wanting or are but imperfectly developed.

If now we examine a transversal section taken a little in front of the place from whence the crural nerves emerge (Cut 19), we shall notice that the central part of the ganglion is occupied by the ventral column and the upper part by the dorsal lobe. In addition to this, in the lateral regions of the ganglion we find two important masses of fibrillar substance. At this point these two masses remain distinct from the parts we have just mentioned, and on the other hand they are in connection with the crural nerves. The latter send a part, and unquestionably the greater part, of their fibres into the lateral lobes. In a section slightly posterior to the preceding one, also transversal, a very important change has taken place; the two lateral lobules, always connected with the crural nerves, have also established connections with the centre of the ganglion, and in the sections further on the fusion is complete. As these lateral lobules possess the characteristics mentioned, only at the point at which the crural nerves emerge, we shall call them the crural lobes. Thus we find in the prothoracic ganglion three principal lobes: (1) the crural lobe, which is double, symmetrical, and lateral, (2) the dorsal lobe, (3) the ventral lobe. These two last, in contradistinction to the crural lobe, will be classed together under the common term central lobe.

And now to finish this summary description of the prothoracic ganglion, we will point out an important disposition of the connective tissue which divides the ganglion into two halves, one anterior, the other posterior. We can easily understand this disposition by looking at a longitudinal section passing exactly through the median line. From the dorsal surface of the ganglion, may be seen descending a bundle of cells and connective fibres, which, in the form of a column, are directed toward the centre of the ganglion; these cells and fibres do not meet any important organ on their way, the dorsal connective filaments always taking a lateral course. A fasciculus, similarly composed of cells and conjunctival fibres, starting from the ventral surface of the ganglion, appears to meet this conjunctival column (Cut 18). This curious disposition appears to be, as M. Henneguy has ingeniously suggested to me, a trace of the anterior development of the ganglion which had been formed of two distinct portions that have been naturally welded together along the median line; the connective fasciculi corresponding to the point where the welding has been incomplete, and representing the survival of a portion of the walls of the two ganglia.

III.

As the ganglion which we have just described contains some structural difficulties not easy of comprehension, let us proceed with our description under another form, following the order of our illustrations.

Figure 1 is the first horizontal section, cut through the ventral region of the ganglion; the knife has here met the lower ventral lobule, which at this point shows itself double; the two halves being joined by a double transversal commissure. Section 2, made at a point a little higher than the preceding one, shows us at the centre the lower ventral lobule as increased in size; and in the lateral part of the figure appears a new organ, the crural lobule, which is here entirely merged into the lower ventral lobule. The crural lobule is traversed by fibres from the crural nerve, which instead of being entirely lost in its substance, proceed still further, passing into the lower ventral lobule. Section 3 merely brings into prominence an important transversal commissure. In Section 4, the inferior ventral lobule is replaced by the ventral column, which appears double, is symmetrical, and united by a transversal commissure; this commissure being formed of fibrillar substance. The ventral column is closely connected on each side with the crural lobule; it is besides crossed by the ventral connective fibres, which can be seen emerging from its anterior and posterior extremities. Section 5 allows us to examine thoroughly the disposition of those ventral connective fibres; we see that while they penetrate the ganglion, they also pass through two symmetrical masses of fibrillar substance; these two masses, which we name the anterior ventral lobules, are joined together by a transversal commissure. After having traversed the anterior ventral lobules, to which it appears they give a portion of their fibres, the ventral connective filaments pass through the ganglion in an antero-posterior direction, and we see them penetrating the two posterior ventral lobules. The last named lobules, which remind us by their position and appearance of the anterior lobules, receive in addition fibres issuing from the crural lobules; but they do not receive them all, because we notice quite a number of these fibres advancing directly into the second thoracic ganglion. After emerging from the posterior ventral lobules, the ventral connective filaments pass into the second thoracic ganglion, where we see them penetrate into the anterior ventral lobules.

With Figure 6, we leave the ventral lobe of the ganglion and come to the lower portions of the dorsal lobule. The important filaments crossing this section from the front to the back are called lower dorsal connective filaments. We notice as they proceed some small masses of dotted substance, and, in addition to these, dark colored dots which are the result of the knife having cut crosswise through several fascicles of ascending fibres. We shall find out by means of the sections taken from different parts and placed so as to allow of our better observation, what these ascending fibres are. The crural lobule, always exhibits the same characteristics. We have given it a homogeneous aspect in our drawing. As a fact it presents in its sections a vast number of structural details. But these details being very difficult to understand, we prefer not to dwell upon them.

Section 7 passes through the very midst of the lower dorsal connective filaments; these filaments being in two pairs, one external and the other internal. The external pair, situated somewhat lower, has here disappeared, and the inner pair is the only one to be seen. Some transversal fibres, whose direction appears to me difficult to follow, divide the inside dorsal connective filaments at two different points, and assume the figure of a square; this square has two black dots, produced by the section of the ascending fibres.

A little higher, in Figure 8, the lower connective filaments have disappeared and the fibrillar substance of the ganglion is furrowed by long transversal fibres, of which a part seems to serve the function of joining the two crural lobules, whilst the remainder, proceeding towards the black dots before mentioned, continue their progress with the fasciculi of ascending fibres. These are no other than ascending fibres which, having changed their direction at the plane of the section, proceed almost in a horizontal plane. In Section 9 we follow the course of the medial dorsal connective filaments, separated from the lower connective filaments by the fibres having a transverse direction, seen in Figure 8. The medial dorsal connective filaments are four in number, an outer pair and an inner pair. At the moment when they leave the prothoracic ganglion, they cross a region where the fibrillar substance is both thicker and darker. In Figure 10 the medial connective filaments are on the point of disappearing; they receive certain fibres coming from the crural lobules, which are now reduced in dimensions. Section 11 shows us the lower dorsal connective filaments, which are the slenderest of all and of which there are but one pair; the crural lobule now disappears. In the middle of the figure, we observe a small collection of conjunctival cells which, as we have supposed, indicates the point where in the course of development the two symmetrical portions of the ganglion have not been perfectly fused together. Finally Section 12 shows two lateral masses of fibrillar substance, separated by a strip of conjunctival membrane.

We will now take up the series of longitudinal sections, the study of which will demand very special attention. We shall there meet again with the organs which we have already examined in the horizontal sections; and we shall perceive that the alterations and modifications presented to us by the difference in our point of observation, bring out very important changes in the appearance of those organs. The sectional method of examination is also one of analysis. In order to reconstruct an organ in its complete form and to conceive of it in space, our mind must bring into a single focus what the sections have represented in a fragmentary manner: we must, in short, substitute synthesis for analysis.

Figure 13 represents the first and exterior longitudinal section; it hardly touches the ganglion; in the front we see the starting point of the crural nerve, and also a portion of the periphery of the crural lobule. The crural nerve exhibits several roots, the most important of which occupy the ventral region. Figure 14, though very elementary, brings out many important points; we see here the crural lobule, which has increased in size and extends from the ventral to the dorsal region; a fact which has already been indicated in the horizontal sections, the crural lobule having been shown in them at all points. This lobule is almost circular in form. Along its ventral region, we perceive some of the fibres of the crural nerve which do not penetrate into the lobule; these are the ones we met with in the figures 2 and 3: they are the fibres which pass directly into the lower ventral lobule. With Section 15, we leave the lateral regions of the ganglion and come to the dorsal and ventral regions; we must notice that the crural lobule is continuous with the central fibrillar mass and has no precise limits. In Section 15 the ventral column appears, reduced in size. In the front of it we observe an incisure through which certain nerve-cells send their prolongations into the fibrillar substance.

Figure 16 shows us the complete junction of all the connective filaments traversing the ganglion; first the ventral column, with the connective ventral filaments starting from both its extremities; and then the three dorsal connective filaments, which preserve their individuality distinct, while they cross the dorsal lobe of the ganglion. The lower dorsal connective filament is distinguished from the others by a small compact mass of fibrillar substance through which it passes. We must note that the fibrillar substance becomes thicker at the point where the whole series of connective filaments enter the ganglion, and the same thing is repeated at the place where they leave the first thoracic ganglion to enter into the second. The ventral column is distinguished from the other parts of the ganglion by the dark color which it assumes through the action of the osmic acid; it presents black granules which, examined with a strong lens, show small fasciculi of fibres running in a parallel direction. The cells which line the lower surface of the ventral column do not throw out any prolongations; they are exceedingly small, but do not otherwise present any special feature.

Figure 17 is but very slightly different from the preceding one: the ventral column is simply strengthened on its lower surface by the lower ventral lobule. The position of this lobule is interesting to note. We have already mentioned that each ganglion is divided into two halves by a column of conjunctival tissue, one anterior and the other posterior. In Section 17 we see the granulated projection of the ventral portion of this conjunctival column. In order to simplify it we have shown no conjunctival tissue in our illustration. We may nevertheless notice, that the nerve-cells at the point marked c. c. seem to separate one from the other, and show a triangular space between them, filled with conjunctival cells. If the segment had not been cut so obliquely, (and this obliqueness in the sections is almost unavoidable when dealing with such very small organs,) we should also perceive on the dorsal line of the section the projection of the dorsal part of the conjunctival column; in fact we shall see this projection in the figure which follows. The presence of the conjunctival column separates, as we have said, each ganglion into two parts, one anterior the other posterior. These portions are not at all symmetrical. We see in Section 17 that the lower ventral lobule is found only in the anterior part. Finally from the ventral column rises an important fasciculus of ascending fibres, which we have already seen in the horizontal diagrams; it is difficult for us to ascertain what these fibres are. In the 18th and last section we approach nearer the median line. The ventral column at this level has the appearance of being divided into two trunks. The ventral connective filaments are clearly seen upon its upper surface. Among the dorsal connective filaments the middle one alone remains visible and receives a certain number of fibres from the ascending fasciculus.

To complete our description let us glance at the series of transverse sections. In Figure 19 the two crural lobules have not yet united and are not yet merged into the dorsal-ventral lobe. This junction does not take place until we come to Figure 20. Here, at this level, we see in addition the circular segment of the two ventral columns, which by their dark color are sharply outlined against the remainder of the fibrillar substance. To the right and left of these two columns we perceive small masses of dotted substance; we merely call attention to them and shall not describe them. Figure 21 furnishes no noteworthy modifications of the preceding. We simply see a few cells of the periphery sending out their prolongations into the fibrillar substance. The point at which they thus penetrate it has already been indicated in Figure 15. In Figure 22 we have a section of several dorsal connective filaments; among others a lower root of the crural nerve is here seen to pass along the ventral surface of the fibrillar substance without penetrating into the crural lobule. Does there exist an upper root of the same nerve, which follows the upper surface of the dotted substance? We do not dare to decide the question. One thing is certain, and that is that if the nerve does exist it is accompanied along its path by a great number of widely ramified tracheæ, of which we see a drawing in tr. In the three figures which follow (23, 24, 25) the ventral column presents an interesting series of modifications. First of all, in Figure 23, it is surrounded by the lower ventral lobule, of which the two masses are in a lateral position, and whose commissures pass underneath the column. We see in the same Figure 23 the two lower roots of the crural nerve, advancing towards the column. In the 24th section the two roots have reached the column, and two other nerves cross the crural lobule; doubtless their destination is the lower dorsal connective filaments, but of this we have no clear indication. In the 24th section two other crural roots also enter the lower ventral lobule. This section is very favorable for the examination of the ascending fasciculus which we have already noticed in the longitudinal sections. It seems to us certain that this fasciculus terminates in the middle dorsal connective filament. Its origin is more uncertain. It seems to spring from the ventral column, or else to come from crural roots which, after having traversed the crural lobule, reascend towards the dorsal lobe of the ganglion, describing a curve exteriorily concave. It is possible that this ascending fasciculus has both these origins. The 26th and last section shows us the ventral column on a larger scale; the two columns being distinct from each other, though united at the lower extremity by a commissure. The ensemble of the figure strikingly reminds one of a section of the abdominal ganglion.

Here our description ends. We have not sought to follow up every fibre in all its details, nor to describe completely the anatomy of each organ. Our intention has merely been to give a synthetic notion of a nervous ganglion. Subsequent studies made on other ganglia will demonstrate the general application of this idea.

ALFRED BINET.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] For the cuts, see the plates in the Appendix of this number.

HINDU MONISM.

WHO WERE ITS AUTHORS, PRIESTS OR WARRIORS?

Among all the forms of government class government is the worst. Carthage was governed by merchants, and the mercantile spirit of its policy led finally to the destruction of the city. Sparta was governed by warriors, and in spite of the glory of Thermopylæ it was doomed to stagnation. India was governed by priests, and the weal of the nation was sacrificed with reckless indifference to their interests. It appears that for the welfare of the community the harmonious co-operation of all classes is not only desirable but also indispensable.

Yet it is often claimed that mankind is greatly indebted to nations or states ruled by class government, for having worked out the particular occupation of the ruling class to a perfection which otherwise it would not have reached. This is at least doubtful.

Carthage was eager to establish monopolies, but she contributed little to the higher development of commerce and trade among mankind.

Sparta raised brave men, but was not progressive, even in the science of war, and was worsted by so weak an adversary as Thebes. Modern strategists could learn something from Epaminondas, but little, if anything, from the Lacedæmonians.

Priestcraft has attained to a power in India unparalleled in the history of other nations, and it is no exaggeration to say that priest-rule was the ruin of the country. Yet the wisdom of the Brahmans has become proverbial. Their philosophy is praised as original and profound, and it is well known that the first monistic world-conception was thought out in ancient India. But we shall see later on what the real share of the Brahmans in this great work has been.

In the very earliest ages of Hindu antiquity, revealed to us in the songs of the Rig-veda, we meet with priests who claimed the power of making sacrifices to the gods in a manner especially acceptable to them, and who thus rose to great power, influence, and wealth. To this ancient period of Hindu history we can trace the origin of the Hindu castes, essentially a result of priestly egotism, and which up to this day has weighed down the Indian people like a nightmare. The organisation of the priestly class into an exclusive, privileged body, as well as the final development of the castes, did not, however, take place until the time represented by the second period of the ancient Hindu literature; by the literature, that is to say, of the Yajur-vedas or the Vedas of the sacrificial formulæ, and the Brâhmanas and Sûtras, both of which describe the sacrificial ceremonies, the former with, the latter without theological comments. The contents of these works illustrate the origin of the Hindu hierarchy and castes; but it is often necessary to read between the lines. The greatest authority on this rich literature, Prof. A. Weber, of Berlin, in the tenth volume of the series “Hindu Studies” which he edits, has published his inquiries concerning this subject in a very learned treatise, entitled “Collectanea über die Kastenverhältnisse in der Brâhmana und Sûtra,” of which I have made considerable use in the following pages.

In these books the Brahmans assert their claims with startling candor. In several passages—to begin with the most striking feature—they announce themselves as real gods wandering on earth. “There are two kinds of gods,” it is said, “the true gods and the learned Brahmans, who recite the Veda.” “The Brahman represents all gods.” “He is the god of gods.” This is perhaps the most remarkable instance of priestly arrogance in all history. Thus it cannot at all surprise us that the Brahmans, as earthly gods, placed themselves above king and nobility; but it appears rather strange that the kings and warriors should have allowed to them the first place in the government. But as a matter of fact, they did do so and were compelled to do so. From mysterious legends in the great Hindu epic poem we infer, that bloody wars have been waged for supremacy, in which the nobility was defeated.

The legends of this epos are thus important additions to the sources with which we are concerned. This struggle, which the Brahmans in all likelihood caused to be fought out for them by the great masses of the people, has been ascribed to the warriors having robbed the priests of the treasures which the latter had acquired by the performance of the sacrifices; and this part of the legend is so highly probable that we cannot treat it as a pure myth, especially if we take into consideration the circumstances of those times. It was the first attempt at secularisation in the history of the world, and the results were very disastrous to those who were then in secular power.

The Brahmans did not establish a social hierarchy or ecclesiastical ranks, nor did they participate in the government, except that the king was bound to employ a Brahman as Purohita or house-priest, who occupied as such the position of prime minister. If, however, they succeeded in dominating the nobility and the whole people, it was principally on account of their greater knowledge, of which they boasted, and especially on account of the sacrificial arts, by the proper exercise of which in those times, all favors could be obtained from the gods. For a duly performed sacrifice, which would last weeks, months, nay, years, the Brahmans charged of course a high fee. A fee of ten thousand oxen was prescribed for a certain ceremony, a hundred thousand for another one, and a later teacher of ritualism charged 240,000 for the same service. And this was not yet the climax of priestly avarice, which—to use an expression of Professor Weber—indulges in veritable orgies in these books. After one has gone through the endless description of a ceremony, one finds at the end the remark that the whole sacrifice has no effect, unless the proper fee be paid to the priest. And—to use a term of modern life—lest competition should reduce the prices or spoil the business, a rule was established, that no one should take a fee which another one had refused. (Weber, p. 54.)

The sacrificial rituals, so trying and tedious for us, are the only literary production of these dull centuries before the rising of philosophical speculation, and the great historical importance they possess is simply due to the light they throw on the moral depravity of the Brahmans as a class.

The following fact will fully show to what extent sexual debaucheries were indulged in. The priest was enjoined, by a special rule, not to commit adultery with the wife of another during a particularly holy ceremony. But he who could not practice continence, was allowed to expiate his sin by an offering of milk to Varuna and Mitra.

Numerous passages in the books on ritualism furnish us interesting illustrations of the great indulgence which the Brahmans had for each other’s weaknesses. The officiating priest is taught how to proceed during the sacrifice, if he wants to wrong the man who employs and pays him, or how to deviate from the prescribed rules, if he wants to rob his employer of his seeing, hearing, children, property, or position. The lack of confidence that resulted is best illustrated by a ceremony, the introduction of which, at the beginning of the sacrifice, became gradually necessary. By a solemn oath the officiating minister and the client bound themselves not to injure each other during the performance of the holy act. Consequently, the strange notions of right, which the Brahmans had in those times, will not surprise us. “Murder of any one but a Brahman is no murder.” “An arbitrator must decide in favor of the Brahman and not in favor of his opponent, if the latter is not a Brahman.” Such maxims are laid down in the texts with shameless insolence.

It is plain that the caste system greatly contributed to increase the power and influence of the priests, because in a country where the people are divided into classes, the priest always succeeds in inciting at his wish the one against the other.

After the Brahmans came as second caste the Kshattriyas (literally: the ruling class, i. e., king, nobility, soldiers); and as third caste the Vaisyas (the bulk of the people: farmers, merchants, etc.). The conquered non-Aryan aborigines were foreordained by the gods to serve the Aryan castes and especially the Brahmans. They were called Súdras (serfs) and had neither civil nor religious rights. “The Súdra is the servant of others; he can be cast out or killed.” By this humane maxim were the Brahmans guided in their conduct towards the aborigines.

With such a state of things, as it appears in the old books, the priesthood ought to have been well pleased. But the Brahmans were not; they desired still greater advantages and carried out the caste system to a most absurd extent. The result is embodied in the famous law-book of Manu, the exact date of which we do not yet know, but which must be placed at the beginning of our era. The condition of things of which I shall now speak, was accordingly developed during the last centuries before Christ. Though we may suppose that some rules of this code have remained a mere theory and have never been carried out, there remains enough to show the social life of those times in a poor light. Köppen, in the first chapters of his book on Buddhism, has severely but justly judged the social organisation, as it appears in Manu’s law-book; but as the age of this code was overrated at his time, he was led to one erroneous conclusion: he attributes the historical process, of which we speak, to the period before Buddha, while it really took place after Buddha: L. von Schröder, in his work “Indian Literature and History,” in the twenty-ninth lecture, gives us a good view of those times.

Different passages in Manu’s code show us that the claim of the Brahmans to divinity had not decreased in the course of the centuries. “The Brahmans are to be venerated at all times, as they are the highest divinity.” “By his very origin the Brahman is a god, even to the gods.”

The many practical privileges they enjoyed were of still greater value. They were exempt from taxation under all circumstances, “even if the king should starve.” For the greatest crimes they could not be executed or chastised, nor was their property liable to confiscation, while at the same time the criminal law was very harsh towards the other castes and especially towards the Súdras. The penalties increased proportionately: the lower the caste to which the criminal belonged, the higher the punishment; and the fines also increased in proportion to the rank of the caste to which the injured man belonged. The money-lender was allowed to exact (monthly) two per cent. of a Brahman, three of a Kshattriya, four of a Vaisya, five of a Súdra. All these laws show how the Brahmans understood the art of advancing their interests. The Súdra was by the code deprived of all rights. “The Brahman may consider him as a slave and is therefore entitled to take his property, as the property of the slave belongs to the master.” “The Súdra shall not acquire wealth, even if he be in a position to do so, as such conduct gives offense to the Brahman.”

But all these things are harmless when compared with the principles by which the Brahmans reduced to the most miserable of lives numberless human creatures who had committed no wrong except that their origin did not agree with the political scheme of the priests. Formerly it had been lawful for the members of the three Aryan castes, after having married a girl of the same caste, to take other wives of a lower caste besides, and no disgrace attached to their children. The son of a Brahman and a Vaisya—or even of a Súdra woman—was therefore a Brahman. But this was no longer the case under the code of Manu.

If the parents belonged to different castes, the children did not follow either father or mother, but they formed a mixed caste and the law distinctly regulates their occupations and trades. This theory gave birth to a great number of mixed castes, who were more or less despised. And the social standing of many of them grew still worse on account of an absurd maxim which degraded the Indian people to the level of grass and plants. Good seed in a bad soil gives of course a poorer return than in good soil; still the crop is endurable. But weed introduced into good soil produces weed abundantly. According to this theory of the Brahmans the children were below the father, if he had married a wife of a higher caste. The lowest and most execrable creature therefore is the son of a Súdra and a Brahman woman. The destiny of a Súdra was of course hard and unhappy, but the misery of the offspring of such a marriage, of the Chandâla, defies all description. “He shall live far from the abodes of other men and bear signs by which everybody can recognise and avoid him, as his contact pollutes. Only in daytime shall he be admitted into the villages, as then people can avoid him. He shall possess but common animals like dogs and donkeys, eat out of broken plates, put on the dresses of the dead, etc. They were compelled to serve as executioners. To the utmost degree of contempt and misery has the proud Brahman reduced these poor creatures.” (Schröder, pp. 423-424.)

But the Chandâla was not the last in the Brahmanic scale, which suppressed all dignity in human nature; his offspring, though he had only a wife of the Súdra caste, was necessarily still below him. Thus originated a great number of mixed castes, one more despised than the other, and despising one another. Most of these outcasts take their names from the Indian aborigines and are thus placed on the same level with the most contemptible tribes. Some of the things I have cited about the mixed castes, may have been merely a theory of the Brahmans; however, the actual existence of classes of people reduced by the clergy to a sort of animal life, has been sufficiently verified by foreign travellers.

In modern times the separation of the people has been going on very rapidly; so much so, that nearly every trade or profession now forms a caste of its own, having no social intercourse with, nor patriotic feelings for the other castes. This condition of things is due to the influence of the Brahmans, for it has grown out of the social order they have founded.

It is not my task to arraign the Brahmans for the sins they have committed; but simply to illustrate to my readers, how little they cared for and had at heart the interests of their people. One will, upon the whole, feel inclined to denounce the selfishness and immorality of the Brahmans, but on the other hand will acknowledge with admiration the intellectual work they have done, and forgive them much for the profound thoughts with which they have enriched their country and the whole world. Is it not the wisdom of the Brahmans that has given to the word India a sound that stirs the hearts of all to whom the struggle for the highest truth appears as the highest phenomenon in the history of civilisation? But suppose it can be shown that the greatest of all the wisdom of the Brahman, the monistic doctrine of the All-in-One, which has had the greatest influence on the intellectual life of modern times, was not discovered by them?

Before I enter on this question, of the greatest importance from an historical point of view, I will give a short sketch of the period of Indian history in which this doctrine was established.

For centuries the Brahmans had heaped sacrifice on sacrifice and multiplied symbolical explanations without end. All this distinctly bore the stamp of priestly sophistry. Suddenly higher thoughts arise. The learning handed down by tradition and the sacrificial system are, it is true, not altogether abandoned; the mind, however, is no longer satisfied with the mysteries of the sacrifices, but aims at higher and more sublime truth. The age of intellectual darkness is followed by a new era, the characteristic of which is the ambition to solve the problems of life and to understand the relation of the individual to the absolute. All the efforts of the human mind are now bent on solving the question of the eternal Unity, from which all phenomena have emanated and which every one perceives within his own self. It is the age of the Upanishads, those famous books, which, as soon as they were known in Europe, filled all scholars with wild enthusiasm and admiration. I refer only to the old Upanishads, that date from the eighth to the sixth century B. C., not to the great number of books of the same name, but not of the same value—there are over 200 of them—which appeared after the Christian era. The Upanishads reveal the struggle of the mind to reach the highest truth. Though they indulge occasionally in strange speculations, still the idea of Brahma, of the universal soul, of the absolute, of the thing in itself, is the ever-recurring subject of their thoughts, which culminate in the idea that the Atman, the inner self of man, is naught but the eternal and endless Brahma. A wonderful pathos animates the language of the Upanishads and testifies to the sublime feelings in which the thinkers of those times sought the great mystery of existence. They look for all kinds of expressions, metaphors and figures, in order to couch in words what cannot be described by words. We read for instance in the venerable Brihadâranyaka Upanishad: “That which lives on the earth, but is different from the earth, that which is the moving power of the earth, that is your Self, the inner immortal ruler.” The same is predicated of water, fire, ether, wind, sun, moon, and stars; and then the chapter ends as follows: “Unseen, he sees; unheard, he hears; unminded, he minds; unknown, he knows. There is none that sees but he; there is none that hears but he; there is none that minds but he; there is none that knows but he. He is thy soul, the inner ruler. Whatever is different from him, is perishable.”

In the same celebrated Upanishad appears a woman, named Gârgî, and moved by thirst of knowledge she inquires of the wise Yâjnavalkya: “That which is beyond the sky and beneath the earth, and between sky and earth, that which is, was, and shall be, in what and with what is it interwoven (that is: in what does it live and move)?” Yâjnavalkya, in order to try the intellectual power of the woman, gives an evasive answer: “In the ether.” But Gârgî, perceiving that this answer did not contain the final truth, asks: “In what is the ether woven?” And Yâjnavalkya replied: “O Gârgî, that is what the Brahman calls the Eternal; it is neither big, nor small, nor large, nor short, without connection, without contact; by the Eternal are ruled heaven and earth, sun and moon, days and nights; the power of the Eternal directs the rivers south or west or to any other point of the compass. Whoever parts from this world without having understood the Eternal, is miserable.”

In the Chândogya Upanishad, a book of no less importance, the same wisdom is taught by a man named Uddâlaka to his son Shvetaketu in the form of several parables. We see them standing in front of a Nyagrodha tree, that kind of fig-tree that everywhere sends roots from the branches down to the ground, thus producing new trunks, until in the course of time one tree resembles a green pillared hall. And in front of such a tree, the most beautiful symbol of ever-youthful nature, the following conversation takes place between father and son: “Get me a fruit of this tree.”—“Here it is.”—“Break it.”—“It is broken.”—“What do you see in it?”—“I see quite small kernels.”—“Break one of them.”—“It is broken.”—“What do you see in it?”—“Nothing.”—Then the father said: “The fine matter that you cannot see has produced this big tree, and believe me, my dear son, this same matter, of which the earth is composed, is the Absolute, the Universal Soul,—it is you.”

The eternal ground of all existence which every one carries in himself, Being as it is in itself, and as it is immediately perceived in thinking, was, accordingly recognised as the sole reality, and all the manifold changes of the phenomenal world were called Maya, a sham, a delusion, a mockery of the senses. We see, it is a consistent monism which is taught in the Upanishads.

I do not intend here either to criticise the Brahman conception of monism or to contrast it with modern forms of monism. All monisms have at least one thing in common, viz. they all recognise the paramount importance of consistency of thought as a basic principle in philosophy. And to have propounded a monism for the first time is a feat which cannot be overestimated. What remains of this essay will be devoted to the investigation of the question, whether this feat is duly or unduly credited to the Brahmans.

It may first be mentioned, that a few scholars like Weber, Max Müller, Regnaud, Deussen, and Bhandarkar, pointed out, a long time ago, certain facts which show that another class of the Hindu nation founded the monistic doctrine of the old Upanishads. But the attention of the great public has never been called to this subject, which deserves to be known by all interested in Indian history.

In the second book of the Brihadâranyaka Upanishad, of which I have already cited two passages, is found the following story, of which also the fourth book of Kaushîtaki Upanishad gives a slightly different version.

The proud and learned Brahman Bâlâki Gârgya comes on his journey to Ajâtashatru, prince of Benares, and says to him: “I will announce you the Brahma.” The king, highly pleased, promises him a great reward, a thousand cows. The Brahman begins to expound his wisdom: “The Spirit (that is the power) in the sun I venerate as the Brahma.” But the king interrupted him, saying that he knew that already. Then the Brahman speaks about the Spirit in the moon, in lightning, ether, wind, fire, water, but the king knows all that. And whatsoever the Gârgya might say, is not new to the king. The Brahman became silent. But Ajâtashatru asked him: “Is that all?” and Gârgya answered: “Yes, that is all.” Then the king said: “Your little knowledge is not the Brahma;” whereupon Gârgya declared that he should like to be one of the king’s pupils. Ajâtashatru replied: “It is against nature, that a Brahman should learn from a warrior and depend on him for the understanding of the Brahma, but I will show it you nevertheless.” The king took him to a sleeping man and spoke to the latter; but he did not get up. When the king touched him with his hand, he arose. The king then asked the Brahman: “While this man was sleeping where was his mind, and whence did it return now?” Gârgya could not give an answer. Then the king explained to him, that the mind or the Self of the sleeping man was wandering around in dream, that all places were open to him, that he could be a great king or a great Brahman; but that there was still a higher condition of felicity, that is, absorption in dreamless sleep, without consciousness. In this condition the Self of man, not affected by the outside world, reposes in his true essence and knows no difference between Atman and Brahma.

Another story, reported in the fifth book of Chândogya Upanishad and in the sixth book of Brihadâranyaka Upanishad, is perhaps of still greater importance.

The young Brahman Shvetaketu comes to a convention, where the King Pravâhana Jaivâli asks him: “Has your father instructed you?”—“Yes, sir.”—“Do you know to what place the dead go?” And three more questions he put to the young Brahman, who was compelled to admit that he knew nothing about them. Discouraged, he returned to his father and reproached him: “Although you have not imparted any knowledge to me, you claim that you have instructed me. A simple king has asked me three questions and I could not answer a single one.” The father replied: “You have known me sufficiently to understand that I taught you all I knew. Come, let us go to the king and learn from him.” The king received the Brahman with great honors and requested him to select a present. But Gautama refuses all earthly gifts, gold, cows, horses, female slaves, and asks the king to answer the questions he had put to his son. At first the king was unwilling, but after a while he agreed to it and said, that no one on earth could give information on those subjects, except a warrior. And the following words of the king’s are very significant: “Would that neither you nor your ancestors had trespassed on us, that this truth might never have set up her residence among Brahmans. But to you, since you are so inquiring, I will communicate our wisdom.”

Substantially the same story is found at the beginning of the Kaushîtaki Upanishad, except that the king appears under the name Chitra.

Omitting points of less importance, I shall only give in a brief form the contents of the eleventh and the following chapters of the fifth book of the Chândogya Upanishad, where again a man of the warrior caste, Ashvapati, prince of the Kekaya, is shown in possession of the highest wisdom. A number of highly learned Brahmans were speculating on the following problems: “What is our Self? What is the Brahma?” and they decided to go to Uddâlaka Aruni, who, as they knew, was investigating the “Omnipresent Self.” But Aruni said to himself: “Now, they will ask me and I am not able to answer all their questions”; consequently he requested his visitors to go with him to Ashvapati. The latter receives them with great honors, invites them to stay with him, promising them presents as high as their fees for sacrifices. But they replied: “A man must communicate what he knows. You are just now seeking the ‘Omnipresent Self’; disclose to us what it is?” The king, said: “I will answer you to-morrow.” The following day, without having received them among his pupils, that is, without a ceremonial reception as was usual, he asked them: “What do you venerate as the Self?” They replied: “Heaven, sun, wind, ether, water, earth.” The king reminded them that they were all mistaken in considering the Omnipresent Self as a finite and limited being; it was the infinite, the infinitely small and the infinitely great.

The weight of these stories is very plain. Whether they refer to real facts or merely reflect the views of those times in the form of legends, cannot be decided. However, the question of the historical truth of these stories has no bearing whatever. The fact that they are to be found in genuine Brahmanic writings, in books which are considered in India as the basis of the Brahman caste, speaks a plain language. It shows, that the thought of claiming the monistic doctrine of the Brahma-Atman as the inheritance of their caste, did not occur to the authors of the old Upanishads, or that they dared not claim it; it may be that they did not yet realise the great importance of the same. Of course in the following ages this science became the exclusive property of the Brahmans and was cultivated and developed by them during twenty centuries—but this does not do away with the fact that it originated among the warrior caste. The men of this caste recognised at once the hollowness of the sacrificial system and its absurd symbolical character; and to them is due the credit of having disclosed a new world of thought and of having accomplished a revolution in the intellectual life of Ancient India. When we learn that the Brahmans continued the sacrificial system, even after having adopted the new creed, and by representing religious ceremonials as the first step to knowledge, thus combined two wholly heterogeneous elements; we may justly conclude that things have taken the same course in Ancient India as in other countries. Progressive ideas are first opposed by the priesthood, their born enemy, until they have become so powerful that they cannot be opposed any longer, whereupon the priest adopts them and tries to harmonise them with his superstitions.

But the ideas mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, the substance of what is commonly called “Hindu wisdom,” are not all that the warriors have done for the religion and philosophy of the people. The noble Gautama of Kapilavastu, the best known of all Hindus, who established Buddhism about 500 years before Christ, was also a Kshattriya, and according to the more recent tradition, which alone was formerly known, the son of a king; but according to the earlier sources, disclosed by Oldenberg, he was the son of a landed proprietor. Buddha, “the Enlightened,” under which name he is known all over the world, most strenuously opposed the sacrificial system and the superstitions of the Brahmans. The ceremonies and the science of the priesthood seemed to him a perfect fraud, and the caste system an absurd institution; he taught that the final beatitude is within the reach of the lowest man, as well as of the Brahman and the king; that every one, without distinction of birth, can attain to “salvation” by contempt of the world, self-denial, and devotion to the welfare of his fellow beings.

Oldenberg’s excellent book on Buddha, the newest standard work on this subject, makes it unnecessary for me to dwell at length on the doctrine of the greatest of all Hindus; only in regard to one important point, which has a direct bearing on the subject under consideration, do I differ from his opinion. According to the oldest sources, Buddha’s method of teaching is, to a great extent, beyond the understanding of the bulk of the people; not a popular, but an abstract philosophical one. For intrinsic reasons, I believe that the old sources do not give a correct report of this matter, and we must not forget that centuries separate them from Buddha. Oldenberg himself raises the point, whether the dry and tedious ecclesiastical style, in which Buddha’s thoughts are clothed by those sources, truly reflects the spoken word. He says on page 181: “Whoever reads the words which the sacred books attribute to Buddha will doubt that the form in which Buddha taught his precepts is to be identified with that abstract and sometimes abstruse metaphysical language. A youthful, invigorating spirit, pervading alike teacher and disciples, is the true picture of those times, admitting of no unnatural or artificial features.”

In spite of this, he comes to the conclusion that “the solemn and stern way of speaking, peculiar to Buddha, has been better expressed by tradition than by what we would feel tempted to substitute.” I am not of this opinion. In India a great success could not have been obtained but by overpowering eloquence and a popular method, intelligible to all, and proceeding by parables and metaphors.

If Buddha had only appealed to the intellect of his nearest surroundings, consisting merely of aristocratic elements, if he had not found his way to the heart of the people, his monastery would very likely have shared the destiny of the other religious congregations of his age, which have all disappeared, except one. As the doctrines of these monasteries or their founders do not substantially differ from each other, and as it cannot be ascribed to mere chance that Buddha’s doctrine has developed into a universal religion, having the greatest number of adherents, there remains but one hypothesis to account for this fact, and that is the superiority of Buddha’s way of teaching. The erroneousness of the generally prevailing opinion that Buddha was in his time the only founder of a new religion, and that he suddenly revolutionised the social organisation of the Indian people, has been clearly established by recent investigations. In fact, he was a “primus inter pares,” one of those numerous ascetics who were striving for and preaching “liberation” from the eternal transmigration.

Besides Buddha’s, only one congregation has survived: the Jaina, having numerous members in the western part of India. The principles of the Jaina are very similar to those of Buddha; so much so that until recently it was considered merely as a sect of Buddhism, while it is really a religion of its own, founded by a contemporary or a predecessor of Buddha, named Vardhamâna Jnâtaputra—in the language of the people, Vaddhamâna Nâtaputta—in the same part of the country where Buddha rose. The only difference between the two religions is this: Vardhamâna lays great stress on castigation; while the more progressive Buddha declares it useless—nay, pernicious. The important point in regard to the object of our essay is this: that the founder of Jaina, which occupies a high place in the history of Hindu culture, was also a member of the Warrior Caste.

We shall now have to consider another production of the Indian mind, the very name of which is unknown to most of our readers, although it offers the most interesting religious problems. I refer to the doctrine of the Bhâgavatas or Pâncharâtras. These names, of which the former is the earlier and original one, designate a religious sect in North India, whose existence in the fourth century B. C. is authentically proved, but which can be placed with great probability in the time before Buddha. They professed a common-sense monotheism, independent of the traditions of the old Brahmans, and venerated God under different names: Bhagavant, “The Sublime,” whence their name is derived; Nârâyana, “Son of Man;” Purashottamma, “The Supreme Being”; but generally under the name Krishna Vâsudeva, “Son of Vâsudeva”. The character of their worship produced feelings identical with the Christian love and devotion to God. The Hindu word for this feeling is Chakti, and for him who was penetrated by the same, Chakta. As the word Chakti cannot be found or has not been found in the Hindu literature earlier than the era of Christ, several scholars are inclined to attribute the Chakti to the influence of Christianity, especially Professor Weber, who deserves the highest praise for his researches concerning Krishna worship. Weber has proved in several of his books, especially in a highly interesting treatise on Krishna’s birth, that numerous Christian notions have entered into the later Krishna legends (the similarity of the names, Krishna and Christ, accounts for it): for instance, the birth of Christ among the shepherds, the story about the stable, and others of the same kind. In spite of this, I cannot embrace the opinion that the Chakti has been brought from a foreign country, because its first appearance belongs to a period in which Christian influences cannot be found. As I cannot go into details without discussing very difficult points, requiring a great deal of erudition, I will only say that whoever is familiar with the old Hindu civilisation will easily understand that the Chakti is of genuine Hindu origin. Monotheistic notions can be traced to the oldest periods of Hindu antiquity, and the Hindu mind has always been animated by a high aspiration towards God; so that it should not surprise us that this feature of the Hindu character has produced a religion popular and independent of philosophical speculation, consisting in love and devotion to God. The founder of this religion was Krishna Vâsudeva, afterwards raised to divine dignity, or rather identified with the deity; from his name and from the legends attached to his name, he was a member of the Warrior Caste. As early as the epoch of the Mahâbhârata, the great Indian epic poem, the Brahmans appropriated to themselves the name and work of Krishna, and transformed the venerated hero into the God Vishnu; thus increasing their strength by adopting a doctrine not of Brahmanic origin.

We have thus found that the profound philosophical monism of the Upanishads, the highly moral religions of Buddha and Jaina, and last, not least, the creed of the Bhâgavatas, based on pure devotion to God, did not originate among the Brahmans.

However favorably we may judge of the achievements of the Brahmans in all branches of science, and I am far from vilifying their merits, still it is certain that the greatest intellectual performances of India, nay, all such in India that have been beneficial to mankind, were accomplished by men of the Warrior Caste.

RICHARD GARBE.

THE IDEA OF NECESSITY, ITS BASIS AND ITS SCOPE.

The idea of necessity, although a fundamental concept in philosophy and science, has not as yet been so clearly defined that all thinkers would agree as to its meaning and significance. Necessity is frequently identified with compulsion, and thus it is supposed to be incompatible with freedom of will. It is also identified with fate, as if it were a destiny that existed above the will of man and the powers of nature, similar to the Moira of the ancients. It is said to exclude chance in every possible conception of the term and to cause the evolution of the world to proceed by a predetermined arrangement, like the mechanism of a clock.

We cannot endorse Mr. Charles S. Peirce’s objection to the doctrine of necessity, but we side with him when he denounces the mechanical philosophy for considering minds as “part of the physical world in such a sense that the laws of mechanics determine everything that happens.” Mr. Peirce is right when he rebukes the mechanical philosopher for “entering consciousness under the head of sundries as a forgotten trifle.” In some sense minds are parts of the physical, i. e. the natural, world, but they are not parts of that province of nature which constitutes the special domain of physics and mechanics. Ideas are not motions and cannot be explained by mechanical laws.

Having criticised in a former article of ours Mr. Peirce’s position, and having rejected the indeterminism proposed by him, we shall discuss in the following pages the basis and scope of the idea of necessity.

The idea of necessity is based upon the conception of sameness, and we find that the existence of samenesses is a feature of the world in which we live. The existence of samenesses is a fact of experience, and upon the presence of this fact depends the possibility of the origin, the being, and the development of the thinking mind itself.

Necessity, as we understand it, must be carefully distinguished from the idea of fate. Although we accept without reserve the doctrine of determinism, we do not mean to deny the important part that chance plays in the world—not absolute chance, which according to Mr. Peirce is exempt from law, but that same chance of which the throw of a die is a typical instance. And bearing in mind that necessity is not a power outside of nature and above the will of man, but that it resides in them as the quality of sameness, we abandon the view that identifies necessity with compulsion; recognising thus, that freedom of the will is not incompatible with our view of necessitarianism.

I. THE BASIS OF NECESSITY.

The standpoint from which we shall treat this subject is that of monistic positivism,—the method which accepts no doctrine, theory, or law unless it be a formulation of facts. Facts are the bottom-rock to which we can and must dig down. At the same time, wherever facts appear contradictory to one another, we should not be satisfied, but continue to investigate until they are systematised so as to form a unitary entirety.

Before we begin our inquiry into the existence or non-existence of necessity, it is advisable to define the meaning of the term.

The Latin word necesse is most probably a compound of the negative ne and the supine cessum from cedere to yield, to move. “Necessary,” according to this etymology, would mean that which does not yield but abides. Thus it is the inevitable; it is that which is or will be.

It is in this sense that the word is still used, or at least ought to be used, and in this sense we shall also use it.

Every word naturally acquires by a more or less appropriate application a series of meanings. So “necessary” means also that which is needful, that which is essential, that which is indispensable and requisite; it also means that which is done under compulsion. It is understood that we exclude all the other meanings of necessary except the original one, which is its properly philosophical meaning.

The idea of necessity is closely allied to the idea of sameness. In order to understand the former we must be clear concerning the meaning of the latter.

THE IDEA OF SAMENESS.

There exist a number of synonyms often used indiscriminately; they are: identity, sameness, equality, congruity, similarity, and likeness. By “identity” we generally understand a sameness in every respect, absolute sameness; by “equality”, a sameness that can be expressed in figures. Equality is always a measurable sameness, and refers to quantity, mass, size, length, height, age, etc. Likeness and similitude are samenesses of form or of proportion, albeit not of size. It is often used as a partial sameness of impressions, not so much as they are in themselves, but as they appear to the mind. Congruity is a synonym of sameness in the province of geometry, denoting the coincidence of figures when laid upon one another.[10]

The logical principle of identity, so-called, it appears to me, ought to be named the principle of sameness, for it has not reference to the absolute sameness of a thing with itself.[11] The statement A = A does not mean that this particular thing A is itself and that therefore the one A is one and the same thing. It is a general statement and means that all A, in so far as they are A, are the same. The statement A = A, as I take it, presupposes the existence of a number of A’s; otherwise it would have no sense, and it would not only be empty, (as we know from Kant that all formal statements are,) but meaningless and useless. It would be of no avail either in logic or in science.

In consideration of the fact that the idea of sameness is a fundamental concept in our scientific, logical, and philosophical reasoning, it is astonishing that no satisfactory definition of it is to be found. To define “same” as “one in substance; not other, ... of one nature or general character, of one kind, degree, or amount,” as is done in the “Century Dictionary,” is no improvement upon “Webster,” who defines it as “not different or other; identical. Of like kind, species, sort, dimensions or the like; not different in character or in the quality or qualities compared; ... like.” However, dictionaries are not encyclopædias; and they have perhaps a right to define same as identical, and identical as same.

Mr. James Ward, in the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” (XVI, 81, in his excellent article on “Psychology,”) incidentally complains about the ambiguity of the word “same”; he proposes a distinction between “material identity” and “individual identity,” but this does not solve the difficulty. Flemming’s “Vocabulary of Philosophy” (4th ed. edited by Calderwood) contains several articles on “identical” and on “identity” without discussing in any one of them the meaning of “same” or of “identical.”

What then is the meaning of same?

Let us first consider the etymology of the word. The root of “same” is found in almost all Indo-European languages; it is preserved in the first syllable of the Latin “similis” and “simul,” in the second syllable of the German “Zu_samm_en”; in the Greek “ἅμα” and “ὅμοιος,” and the Sanskrit “sama,” all of which denote a togetherness. Thus the etymological meaning seems to signify what is classed in one category. Accordingly, the present meaning as defined by the dictionaries, as being that which is “of one nature or not different in character,” has not changed; at any rate if there is any change, it is slight. Yet it is desirable to bring out and set in a clear light the purport of the word and its essence.

What, then, is the economic service and function of the idea of “sameness” in the household of thought?

“Sameness” is that feature in two things or states of things, in two processes or modes of action, which brings it to pass that the one may be replaced by the other without altering for a certain purpose the state of things or affecting the result of the entire process. Popularly expressed, sameness is the capability of one thing’s being substituted for another.

There is no need of discussing or proving the truism, that, properly speaking, there is no absolute sameness, no identity in the strict sense of the term. This was the meaning of Heraclitus’s idea of the perpetual flux of things, expressed in his πάντα ῥεῖ. There are no two moments in time, no two points in space, no two atoms of matter actually identical, and we cannot enter into the identical river twice.

Cratylus tried to outdo Heraclitus, by saying that we cannot even enter once into the identical river, for while entering, not only the river changes but also we ourselves; and Cratylus is perfectly right.

We have purposely substituted in Heraclitus’s proposition “identical” for “same,” because this change is needed to bring out the truth of the idea. Heraclitus and Cratylus cease to be right if we use the word same as above defined. We enter indeed the same river twice. The river of to-day is, for a certain purpose, quite the same as the river of yesterday, in so far namely as the river of to-day and the river of yesterday serve a certain and the same purpose: for other purposes this same river will perhaps not be the same. The geographer and historian speak of the Rhine as that stream of water which since time immemorial has flowed down from the St. Gotthardt to the North Sea. Accordingly, if we stand on the bank of the Rhine, it is quite correct to say that this is the same river that was crossed by Cæsar. Let the purpose of our thoughts be changed, and we shall no longer be permitted to speak of sameness. Suppose we had seen the Rhine for the first time in its beautiful emerald coloring, and had come again after a rainy day to admire its beauty, should we not be justified in exclaiming: This is not the same river!

Sameness, accordingly, depends upon a special purpose. If in a chemical combination a metal is wanted, it may be all the same whether we use iron, zinc, lead, or gold. That is to say, it is all the same for bringing about a special result; yet it is not all the same in other respects. The weight and certain other qualities of the metals are different, and also the cost.

SAMENESS AND MIND.

Sameness depending upon a special purpose, the question arises, Is there any objective sameness in the world, or is sameness a mere subjective addition to things? Is sameness something “real” or is it purely mental?

This is the old quarrel between the Nominalists and Realists among the Schoolmen. It lies at the bottom of the problem of universals and particulars, and we should say, it is only a special form of the question, “Are relations objective qualities of existence or are they products of the mind?” which was discussed in a former number (The Monist, II, 2, pp. 240-42). The idea of sameness represents the most important relation that exists; and if any relation is real, the relation of sameness must be real also.

If sameness depends upon a special purpose, it appears that there can be no sameness without that purpose; and the purpose being purely mental, the sameness also would seem to be purely mental. But this is not so. Sameness is an idea, and it is no exception to other ideas. All ideas are mental symbols formed for a special purpose; but, being symbols of something, ideas are representative of some reality, or of some feature of a reality, or of some relation between two or several things. Every idea stands for something; and this quality of the significance of ideas is called their meaning or their import.

The question now is, How does the idea of sameness originate in the world where, as we stated above, there is no absolute sameness, no identity? Our answer is that sameness, not identity, is a general feature of this world of reality, which impresses itself upon every mind from the very beginning of the mind’s origin.

We can go farther in our statement and make it more emphatic: Mind originates and grows only on the ground of the fact that sameness is a feature of the world, and is recognised as such by feeling substance.

Two points or two congruent geometrical figures being in different places are not identical. But they are of such a nature that, so far as regards the purposes of geometry, one serves the purposes in question just as well as the other, or one can be replaced by the other; and this quality is called their sameness.

Now as a matter of fact there are no two concrete things in the world in which there cannot be found some sameness. Both somehow affect sentiency; we say they consist of matter. Both can be measured in size, breadth, and height: we say, they are extended. Both are at any given moment in a certain relation to other things: we say, they are in space. Both have a definite form and consist of one or several special structures (i. e., so to say, inside-forms). All things can in some way or other be classed together under one heading. These samenesses of things go along with differences, and the degree of sameness in the different things varies greatly. Whether there is any sameness and difference at all in the world, cannot be decided a priori, but is a problem which can be solved only on the ground of, first, an a posteriori statement of the facts, second, a systematical arrangement of the facts. If this is accomplished we can venture into a methodical investigation as to the nature of the samenesses as well as the differences that obtain in the universe, and having arranged them in a system, we can apply a priori this system to facts with which we are not as yet acquainted.

The many samenesses which are experienced are not purely mental additions; they are not mere subjective imputations transferred upon objective existence. They are real; i. e. there are in the objective things actual features which allow of certain substitutions. A ray of light awakens in some feeling substance the traces left by former rays of light; and this reawakening is called memory. The perception of sameness is the beginning of mind, and it involves the perception of difference as a natural consequence.

Suppose that the stuff of which the world consists were capable of acquiring feeling, but there were no samenesses whatever; which would mean that every smallest piece of the world-stuff were a particular thing by itself and in every respect unlike every other piece, of a different material or of no material at all, of different size or of no size at all, and also possessed of a different number of space dimensions. In such a world all the impacts made upon a sentient being would be different; not one would be like the other, and all feelings would present a chaos without uniformities, worse than the most complex crazy-quilt. Under such circumstances mind would be impossible: it would neither originate nor could it develop.

On the other hand suppose again that the stuff of which the world consists were capable of acquiring feeling in some certain formation, and that there were samenesses in the world and in the events of the world. Would not mind necessarily originate in such a world? Given feeling substance in a world of samenesses and differences, these samenesses will produce analogous samenesses of impression upon the feeling substance, which will be perceived as samenesses of feeling. The preservation of the traces left in the feeling substance (supposing this substance to live on indefinitely) will in the long run result in the formation of special sense-organs. It will later on, with the aid of word-symbolism, lead to the formation of universals, for universals are nothing but samenesses perceived. It will then create with the assistance of abstraction the realm of scientific thought, representing the uniformities of the events of the world in exact formulas.

THE EXISTENCE OF SAMENESSES A FACT.

The question whether there are samenesses at all in the world, is in our opinion settled. It is a fact that there are samenesses. The uniformities of the world are a matter of indubitable experience—indubitable because our very existence as thinking beings, as minds, is conditioned by this fact. We see the mind of every child develop out of his perception of samenesses. Our scientists teach us that the race-soul, like a great immortal individual, is the product of the accumulated experience of samenesses; and all future progress, in science as well as in civilisation, in mechanical invention as well as in ethics, depends upon the trustworthiness of the samenesses stated to exist in the objective world.

The question of the ultimate raison d’être of the samenesses and differences, is another question; and it would lead us too far here to discuss it. In several details the problem is not as yet ripe for solution. A full solution of the problem would be tantamount to the exposition of a complete knowledge of the world. Suffice it here to say that we have reasons to think of the world-stuff as being of the same nature throughout. The chemical elements seem to be different configurations of one and the same substance. In this way all difference would have to be explained as a difference of form.

The form of reality possesses sameness and difference in all its parts. Space in its sameness is by experience found to be tri-dimensional, which means, it is determinable throughout by three coördinates; while its differences are due to the position of the points considered. For the purpose of the geometrician space is uniform, but for the purpose, say of the architect, it is not uniform. To the geometrician two congruent triangles, whether they are in the cellar or in the garret, are the same. However, to the architect the position of two congruent triangles in his design of a house is by no means the same. Every single point of space has its special and individual qualities.

The whole business of science is to systematise the samenesses of experience, and to present them in such convenient formulas that they can be used for guidance in our actions.

The most comprehensive formulation of the sameness of the universe as a whole has found its expression in the law of the conservation of matter and energy. This law rests upon the experience, corroborated by experiments, that causation is transformation. It states that the total amount of matter and the total amount of energy remain constant. There is no creation out of nothing and no conversion of something into nothing.

EINDEUTIG BESTIMMT.

After this sketch of the importance of sameness, (a subject which we have by no means exhausted,) we return to the idea of necessity. The ideas of sameness and necessity are closely related. A world of sameness is a world in which necessity rules, and necessity means regularity and order.

German scientists have a very good expression to denote the formulation of events in a manner which describes them in their necessary course. If they have succeeded in finding the sameness in the instances of a certain class of events, they say that it is eindeutig bestimmt, which means, the sameness is determined in a way that admits of no equivocation; it is complete, representing solely and purely that feature upon the presence of which the result depends. Whatever is thus eindeutig bestimmt, is recognised in its necessity. The presence of that feature which makes it eindeutig bestimmt, determines the event to take place; and this being determined, its inevitableness, the it will be of the process, is all there is to necessity.

All natural phenomena that can be eindeutig bestimmt are necessary in their happening. A world which with regard to the total amount of its matter and energy is the same to-day and yesterday and will be the same to-morrow, a world whose laws of form possess a sameness throughout, so that it allows of formulating and applying them in their rigidity to all facts present, past, and future, a world in which all the changes are transformations determinable with the assistance of formal laws, can be relied upon and the course of its events can be computed.

Such is the world in which we live; and taking this ground I say, the world is a cosmos, it is no chaos; and noticing that being possessed of sameness is an intrinsic and inalienable feature of the world, I am inclined to add the world never was and never will be a chaos. And this, if it be true at all, is true not only in general and as it were wholesale, but in its minutest details. If there were deficiencies of this order in the unobservable details, they would not be diminished by being summed up in large and ever larger amounts; on the contrary, they would increase; they would grow in proportion. This not being the case, we have not the slightest reason to doubt that in those realms of minutest existence into which, from the grossness and the lack of precision of our organs and instruments of observation, we cannot penetrate, the same order and regularity obtains as in those regions which lie open to our investigation. In other words: From this standpoint, existence is, so to say, permeated by law throughout; every event is determined and any kind of absolute chance is excluded.

Following Kant’s etymology we understand by a posteriori the sensory elements, and by a priori the formal elements of our experience. The queer expression “a priori” is in so far justified as formal truths (such as geometrical, arithmetical, logical rules) are formulas expressing the universal samenesses of the form of existence. They contain the laws of form in a shape that is eindeutig bestimmt, so that an experimenter will know them a priori to be so. A priori means beforehand. An experimenter knows certain things even before he makes his experiments. The a priori elements of experience are by no means innate truths; nor are they the historical beginning of experience. On the contrary. In their abstract purity they appear as a very late product of man’s mental evolution.

The a priori systems of thought are not arbitrary constructions; they are constructions raised out of the recognition of the formal, i. e. the relational, samenesses that appear in experience. All possibilities of a certain class of relations can be exhausted and formulated in theorems. As such they can be used as references to assist in the explanation and determination of new experiences. We know some part of any new experience with which we are confronted even before we have investigated it. We know certain laws of its form, and by reference to these known laws we are enabled to reduce the unknown to the known, to analyse the process and set forth that feature of it which makes eindeutig bestimmt.

II. THE SCOPE OF NECESSITY.

Mr. Peirce objects to necessitarianism, and classes it together with materialism and the mechanical philosophy, speaking of the latter as the most logical form of necessitarianism. In consonance with the dictionary-definitions of these words, he contrasts them to the doctrine of the freedom of the will and also to miracles—the latter, we must confess, being a dangerous concession to certain theological conceptions.

The “Century Dictionary” defines “necessitarianism” as

“The theory that the will is subject to the general mechanical law of cause and effect.”

And “necessitarian” as

“One who maintains the doctrine of philosophical necessity, in opposition to that of the freedom of the will: opposed to libertarian.”

The word “determinism” is regarded as a synonym of necessitarianism. Its first definition in the “Century Dictionary” reads as follows:

“A term invented by Sir William Hamilton to denote the doctrine of the necessitarian philosophers, who hold that man’s actions are uniformly determined by motives acting upon his character, and that he has not the power to choose to act in one way so long as he prefers on the whole to act in another way.”

Hamilton’s definition as here presented is puzzling. If the words “choose” and “prefer on the whole” are not meant to be tautological, there is no sense in it; for no determinist denies that a man might “upon the whole” prefer to act this way, while he has the power to choose, and for special considerations perhaps does choose, to act in another way. However, if the words “choose” and “prefer on the whole” are meant to be tautological, the self-contradictoriness of the statement is too palpable for a Hamilton. Is there anybody who would maintain that a man who chooses to act in one way can at the same time, under the very same circumstances, and he remaining the very same man of the same character and intentions, choose to act in another way?

While we accept determinism and also necessitarianism in the sense that all events (the actions of willing beings included) are determined, we cannot accept either the mechanical philosophy or materialism as the terms are commonly understood.

We find materialism defined as

“The metaphysical doctrine that matter is the only substance, and that matter and its motions constitute the universe.” (“Century Dictionary,” 2d sense.)

The mechanical philosophy is explained sub voce “atomic” as

“[The view that] from the diverse combination and motions of ... atoms all things, including the soul, were supposed to arise.” Ibid.

Determinism is simply the negation of absolute chance. It does not exclude chance in the original sense of the word as an unexpected event, as something that befalls one without his seeking it or making the event—chance being derived from ML. cadentia, i. e. the falling, as in a throw of dice.

The “Century Dictionary” defines “chance” in sense 9, as

“Fortuity; especially the absence of a cause necessitating an event.”

This is absolute chance, the existence of which we deny. The “Century Dictionary” adds the following little note:

“Absolute chance, the (supposed) spontaneous occurrence of events undetermined by any general law or by any free volition. According to Aristotle, events may come about in three ways: first, by necessity or an external compulsion; second, by nature or the development of an inward germinal tendency; and third, by chance, without any determining cause or principle whatever, by lawless, sporadic originality.”[12]

We understand chance as being, from certain premisses, an incalculable coincidence, either not intended to be calculated, or, for certain reasons, from a given standpoint with a limited and definite amount of knowledge, not capable of calculation. Determinism, as we understand the term, does not imply as the “Century Dictionary” has it in its definition of necessitarianism, that “the law of cause and effect” is “mechanical.” It simply asserts that the law of cause and effect holds good universally, and that there is no effect that is not definitely determined, according to the nature of the things in action, by causes and all their circumstances.

NECESSITY AND CHANCE.

Mr. Peirce says:

“All the diversity and specificalness of events is attributable to chance—diversification, specificalness, and irregularity of things, I suppose is chance—and this diversity cannot be due to laws that are immutable.” (P. 332.)

Our world-view leads us to other conclusions; we say:

Every specificalness or particularity is such by possessing a certain form and standing in a definite relation (in time as well as space) to all other things of the universe. Of every concrete thing we can say it is now and here, or it was then and there. It is or was made up in this special way, and it stands or it stood in these special relations to its surroundings. Proportions, relations, forms—these are what account for the diversification and specificalness of all things in the universe; they are what explain the irregularities of individual cases and of all those events which appear as chance to him who, although he may be well informed about the nature of a thing, does not know the relation of its complex surroundings, exercising according to law their disturbing influence upon its actions which otherwise would be uniform.

And since no two spots of space and no two instances of time are the same, since the relations of every atom are different in every position and at every moment of its existence, we need not be astonished to find diversity and specificalness in this world of samenesses.

We do not believe in absolute chance, but we believe in chance.

What is chance?

Chance is any event not especially intended, either not calculated, or, with a given and limited stock of knowledge, incalculable.

Gunpowder was, according to the legend, invented by chance. Berthold Schwartz intended to make gold, yet when the mixture was ignited, he began to understand that it was an explosive. When I say that I met a friend by chance, I mean that the meeting was unintentional. I had not foreseen it and perhaps could not foresee it. When we call a throw of dice pure chance, we mean that the incidents which condition the turning up of these or those special faces of the dice have not been or cannot be calculated. We do not mean that the law of cause and effect is suspended; we mean that we are unable to determine the effect. That which would make this or that throw eindeutig bestimmt is either not known to us, or, if it were known, is of such a nature that we cannot produce the desired effect with any certainty. Matters are so arranged in the game of dice that the slightest incident changes the result, and these incidents are either not within our ken or not within the range of our power. Chance, accordingly, as we understand it, is no exception to necessity; it does not happen contrary to law, and is in each case the strict result of a definite cause under definite circumstances.

Absolute chance is something quite different. Absolute chance is that which is incalculable because of the absence of law. Mr. Peirce says:

“Another argument, or convenient commonplace, is that absolute chance is inconceivable. This word has eight current significations. The ‘Century Dictionary’ enumerates six. Those who talk like this will hardly be persuaded to say in what sense they mean that chance is inconceivable.”

Absolute chance is “inconceivable” as the word is defined by the “Century Dictionary” in the second sense: It is

“unacceptable to the mind because involving a violation of laws believed to be well established by positive evidence.”

Absolute chance is not unthinkable in the sense of unimaginable. We can very well depict a case of absolute chance in our imagination, just as we can tell and describe in minutest details the fairy tale of Alladin’s lamp; just as we can in our imagination depict a creation out of nothing. But he who accepts that the world is in its innermost nature a cosmos, that its events are strictly and throughout regulated by law, cannot at the same time think that there are nooks and crevices in which the law does not operate. Absolute chance actually involves the idea of a creation out of nothing; and thus it stands in contradiction to the law of the preservation of matter and energy. Absolute chance which means that the very same thing under the very same conditions can act in this or in some other way, that it need not act in exactly the same way, involves a belief in either the creation of a not existing quality out of nothing, or the disappearance of existing qualities into nothing.

Mr. Peirce says:

“It seems to me that every throw of sixes with a pair of dice is a manifest instance of chance.”

Yes, of chance; but not of that chance the existence of which Mr. Peirce maintains—not of absolute chance. Every throw of dice, every toss of head or tail, are exactly determined by circumstances. We call it chance only in so far as we cannot calculate and predetermine the result.

Suppose you take two large silver coins between your thumb and the first two fingers, one coin parallel to and a little above the other. Suppose tails are up in both. Drop the lower coin without an effort just as it would fall, about twenty inches, and you may be sure that, in spite of yourself, it will turn up head. Then drop the upper one and it will not turn, but plump right down showing tail. There are certain mechanical reasons for the one case as well as for the other. As soon as we know the law and can apply it, the case ceases to be an instance of chance.

Dice, the roulette, and other games of chance are so arranged, that the determinating circumstances are too numerous and also too complex, one interfering with and being disturbed by the others, to admit of any adequate calculation or predetermination. An arrangement of conditions which in this way eludes the calculation of a definite set of possibilities, is called by Professor Kries gleiche Spielräume or equal chances. And the province of equal chances is and will remain the proper sphere of the calculus of probabilities.

Professor Nitsche objects to Kries’s proposition, saying that absolutely equal chances are impossible and an equal chance (ein gleicher Spielräume) is nothing but the objectification of a judgment of equal value.[13] We find no fault with Nitsche’s objection; there are no absolutely equal chances; and what is called “equal chance” means that the strength of two or several anticipations is of the same degree; that our belief and doubt as to the turning up of one, two, three, four, five, or six spots of a die are equally justified. The objective conditions which justify such equality of several expectations is what Kries (if we understand him correctly) calls gleiche Spielräume. But gleiche Spielräume do not imply absolute chance. We might as well expect that all the six faces of a die should turn up simultaneously in one throw, as that any one of them should turn up by absolute chance.

While absolute chance cannot be admitted, partly because we are not in need of it, (since the irregularities of nature can be sufficiently explained otherwise,) and partly because the idea of absolute chance if it were needed, is incompatible with our world-conception, we shall, nevertheless, have to concede to chance, as we understand the term, a very important rôle in the evolution of life. The formation of worlds and the history of mankind depend to a great extent upon chances similar to the throws of dice. There are many possibilities, and now this, now that, will, according to the circumstances, be realised—of course in each case with strict necessity.

Let us illustrate this idea by an example.

The formation of about seventy elements out of the original world-substance, which may be supposed to be homogeneous, does not appear to depend upon chance. Their universal appearance in all parts of the universe suggests the hypothesis that their formation is the inevitable result of a gradual condensation of nebular substances. We find everywhere, according to the stage of condensation, a gradual appearance, first of the lighter, then of the heavier elements. There seems to be no possibility of the formation of other elements than those known to us (including here the hypothetical elements which are still missing in the Mendeljeff series and at the same time, at least, not excluding a further continuance of the series). These elements or none, it appears, must be formed out of the original substance of our world. Let us here assume, for argument’s sake, that it were so beyond question, and that we knew the nature of the world-substance to be such as to condense, if it condenses at all, into no other but these forms, which we call chemical elements. This would be a limitation of possibilities. Exactly so the throws Of dice are limited. With the dice commonly in use we cannot throw fractions; nor can we throw either zero, or seven, or any other higher number. We can throw only whole numbers, integrals from one up to six. But while we thus assume that the formation of the elements is limited to those actually existing, the proportion in which the elements may be distributed in the different nebulæ and solar systems, is apparently very different. Suppose we had a full knowledge of the intrinsic nature of the world-substance and were standing outside the universe observing the process of world-formations; we could not from this knowledge alone predict all that would happen. We should on our assumption be able to predict a priori that such elements would be formed. But whether the different elements would be generated in these or in other proportions appears to depend upon the presence of certain conditions, perhaps the rapidity of motion, the heat produced by friction, the temperature of the surrounding cosmic space, any knowledge of which is not included in our knowledge of the nature of the world-substance. These conditions may vary, nay, so far as we can judge they actually do vary; and any apparently slight variation of them, or even one of them, will result in different effects of great consequence. Without a detailed knowledge of all these special conditions, simply from a supposed a priori knowledge of the world-substance, the idiosyncrasy of this or that particular solar system could not be a priori determined. Here it will be such, and there, under perhaps slightly different circumstances, it will be entirely other. Here the centre of gravity may be in one great mass, there again it may be divided in two, so that the planets circle around two suns.

From this point of view we have to call these results products of chance.

To a being who not only might be supposed to know the intrinsic nature of existence, but could have present before his mind every event of the great interacting cosmos in its entire complexity, this kind of chance would, of course, also disappear. To him all states of things would appear throughout as eindeutig bestimmt. Yet, although in this way necessity permeates all events that take place, we do not intend to deny the irregularity of detail,[14] the specificalness of the particulars, the diversity of individual incidents and existences. According to our conception of nature they must remain, and we need not attribute them to absolute chance. To attribute irregularities to absolute chance (as Mr. Peirce does) is actually an abandonment of explaining them. The specificalness and particularity of nature can be said to be due to chance in so far only as they do not depend upon and are not determinable by the nature of the things under consideration, but result (with strict necessity of course) from the ever-changing conformations of surrounding circumstances.

Thus the fate of a man depends mainly upon his character,—the proverb says, “Every man is the architect of his own fortune”—but not entirely. There are sometimes coincidences determining the fates of men, and through them the fates of whole nations. And these coincidences do not result from their character.

Let everybody think of his own fate. Part of his life has been what it was because he is such a man as he is; and we can, within certain limits, predict the fate of a youth with whose character we are familiar. But how much of our lives depends upon circumstances which could be foreseen only by an omniscient being, and which, as we might properly say, if we do not misunderstand the term, is due to chance!

FREE WILL.

Compulsion is generally considered as a synonym of necessity. But the usage of the term necessity in the sense of compulsion is, in our opinion, very inappropriate, because misleading. Necessity and compulsion should not be confounded; for compulsion excludes free will and “necessity” does not.

A government compels its citizens to obey certain unpopular laws; the victorious army compels the enemy to surrender. The obedience of the citizens and the surrender of the enemy are acts done under compulsion; they are not acts of free will. But a man of a certain character wills, under given circumstances and in the absence of compulsion, necessarily in the way in which he does. The determination of a free will is not a matter of chance but of necessity. Yet the determining factors are not outside but inside; they are not due to compulsion, not to the pressure of a foreign power, but to the nature of the willing being himself.

This, then, is the definition of “free”: A being is free if it is unrestrained, so that it acts according to its own nature. As is its nature, so it wills; as it wills, so it acts. If we know the character of a man and the situation in which he is placed, we can predict his choice as the necessary result of his nature. His decision, although it is free and not under compulsion, is not an outcome of chance which might under the same conditions be different, but is the inevitable result of necessity.

If by free will we had to understand that the decisions of the will are the result either of chance or of absolute chance, the foremost duty of the educator would be to make man unfree, to insert certain dominant ideas into his mind, destined to determine his will. The free man according to this definition of free will as being due to chance, would be a person whose actions are more whimsical than the fancies of lunatics. We reject this conception of the freedom of the will.

In our opinion a will is free if it is unrestrained so that it can act according to its nature. Our conception of free will does not stand in contradiction to the doctrine of “determinism” as defined by the “Century Dictionary” in its second sense:

“In general, the doctrine that whatever is or happens is entirely determined by antecedent causes.”

THE MECHANICAL PHILOSOPHY.

We distinguish between (1) mechanical, (2) physical, (3) chemical, (4) physiological, and (5) psychical events.

A mechanical phenomenon is a change of place which does not involve a change of the constitution of the parts moved. E. g., a stone is pushed; its position is altered, but the stone remains the same.

A physical phenomenon is an event in which the molecular state of the bodies in action is altered. Water heated becomes steam, frozen it becomes ice. The three states have different molecular configurations.

Chemical phenomena are such in which the constitution of the atoms is altered. The characteristic qualities of hydrogen, for example, are different when combined with different elements or when isolated. Each combination is a peculiar substance with peculiar qualities and not a mixture or combination of the qualities of the isolated elements.

Physiological processes are all those changes that take place in the living irritable substance of plants and animals, such as nutrition, growth, and propagation. Its characteristic features are (1) hunger or thirst, i. e. the want of certain materials (food), (2) the reception of the wanted materials by suction or other means, which in some cases are a quite mechanical or physical process, not unlike the afflux of oxygen caused by a burning candle or the suction of water by a sponge, and (3) the assimilation of food. The materials received are distributed in the places wanted, thus adding to the building up of the living substance according to the nature of its structure. This produces as a natural result (4) the phenomenon of growth with a preservation of form. (5) Propagation is a special kind of growth; it is the growth of a part that at some stage of its development becomes an independent individual.

Psychical phenomena are such in which feelings and the meanings of feelings are the determinant factors.

It is apparent that all these terms, mechanical, physical, chemical, physiological, and psychical, are mere abstracts. In describing a mechanical phenomenon, we limit our attention to the mechanical change. We do not mean to say that the body moved does not possess chemical, physical, perhaps physiological, or even psychical qualities. The calculation of the curve of a jump is a mechanical problem, although the jumping body may be a human being. However, the question why did the man jump, is a psychical question. The motive of the jump is an idea in that class of mental activity characterised as purpose. The man had an end in view. And this idea of an end to be realised is the combined result of special conditions and of the character of the man.

The different spheres of mechanical, physical, chemical, physiological, and psychical actions being abstractions, it is obvious that science when dealing with so-called purely mechanical phenomena, has to do with a fiction. There are no purely mechanical phenomena. There are features of reality which are purely mechanical; and these we call motions. But the world does not consist of motions only. It also possesses other qualities.

The mechanical philosopher assumes that the world consists of matter and motion only, and so he feels warranted in the hope that every event that takes place, the actions of man included, can be explained by the laws of motion. Yet the premiss is wrong, and we may anticipate that the conclusion also will prove erroneous. And so it is.

The laws of motion are applicable to and will explain all motions; but they are not applicable to that which is not motion.

It is inconceivable how we can hope to explain a feeling by the laws of motion; and so the fond hope of explaining the problems of the nature of the soul by mechanics is preposterous. No objection can be made to the possibility of explaining the delicate motions in the nervous substance of the brain by the laws of molar or molecular mechanics. But these explanations would throw no light upon the causation that takes place in the mind. The properly psychical phenomena, the properly intelligent action of thought, could not be explained in this way. For the world of mentality introduces quite a new factor into the sphere of being.

What is this new factor?

The nature of mental activity consists in the symbolism of feelings. Feelings, being different under different conditions and the same under same conditions, become representative of their corresponding causes, and thus the objects of experience are depicted in feeling symbols.

Representativeness, accordingly, is the nature of mind.

The question, How certain brain-structures operate, is a question of the mechanics of nervous substance, and further, the question, How thought-operations take place, is a question, so to say, of logical mechanics. But the question, Why a certain idea responds to certain stimuli and not to others, does not admit of a mechanical explanation or formulation. The answer to this question will be a description of the nature of the idea; and the nature of the idea is not a motion: it is the meaning of which the idea is possessed.

The action of a mind depends upon the meaning of certain symbols. A written or spoken word has a special meaning, and this meaning becomes the determinant factor of mind action. The meaning of a word is not a piece of matter, neither is it a motion. It is something sui generis. I do not say that there is any inexplicable mystery connected with it. On the contrary, wonderful as the fact is, it is not mysterious; it does not stand in contradiction to any other fact of nature. Symbols stand for something; they indicate, denote, or signify something. This significance is called their meaning; and mind is a system of symbols in states of awareness.

Now, neither states of awareness are mechanical, nor is the meaning of words anything mechanical. How can we hope for a mechanical explanation either of the soul or the mind or of any mental action?

Suppose, for instance, a general receives a message containing a few words. He opens the paper, he reads it, and all on a sudden, his mind is in a tumult of excitement. What is it that produces the excitement? Is it any motion? Yes! In a certain sense, it is a motion: it is the reading of the paper. This is the cause. Yet not the reading as such excites his consternation. He might read other messages all the day long without any such an effect. Plainly, the causative element of the cause is not the reading, not the motions of which the reading consists, not the shape of the written characters and their combinations in groups, called words. It is something more subtle even than that. It is the significance of the writing. It is the meaning of the written characters. It is the purport that is attached to the word-symbols.

The origin of mind accordingly introduces a factor which has nothing to do with mechanics; and the simplest psychical reflexes, including those physiological reflexes which we must suppose to have originated by conscious adaptation and then been submerged into unconsciousness, cannot be explained from mechanical or physical laws alone.

SPONTANEITY.

While we thus reject the conception of the mechanical philosophy and also of materialism, we do not say that there are motions either in the brain or anywhere else which form exceptions to the laws of mechanics. The laws of mechanics hold good for all motions. The laws of mechanics are formal laws: they do not explain why bodies gravitate; but they describe how they gravitate; and the latter is much more useful to know than the former. There is (as we conceive it) no deep secret in the problem why bodies gravitate; they gravitate because they possess a quality which attracts them to each other with a force directly as their masses and inversely as the squares of their distances. In a word, gravity is the intrinsic nature of masses, it is an inalienable part of their existence. Thus whenever bodies gravitate, we are confronted with an act of spontaneity.

Attempts have been made to explain gravitation without the assumption of spontaneity, by the pressure of an atom-surrounding ether. But that only defers the question; for the spontaneity, in that case, would have to be placed in the ether. Whatever be the merits of the explanations of gravitation by a vis a tergo, we must recognise the fact that no motion can take place in the world, no pressure can be exercised, without there being somewhere some spontaneous something that moves or presses. Spontaneity is a universal feature of nature.

Mr. Peirce uses the term “spontaneity” in a different sense from ours. He identifies spontaneity with absolute chance. He means by it the irregularities that arise without cause, thus producing departures from law. We call that action spontaneous which is not due to external influence but springs from the nature of the things in action.

Spontaneous is derived from the Latin spons, “will,” which as a noun was obsolete at the classical period of Roman literature and occurred only in such forms as sponte, “of one’s own will, of one’s own accord.” If a man acts of his own will, free from and not biassed by the influence of other men, his action is spontaneous. A free man’s action is not arbitrary, unless arbitrariness[15] be the character of the man; it is not an exception to law; it is, if the character of the man is known, calculable in advance, for every free action is spontaneous: it springs immediately from the character of the man; it is the direct expression of his will; it reveals the nature of his very being, thus showing the man himself, and not something beyond or outside of him.

Taking the word spontaneity in this sense, we say: Masses gravitate spontaneously; they are self-moving; their motion is due to their gravity, and gravity is their intrinsic nature.

Exactly as the laws of mechanics explain the “how” of motions but not why there is motion at all, the “why” depending upon the nature of each moving body, so the “how” of the brain-motions is explicable by mechanical laws, but the “why” depends upon the nature of the moving material. The brain-atoms are possessed of the same spontaneity as the atoms of a gravitating stone. Yet there is present an additional feature; there are present states of awareness, and these states of awareness possess meaning, both of which are items which the chemist cannot find by chemical analysis. Neither states of awareness nor their meanings can be weighed on any scales, be they ever so delicate, nor are they determinable in foot-pounds.

Yet while mechanics is not applicable to mental facts, the realm of mentality is by no means to be surrendered to indeterminism. Mr. Peirce describes the domain of mind as the absence of law and the prevalence of absolute chance, of an indetermined and indeterminable sporting. This is not so. While the fact must be recognised that the nature of the mind is not something mechanical, its action is nevertheless determined by laws—not by mechanical laws, but by psychical and mental laws. These psychical and mental laws are in one respect of exactly the same nature as mechanical laws; they describe the samenesses of certain facts of reality. And the facts of the ideal domain of thought, the facts of subjectivity, are no less real than the grosser facts of mechanical motion, which are the facts of objectivity.

The term mechanical is often used in the sense of “lacking life or spirit” (“Century Dictionary,” p. 3679). This is justifiable in so far only as when we speak of mechanical phenomena we do not mean psychical or any other phenomena. It is true that that which makes this or that idea respond to a certain stimulus is not a mechanical but a mental quality, but the action itself, in so far as it is a motion, is and remains mechanical. Thus it happens that the laws of mechanics, far from being anti-spiritual, are the means by which we learn to understand and objectively to represent the action of mental phenomena.

In this connection attention may be called to the efforts of modern logicians to construct thinking machines which will perform the work of mental operations in a purely mechanical way. You propose the problem by adjusting certain indicators; then you turn the crank, and the machine does the rest. The results will come out with unfailing exactness.

The attempt made to construct thinking machines cannot as yet be called successful. Nevertheless they are not impossibilities. Calculating machines of various constructions are in practical use and doing satisfactory work, not only in addition and subtraction but also in multiplication and division, and even in extracting roots and in raising numbers to higher powers. Calculations are undoubtedly one kind of thought, and if calculations can be performed by machines, there is no theoretical reason why we should not be able to construct logical machines, which shall perform the operations of deductive and even of inductive thought with perfect accuracy.

CONCLUSION.

Determinism does not make freedom impossible and natural laws do not suppress the spontaneity of nature.

Natural laws are not a power forcing a certain mode of action upon things; they are not an oppression of nature. Natural laws are simply a description of nature as nature is. There is no “must” in nature in the sense of compulsion, as if there were two things, (1) a master (i. e. the law) giving a command, and (2) a slave (i. e. the single facts) obeying the command. The situation is not dualistic, but monistic. There is an “is” in nature, and this “is” is constant. There is a certain sameness in nature. In spite of all changes it remains the same; and thus even the apparent irregularities preserve throughout an unvarying consistency. The facts of nature express the character of nature; they are nature herself. Briefly, the “is” of nature (if we are permitted to personify her) does not describe that which nature must do, but that which nature wills to do; it describes how she acts spontaneously, of her own free will, in conformity with her innermost being and consistently with her permanent character.

The main difference that obtains between the actions of inanimate nature so-called and rational beings is not the absence and presence of spontaneity, (for spontaneity is in both,) but the absence and presence of mind: and mind is not only the subjectivity of existence; mind is not merely sentiency, i. e. the awareness of feelings; mind is the representative symbolism of subjectivity.

There are sufficient reasons to assume that all objective existence, which appears to us as matter in motion, possesses a subjectivity, the nature of which depends upon the mode of the interaction of its elements. This subjectivity appears in organised substance as feeling and develops naturally into mind.

The essence of nature, accordingly, is not materiality, but spirituality. Materiality is the character of nature as it affects sentient beings; but its innermost self, as it were, its subjectivity, its psychical aspect is revealed in the appearance of the spirit-life of rational beings—of minds.

While we fully recognise the spirituality of nature as nature’s innermost essence and as an ineradicable feature of reality, we cannot with Mr. Peirce place mind at the beginning of the world. There is a great difference between spirituality and mind. One is the source and condition of the other. One is permanent, the other is transient. One is the abstract view of a universal quality of the world, eternal and everlasting, as much indestructible as matter and energy; the other is an individual formation that originates, grows, and develops; that can be broken and built again; that dies with the body and rises again in new generations; that decays, as the foliage of the trees falls in winter, yet reappears, as the verdure reappears in spring; for the life of nature is immortal.

Mr. Peirce, regarding determinism as that view which does not recognise the freedom of will, has an original and in our conception a wrong view on the one hand of natural laws, which are to him mere habits acquired by the world, and on the other hand of chance, or arbitrary sportiveness, (i. e. that which is not determinable by law,) which he identifies with mind and with the spontaneity of freedom. Mind is to him the beginning of all. Mind remains mind, according to his view, so long as it is irregular, producing out of its own undetermined being sporadic effects without order or consistency. As soon as mind takes to habits, it grows mechanical; by creating regularity it disappears; and the result is matter in motion according to mechanical laws. Matter, accordingly, is said to be “effete mind.” Law in our view is the divinity of nature; according to Mr. Peirce it is the termination of nature’s irregularities: it comes to suppress her freedom and to supplant her mentality by mechanicalism. An element of pure chance, however, survives, which, appears in the free will of man, in miracles, and in nature’s irregularities, and this element of pure chance will remain until in the infinitely distant future, mind becomes crystallised into an absolutely perfect, rational, and symmetrical system. Such is in brief Mr. Peirce’s view of the rôle played by mind in the world-process.

Mr. Peirce’s views of chance and law seem to come to the rescue of certain theological dogmas, which represent the world-order as the product of a divine mind. We doubt very much whether Mr. Peirce’s position be tenable even from the standpoint of the scientific theologian. For the order of the world, as it appears in natural laws, must be, and is recognised even by the theist, as part and parcel of God’s eternal being. The scientist who formulates sub specie aeternitatis certain facts of nature, say the “how” of gravitating bodies, describes a certain quality of God himself; he describes something that is immutable, eternal, everlasting; it is not the whole of God, but it is certainly one feature of Jahveh, of that which is, was, and will be as it is.

In contradistinction to Mr. Peirce, we recognise, that the regularity of the whole is preserved in the specificalness of its individual particulars, that there are samenesses in this world of changes and diversities, and that if all reality is regarded as being essentially the same throughout, all the diversities and apparent irregularities can very well be explained as resulting from peculiar forms, combinations, and relations. Furthermore, we recognise that natural laws are compatible with the spontaneity of nature and that the necessity with which a free man acts according to his character, does not reverse his freedom of will.

Nature is self-acting throughout; nature is free; even inanimate nature is spontaneous. But a higher freedom rises with the appearance of mind. And there are degrees of this higher freedom which can be determined with great exactness, for they correspond to the range of the mentality of each creature. Mentality develops by the observation of samenesses, and it reaches rationality by the recognition of natural laws. The recognition of natural laws is a view of some natural phenomena in their eternal aspect, and we call them truths. So much is natural law and freedom interconnected that the recognition of natural laws widens the range of freedom; and obedience to them raises man out of his dependence upon his surroundings to a state of dominion over the creation in which he becomes the master of natural forces.

What a deep significance lies in the saying of the apostle: “The truth shall make you free!”

EDITOR.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] The adjective “like” is an abbreviation of “alike”; and “a-like” (M.E. alyke, A.S. gelic, O.H.G. galih, M.H.G. gelich, M.G. gleich) is a compound of the prefix a with lic body, shape, figure.

[11] I am satisfied that logical identity is intended to mean sameness. I suppose that the word identity, being Latin and a kind of international term, appeared to logicians preferable to the Saxon word “sameness” or the German “Gleichheit.” We need not look for any deeper reason for the adoption of the term.

[12] Knowing that Mr. Peirce is one of the most prominent contributors to the Century Dictionary, I may be pardoned for surmising that, perhaps with the exception of the parenthesised word “(supposed)” he is the author of this passage and very likely of most of the other quotations of philosophical terms we have adduced from the same source.

[13] Die Principien der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung by Johannes von Kries. See also Meinong’s review of the book (in Gött. gel Anz., No. 2, p. 56 et seqq.) and Ad. Nitsche’s article on the subject (in Vierteljahrsschrift für wiss. Phil. of 1892. XVI. 1, p. 26).

[14] By irregularity of detail we understand simply a lack of uniformity, but not exceptions to law. If irregularity be defined as exception to law, we should say, There is no irregularity in the world, while at the same time nothing is uniform: for every particle of the world is in its time and space relations and otherwise different from every other particle.

[15] Arbitrary, as used here, means capricious, uncertain, unreasonable. A man’s action is capricious if he is biassed by the present motive alone, without considering other motives which he would have under other circumstances. A deliberate man equalises, as it were, his actions by forming rules of conduct. An arbitrary man does not recognise rules or laws, made either by himself or by others.

LITERARY CORRESPONDENCE

I.

RECENT EVOLUTIONARY STUDIES IN GERMANY.

Since Darwin’s death, his theory, which in Germany more than elsewhere received its development, has but few decisive steps in advance to point to, even though the circle of its adherents has been enlarged and though in many respects and in special directions it has been rendered more complete and placed upon a firmer foundation. It is a gratifying fact, that most, if not all, of the recent discoveries in zoology, palæontology, and particularly in developmental history, are easily and completely reconcilable with the principles originally established; so that the views which we have reached on this subject have lost more and more the characters of a purely hypothetical fabric.

But the accurate investigations of developmental history have unquestionably furnished the most important material in proof of the theory in question, and the principles established in this department, in the main the results of the labors of German investigators (E. von Baer, Fritz Müller, E. Haeckel), have been verified in a truly surprising manner.

It is true that Darwin himself in no way undervalued the importance of the results of the studies in question, but how little the facts known at the time of the enunciation of his theory of natural selection sufficed, is most clearly proved by the fact that E. von Baer and Louis Agassiz, who at that time were perhaps the greatest authorities in embryology, assumed a hostile attitude towards the new Darwinian theory. Agassiz’s combination of the points of agreement of palæontology and embryology, his explanation of extinct forms as “prophetic types,” proved a veritable hindrance to the perception of the truth, and Carl Vogt, who was his co-worker at that time, appears to have been the last to set up any opposition to the “fundamental biogenetic principle,” that the development of the individual repeats in an abbreviated form the history of his race. Vogt, formerly the champion of advanced views, appears to-day as the leader of the small band of the opposition.

If we compare the recently published fourth edition of Haeckel’s Anthropogeny, 1891, and the eighth edition of his History of Creation, with the early editions, we cannot help remarking, with considerable astonishment, despite the enormous increase of fresh material, the fact that little in the old plans and principles of the work needs correction. Even the bold generalisations, the inference as to the identity of form of the original beginnings of all of the middle or higher classes of animals, the “Gastræa Theory” of Haeckel, at first so violently opposed, the stress laid upon the equivalence of the blastoderms in the various orders of animals, nay, even many of the animal genealogies, really only asserted as a working hypothesis, have stood the test beyond all expectation; although Du Bois-Reymond insinuated that the pedigrees of the heroes of Homer were more worthy of credit. To appreciate the complete victory of these ideas one need but refer to the discourse On Recapitulation in Embryology with which A. Milnes Marshall opened the meeting of the Biological Section of the British Natural History Society at Leeds, September, 1890.

The very conspicuous irregularities in the formation of organised bodies, which formerly were regarded as monstrosities, or as the freaks and riddles of the formative instinct, the hare-lips, the cleft palates, cases of microcephaly, etc., or the conspicuous want of symmetry in the physical structure of the plaice and sole, formerly made use of by Mivart and Schimper as unassailable counterproofs of Darwin’s doctrines, have shaped themselves into the most decisive verifications of his theory; as in fact, generally, a number of the most splendid evidences of the correctness of the theory have, as the result of exact investigations in organic evolution, proceeded from the most obstinate of its supposed difficulties. Thus, for example, as proof that birds are far removed from the other classes of vertebrates, the circumstance had been cited that certain parts connected with the visual organs are in them situated at the side of the brain, instead of on the dorsal surface, as is the case with the other vertebrates. But a more exact observation has shown that this variation in formation is a secondary result, since in each previous period of development these same organs in the young birds lie, exactly as in the case of the other vertebrates, on the dorsal surface, and only shortly before leaving the egg do they move downward to the sides. In many cases where the development of parts preservable in fossil conditions is under consideration, as for instance portions of the skeleton, the hard integuments, and the teeth, a direct proof may, by comparison, be furnished of the truth of the fact of the correspondence of the embryological formations of living animals with the final and permanent forms of their extinct representatives, a fact which was indeed acknowledged by Agassiz and Vogt, but completely misunderstood. We need only to recall to mind the exact parallelism which Alexander Agassiz and Neumayer have demonstrated to exist in the case of echinoderms, Huxley, Marsh, and others in the formation of the wings of birds, the pelvis of birds, or the hoofs of horses, in order to stamp this view as one that cannot be refuted.

Nevertheless, those opposed to this view, as Carl Vogt, His, Heufen, and others, have not abandoned their position as a hopeless one, and in recent years have relied particularly upon those cases which Haeckel, and before him, Fritz Müller, characterised as a falsification (cenogenesis[16]) or a supplementary alteration and abbreviation of the natural process of development. “Nature is no falsifier,” these opponents proclaim with emphasis, and everything it does is correct and true, and “this false heart alone brings untruth and deceit into the true heaven,” they cry with Wallenstein. People who rely on verbal sophistries merely betray thereby their want of valid counter-arguments. A mala fides on the part of nature can of course never be the subject of discussion among reasonable beings, but a deviation in the process of development of certain varieties from the typical path of the development of the remaining varieties of the species, is felt as a falsification by every investigator who has thoroughly studied the regular processes, for the reason that it has a tendency to obscure the original facts. Thus, for example, in the embryos of certain vertebrates the æsophagus is temporarily completely closed, as Balfour has observed in young sharks, Bles and Marshall in frogs; and this state of affairs may well be considered as a falsification, since an animate being with a closed æsophagus is a natural contradiction, which can never have existed and here happens as a supplementary and temporary process.

As a rule such deviations from the normal course may be classified as consequences of a prolonged residence of the animal germs in the egg or in the womb, the result of which is that owing to the presence of an abundant quantity of nourishing yolk, or through direct connection with the circulatory system of the mother, they in the early stages of their development are relieved of the necessity of acquiring nourishment through their own efforts, and therefore all the contrivances necessary to that purpose may be dispensed with. For this reason we find the primitive processes of development, as Professor Sollas has lately shown, most frequently preserved in marine animals which have never changed nor abandoned their element in the course of the history of their species, in the case of which, therefore, no occasion could ever have arisen for supplementary changes in the process of their development. Much more frequently do we meet with this change in the case of fresh-water animals, for often the rapid currents of their elements, for example a river, will not suffer these to leave the egg in any very helpless larval condition, and in addition fresh water is subject to other unfavorable changes, as the drying up of streams. Also the larvæ of carnivorous animals, which from the very beginning of independent life need more strength to acquire their means of existence, are so completely developed in the richly provisioned eggs in which they take their form, that they emerge therefrom in an almost perfected state of being, as, for example, young sharks and cephalopods. In this kind of animal life, as well as in the case of forms which are brought forth alive from the parent, although they see the light of day much later, comparatively, there takes place not only a great abbreviation of the first stages of existence in the entering upon a more direct path of development, but also changes occur in the form of the original designs because of the limitation of room due to the presence of yolk in the egg, the reason for which is easy to perceive. In many other cases the mechanical cause of the change in development can be directly recognised; for example, in the case of, the tree-toad of the Antilles (Hylodes marticinensis), which, owing to the absence of pools lasting through the dry season, is obliged of necessity to remain in the egg during its tadpole stage, that is to say, to skip this stage, as it were; for which reason the formation of external gills in its case is entirely omitted.

The explanation of the origin of new organs seemed at first to afford an insuperable difficulty to the Darwinian theory, since, as Mivart objected, it was not possible to perceive how natural selection could be able to effect the formation of new organs unless they executed corresponding functions from the very beginning. This difficulty, however, has been completely overcome by the theory of altered functions (Functionswechsel) which was first proposed by Dorhn, and particularly in recent years by Kleinenberg. According to this theory, in all these cases we have simply to deal with a gradual change in form of already existing organs, which, originally being used to perform one set of functions, are modified so as to perform another. Thus the later developed organs of mastication and the feelers of insects were originally organs of locomotion, legs; and these in the still earlier stages of creeping motion performed appropriate functions as the crooked appendages of the body-rings. The wings of birds were, in their progenitors, forelegs; the tongue of air-breathing vertebrates originated from the fish-bladder, which before that was chiefly an organ of swimming.

The knowledge thus acquired of the natural connection of the processes of evolution also explains, according to Kleinenberg, why organs which are at present completely useless, must yet necessarily appear in the formation of the embryo; for example, the gill-openings in the higher classes of vertebrates, which have no functions to perform at any stage of vertebral development, and which furnished Meckel the first intimation of the fundamental biogenetic law. But as soon as it was explained that the gill-openings furnished the foundation of the development of later-appearing organs with actual functions to perform, it was rendered clear why they should continually recur; namely, because they form the indispensable links of a chain which extends from the dim past of the type in question down to the present time.

There is no doubt that profounder researches in evolutionary history will furnish still more important results: for instance, the more perfect elucidation of the pedigree of mammals; for in this province even our domestic animals are not sufficiently investigated. Every new effort in this direction, for example the recent work of Klever on the evolution of the teeth of the horse, and other investigations concerning the formation of special organs, has invariably shown that much in this field yet remains to be discovered. We have only to recall to mind the recent investigations relating to the development of the pineal gland, which in the last decennium have also led to the discovery of a rudimentary occipital eye, which seems to have actually existed and performed functions in numerous early representatives of the vertebrates, but to-day is simply a fact of history, and has given rise to an organ which Descartes considered as the seat of the soul. We may here also refer to the recent investigations concerning the earlier developmental stages of the duckbills, which have completely confirmed what the theory asserted in advance and required; namely, that they fill the vacancy between the egg-laying reptiles and the mammalia which bring forth their young alive.

Only a few years ago Carl Vogt vehemently opposed the opinion of the duckbills being transitional types, and sought to explain their inferior stage of organisation, which is also evidenced in their low blood temperature, as the results of a stunting process (degeneration, so called). They formed a degenerated branch of marsupials, nothing more. Later, the remarkable yet long anticipated fact was revealed by Haacke and Caldwell, 1884, that the duckbills are egg-laying mammals, a character which certainly could not have been acquired through degeneration, but which simply shows that they are closely related to extinct reptilian forms. In one other respect, namely, with regard to their supply of teeth, the process of degeneration must indeed be admitted. On this point, Poulton and Thomas discovered a few years ago that in their early stages they really do possess true teeth, which, however, just as in the case of certain carnivorous cetacea, later completely disappear, and are replaced by a sort of horny teeth. This, however, is really not a true degeneration, but rather a special adaptation, doubtless beneficial to the animal in some way or other; and with as little reason as we may regard birds as a degenerated race in comparison with their progenitors, because they have lost the numerous teeth which these possessed, with just as little reason can we hold that the duckbills, in their general organisation, have suffered any retrogression worth mentioning. On the contrary, the recent investigations of Marsh and Lemoine concerning the mammals of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods point more and more distinctly to the conclusion, that there existed among these mammals a very large number which possessed the same degree of organisation as the duckbills of to-day, now represented by only a few species; a supposition which the adherents of the theory of evolution made twenty-five years ago. I do not know that the pedigrees of the heroes of Homer have been so well preserved!

In many other directions, however, speculation of late years in Germany has considerably digressed from the facts of experience and from all probability; especially with reference to the questions of propagation, variation, and heredity. Here, first of all, are to be mentioned the works of Weismann, Ueber die Continuität des Keimplasmas (1885), Die Bedeutung der sexuellen Fortpflanzung für die Selectionstheorie (1886), Der Rückschritt in der Natur (1886), Die Bedeutung der Richtungskörperchen für die Vererbungstheorie (1887), Die Hypothese der Vererbung von Verletzungen (1889), and Ueber Amphimixis (1891).

If we revert to the beginnings of this movement we shall find that it is intimately connected with the more exact study of the processes of fecundation as perfected through the researches of Strassburger, the Hertwigs, and other investigators. In connection with the ideas of Nägeli concerning the so-called idioplasm, the notion was reached that the matter determinative of heredity was contained in the nucleoli, and that by the union of the paternal and maternal nucleoli the sum-total of the parental hereditary tendencies is transmitted to the offspring. This view was to a certain degree verified by the experiments of the brothers Hertwig in removing the nucleoli of the eggs of the sea-urchin; the result being that eggs containing the nucleoli alone, furnished, through artificial impregnation, results resembling the female parent, whereas eggs from which the nucleoli had been removed, furnished germs completely corresponding to the traits of the male parent.

Other processes of fecundation, to which we shall soon recur, had since 1876 produced the impression in the minds of a number of naturalists that the germ-material led an independent life in the bodies of organisms, that it possessed only an internal development, and required from the body nothing but nourishment in order to multiply itself, and to develop its internal powers uninfluenced by the various vicissitudes of the body. In the year 1876 Gustav Jaeger in Germany, and Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, almost at the same time in England, called attention to the observation made some time previously, that in certain animals, particularly in insects, the development of the egg into the young offspring begins with the withdrawal of a small portion of the germ from the component substance of the embryo, which remains at first unchanged and only later multiplies. This observation was generalised and accepted. At the commencement of every sexual multiplication the germ-substance, after impregnation, is divided into two parts, according to its future purpose; an ontogenetic or personal part, out of which the body is built up, and a phylogenetic or germinal part, which at first is stored up unused in the individual, but later furnishes new germ-cells. This idea led Weismann to his view of the continuity of the germ-plasm, which forms an unbroken line of descent from the first beginnings of the species and which is simply nourished by the organisms in which it has its temporary abode. From this germ-plasm spring secondarily the cells that go to make up the body (soma); but from these soma-cells no new germ-cells can originate, and consequently none of its inherent or adscititious qualities are capable of transmission. The somatic cells make up the mortal and perishable forms of life, while the germ-cells alone insure the further existence and immortality of the race.

It is easy to perceive that these views, if they could be maintained, would completely transform the Darwinian theory. Since, if the somatic cells, that is, the body-parts of animals and plants, with all their adaptations to soil and climate, to definite modes of life, etc., are to be deprived of every power to transmit hereditary characters, then the so-called Lamarckian theory, which should really bear the name of Erasmus Darwin, would be deprived of every foundation which it possesses. Neither the increase in strength of the members of the body, acquired by use and practice, nor their weakness created by their non-use could be inherited; and in just as small a degree could changes caused by external influences, bodily injuries, sickness, entail consequences which were inheritable. This being the case, then also all those views would be untenable which seek to explain the important effects of time as the result of the accumulation and augmentation of the minute impressions of the external environment. If the variations which are generated by means of external influences are not capable of transmission, then the direct adaptation must commence at the beginning in the case of every following generation; an accumulation is impossible.

We can observe, however, in every particular case, the complete harmony in which every living being exists with its surroundings and mode of life; and observe in closely related species the most various adaptations to the elements in which they live: climate, food, nay, even to the particular companions with which they associate; with the result that many plants have shaped the structure of their flowers to conform to the physical anatomy of the insect which ordinarily effects their fertilisation, and that animals assume the figure and form of some associate who is safe from hostile assaults, or even completely adopt different modes of life where it is necessary to enter a life-partnership with a strange animal or plant. But, granting that the most widely extended capability of adaptation is a thing of daily experience, there still arises the question how we shall explain this quality, which can only be brought about by slow degrees, without taking into account the factor of heredity in the transmission of acquired qualities. The theory of Weismann attempts this, in that it takes for granted an infinite variability in the germ-formative materials, and guides the new forms and variations thus begotten into the really true path, that is, into the most successful paths, through the process of natural selection (that is, through the survival of the fittest as regards environment and all other things). According to this doctrine, external circumstances have no direct influence whatever upon the variation of species, as Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, and the founder of the theory of natural selection and all his followers up to that time supposed, but we have to have recourse to a pure theory of natural selection, and call to our aid an, even now, rather obscure phenomenon, occurring in connection with sexual impregnation, which has been called “the expulsion of the polar bodies,” an extrusion of minute qualities of germ-plasm from the germ-cells while in union. By the processes of crossing, which continually recur, a vast number of the most manifold hereditary tendencies are united in the germ-material. Then certain of these are ejected, so that others acquire supremacy; and in this manner the way is opened for the origination of a vast number of possible combinations. In this way the path is clear to a theory of perfect mechanical variability, in which the germ-material has only to transmit the characters which spontaneously arise in it, and yet affords an investigator endowed with any imagination the possibility of understanding the origin of the great variety and final purpose of the world. It is Frohschammer’s “principle of the imagination as the creator of the world” translated into comprehensible formulæ. The simplicity thus reached by the elimination of all direct influences from the external world, has won the adherency of many investigators following in Darwin’s steps, particularly in England; but whilst Wallace, Galton, Ray Lankester, and others have expressed their full assent to it, other and not less eminent authorities, as Herbert Spencer, Haeckel, Fritz Müller, and Virchow, have emphatically rejected it.

The reasons in favor of this assumption are, as is indeed the whole view itself, mainly of a theoretical nature; the arguments of the opposition are divided into philosophical and experiential propositions. The philosophical opposition is mainly based on the fact that, from the very beginning, there is assigned to the germ-material, as it unceasingly continues its existence, an infinite variety of capacities which the external world cannot affect, and that all progress and advancement takes place as the result of the loss of the originally endowed powers and tendencies. On this theory a family of acrobats or race-horses would not acquire their powers through the gradual augmentation by practice of their feats of skill and endurance, but because these powers were originally resident in them, and every factor incompatible with them was gradually eliminated. On the other hand, these views approach in a dangerous degree to the theories of predestination and preformation, the overthrow of which has been justly regarded as one of the greatest advances of science.

Still more important must be considered the objections of empirical science, which up to this time was completely convinced of the heredity of acquired qualities. Popular experience, as well as that of physicians, universally speaks of inherited disease-germs, and in certain cases, particularly in mental diseases, physicians are so thoroughly convinced of their inheritability that the first question put to the relatives of such sufferers usually is whether the disease has ever appeared in the parents or family of the patient. This fact is so deeply grounded in the general belief, that the modern naturalistic school of novelists, the school of Zola, Ibsen, and their associates, are wont to devote their main efforts to the problem of inherited evils. Now the inheritability of certain evil conditions, even though proved, would not by any means be an absolute disproof of Weismann’s theory; for, inclined as much as we may be to derive diseases from mistakes and sins against a natural mode of life, such as colds, drunkenness, dissipation, mental and bodily over-exertion, we yet cannot deny a priori that blastogenic diseases, or diseases originating in the germ-plasm, may exist, which without any doubt would then be transmissible. It also does not lie beyond the realms of possibility that congenital malformations, such as hare-lips, supernumerary fingers, and the defects which show a remarkable disposition to heredity, fall into this category. These blastogenic germs of disease would then, of course, have to be distinguished from the somatogenic diseases (or the diseases produced in the body by external causes), which never could be inherited.

From this point of view the question as to the hereditary consequences of external injuries has given rise to great efforts to prove experimentally the truth of this belief, which has existed for centuries. In almost every part of the globe we meet with the assertion that hornless cattle, such, for example, as are bred in South America, or the tailless cats of the Isle of Man, or other domestic animals with similar deficiencies, are descended from a progenitor which lost its horns or its tail through disease or other mishap. Since now, recently, similar assertions have again been put forward to the effect that tailless cats are found among the descendants of feline progenitors who have been robbed of their posterior ornaments by an act of violence, and these cases have been discussed in connection with the pangenesis theory of Darwin, according to which each part of the body is believed to supply material contributions to the germ-plasm, Weismann determined to institute experiments on this point. He started the breeding of white mice whose tails were regularly cut off, without finding as a result, from among 840 young ones derived from such mutilated progenitors, a single one having a malformation or missing tail. However, even this experiment cannot be regarded as an absolute proof, as it at first view might seem, and the negative result was foreseen by the writer of these lines. It is a clear conclusion that if in the case of many vertebrates, for example, salamanders and lizards, as well as in the case of most invertebrates, missing limbs and tails are renewed in the course of their lifetime, it would indeed be very remarkable if their renewal should not take place, at least in the case of the complete rejuvenation of new birth.

Darwin himself had concluded, from his own experience and that of others, that injuries and similar inflicted acts of violence are the cause of hereditary consequences only in cases where they bring about some long-continued and wasting disease, and thus produce some permanent effect on the bodily constitution. For this reason, especially injuries to main nerve-tracts in parts near the centres are readily accompanied by hereditary consequences, because they interfere with the nutrition of the members supplied by them. Brown-Séquard has observed in a great number of cases of guinea pigs whose nerve-roots he had severed, that the offspring of the animals operated upon developed diseases of the eyes, ears, and other organs which conformed regularly to the character of the operation, and could therefore be predicted; and also noted malformations and deficiencies, amounting even to the complete disappearance of the eye-balls, such as never arise or have been observed in these animals without violent interference. His positive results regarding the hereditability of the evil consequences of disturbing operations have a decided advantage in numbers and scope over the negative results of Weismann; and it is not clear how the belief in the non-hereditability of somatic conditions will accommodate itself to them.

But if conditions of the body produced by such sudden interferences have under certain circumstances entailed hereditary consequences, how much more should we expect this same result from slowly effected constitutional changes, which external influences, working uninterruptedly for hundreds of years, bring about in an organism which has been transported into a new element, into new surroundings, or into a different climate. Not at all infrequently does the coming together and union of two new organisms beget hereditary changes which can be explained only through the direct influence of the one upon the other. Thus, for example, in the case of plants in hot countries which are protected against the assaults of leaf-devouring ants by body-guards of smaller ants, and also in species of quite different families, as, for example, in Cecropia of the order Euphorbiaceæ, and in some Triplaris species among the Polygonaceæ, we find little chambers, approachable through small openings in the stems, which serve the ants protecting the plants as dwelling and breeding places. Are we to believe now, in regard to this fact, that these plants, so different in their nature, have produced through voluntary variations the stems which contain these openings, or are we to believe we have to deal here with openings acquired through inheritance which originally were bored in the stems by the ants at the most appropriate points? Surely the first conclusion, which would uphold Weismann’s theory, has but a very slight degree of probability in its favor, whilst the latter, which would overthrow his view, is very highly probable. And such examples could be cited in great numbers.

It is also to be remembered that the power of variation is not exhibited solely in sexually created individuals, as it should be according to Weismann’s theory, but frequently also in non-sexual multiplication, where no amphimixis (mingling) occurs. It is well known that the majority of the sporting varieties of our trees, for example, Fagus sanguinea, and the so-called weeping varieties, that is, abnormal varieties with pendent twigs, forms with split, spotted, or white leaves, are wont first to appear on single branches of old trees, in which the continuity of the protoplasm unquestionably existed, but no amphimixis or extrusion of the polar bodies took place. It is also the generally received opinion of naturalists that the lowest classes of animal and plant life are universally multiplied by non-sexual means. And if this is so, it is not clear how higher forms which sexually propagate can be derived from them, if the latter have originally to furnish the fundamental conditions of variation. The adherents of Neo-Darwinism will, accordingly, have to furnish many additional facts if they wish to invest their theory with any degree of probability.

CARUS STERNE.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] Cenogenesis, from κενός, empty, fruitless (and γένεσις, birth); not from κοινός, common, the derivatives of which are sometimes written “c_e_no.”—ED.

II.

FRANCE.

The study of personality, from the point of view of pathological psychology, has already supplied us with numerous books. M. ALFRED BINET, in his fine work, Les Altérations de la Personnalité, has undertaken to present systematically to us these alterations in their entirety, while restricting himself to ascertained results, and avoiding disputed points. He exhibits to us the “dismemberment of the ego” in diseased states, the frequent rupture of that “unity of consciousness” which is the principal attribute of the normal individual.

Clinical observation has established the existence in certain subjects of successive personalities, and in others that of co-existing personalities; the experiences of suggestion have at last allowed of analogous morbid phenomena being provoked, in such a manner that cases may be varied and rendered still more instructive. The simple movements provoked in normal persons in states of distraction, of which many very curious examples may be found in M. Binet’s book, are the recognised mark of a subconsciousness; but it is often possible, under the same conditions and with the same processes, to provoke in a hypnotisable hysteric individual an actual sub-personality, that is to say, to augment the phenomena which attentive observers have long since remarked in every-day life.

It cannot be doubted that, on the one hand, it is possible to produce in an insensible limb a great variety of subconscious actions, and all sorts of reactions; and when they are recorded by the graphic method, it is perceived that with the fingers of his insensible hand, the subject has made movements the form of which varies according to the receiving apparatus (the dynamograph, drum, pencil, etc.). These movements thus exhibit the truly psychological marks of adaptation, and seem to reveal the existence of an intelligence which is other than that of the ego of the subject, and which acts without his assistance and even unknown to him.

On the other hand, numerous experiences of very different kinds show that the subject whose anæsthetic arm, for example, is pricked, can have an idea of the stimulation, although he does not perceive it. He does not feel the prickings, but the excitation calls forth the idea of their number: he counts them as a normal individual would do; “only, in hysterical individuals, the first part of the process occurs in one consciousness, and the second in another.”[17]

It can hardly be denied that these different consciousnesses are distinct; since experience proves that each can have its own perceptions, its own memory, and even a moral character. However, their relative value with respect to each other matters little. We are compelled to consider, with M. Ribot, the ego as a “coördination” of states of consciousness, admitting of infinitely variable groupings. According to the old conception of the ego, the personality, with respect to secondary consciousnesses, was compared to a coachman who had ceased to have control over his horses. This comparison is now insufficient, since it may happen that the coachman falls asleep on the box, and that one of the horses then governs the set, regulating, more or less perfectly, the pace of the others by its own gait. Spiritualists, however, will never consent to put the ego in the place of the coachman. “A stone detached from the complex structure of the personality,” M. Binet now tells us, “can become the starting point of a new structure, which rises rapidly by the side of the old. Whereupon a disaggregation of the psychological elements is produced.” This comparison is certainly more precise and more in accordance with facts.

Moreover, there remains to be explained how the mental compound which constitutes the ego has been constructed from its elements. M. Binet shows, à propos of this question, that the association of ideas is powerless to explain the genesis of personality; associations alone, as proved by the experiences of suggestion, are not sufficient to restore forgotten memories. Neither is memory the sole factor in personality; since, in certain conditions a person may, while preserving the consciousness and the memory of certain of his mental states, nevertheless repudiate these mental states and consider them as foreign to himself.

This question is still an open one. But there exist certainly some grounds for our seeking in the division of consciousness the key to certain psychological facts, like unconscious cerebration. Such a key would be the action of detached consciousnesses and detached memories, that afterwards immediately enter the current of general consciousness. Finally, “it is possible,” as M. Binet says in conclusion, “that consciousness may be the privilege of certain of our psychic acts; it is possible also that it exists everywhere in our organism, and it may be even that it accompanies every manifestation of life.”

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In his new work, Agnosticisme, M. DE ROBERTY studies with special care the position of modern doctrines with regard to the unknown, the great x of philosophic speculations—God, Idea, Matter, Noumenon or Unknowable. Although perhaps a little hastily written, and somewhat obscure, his book nevertheless enforces conviction. “Our conception of the world,” says M. de Roberty, “embraces solely the things that we know (feel, perceive, imagine, analyse, compare, etc.), and does not comprise the least jot or tittle of what we do not know. For us, therefore, there can be no question of any relations except between two classes of known elements: that which constitutes the object of scientific research, and that which is outside of science. The latter class represents our unknown, which is always relative and purely human.” Here, indeed, we have the true point of view, that which we shall all reach, though perhaps at first unknown to ourselves; and I shall be much surprised if the philosophers do not at last decide to wipe out the formidable Unknowable set up by Spencer as the ultimate entity. We shall speak no more of the fathomless universe, but of the still unexplored universe; of the unknown, not of the unknowable.

There is, however, another aspect of the question. Let us suppose the unknown got rid of; or to be more precise,—and if we regard with M. de Roberty the psychic centres as special receivers in which the cosmical energy empties itself, resolving itself into sensation and idea, and from whence it spreads itself anew as motion,—let us suppose that we have summed up all the energies received and emitted, and verified the law which reduces memory to the conservation of energy; let us suppose in fine that philosophy shall have found in the ego the synthesis of the non-ego, expressed “in symbolic abbreviations and in signs,” and shall have realised the “logical monism” which reduces things to their ideas: would the intellect—and would the sensibility—even then be completely satisfied? Can we conceive a state in which the curiosity of man as to all that concerns himself will be at rest, and when he will cease to be disquieted about the cause of suffering and of life? Kant long ago propounded this question. But, according to M. de Roberty, the thinker who is “a prey to the afflux of emotion referred to by Kant,” the man “given over to the desire for another kind of knowledge than that of experience,” are, in the category of intellectual emotions, diseased and “perverted” persons. “The sentiments, so varied in aspect and in strength, which inspire us,” writes he, “the contemplation of the unknown, determine the mental illusion which materialises, so to say, our ignorance and transforms the unknown into the unknowable.”

Would it be inconsistent, however, to preserve the emotion of the unknown without “materialising” it, without pronouncing any dangerous scientific ignorabimus? M. de Roberty does not accept this situation,—which was that of Littré. I do not know whether any one will discover the “vaccine,” as he calls it, “of the pessimist emotion which has produced agnosticism or latent religiosity.” If this constitutes a mental malady, I fear much that it will be incurable. As long as there is unhappiness in life, there will also be unsatisfied curiosity, and for a very long time to come, inquietude.

* * * * *

The last publication of LOMBROSO and LASCHI, Le Crime politique et les Revolutions, par rapport au droit, à l’anthropologie criminelle et à la science du gouvernement (Political Crime and Revolutions, in their Relation to Law, Criminal Anthropology, and the Science of Government) of which we here have a French translation, is, I will not say, the worst written, but the most confused work imaginable. Its arrangement is clear, but its examples are given without any order whatever. The facts presented are abundant, but they are taken rather too much at haphazard, and often too uncritically. The worst is that its very thesis is weak, badly formulated or elusive in places. What a pity it is that so much erudition should be expended, and so many valuable data be brought together without better success in displaying to the best advantage these riches, and also, let me say, without so many times having had occasion to appear so clearly in the wrong! M. Lombroso remains unmoved, unfortunately, in his high sounding and unqualified hypothesis of “diseased genius.” He continues to develop it and to defend it in this latest book of his, which is replete with instructive details, and which is undoubtedly the first considerable attempt at an etiology of revolutions and of political crime.

The complex doctrine of Lombroso could be sufficiently summed up, if I am not mistaken, by uniting word to word—by the mathematical sign of equality—philoneism (or the love of novelties) with the revolutionary spirit, the revolutionary spirit with genius, genius with insanity, insanity with criminality, and criminality, finally, with progress. But what a detestable thing progress would then be! We should have to protect ourselves against it as we do against a pestilence. The evolution of societies does not take place without great waste and loss, as we all know. It should be carefully shown what these losses are. The study of the conditions of social progress ought to be made in greater detail than is here found. The terms of the imagined equation, which here hovers before our eyes, should in fine, if any comparison is to be effected between them, be subjected to a much more exact quantitative and qualitative analysis.

For example, let us take genius. Of what kinds of genius does Lombroso speak? It seems to be sufficient for him that a man has attracted attention, and made himself talked about, to entitle him to be called great, while perhaps he is only a blusterer, a braggart, a servile imitator, a mere homunculus. In this way the quantity of geniuses and talented individuals he has unearthed is something extraordinary. The result of this is a radical error in his tables of the distribution of geniuses. The superiority that he attributes, in this respect, to certain of our southern departments, as compared with the Norman departments, for example, would have to be reversed if we considered the relative quality and kind of the genius involved. For the same reason, the relation established between genius and republican modes of government is undoubtedly not so precise and simple as is stated. But the worst of it is that in thus augmenting the number of men of genius, it is found that we have, in consequence of the above mentioned equation, also increased the number of the demented and the degenerate!

If, moreover, it is true that the conservative mind, with less genius, insanity, and criminality, is evidence of the senility of the race, how can we accept the thesis that genius and the spirit of innovation are also absolute evidence of a neurasthenic condition? Shall we deny sound nerves to robust and vigorous youth? This, indeed, is not what Lombroso wished to assert. Yet the famous thesis always confronts us: Latet anguis in herba. The least sign of degeneracy is enough for him to brand a man, and not only are all geniuses in his eyes unbalanced, but even the insane are without any ado baptised geniuses; with the result that all is heaped together in one great mass—genius, insanity, and spirit of revolution.

I shall not dwell any longer on these criticisms. They are simply intended as an admonition to the learned M. Lombroso against the allurements of a badly founded theory, and against the dangers arising from a too hasty preparation of his books. Whatever may be its defects, he has at least brought together in his present book many ideas. I advise all to read with care what he says about women (and how many will find him misoneistic on this point!), concerning their great influence in rebellions, which are always barren of results, and their impotence in revolutions, which are always productive of good. In the second part of his work, namely, in the section entitled Juridical and Political Applications, nearly all he says is to be commended. I agree with the authors—or I do not wish to forget M. Laschi—as to what they tell us in relation particularly to pettifogging parlementarianism and public instruction. Their conclusions are perhaps not connected with the thesis in any very intimate manner. But this is not of much consequence, as they possess an independent value of their own.

* * * * *

In a previous communication I referred to the work of Savvas-Pacha on Musulman jurisprudence. I have now to announce a work entitled Souvenirs du Monde musulman, by M. CH. MISMER, (published by Hachette,) the fourth and last volume of a valuable series which is greatly deserving of attention. M. Mismer, who has lived a long time in the East—at Constantinople, in Crete, and in Egypt—and was acquainted with the leading personages of the Empire, does not hesitate to return here to the theory which he set forth more than twenty years ago in his Soirées de Constantinople, his theory, namely, of the social advantages, and even the superiority, of Islamism over Christianity; subject however to the special worth of the races which belong to either of these two forms of religion. This opinion is not lightly uttered, and it will appear the more striking in view of the present crisis of social and moral decomposition which is now spreading throughout the western nations.

In the work of M. Mismer will be found some of the great and striking qualities of the observing and thoughtful mind. In connection with a special problem of great importance in public instruction, that of heredity, I shall call to the attention of my readers the following statement, made with reference to the young men of the “Egyptian Mission” in France, directed by M. Mismer for ten years. “The capacity of a pupil,” says he, “was always found to be intimately connected with the cerebral culture of his ancestors and the faculties constituting the superiorities of his race.” “It was the same,” adds he, “from the moral standpoint.” Undoubtedly, if M. Mismer had taken the pains to make a note of the facts summed up in his statement, and to present the full case of the numerous pupil’s that he has had under his care, he would have been able to furnish science with data of the greatest value. Let us at least receive his lessons as he offers them to us. They are the fruit of the experience of a “man of action,” and it speaks well for an observation that it has rendered good service in practice.

LUCIEN ARRÉAT.

FOOTNOTES:

[17] The hypothesis of the division of consciousness explains, consequently, much better than that of the motive force of mental images, the facts of automatic writing (spiritism). [The works of Binet, Roberty, and Lombroso are published by Alcan.]

CRITICISMS AND DISCUSSIONS.

COMTE AND TURGOT.

To the Editor of The Monist:

Your “note of inquiry” mentioned on p. 611 of the last Monist is answered in full by Littré in Auguste Comte et la Philosophie Positive, where Turgot’s name heads the third chapter. He shows that the latter discovered the law of the three stages, theological, metaphysical, and positive, by the following quotation from his Histoire des progrès de l’esprit humain.

“While the connection between physical effects was yet unknown, nothing was more natural than to suppose that they were produced by intelligent beings, invisible and resembling ourselves; for what else could they have resembled? Everything that happened without the intervention of man, had its god, whose worship was soon established by fear or hope, and this worship was conceived in accordance with the deference accorded powerful men; for the gods were only more powerful men and more or less perfect according as they were the product of an age more or less enlightened as to the true perfections of humanity. When philosophers had recognised the absurdity of these fables, without however having obtained true light upon natural history, they imagined an explanation of the causes of phenomena by abstract expressions, such as essences and faculties: expressions that nevertheless explained nothing and that were reasoned about as if they had been beings, new divinities substituted for the old ones. These analogies were followed out, and faculties were multiplied to account for each effect. It was only very late, in observing the mechanical action that bodies have upon one another, that other hypotheses were drawn from this mechanics, (de cette mécanique) which mathematics could develop and experience verify.”

Littré calls attention to “the great sureness of judgment” that led Turgot to cite only physical phenomena when he spoke of those that had ceased to be interpreted either theologically or metaphysically. “When he wrote this passage, positivity (I use this word, a necessary creation of M. Comte’s) was only beginning to reach chemical phenomena and had not yet attained those of biology and sociology.”

But, says Littré, “after reserving the rights of priority for this eminent thinker, there is nothing to prevent M. Comte from keeping all the part that he had made himself and that belongs to him. Three principal points mark Comte’s independence of Turgot. The latter saw in the conception nothing more than an idea to meditate upon; Comte saw in it a sociological law; Turgot did not attach to it a sketch of human development; Comte developed with the aid of this law the whole historical series; Turgot did not perceive that he held one of the necessary elements of a philosophy; Comte, in the same flight of thought, went from history become science to philosophy become positive. The sociological law, isolated in Turgot, makes part, in Comte, of a vast whole: there were therefore two independent creations. Either M. Comte had not read Turgot, or, more probably, he had read him at a time when this passage, which to-day awakens attention, had no particular significance.”

The fourth chapter in Littré’s Life of Comte has for heading the names of Kant and Condorcet. The whole of the former’s remarkable sketch of general history is given and reference is made to the letter in chap. viii, where Comte, in 1824, being twenty-six years old, says to M. d’Eichthal, his former pupil, “I have read and reread with infinite pleasure Kant’s little treatise; it is prodigious for the epoch, and if I had known it six or seven years sooner it would have saved me trouble. I am delighted that you have translated it; it can contribute very efficaciously to preparing minds for positive philosophy. Its general conception or at least its method is still metaphysical, but the details show the positive spirit at every instant. I had always regarded Kant not only as a very strong head, but as the metaphysician that approaches the nearest to positive philosophy. But this reading has greatly fortified and especially given precision to my conviction in that regard. If Condorcet had had knowledge of this writing, which I do not believe, very little merit would remain to him, since he can pretend only to that of the conception, which is almost as firm and, in some respects, even clearer in Kant. As for me, after this reading I can find in myself, up to the present time, no other value than that of having systematised and fixed the conception that had been sketched by Kant unknown to me, which I owe chiefly to a scientific education; and even the most positive and distinct step that I have taken after him, seems to me only the discovery of the law of the passage of human ideas through the three stages, theological, metaphysical, and scientific; a law that appears to me to be the foundation of the work whose execution Kant has counselled. I thank my lack of erudition to-day; for if my work, such as it is now, had been preceded by a study of Kant’s treatise, it would have lost much of its value in my eyes. I conceive now, as you said, that, for the German philosophers that are familiar with this treatise, my work will really have a great effect only with the second part.” This work was a short one reprinted in Saint-Simon’s Catéchisme des industriels and called “A System of Positive Politics.” It had been inserted two years before, under the title of “A Plan of the Work Necessary for the Reorganisation of Society,” in a pamphlet of Saint-Simon’s, without Comte’s name, and it was because the latter insisted, this time, upon an acknowledgment of his authorship that Saint-Simon broke with him. The “second part,” which was to produce the great effect upon the German philosophers, never appeared; or rather, it soon grew to be the Course of Positive Philosophy, begun on the 2d of April, 1826, before Humboldt, Blainville, and other celebrated listeners.

The term positive philosophy had long been used by Saint-Simon and his school, Comte among the rest, not in the special sense that the latter now gave it, but as a “generic name for the whole of science.” The first use of the words as we now understand them is in a letter from Comte to M. d’Eichthal, dated Aug. 5, 1824. “I cannot help recalling your judicious reflection upon the influence that social physics, once formed, will have upon scientific philosophy. I go even further than you, for I think that it will be only then that a veritable philosophy of the sciences can exist. All the philosophical ideas that are there to-day, although very precious up to that time, appear to me to have nothing more than a simply provisory (provisoire) character. I shall speak a little about this relation in the general preface that I announce to you, where I shall explain that the true title of my work would be positive philosophy, and that if I preferred politics, it is because that is the most urgent philosophical application and the one that is to found the science, but that later I or you or others will complete this system of ideas by the encyclopedic re-coinage of all our positive cognitions (connaissances), which ought really to be conceived as a single mass, although, for good culture, it is indispensable to preserve and to push even, in one sense, further than it is, the division of labor, so that each special savant can always, subsequently, conceive the relation of his branch and even of his twig to the universal trunk.”

In a letter of about this date Comte refers to his habit of never rewriting anything. His memory permitted him to look upon a volume as finished when it had been thought out and before a line had been written. But even in his letters we notice some of the disadvantages of this procedure, which, while conducive to unity, sacrifices literary form.

It is true that Comte studied under Saint-Simon; but, according to Littré, his purely philosophical dependence was very slight, while his influence upon his master was important. “What forms the distinguishing characteristic of Saint-Simon at the epoch when he lived, is the social destination that he assigns without hesitating to the ideas that preoccupy him. He has, as we have seen, only the most confused notion of what this philosophy will be; but, no matter what it is to be, he consecrates it in advance to the reorganisation of society.”

As regards Condorcet, Comte enthusiastically acknowledges his indebtedness to the “Sketch of an Historical Table of the Progress of the Human Mind,” and even goes beyond the facts, as he did in his praise of Kant.

Littré makes a fair division of credit among others as well as those already named, and concludes as follows: “Turgot had discovered that human conceptions, at first theological, afterwards become metaphysical and end by being positive. Kant had known that history is a natural phenomenon, subjected to a determinate course, and Condorcet, pushed harder than his predecessors by advancing time,” (he had been condemned to death) “had attempted to trace a table that should put in evidence the enchainment of the progresses of civilisation. These are great things, but they are still only rudiments; for neither Turgot nor his successors make use of the discovered law to found upon this general fact evolution; Kant, who perceives clearly the necessity of conceiving history as regulated by the conditions inherent to humanity, is unable to base this important notion on anything better than an à priori idea” (the metaphysical principle that nature does nothing in vain, and that as human faculties do not reach their development in the individual, who is ephemeral, they must do so in the species, which is durable) “and thus he leaves it incapable of fixing the attention of a century whose tendencies were more and more positive; lastly Condorcet has no other guide than the negative philosophy of the eighteenth century in a work to which it could bring only contradiction.”

John Stuart Mill says of Comte that “far from pretending to originality when he had really no right to do so, he was eager to attach his most original thoughts to every germ of a similar idea that he met with among his predecessors.”

Speaking for himself, Littré says of the law of the three stages, “I do not reject it, I restrain it. As long as we remain in the scientific order and consider the conception of the world first theological, then metaphysical, finally positive, the law of the three stages has its full efficacy in directing the speculations of history.... But in history all is not comprised in the scientific order. M. Comte, who has said somewhere that it is necessary to suppose, at the beginning of humanity, certain notions that were neither theological nor metaphysical, has indicated the germ, I will not say of my objection, but of my restriction. In fact this law of the three stages comprehends neither industrial, nor moral, nor æsthetic development. It has however, the excellent character of being relative to the speculations in which evolution by filiation is most manifest and consequently of giving a positive notion of the march of history.”

Is it true, as stated on p. 565 of The Monist for July, that Stuart Mill adopted Hume’s “erroneous conception of causality” to the extent implied in the following passage? “This idea of ‘sequence’ however was exactly Hume’s mistake, adopted by Mr. Mill, and through Mr. Mill popularised among English thinkers. If the nature of cause and effect were really constituted by invariable sequence, then the night might be called the effect of the day because night is invariably consequent upon day.”

The only authority at hand on the island from which I write is Clemenceau’s translation of Mill’s “Auguste Comte and Positivism,” where, on p. 61, I read as follows, “The succession of day and night is just as much an invariable succession as the alternate exposition of the earth’s two opposite sides to the sun. Yet day and night are not the cause of each other; why? Because their succession, although invariable, according to our experience, is not so unconditionally: these phenomena succeed each other only upon the condition that the presence and the absence of the sun succeed each other; and if this alternation were to cease, day and night would not follow each other. There are thus two kinds of uniformities of succession, one without conditions, the other dependent on the former: laws of causation, and other successions which depend on these laws.”

In a note Mill refers to his System of Deductive and Inductive Logic.

LOUIS BELROSE, JR.

SOME REMARKS UPON PROFESSOR JAMES’S DISCUSSION OF ATTENTION.

In his recent treatise on psychology Professor James discusses in an interesting and suggestive way the relation of ideation to attention, maintaining that “ideational preparation ... is concerned in all attentive acts.” Attention is “anticipatory imagination” or “preperception” which prepares the mind for what it is to experience. Thus the schoolboy, listening for the clock to strike twelve, anticipates in imagination and is prepared to hear perfectly the very first sound of the striking.

It is undoubtedly true that in the form of attention we term expectant, where we are awaiting some given impression, there is a representing, antedating experience, which may be a preparatory preperception. But with a wrong imaging of what is to be experienced there is hindrance, as when in a dark quiet room we are led to expect sensation of light but actually receive sensation of sound. Very often, indeed, our anticipations make us unprepared for experience. Further, the experiments adduced by Professor James from Wundt and Helmholtz are in the single form of expectant attention, and we must remark that in these experiments the reagent is also experimenter, and this introduces a new attention, consciousness of consciousness, and that of a peculiar kind, which complicates an already complex consciousness. In general we may say that experimentally incited consciousness is artificial, at least as far as it feels itself as such, and for certain points like simple attention this tends to vitiate results. Self-experimentation or experiment on those conscious of it as such may mislead in certain cases, and must, so far as this element of consciousness of experiment is not allowed for. In physical science things always act naturally whether with observation or experiment, but in psychology observation, other things being equal, is more trustworthy than experiment.

In all cases of expectant or experimentally expectant attention, the attention does not, however, lie in the expectancy or in the imaging as such, but it is merely the will effort concerned in these operations. Yet as we may expect without effort, and preconceive without volition, attention is necessarily involved in neither. A perception or a preperception is an attention only as accomplished by will with effort, but only an unattention when purely involuntary. Professor James’s use of attention as preperception brings us back to the common idea of attention, as any consciousness which cognises something. This is so inbred in thought and language that it is most difficult to avoid using the term in this sense. Many psychologists like Mr. James and Mr. Sully frequently mention attention as a will phenomenon but they do not treat it under will, and they constantly return to the cognition meaning. Höffding, however, treats attention under psychology of will. Attention as the exercise of will in building up and maintaining cognitive activity, is naturally treated under cognition; but it is on the whole safer and better to discuss attention under will so as to keep it sharply distinguished from the presentation form which it vitalises. I have endeavored to hold the term strictly to this sense, yet it is not unlikely I may sometimes unwittingly countenance the common confusion, but trust the instances will be few.

When we have, then, a case of expectant attention we must distinguish the attention in the imaging from the attention in the actual cognising. It is, indeed, true for us almost invariably that cognitive strain without immediate realisation is incentive to ideating. In listening in the night in vain for a sound we hear in imagination many sounds, and we form preparatory ideas of what we are to hear. Sense-adjustments call up a train of sensations in ideal form. But it is obvious that low intelligences which have no power of expectancy or ideation do yet really attend. The very first cognitions and all early cognitions by their very newness and difficulty were attentions long before ideation was evolved. With low organisms, as cognitive power extends only to the present in time and space, immediacy of reaction is imperatively demanded, and every tension of cognitive apparatus is immediately directive of motor apparatus so that suitable motion is at once accomplished. The cognition, though dim and evanescent factor, is yet powerfully energised, and so a true attention. Always with lowest sentiencies, and often with higher, pain is suddenly realised without anticipation, followed quickly by attention as strong effort to cognise the nature and quality of the pain-giver and so to effectually get rid of pain-giver and pain.

Preliminary idea, then, cannot occur in early attentions and in late attentions it is by no means necessary. It is said that we see only what we look for, but it must be answered that seeing commonly happens without any looking for. The kindergarten child, Professor James to the contrary notwithstanding, is not confined in his seeing to merely those things which he has been told to see and whose names have been given him. A child continually asks, What is that? and is quick to discern the absolutely new and strange. He accomplishes a wide variety of attentions without ideas and gives himself almost entirely to immediate presentations.

To be sure, every one sees only what he is prepared to see, only what is made possible for him by his mental constitution as determined by his own pre-experience and the experience of his ancestors, but this does not signify ideation. Every cognising is conditioned by the past, but this does not call for a reawakening and projecting in ideal form at every instance of cognitive effort, before any real cognition is reached.

In fact, many, if not the most of our attentions, are merely intensifyings of some present cognition, of some cognitive psychosis which has simply come or happened. Take the instance of attention to marginal retinal images, this certainly does not always imply preperception, the forming of an idea of what we are to see, though in the cases mentioned by Professor James it may. For example, I was writing the above seated with my profile to the window when I became suddenly aware, through the physiological agency of a marginal image, of a moving object to my right. This perception of bare undefined object was spontaneous, a pure given; I exercised no will in attaining it, and so the state of cognition was not an attention. However, by attending, by intensifying the cognition by will effort, I perceive that the indefinite object is a man walking on the sidewalk, who is of a certain height, clothed in a certain way, etc. I do not trace the least ideation in the whole process, the slight attending as act of will did not imply any anterior or posterior idea or representation. The reason for the will act was the intrinsic interest of movement, and this intrinsic interest arises in the fact that moving objects have had for all life a special pleasure-pain significance, the moving object is the most dangerous, and so motion perceived has become ingrained in mind as a special stimulant of attention. This habit of attentiveness to things in motion survives and continues for cases where it is of no use and even of harm; thus, in the present instance, it diverts me from my work. It is obvious that attention often occurs in the same way for other senses without preliminary idea.

On the whole we must conclude that attention is a much abused term, and it is to be hoped that psychologists will for the future keep to the definite and best use of the term; namely, to denote cognitive effort in all its degrees and modes.

HIRAM M. STANLEY.

IS MONISM ARBITRARY?

In Vol. II, No. 3, of The Monist, a very kind criticism appeared from the pen of Mr. Francis C. Russell of the doctrine of a double-faced unity of mind and matter. It was said that this doctrine is very far from inducing that final satisfaction which we rightly expect of a competent theory, and the critic propounded as a possible explanation of mental phenomena the postulate of a conservation of spirit. He calls spirit the elementary basis of consciousness considered as a quality. Spirit would be the subjectivity of nature, the elements of feeling, or as Professor Morgan calls it metakinesis; and consciousness would originate in the same way as electricity, i. e., by rending spirit asunder into positive and negative spirit so as to produce a tension. This would account for the appearance and disappearance of consciousness in that spiritual “dynamo” which is called the nervous system.

This proposition seems to be highly acceptable because it stands upon the principle of a conservation of substance and attempts to represent the phenomenon of consciousness as due to a transformation. But does it for that reason remove the difficulties of the doctrine of a double-faced unity of nature, which, as Mr. Russell says, “is open to the charge of being arbitrary and brings no access of insight”? Is not perhaps the term double-faced unity (which is none of my invention, and which I have been careful to avoid) a misleading and unsatisfactory term? Why should nature be double-faced? Why are feeling and motion the only two attributes of natural phenomena? Is this not arbitrary? Could nature not be just as well a treble or quadruple-faced unity. Nature might possess, as Spinoza actually declares, infinite attributes of which these two only, viz. extension and thought, i. e. motion and feeling, happen to be known to us.

It is this apparent arbitrariness which bars our insight and deprives us of the satisfaction that ought to attend the real solution of a problem. But let us avoid the term double-faced unity; let us speak of the subjectivity and the objectivity of nature, and the clouds will disappear.

The doctrine of a double-faced unity has been criticised as dualism, and the proposition that nature consists of two radically different attributes—exactly of two, not more and not less—must most decidedly appear as dualism. But is it dualistic to say that every subject appears to its objects not as a subject but as an object among other objects? Certainly not.

The relativity of the terms subject and object affords us the key to a comprehension of the situation. This world of ours is a world of relations. The phenomena of nature exhibit an unceasing activity; they consist of constant changes, and every change, every motion, has a whence and a whither. Every transformation is a series of events among which any prior one is called cause and any subsequent one effect.

If we regard feeling and motion as two attributes of nature, we are actually on the brink of dualism, and we shall understand how Spinoza, in order to escape from dualism and arrive at a monistic view, assumed without any plausible argument the existence of an infinite number of attributes. This assumption however is of no avail, for the problem would arise: How is it that we know only two of all these infinite attributes? Why do we not know any other? and why are we unable to form even a dim notion of any other? If they exist why do they exhibit no effects upon us? Perhaps because we ourselves and this world of ours consist only of two! And if they exhibit no effects upon us and upon our world, can they be said to exist at all? Might we not, in that case, consider them as non-existent and count the two known attributes alone as actual realities? Thus the dualism would remain; and Spinoza’s monism is only apparent.

The same objection cannot be made if we remain conscious of the fact that feelings are as much abstracts as motions. Subjectivity and objectivity are correlative terms. There is as little a duality in the idea, that subjects presuppose objects as that effects presuppose causes. There are not causes in the world which are nothing but causes, nor are there effects which are nothing but effects. Take for instance an historical event. Was Cæsar’s death a cause or an effect? Plainly, this depends upon the view we take. As the sequence of the wounds which Cæsar received from his assassins it was an effect; as the beginning of the civil war consequent thereupon it was a cause. If I look at you, you are the object and I am the subject. If you look at me, it is the reverse. Thus the relation of a certain thing to its surroundings makes of it a subject, while the surroundings are its objects.

Subject and object being correlatives, we can very well understand why there are no “subjects in themselves”; every subject is at the same time an object in the objective world. We can further understand, why every subjectivity except our own withdraws itself from direct observation. We can observe the movements of organisms like ourselves and judge by way of analogy that they feel pain or enjoy pleasure. We see their motions which betray certain feelings, but we can never see the feelings themselves; and even supposing that we could enter into the brain of a man and that the whole mechanism of brain-action were laid open to our inspection in its minutest details, we should see motions, combinations and separations, integrations and disintegrations, we should see the oxydation of the gray substance, which would appear as a great turmoil and excitement, but we should see (as Leibnitz says) no thoughts, no perceptions, no feelings. That it cannot be otherwise is obvious when we consider that our objects will always present to us the character of objectivity.

But suppose We were an atom of oxygen and entered into the process of brain-action as an active factor, our subjectivity would soon become absorbed and welded into a higher unity with the subjectivity of the other atoms. We should then, as a part of that brain’s consciousness, feel these feelings, perceptions, and thoughts; we should, then, be the subject which we could not see and which we were searching for in vain in the world of objectivity.

This conception of the correlation of subjectivity and objectivity does not only convincingly explain the unity of feeling and motion, it does not only establish a satisfactory monism, it throws light also on some other of the questions that puzzle us. How is it that we do not feel our brain-motions to be brain-motions? We feel our feelings only; and when feeling our feelings we do not so much feel that we feel as what we feel. In other words, we feel the contents of our feelings; we feel their import, their meaning; we are aware of their significance; our consciousness is conscious of the object, the presence of which is indicated by this special feeling. Our attention is concentrated upon the messages conveyed by and contained in the different feelings.

These messages of certain feelings are the interpretations given either to certain sense-impressions or they are the thought-symbols representing some abstracts, representing certain features of sense-impressions.

How little we feel our brain-motions when we think, can be learned from the fact that some nations place the seat of thinking in the heart, others in the stomach or even the bowels, while even so great a naturalist as Aristotle regarded the brain as cold and insensible; he made the observation that man is in possession of the relatively largest brain, but he understood its function so little that he thought it served to cool the warmth rising from the heart.

It is strange that every subjective feeling so long as it remains within itself can neither be localised nor determined. We know nothing whatever of the brain-motion that thinks a certain idea. We can fairly assume that every idea is in its objective existence a peculiar kind of brain motion taking place in a particular part of the brain, but we are not conscious of the brain-motion as a special and localised motion. We are quite unable to tell the difference that we must suppose to exist between the forms of the brain-structures or combinations of brain-structures and their motions when we think say for instances of virtue and of vice. We are conscious only of the idea and not of their objective correlates.

Whatever we know of our body, we know only through sensation; i. e., by the same means by which we know of other things. Our body is to us, and is represented with the assistance of the senses, as an object in the objective world. As such it is localised and all its relations and activities are determined. Whatever subjective feeling we have concerning any state of ourselves, remains indistinct until with the help of the senses it is made an object to our observation. Who has not as yet made the experience that he was unable to localise a toothache. The pain itself gives no information either as to its nature and cause or as to the seat of the suffering. The pain itself is purely subjective. All the objective facts have to be localised with the assistance of the senses. The suspected regions must be made the object of experiments and if any irritation of a certain spot increases the ache, it will be assumed to be the seat of the pain. And even then how often is a patient mistaken not only almost always as to the nature but often also as to the seat of the pain.

These facts appear strange, but they cease to be strange, when we consider that the nature of subjectivity is feeling. Subjectivity can as little become directly conscious of its own objectivity as an eye can look at itself. However, an eye can look at its image in the mirror. So the complex of subjective existence, which is through the interaction of an organism united in what we call a soul, can and does turn the channels of its own senses back upon itself and thus forms an opinion concerning its own objectivity. Man’s knowledge of his own objective existence is not due to any internal and direct perception of self, but solely to the same experience through which he receives information concerning the rest of the world.

P. C.

A REPLY TO A CRITIC.

WITH A DISCUSSION OF NECESSARY TRUTHS.

To the Editor of The Monist:

I hope it is not a breach of etiquette to ask you to forward to your reviewer the following remarks in reply to his criticism of my work (The Foundations of Geometry, reviewed in Vol. II, No. 1, of The Monist). If he is good enough to review my second book also, I think they will clear up some misunderstandings.

Your reviewer commences with some general remarks, against which I have nothing to say. He then proceeds to consider my “requirements for a logical definition.” Here he seems to find a difficulty—which may be due to my not having expressed myself clearly. If so I hope he will read what I say on the same subject in my Essay on Reasoning, which I cannot believe he will find “indefinite” or not well “issuable.” But indeed I cannot see where his difficulty comes in with my old statement of the case. I state perfectly clearly that requirements (3) and (4) are not logically necessary for a definition, but are only required if that definition is intended to give a particular meaning to the word. He tries to reduce my argument ad absurdum by giving a definition of “troft.” But so far from being absurd his definition is perfectly good. According to it “troft” would include in its denotation all our percepts and concepts. When however he goes on to say “... These significant names must be so used that the intellectual sensibility shall be excited to perceive that which is intended to be defined,” I differ from him entirely. This is only required for a description, not for a definition (see Essay on Reasoning, p. 53).

Your reviewer’s only solid objection to my “requirements” seems to be that the fourth includes all the rest. This is only true if the term proposed for definition has an import which has already been determined; but even in such a case it is better to consider the requirements separately, as I have given them. For the force of objections under the different headings varies enormously. An objection under heading (1), if established, would be fatal to any definition whatever. One under heading (2) so far from being fatal would only be a suggestion for the improvement of the definition. Objections under either of the headings (3) and (4) would only be to the effect that the term as defined meant something different from what it was desired that it should mean. It is however convenient to consider (3) and (4) separately as it would generally be possible to decide (3) at once, whereas if a doubt were raised under heading (4) it might lead to a prolonged discussion before it could be laid. I do not however pretend that the “requirements” are laid down in my Foundations of Geometry in the best possible form. Indeed I have altered the form in my second essay. There is moreover one requirement for a logical definition which is not included in my heading (1) in the Foundations of Geometry, though it is included in (4). This defect is remedied in the Essay on Reasoning (p. 55). It is curious that your reviewer should have missed this point, as it is the very one on which he attacks my definition of “direction.” It is that the assertions in a definition must not be independent of the meaning of the term defined. If they were, the assertion would be equally true (or false) whatever meaning the term might have. The import of the term would therefore be unlimited. In the case of explicit definitions a similar error is called circulus in definiendo.

When your reviewer goes on to attack my definition of “direction” why does he change his front all at once, and disregard all the considerations he has just been discussing? Why does he not apply my, or his own, requirements for a definition to the case in point? The criticism he actually does put forward will not bear a moment’s investigation. If my definition is “circular,” the assertion must be equally true whatever meaning is ascribed to the term. Well, then, let us try the effect of giving to it the meaning we ordinarily ascribe to “cheese.” Is it equally true that “a cheese may be conceived to be indicated by naming two points, as the cheese from one to the other”? Clearly not. But not only does this one assertion out of my definition exclude the import of “cheese” from the meaning of “direction,” but, more particularly, it distinguishes between the “three distinct but closely associated notions” which your reviewer quite rightly says “become confused in thought and expression unless the most solicitous care is taken to distinguish them.” This is exactly the care which I have taken, by framing my definition.

I need not say much about the rest of the criticism. Your reviewer’s remarks on my definition of “angle” are simply due to the fact that he has not read the definition carefully, and probably has not read the note on the top of page 36 at all. It may make it clearer to him if I point out that if “we imagine a northeast-southwest line cutting an east-west line,” we imagine four different directions and therefore (4⋅3)/(1⋅2) = 6 angles. Two of these are the straight angles between the opposite directions of each of the two lines. The other four are what Euclid calls “the angles between the lines.” As an angle, according to my definition, has no local habitation in space, it is, prima facie, meaningless to talk of the “right hand upper angle.” But if this is only an abbreviation for “the angle between the directions upwards and to the right,” then “the right hand upper angle” means the same as it would in Euclid.

With the remarks about the nature of the challenge I have thrown down I heartily agree. May I however suggest that I have a right to expect that criticism should be, not only “competent and candid,” but careful? It is a difficult subject, and I at least am not always able to express myself in such a way that my meaning cannot be misunderstood by any one. I think if your reviewer looks at what I have said again, with the aid of what I say further in my Essay on Reasoning, he will see that his criticisms have really originated in misunderstandings, and perhaps he will alter his judgment that I have “come short of the high result to which I aspired.”[18]

But my chief object in writing to you to-day is to bring specially to your notice my ideas on the nature of so-called “necessary truths.” I am not quite clear how far you will find my views harmonise with your own. To a great extent I am inclined to think they are simply a further analysis of the views you express in The Monist and in your Fundamental Problems. I will briefly sketch my own ideas and you can then judge whether they are yours also or not.

In my Essay on Reasoning I classify assertions as Truisms (assertions whose truth depends solely on the definitions of their terms) and Real Assertions, which convey some real subjective or objective information. I show that the validity of all purely formal knowledge depends on the fact that it is deduced from definitions alone, which are laid down arbitrarily and that the supposed peculiar certainty of the theorems of pure mathematics is merely due to the fact that they are all truisms. Thus, I think it a misnomer to call such theorems “necessary” truths. It would be nearer the mark to call them “arbitrary” truths.

There is no necessity whatever about the theorem “twice two is four.” “Two” is defined as 1 + 1; “twice,” as the operation of adding a thing to itself. It follows from this that “twice two” is 1 + 1 + 1 + 1; and this, by definition, is “four.” If “four” were defined as 1 + 1 + 1, (and there is no “necessary” reason why it should not be,) then “twice two” would not be “four.” The assertion “twice two is four” conveys no real information whatever—at best it could only tell us what one of its terms meant if they had not all been previously defined.

I cannot insist too strongly on the importance of a proper understanding and use of logical definition. If you desire to know whether a given assertion is true or false, a priori or a posteriori, the first step in the investigation MUST be to find out how its terms were defined. If it turns out that the truth (or falsehood) of the assertion can be formally deduced from these definitions, then the assertion is a truism (or contradiction in terms): in either case it can give no real information, and even if true cannot be a “necessary” truth. Only if the definitions of the terms are both independent and consistent is it open to discussion how we might come to a knowledge of the fact it expresses.

I may briefly indicate here how I think the problem ought to be attacked. “Objective facts” can only be established by induction. I do not mean by that term necessarily the process described by Mill, but some similar process, based ultimately on inductio per enumerationem simplicem. Now no such process can ever lead to a necessary truth. The most fundamental and certain induction which can be made, that which induces us to believe in the objectivity of our environment, does not lead to a “necessary truth”; and much less can any other induction based upon this one do so. “Objective facts” then may be established with greater or less probability, but can never be necessarily true. But all inductions are based on our perceptions, that is ultimately on our subjective sensations. And a man can, nay, must be, absolutely certain of the reality of his own sensations though he cannot be certain of the interpretations he puts upon them. If I have a toothache I cannot be absolutely certain that I have a tooth, but, at least while the pain lasts, I am absolutely certain that I have an ache. And so of any subjective sensation.

I can similarly be absolutely certain that I entertain a given concept, while that concept is before my mind; though of course it is possible that if I assert the possession of that concept I may do so in language which may be misunderstood by the person I am addressing. If then a man has certain concepts which he can call up at will, the reality of those concepts, qua concepts, is to him a necessary truth. He may lay down such necessary truths as axioms, and by their aid he may give real subjective import to a symbolic argument, and so obtain new and complicated assertions which are also to him necessary truths. This is what I do in my subjective theory of geometry. That theory might be regarded as purely symbolic—the axioms might have been left out, and all its conclusions looked upon as mere truisms. The conclusions of geometry of four or more independent directions can perhaps only be regarded as truisms. But by the aid of the axioms, geometry of two and three independent directions can be given real subjective import, and its conclusions therefore regarded as necessary truths, as long as they are only taken subjectively. They may further be applied objectively by the aid of objective facts established by induction, but in this case their validity is no greater than that of the primary facts, the counterparts of the subjective axioms, which are employed to give the theory objective import.

I confess I have not studied Kant sufficiently to say that his views differ, materially from mine, though I always thought they did until I read your interpretations of them. Perhaps I misunderstood the sense in which Kant used the term a priori. The term has been used in so many different senses that I prefer myself to drop it altogether. If it merely refers to priority in time there can be no practical doubt that, whether in the case of the human race or of an individual thinker, a large amount of sense-experience must have preceded even so simple an a priori judgment as “twice two is four.” If the term merely refers to priority in logical validity it seems to me better to say that “such and such assertions are not dependent upon experience.” But Kant says of the assertion “7 + 5 = 12” that it is not only “a priori” but “synthetic”. By the latter term he means that its truth was not deduced from definitions alone, and that the assertion therefore conveys real information. In this I believe he was wrong, and though he afterwards declares that “all knowledge a priori is empty and cannot give information about things,” unless the true nature of a priori knowledge is made more clear, people will inevitably continue to believe the contrary—and to believe moreover that Kant taught so.

Any language which seems to imply that there is some dread necessity about mathematical truths—that they could not be otherwise if they would—is very misleading. Of course it is necessarily true that if you have seven objects and add five more to them you will have in all twelve objects. But the whole objective difficulty is begged by the supposition. “Much virtue in if!”

As I understand it the essence of the “laws” of pure mathematics is that they are verbal, that is they are only abbreviated expressions of the results of certain verbal processes. If the processes are repeated and the results similarly expressed, the results must always be the same. Our reason cannot “inform us about the form of existence” unless it is first given, as the data or facts which correspond to the definitions of our symbolic arguments. It is only because our reasoning faculties are limited that symbolic arguments are necessary at all—that it is not evident to us at once that the conclusions of the most intricate mathematical calculations are given to us along with the data. Given the data, then in all possible worlds the conclusions must indeed follow, but only because they really are already in the data which were given.

It may be that you will not only agree with all I have said, but have already said much of it yourself. But there are some passages in your Fundamental Problems which seem to imply otherwise. I think the great objection I have to urge against Kant, and also perhaps against you, is that you do not distinguish as clearly as I could wish between symbolic argument and real, though subjective, knowledge. And the only way to distinguish between them is by inquiring into the definitions of the terms.

For example, on p. 165 of Fundamental Problems you say that to four-dimensional beings Kepler’s third law “would most probably appear as ‘the cubes of their times of revolution being proportional to their mean distances to the fourth power.’”

Now what sort of assertion do you take Kepler’s law to be? Originally it was a purely empirical law obtained by pure induction. If the four-dimensional people obtained their law the same way why should the result appear different to them? Or do you conceive the law to be deduced from Newton’s theory of gravitation? But even so the law of the inverse square was obtained empirically. If you think that law can be explained (as the analogous law for the distribution of light can) by the supposition that the integral of the force over all points at a given distance from the origin is constant, still this supposition is purely gratuitous unless established by induction from experience. If you grant any one of these suppositions you can by symbolic argument obtain the law corresponding to Kepler’s for a four-dimensional space. But I may mention that in no case does the result you anticipate come out. On the first two suppositions the law would be unaltered. On the last supposition the law of gravity would be changed to the inverse cube; but after that the solution of the problem has nothing to do with four dimensions—it is a two-dimensional problem only. The result is that in general planets could not move in closed orbits at all. They might conceivably revolve in circles, but such a condition would be unstable, and if it obtained their periodic times would vary as the squares of their distances.

Again you say (p. 74) “the doctrine of the ‘conservation of matter and energy,’ although it has been discovered with the assistance of experience, can be proved in its full scope by pure reason alone.” I should very much like to see your proof (which I cannot find in Fundamental Problems). How do you define the terms of the doctrine? Do you deduce the proof from these definitions—that is do you make it a truism? Or do you base it upon subjective axioms as I do my geometry? Or if you base it on objective facts, how do you prove those facts by pure reason alone? And if it is purely a subjective proof, how, can you say the doctrine is proved “in its full scope”? Surely objective applications come within its scope?

It would not be fair in me to ask you to publish my reply to your reviewer’s criticisms, though if that reply is justified the criticism must have done the prospects of my book some injury, seeing from what a quarter it comes. But I hope you will see your way to publishing the latter part of this letter in The Monist, together with your reply to it, if you think it worthy of such a distinction.

I have just come across, in this month’s Nineteenth Century, another remarkable instance of reasoning which seems to be rendered entirely nugatory by the want of proper definitions. It is asserted that conceptual thought is impossible without language. At first sight this would certainly appear to be a real assertion. It follows from it that since dogs have no language they have no “conceptual thought.” But it may be plainly shown that dogs do entertain “general notions,” which in ordinary English would be included under the head of “conceptual thought.” The apparent contradiction is however explained when it appears that the author distinguishes general notions as “concepts” or “recepts,” according as they are or are not named. This being his definition of “conceptual thought” as opposed to other thought, it appears that the assertion is only a truism after all, and conveys no real information whatever. To discuss it further is then mere waste of time. The author of the assertion doubtless wished it to convey some information, but he did not attend to his definitions and so failed to attain his object.

EDWARD T. DIXON.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] The reviewer of Mr. Dixon’s book has read these remarks on his criticism (The Monist, Vol. II, No. 1, p. 126) and has given them what seems to him full consideration. He confesses that he misunderstood what Mr. Dixon meant by “a direction.” (See the article “Logic as Relation-Lore” to be published in a subsequent number.) In regard to the requirements for a logical definition he must still abide by his former opinion. The need of a definition arises either from the inaccuracy in the application of a term or from a supposed lack of knowledge as to its signification. Hence to use the term itself in its own definition is to import into the definition the same vagueness or ignorance which it is the very office of a definition to correct. When Mr. Dixon says that it is requisite for a logical definition that the defining assertions “must not be independent of the meaning of the term defined,” what is that but to say that the same must be dependent upon that meaning? which, unless the reviewer again misunderstands the author, is to say that we must understand the meaning of the term before we can understand the definition.

ρσλ.

MATHEMATICS A DESCRIPTION OF OPERATIONS WITH PURE FORMS.

IN REPLY TO MR. EDWARD DIXON.

It is true, as Mr. Dixon says, that “Any language which seems to imply that there is some dread necessity about mathematical truths is very misleading.” But to say, as Mr. Dixon does in another passage, that the truisms of mathematics are arbitrary truths, is more misleading still. The theorems of the formal sciences are not “assertions whose truth depends solely on the definition of their terms.” They are “real assertions which convey some real subjective or objective information.”

Mr. Dixon objects to Kant’s assertion that 7 + 5 = 12 is not only a priori but also synthetic. He declares, in contradistinction to Kant, that it is deduced from definitions alone; that therefore it is empty, and cannot give any information about things. This latter proposition, which is a phrase of Kant’s, appears in this context as an inconsistency of Kant’s. And it would be an inconsistency, if it had to be understood in the sense in which Mr. Dixon quotes it. We construe Kant’s phrase that “the a priori is empty, and cannot give information about things,” in a different way. We think that Kant intends to say that the a priori imparts real information concerning relations and forms; but that it does not impart real information concerning substances or the materiality of things. It is apparent that the assertion 7 + 5 = 12 cannot be derived from the definitions of 7 or 5. Similarly, the ideas of higher mathematics are not deduced from the few definitions of elementary mathematics that tell what points, lines, parallels, etc., are. Of what, then, are these complex theorems of mathematics, products? They are not derived from sense-experience, nor from the definitions of their ultimate elements.

Is their origin mysterious? Here Kant leaves us in the lurch; he simply declares that formal truth is a priori and transcendental; and those of his disciples who call themselves, with preference, transcendentalists, have ample occasion to introduce in this lacuna of Kantian thought, all the mysticism they please.

The problem of the origin of the truths of formal sciences is not so difficult as it is sometimes represented. The theorems of higher mathematics are the products of certain operations performed with the elementary forms described in the definition with which the mathematician starts. These operations are not arbitrary; they are not merely verbal processes; they are realities of highest importance. Not material realities, but realities, nevertheless. They are functions, and mathematics deals with the products of functions. It is true that we might call twice two by any other name than four; we might call it vier, or quatre, but the operation 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 would remain the same, by whatever name we call its result. Mathematical truths, accordingly, are not empty in the sense that they are meaningless; for they are significant in the highest degree. They give real information, not about things, but about certain relations that obtain among things. They describe certain operations in which formal relations are traced. And they describe them exhaustively, so that the result is, as the Germans call it, eindeutig bestimmt, and the result will, under all circumstances, be the same. Twice two will always be the same as 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. This “it will always be,” is called necessary. There is nothing dreadful about it, nor is there any mystery connected with it. It is not an awful fate that decrees it, but it is the nature of sameness, that the same is and will be the same, so long as it remains the same.

It is often overlooked that every number in arithmetic is the result of an operation which is symbolised by a certain figure. Numbers are not concrete things; and as soon as we forget that they are products of a function, we are liable to lapse into mistakes. This happens most frequently with the numbers “zero” and “infinite.” The latter of these two symbols is often looked upon as a concrete thing; and because the infinite, with actual reality, is, in its completeness, inconceivable, it has made, of every one who stumbled over this stone of offence, a mystic, and many a radical, fearless thinker bows down to worship before the idea of infinitude-function as it would be if it were a real thing.

Says Mr. Dixon, “Our reason cannot inform us about the form of existence, unless it is first given.” This is very true. The form is given, and formal systems such as the numerical system and the lines and figures of mathematics are mental constructions built of the stones quarried out of the relational given in experience.

Form being given, we can reason about the form of existence in general. We can have ready in our minds systems of pure forms to apply to all the various cases of our experience. And this will help us in unravelling the problems of reality, and in extending our knowledge in those fields with which we are little acquainted. Far be it from us to consider the definitions, the operations, and the results of the formal sciences as purely verbal; if they were, mathematics would lose all the great importance which it undeniably possesses, and become mere verbiage.

I confess that I do not understand Mr. Dixon when he says: “It is only because our reasoning faculties are limited that symbolic arguments are necessary at all.” In my opinion all mental activity is symbolic. Every idea is a symbol that signifies something. It is not because our reasoning faculties are limited that symbolic arguments are necessary at all, but symbolism is the nature of our mind, and symbols are the elements with which our reasoning faculties have to deal. In this sense, every argument is symbolic. If it symbolises sense-experience, it represents our knowledge of what may be called the materiality of things. If it symbolises operations with pure forms, it represents the purely formal relations of mathematics logic, algebra, etc.

The doctrine of the conservation of matter and energy in reality means nothing more or less than that there is no increase or decrease in the world at large. Nothing originates out of, and nothing disappears into, nothing. It means that twice 1 + 1 is 1 + 1 + 1 + 1, neither more nor less; or, in other words, it means that all events are transformations. New things originate, but their newness consists in their forms. In this sense the law of the conservation of matter and energy would have to be called, from Mr. Dixon’s standpoint, other differences neglected, a truism. It is not a truism, in the sense of being arbitrary, but in the sense of being a purely formal truth, as are all mathematical theorems.

Mr. Dixon refers to a passage in Fundamental Problems, in which I say that “To four-dimensional beings, Kepler’s third law would most probably appear as the cubes of the times of revolutions of the planets being proportional to their mean distances to the fourth power.” His questions, “What sort of an assertion do you take Kepler’s law to be?” and “Why should the result appear different to them?” show that Mr. Dixon has overlooked the condition on which this proposition was made. The first sentence of this paragraph begins with the words, “If space inhered, as Kant maintains, in the thinking subject only, spatial relations and laws would appear different to four-dimensional beings.” Space relations are not subjective, in my opinion, but objective. Therefore, since space relations do not inhere in the thinking subject only, because they are a feature of the objective world, and inhere in the thinking subject in so far as it is at the same time an object in the objective world, Kepler’s law would appear to four-dimensional beings, if they could exist at all, just the same as it does to us three-dimensional beings.

P. C.

BOOK REVIEWS.

SOCIAL STATICS. Abridged and Revised; together with THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE. By Herbert Spencer. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1892.

JUSTICE. Being Part IV of the Principles of Ethics. By Herbert Spencer. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1891.

Among Mr. Spencer’s most important books are those entitled Justice and Social Statics. The latter, which first appeared in 1850, has just been republished in about one-half of the original size, some parts having been transferred to the book on Justice, and others omitted altogether. “One difference,” as he says, “is that what there was in my first book of supernaturalistic interpretation has disappeared, and the interpretation has become exclusively naturalistic—that is, evolutionary.” Another change is that a demonstration of the injustice of socialism is substituted for his former arguments, plainly repudiated in Justice, against private ownership of land. Equally important is the omission of the chapter asserting “The Right to Ignore the State.”

The demand for Woman Suffrage has also been withdrawn from the new edition of Social Statics, though it retains the original protest against “the reign of man over woman,” and asserts an “equality of rights in the married state.” Here again, Spencer’s final position must be sought in his Justice where it is urged that women cannot justly have equal powers with men unless they have equal responsibilities. They cannot serve their country as men do; and if they take an equal share in the government, “their position is not one of equality but one of supremacy.” Even in time of peace, they are, he thinks, too impulsive to vote judiciously, too sympathetic to oppose “fostering the worse at the expense of the better,” and too fond of “a worship of power under all its forms” to protect individual liberty against the encroachment of authority. This objection seems particularly strong, because there is still great danger of the growth of state despotism at the expense of personal freedom, even in republics. Many recent instances are given by Spencer in “The Man versus the State,” now reprinted in the same volume with Social Statics; and it is urged in Justice, that even in the United States “universal suffrage does not prevent an enormous majority of consumers from being heavily taxed by a protective tariff for the benefit of a small minority of manufacturers and artisans.”

Our voters are much too ready to follow hasty impulses and unscrupulous leaders; and both faults are most common among the most ignorant. How strongly education encourages independence was acknowledged by those slave-holders who said, “Our negroes shall not learn to read, for that makes them run away.” Public schools have found their worst enemies among Popes and Czars, and their best friends in the statesmen most honored by republics. There is no other institution for whose advantages Americans are practically unanimous. The necessity of popular education at the public cost is acknowledged by Huxley, Mill, and other advanced thinkers so generally, that Spencer’s exceptionally hostile opinion ought not to be taken as a self-evident truth.

Mr. Spencer’s examination of this subject does not appear to have been so thorough as the occasion demands. In denying that education prevents crime, he relies mainly on Joseph Fletcher, who, as stated in both editions of Social Statics, “has entered more elaborately into this question than perhaps any other writer of the day,” and who admits that there is a “superficial evidence against instruction.” Spencer takes no notice of Fletcher’s having succeeded completely in breaking down this superficial evidence. In elaborate papers, published in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth volumes of The Journal of the London Statistical Society, and illustrated by many tables and maps, Fletcher shows that the proportion to the population, in various parts of England, of people unable to sign their names, corresponded everywhere to the proportion of illegitimate births as well as of commitments for crime. Separating these latter into classes according to degree of guilt, he proves that the worst crimes are most common where there is the most ignorance. Thus he is enabled to say, “The conclusion is therefore irresistible that education is essential to the security of modern society.” That this testimony of Spencer’s principal witness is really the truth can be further proved by the statistics in the Encyclopædia Britannica, showing that between 1841 and 1876, while the percentage of illiterates to population in England and Wales was reduced one-half, that of criminals was reduced to one-third of what it was originally. (Vol. VIII, pp. 221 and 249-251.)

Spencer also refers to the fact that schools have sometimes been carried on in the interest of despotism; but most kinds of food are easily adulterated; and education is valuable, notwithstanding, as food for liberty. This last consideration disposes completely of his comparison of state-churches with state-schools; and the fact, mentioned in the revised but not in the original edition of Social Statics, that opinions differ about the best methods of education, is really an additional instance of the encouragement given by our system of public schools to independence of thought.

Spencer’s chief objection to this system is that it does not fit his theory that “the liberty of each, limited by the like liberties of all, is the rule in conformity with which society must be organised,” (p. 45). Such a “law of right social relationships,” (p. 55) would, he admits, require us to repeal our laws against indecency, abolish our Boards of Health, and close our poorhouses, postoffices, banks, and lighthouses, except in so far as these institutions, like our streets and roads, might be cared for by benevolent individuals. He does not tell us how a government, thus limited to managing the police, army, and navy, could keep up a fire-department, nor how new streets, roads, railways, or canals could be opened, in case the owners of land put their prices too high for the projectors; but the most unfortunate application of his theory would be to close our public schools.

There is no danger of this, however; and the principal evil likely to result from his pushing his theory so far, is that he prevents people from seeing its real value, as indicating the direction in which our race has advanced and must make all further progress. We shall keep on diminishing the power of the state over the man, as well as that of the man over the child, but neither authority will ever be abolished entirely. We shall dispense, sooner or later, with some of the public institutions which Spencer condemns; but our common schools will, I think, last as long as government itself. The abolitionists helped the slave to freedom by pointing out the North Star; but they did not advise him to quit solid earth. This mistake, although we grant that Spencer shows us our North Star, is sometimes made in Social Statics.

Timely help, too, is given by him, in a thoroughly practical way, to those reformers who are passing out from under the cloud with a silver lining into a Cleveland summer and a fair prospect of a Harrison fall. Among the words best worth putting into actions at once, are these: “The right of exchange is as sacred as any other right, and exists as much between members of different nations as between members of the same nation. Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries.” ... “Hence, in putting a veto upon the commercial intercourse of two nations, or in putting obstacles in the way of that intercourse, a government trenches upon men’s liberties of action, and by so doing directly reverses its function. To secure for each man the fullest freedom to exercise his faculties, compatible with the like freedom of all others, we find to be the state’s duty. Now trade prohibitions and trade restrictions not only do not secure this freedom, but they take it away. So that in enforcing them the state is transformed from a maintainer of rights into a violator of rights.” ... “Whether it kills, or robs, or enslaves, or shackles by trade regulations, its guilt is alike in kind, and differs only in degree.” (Social Statics, ed. of 1850, pp. 326, 327; ed. of 1892, p. 137).

F. M. H.

AN ESSAY ON REASONING. By Edward T. Dixon. Cambridge (Eng): Deighton, Bell, & Co. 1891. Pp. 88.

Some years ago the author of this essay made public certain views of his, on “Geometry of Four Dimensions.” He was surprised to find that though his arguments were received with incredulity they were not refuted. This result appeared to him to be due to the fact that he was not understood, that his views on geometry of even two and three dimensions being different from those commonly entertained, he had failed of being understood, because he had not begun his explanation at the beginning.

He therefore set to work to analyse those views and ultimately published a book on the subject. This book, The Foundations of Geometry, was reviewed by us in The Monist of October, 1891. But now again the author regards himself as not understood. He rested the positions and arguments of his book upon certain views of logic and especially of definition, which depart from the orthodox views, and he misjudged the fullness of explanation that would therefore become needful. Hence this little essay.

The proper approach to the views of the author is through his doctrine of definition. Usually definition is regarded as finding its main motive and utility in the convenience of social converse. The meaning of any term is regarded as resting not in the choice of him who utters it, but in the suppositions of those who are addressed. It is true that a license is accorded to any one upon a sufficient occasion to give a special intent to some word, but only upon condition that that intent shall be made sufficiently express, in other words well understood by those addressed. Hence definition is usually taken to mean the recital or the precision of the meaning of a term by means of language naturally apt for that end. There is no good sense in pretending to effect either one of these ends by language that lacks natural ability on that behalf.

Now Mr. Dixon holds, if we understand him, that conventional usage is of very subordinate consequence in this matter, that it pertains to the prerogative of an author to throw upon those whom he addresses the task of gathering his meanings as best they can; that even when he professes to explain his meanings he need not seek and employ any plain, direct speech, but may supply his instruction indirectly: may ask his audience to solve a problem, or to rightly guess what certain hints mean; may require them to extract the meaning in question out of a set of assertions that involve the same in a collateral way only. This he calls “implicit definition.” It is analogous, he tells us, to an unsolved equation or set of equations in algebra. So far as we are aware no one can claim priority of the author in respect to this expedient. He seems to regard it as of great importance, and proposes by its aid to overcome the difficulties that environ the fundamentals of geometry.

We think that the author is led to put undue confidence in his implicit definition, by his peculiar views upon propositions. He holds that all propositions can, without loss or gain in the meanings as originally stated, be reduced to statements of strict identity. This done, propositions can, as he thinks, be operated upon after the fashion usual with equations. But we submit that between a logical proposition and an algebraic equation there is a difference that is in general irreducible. For example take this proposition, Every parent loves children. To alter this to, Every parent is identical with some [or every] person that loves children, as is, we think, the prescription of Mr. Dixon, will not serve; for by reading our identity in the reverse order we have: Some [or every] person that loves children is identical with every parent.

Mr. Dixon’s views in respect to terms and to the doctrine of denotation and connotation depart as widely from the suppositions usually held, as do his views regarding propositions and definition. To follow out the consequences of his proposed innovations in any adequate fulness is forbidden to us by lack of space. We feel sure that further reflection will lead him to much modification of his doctrines.

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OUTLINES OF A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. By Hermann Lotze. Edited by E. C. Conybeare, M.A. London: Swan, Sonnenschein, & Co. New York: Macmillan & Co. 1892. Pp. 176.

This book is an excellent translation of one of the most important works of a prominent philosopher, who made an unusually strong impression upon the minds of his contemporaries. Almost every line of this clean, accurate, and charming translation betrays the translator’s devotion to the subject, for he has taken the utmost care to bring out the ideas of the author in the same brilliant style for which Professor Lotze is justly famous.

The translator says in the preface: “I have completed and venture to publish the following translation of Hermann Lotze’s Lectures upon the Philosophy of Religion in the same hope in which it was undertaken by my late wife, that it may be of use to some who cannot read the German original, and yet desire a concise statement of the form in which one of the clearest-minded of our later thinkers put to himself those great questions—as to the origin and destiny of the spirit of man, as to life in general, and the meaning of the material universe—which occupy us all at some time or another, many of us as soon as we have won food and shelter for our bodies.”

We do not share Mr. Conybeare’s and his deceased wife’s enthusiasm for the author. Although we are not blind to the great deserts of Professor Lotze, his amiable personality, the depth of his religious and emotional nature, the breadth of his scholarly erudition, and the brilliancy of his ingenious, not to say poetical, presentation of philosophical subjects, we cannot conceive that his work is come to abide. On the contrary, we consider his philosophy as antiquated in many respects. He considers problems that originate from a mere confusion of ideas, as being insolvable in their nature, and attempts the solution of other problems with inadequate methods. His thoughts still remind us of the ontological spirit of past philosophies, and his principles are not in agreement with positivism and the methods of scientific research.

As an instance, we quote the following passage: “We must ever set aside any attempt to describe in positive terms, or to construct in thought, the process by which this absolute being came to be not only one, and that unconditionally, but at the same time a many of things which condition one another reciprocally.”

Lotze still believes in an “absolute unity” as something prior to the world of reality, and he declares that “We cannot Know or Explain how this Absolute Unity is also Many” (Sec. XXI); and even if an unconscious being could be a Many-in-One, yet it could not, according to Lotze, generate consciousness (Sec. XXV). We do not believe that this problem is insolvable, and do not, as does Lotze, feel constrained to fall back on idealism. In fact, our position is so different from Lotze’s that in spite of the full recognition of his genius, we feel as much severed from him as if he belonged to ages long gone by.

Mr. Conybeare’s translation is most certainly an invaluable work and is indispensable for any English student of Lotze’s philosophy.

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ON THE PERCEPTION OF SMALL DIFFERENCES, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE EXTENT, FORCE, AND TIME OF MOVEMENT. By George Stuart Fullerton and James McKeen Cattell. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1892. Pp. 159.

This volume of the Philosophical Series of Publications of the University of Pennsylvania gives an account of a large number of experiments made for the purpose of testing the perception of small differences of movement, of weight, and of light. The most noticeable conclusion arrived at by the authors, is that they cannot accept any of the received explanations of Weber’s law. They found from their experiments, by the method of estimated amount of difference, that “we tend to estimate the intensity of sensation as directly proportional to the intensity of the stimulus; consequently, in so far as any deduction concerning quantitative relations in sensation can be made from such estimation, the sensation increases as the stimulus and not as its logarithm,” thus invalidating Fechner’s law. The authors believe also that Weber’s law does not hold for the perception of movement, as they find that the error of observation usually increases “as the stimulus is taken greater but more slowly,” and that it is proportional to the square root of the stimulus. Accordingly, they substitute for Weber’s law the following: “The error of observation tends to increase as the square root of the magnitude, the increase being subject to variation, whose amount and cause must be determined for each special case.” It is proper to add, that Professor Fullerton gives only a qualified assent to these conclusions, on the grounds that mathematicians are not agreed as to the soundness of the theory upon which the law is based, and that the errors in question may not be independent errors. He considers, however, the results obtained by the authors “as sufficiently in accord with the laws to justify them in holding it tentatively, and subject to criticism.”

As Fechner’s law rests on that of Weber, and on assumptions which appear to be incorrect, it also fails, and it follows that the psycho-physical, physiological, and psychological theories put forward to account for the supposed logarithmic relation between mental and physical processes are superfluous. From these conclusions we may judge of the importance of the experiments made by Professors Fullerton and Cattell, whose work requires to be carefully studied by all those interested in the special questions to which it relates.

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PSYCHOLOGIE DU PEINTRE. By Lucien Arréat. Paris: Félix Alcan. 1892. Pp. LIX, 264. Price, 5 fr.

The author of this interesting work informs us that it does not aim at being a natural history of society, nor is it even a study in professional psychology. This is hardly correct, however, as such a study must be based on that of individuals, and a writer of M. Arréat’s reputation cannot treat of a large group of individuals without throwing light on the psychology of the whole class to which they belong. He very aptly likens artists as a whole to a large family, the artist in design to a genus of this family, and painters to a species. This has its varieties, and it is by the study of these that the author seeks to arrive at a knowledge of the psychology of the painter.

Believing that there exists a relation between the temperament and the qualities of the mind and that this is influenced by heredity, he devotes the first part of the work to questions of physiology and heredity. The second part deals with the painter’s vocation, his æsthetic sentiments, his professional memory, and, as the evolution of art is connected with the progress of visual analysis, with his sense of sight. Then comes an examination of the general mental qualities of the painter, his intellectual character, his various phases of memory and aptitudes, and the influences which affect his work. The fourth part of the book treats of the painter’s character, his egoistic and sympathetic traits, his will, and his moral and social traits. And finally reference is made to questions of pathology, particularly defects of vision, and to “the miseries of genius.”

On all these subjects M. Arréat has many acute remarks supported by numerous facts, often derived from painters themselves, who thus, says the author, will be found “living and speaking on each page, just as they are, and making themselves known by their works, sympathetic or disagreeable, indifferent or superior, but always interesting.” It is noticeable, in connection with the important subject of heredity, that in a list of about three hundred painters almost two-thirds are sons of painters or of workers in art, and M. Arréat thinks that if more complete information were obtainable the proportion would be increased.

In the chapter on the miseries of genius, the author takes exception to the view expressed by M. Lombroso that the creative inspiration of genius is, at least in some cases, the equivalent of epileptic convulsion. That genius may lead to insanity is true; and M. Arréat admits that remarkable aptitudes have often appeared in a family at the beginning of its degeneracy. But he adds that painters are for the most part healthy, and they show hardly any more singularity than other men may have. He concludes his work with the following words: “Genius makes use of, as we have sufficiently shown, faculties which are common to nearly all men, if they are unequally strong and variously distributed with each. Genius, moreover, in the most elevated sense that it can be understood, is an exception among artists themselves, and even in genius, the meeting together of several happy gifts is exceptional. But it is willingly attributed to all those, whatever may be their art, whose works are able to touch the human cords that vibrate the most profoundly. Painters appear to us to compose a well-marked type among such. The reader has seen the characters of it brought together and discussed in this volume: he will preserve its living image after having closed the book.” This in itself furnishes a sufficient recommendation for the perusal of M. Arréat’s work, which apart from its psychological value, is a perfect mine of gracefully written information about painters and their peculiarities.

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PHYSIOLOGIE DE L’ART. By Georges Hirth. Traduit de l’Allemand et précédé d’une Introduction par Lucien Arréat. Paris: Félix Alcan. 1892. Pp. 247.

We have now occasion to review a work on a subject much akin to the preceding—a work which has been translated from the German by the same author, M. Lucien Arréat, and supplied by him with a very interesting introduction. This Introduction is in reality a résumé by M. Arréat of a series of studies by M. Hirth on physiological optics. These studies are of great importance and are classed by the French editor under the three heads of Form, Illumination, and Movement. The first of these comprises the subjects of monocular and binocular vision, the depth and the bilateral enlargement of the visual field, perspective and identical points. Under the head of illumination the effect of the “double bath of light” through the two eyes, the “luminous equation,” and the problems connected with optical measurement are considered.

We have not space to exhibit fully the author’s ideas on these topics, but we can state what are regarded by M. Arréat as the two principle propositions which give to them their life and unity. One of these propositions is, that the first function of our dioptric apparatus consists in furnishing to our central visual organ, which M. Hirth terms the internal eye, material which the latter has to interpret. The other is that it is necessary to get rid of mathematical concepts, which are much too rigid to be applied to the delicate problems of vision, and to fall back on visual sensation such as it is. These propositions imply, moreover, the admission of an electro chemical process, “without which the properties of the eye and the marvels of vision remain inexplicable.” This last conclusion has a bearing on the nature of memory, or the recollection of the impressions received by the nerves and brain after the original excitation has disappeared. Thus, M. Hirth suggests that when we know the physiological procedure in the impregnation of cerebral molecules, or in their electric charging, memory will be found to be only the prolongation of the duration of consecutive images.

The inquiries of M. Hirth throw great light on the difference between monocular and binocular vision, for information as to which and other details of his optical theory we must refer our readers to M. Arréat’s Introduction. This concludes with a consideration of the perception of light-movement, the reproduction of which is said to require a special exercise of attention, direct or indirect. Here we have the third degree of attention, according to the views of M. Hirth, who regards it as artistic apperception, having its end in itself and capable of being reproduced through co-ordination of the movements perceived.

A considerable portion of the second and principal part of this work is occupied with the psychology of attention and of the related subject memory. The latter is defined by M. Hirth as “a sum of states of perception gradually accumulated by the various organs of sense,” and it is thus not a special faculty of the mind. The mental condition which results from the action of memory is what is known as disposition. This disposition is transmitted from one generation to another, and becomes innate as the memory of the species. But it is intimately connected with the nervous system, and with the brain regarded as the electric storehouse of memories. It is in accordance with these ideas that the author explains the transmission of hereditary qualities, the problem which is at present engaging so much attention. The innate organisation is a conservation of nervous quality or temperaments associated with the anatomical disposition of the nervous system, and a certain condition of electrical tension among the cerebral molecules. The transmission of ancestral qualities depends, however, on the vigor and good condition of the germ, and as the organisation received from our earliest ancestors is the most persistent, the primitive “disposition” will subsist even without exercise whilst nutrition and circulation assure the continuance of molecular growth.

It is with the visual memory that the author is chiefly concerned, and he affirms that the optical phenomena referred to in the Introduction compel us to admit the existence in the brain of a central organ, which he terms the internal eye. In order to determine the position of this organ, which is the real seat of visual perception, to the exclusion of the retina, whose function has been overestimated, M. Hirth considers the anatomical and physiological aspects of the question, and he accepts the conclusion arrived at by H. Munk in his Functions de l’écorce cerebrale, that perception is the function of a particular portion of the cerebral cortex. There thus exist two visual centres or “internal eyes,” one in each convexity of the occipital lobes, as shown in Plate V. of the present work. Munk’s researches would seem to prove, moreover, that not only is there a general localisation of visual memories, but that each memory is fixed in a precise and determined place. The centres of memory and the centres of perception, which M. Hirth supposes to be simply a phase of memory, are the same. Moreover attention is connected with perception, but it is an imperfect state of memory. Attention requires the expenditure of force, while perfect memory acts spontaneously; and it is only in this form, “exempt from fatigue, that it becomes the passive servant of our instincts and sensations, of our voluntary acts, of our labor.” Memory when perfect is automatic, and according to the theory of M. Hirth, who does not accept M. Ribot’s monoideistic theory, it is accompanied with automatic attention, which is the result of a gradual transformation of “energetic” attention, and attains in a normal adult an incredible development both in quantity and quality. This latent attention is required by the existence of latent memory, which is properly spoken of by M. Hirth as an organic attribute of the highest moment, seeing that it forms the basis of all individual acquirements. It would seem to answer, however, to what is often spoken of as the subconsciousness.

We can understand how this doctrine of latent memory and latent attention can have an important bearing on the question of the origin of the artistic sense, especially as each brain centre may be supposed to have its own memory, and each fundamental memory its special temperament. The activity of such centres is due in great measure, as pointed out by M. Ribot, to nutrition and blood-circulation but M. Hirth adds a third factor, electrical tension. According to his theory, cerebral activity rests ultimately on electricity, the invisible currents of which, maintaining the whole system in a state of tension, are “the inferior currents of the latent memory,” the brain centres being electrical accumulators. This idea, which the author applies also to the explanation of colored visual memories, is open to strong critical objections. In relation to the particular subject of art, the author shows that the hereditary transmission of talent depends on the active maintenance of the special temperament of certain fundamental memories and their associations, and talent itself therefore depends on the existence of such a temperament. We here come in contact with M. Lombroso’s theory of the physiological degeneracy of genius, which M. Hirth opposes with much force, and we think on the whole with success. This discussion occupies the last chapter of a work that, as our readers will be able to judge from the glance given here at some of its leading topics, has a scientific value quite apart from the special subject of art which it is intended to illustrate, and which it goes far towards establishing on a physiological basis.

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LES ALTÉRATIONS DE LA PERSONNALITÉ. By Alfred Binet. Paris: Félix Alcan 1892. Pp. 323. Price, 6 fr.

In the present work, the accomplished director of the laboratory of physiological psychology at the Sorbonne has brought together and systematised all the most reliable phenomena bearing on one of the most curious subjects of inquiry now engaging attention. Notwithstanding the disagreement between different experimenters as to particular facts, all have arrived at the conclusion that, under special conditions, the normal unity of consciousness may be broken, and that then there is the production of several distinct consciousnesses “each of which can have its perceptions, its memory, and even its moral character.” No one is better fitted than M. Binet to perform the eclectic work he has undertaken of discussing the recent researches on the alteration of personality, without regard to the special views of particular schools.

The subject is considered by him under the three heads of Successive Personalities, Coexisting Personalities, and The Alterations of Personality in the Experiences of Suggestion. The two first parts deal chiefly with phenomena presented by somnambulic and hysteric subjects. In the third part M. Binet applies the fact of the duplication of personality to the explanation of the phenomena of spiritism, the term he very properly gives to so-called spiritualism. He regards the supposed spirit agent as the subconscious personality of the medium acting under the influence of suggestion, a view which undoubtedly meets most of the actual facts of spiritism.

Notwithstanding the divisibility of the ego, there can be no doubt of the unity of the personality under normal conditions. The question is as to the nature of this unity, and the author follows M. Ribot in affirming that it consists in the coördination of the elements which compose it. He repudiates the idea that memory is the sole foundation of consciousness, as not only may one memory embrace different states, but the same individual may have several memories, several consciousnesses, and several personalities. For the opinion of M. Binet on other points we must refer our readers to the work itself, which forms an important addition to the International Scientific Library.

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L’HOMME DANS LA NATURE. By Paul Topinard. With 101 Illustrations in the text. Paris: Félix Alcan. 1891. Pp. 350. Price, 6 fr.

The present is the third work in which Dr. Paul Topinard, the well-known pupil and successor of M. Broca, the founder of French Anthropology, has given to the public his general ideas in relation to the science of which he has made so profound a study. In 1876 he published his Anthropologie, which reflected in great measure the teaching of his master, Broca. Ten years later, in 1886, appeared his larger and more important work, Eléments d’anthropologie générale, which treated of the history and methods of anthropology, with various other subjects. Now Dr. Topinard gives us his matured ideas on “Man in Nature,” by which is meant physical nature, the object of the present work being to show the place that man occupies physically among animals, and his probable origin or descent. It is not surprising that a writer who was the pupil of Professor de Quatrefages as well as of Professor Broca should declare himself a supporter of the principle of unity of composition, formulated by M. Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, from which flows that of evolution, that is the natural derivation of beings from one another. As to the means by which this is brought about, the author reserves his opinion until the publication of a further work which he has in preparation.

Dr. Topinard devotes the second chapter of the present work to a consideration of the position to be accorded to anthropology in relation to the other sciences. He declares it to be a pure, concrete science, essentially anatomical and observatory, and thus distinguishes it from ethnography, which has to do with peoples under all their aspects. Both alike are branches of the science of man in its broadest sense. If anything can be added to the author’s explanation, it is that anthropology has to do with mankind as a series of individuals, while ethnography is concerned with the groups into which such individuals are collected. This is not inconsistent with Dr. Topinard’s definition of anthropology as the science “which studies human races, the human species, and the place of man in the classification of animals.” For all the facts on which it is based are derived from the observation of individuals, and when races are compared with each other, they are compared as ideal individuals, formed by a generalisation of certain prevailing qualities, just as mankind by a similar process becomes an ideal individual, a scientific Adam, who is compared with other animals. There is an apparent difficulty in relation to psychology which Dr. Topinard claims entirely for anthropology, but it disappears when we see how closely he associates psychology with physiology. He says, and we quite agree with him, that “characters of a psychological nature, reduced to their most simple expression, whether attributed to human races, or to the general human type, belong to ordinary physiological characters; the corresponding anatomical part takes its place by the side of other physical characters; the theory and explanation of intellectual operations, of feelings and volitions, belong to the special physiology of man and to the application of the ideas of general physiology.”

While accepting as correct the division of anthropology, in its restricted sense into general and special, as proposed by Broca and Bertillon, the author thinks it does not conform to the plan which should be adopted if it is desired to proceed, by the method of analysis and synthesis, from the known to the unknown. The plan adopted by Dr. Topinard is, by analogy with the procedures of general zoölogy, to begin by recalling the general notions applicable to his subject as to the distribution of animals by groups of varying values, the choice of characters on which they repose, and the differences between the race, the species, the family, and the order, these last forming the pivoting point of his views as to the place of man in classification. Then commences the study of characteristics, the mode of ascertaining them, of putting them to use and of appreciating their value, accompanied by examples, drawn from special anthropology, proper to illustrate the methods employed. Finally, a parallel is drawn between man and animals, that a conclusion may be arrived at as to the place of man in the series of beings, and his probable genealogy.

All these points are carefully considered by the author, who has framed a canon of the medium adult man of the European type, a figure based on which forms the frontispiece to the work. The proportions of this figure are derived from a comparison of all the most authentic published measurements, and the canon framed from them conforms closely to that recognised in artists’ studios, except that in the latter the arm is too short and the neck too long.

The most generally interesting subjects discussed by the author are those connected with the relationship of man to other animals, and particularly the structure of the brain. Dr. Topinard makes a careful comparison of the cerebral convolutions of various animals and man, with numerous illustrations, and he arrives at the conclusion that none of the characters said to distinguish man from the anthropoid apes are absolute; all are reducible to a question of degree of evolution, the superior degree being sometimes found among the anthropoids, and the inferior degree with man. The cerebral type of the anthropoids is a human type not completely developed, or the cerebral type of man is a developed simian type. Man thus undoubtedly belongs to the order of the Primates. After considering the form and volume of the simian and human brains, the author remarks that “man alone has a frontal lobe developed in all its parts, and filling up a large, concave, and deep frontal shell which externally gives place to the forehead, one of the characteristics of man.”

Connected with the form and volume of the brain is the transformation of the animal skull into the human skull, and the relation of this transformation to the facial characteristics of man. These points, and also various questions connected with the bipedal or quadrupedal attitude, and with the attitude and function of prehension, are treated in detail, as are certain other distinctive simian and human characters. A chapter is devoted to a consideration of the important subject of retrogressive anomalies and rudimentary organs. In his concluding chapter Dr. Topinard points out the place of man in animal classification, and refers to the questions of his single or multiple origin, his genealogy and his future. In connection with the subject of classification, the author dwells on the fact that man is not the only relatively perfect animal, and yet that none of the mammalia, which we admire for their beauty or for their usefulness, equal the monkeys in the possession of a brain approaching the human type. The brain, the hand, and the attitude are the three characteristics which especially connect man with the monkey, and particularly with the anthropoids, and the question has long been agitated whether in these particulars the last named is allied more closely to man or to the other monkeys. Dr. Topinard affirms that in all these particulars the anthropoids should be classed with the other monkeys, and therefore that man stands alone.

As to the descent of man, the French anthropologist would seem to agree with M. Vogt that the type from which man has developed was also the source of the monkey and anthropoid types, and that it first appeared at the commencement of the Miocene period, when the earliest monkeys succeeded to the Lemurian of the preceding Eocene epoch. Dr. Topinard remarks that this conclusion is agreeable to that of the eminent American palæontologist, Professor Cope, who makes man descend directly from the Lemurian without passing through the monkeys and the anthropoids, basing his opinion chiefly on dentition. The question of the descent of man is connected with that of the singleness or multiplicity of his origin, and on this point the author does not express a decided opinion. He says that all existing types of humanity could be reduced to three, the Europo-Semitic, the Asiatico-American, and the Negro; if not to two, the White and the Negro. He adds that, nevertheless, “in losing oneself in the depths of time, we can conceive the Negro, born the first, giving birth successively to the Australoid with frizzled hair, to one of the forms of the Brown stock with straight or wavy hair, and finally to the white European.” Probably his actual opinion is to be gathered from his final statement when comparing the order of the Primates to a tree, that the Lemurians are its roots giving birth to several stems, of which one is that of the monkey, from which branched the anthropoids, and another, whose point of contact with the first is unknown, gives the actual human branch, which runs parallel to that of the anthropoids without being connected with it, and goes beyond it.

As to the future of the human race, Dr. Topinard affirms that the volume of the brain will notably increase, that dolichocephaly will give place to a universal brachycephaly, and that the cellules of the brain will be perfected in quality. As the human brain is being thus perfected, the animals nearest to the human type will disappear, and then man will really think himself the centre round which the universe gravitates, the sovereign for whom nature has been created. But even then the anatomist will bring him to himself by uttering the words of Broca, “Memento te animalium esse.” This work, which forms volume seventy-three of the International Scientific Library, is sure to be widely read, and it will be indispensable to the student of anthropology, who will find in it all the information he requires on the methods of the science.

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DIE URHEIMATH DER INDOGERMANEN UND DAS EUROPÄISCHE ZAHLSYSTEM. By Johannes Schmidt. Berlin, 1890. Pp. 56.

This essay is an important contribution to the problem of the place of origin of the Indo-Germanic languages. The author is confident that while nothing certain was known before, he has established at least one fact which will give us a clue to the solution of the problem. This fact is the interference of the duodecimal system with the decimal system. The former is of Babylonian origin, but its effects are noticeable upon almost all the Aryan tongues. The duodecimal system is not original with the Goths or with any of the Teutons, which can be proved by the fact that 60 or a Schock was a round number, but not twelve, the etymology of twelve (twa-lif) being two above a lif, which latter means a certain set. Thus when the Gothic hundred as a rule meant 120, when for a long time they distinguished between great hundreds (i. e. 120) and small hundreds (i. e. 100), this was due to foreign influence. For if twelve had been the basis of their number system, a lif would have meant twelve and the numerical arrangement would have progressed not in 10 × 12 but consistently in 12 × 12 or 144. Everything points to the supposition that the Babylonian sossos is still preserved in the German Schock (60). Accordingly, says Schmidt, the Europeans must have been exposed to a strong influence of the sexagesimal system; they must have been nearer to the centre of Babylonian civilisation than are the valleys of the Indus and the Eastern Iran. Professor Schmidt considers Penka as refuted and also all those who regard Europe as the home of Indo-Germans.

We have to add that the eminent philologist when, discussing the problem of the cradle of the Indo-Germanic languages does not touch upon the other problem of the home of the Aryans, the latter being mainly an anthropological question. Schmidt says (p. 13): “I do not intend to enter into the problematic domain of anthropology. The original race-characters of the Indo-Germanic nations, their causes and the home in which they were moulded, also the physical conditions and mixtures of the races which speak our languages, undoubtedly can be treated with success only by the representatives of physical anthropology. But exactly so the problem of the cradle of the original Indo-Germanic speech and the evolution of its several languages, as they are known in history, can be solved only by philologists.”

This is very true. Perhaps we shall approach the subject with better success if we learn to distinguish between the anthropological problem of the origin of the Aryan race and the philological one of the origin of the Aryan languages. A European origin of the one might not exclude an Asiatic origin of the other, and it still remains possible, that European Aryans when migrating south and east developed through their intercourse with semitic and other races the beginning of a civilisation which powerfully affected all the Aryans, since there is ample evidence that even in olden times a lively commerce took place between them. When Prussian amber is found in Pelasgian graves, why should not the sexagesimal system of the wealthy nations of the south have spread over northern countries?

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LEHRBUCH DER HISTORISCH-KRITISCHEN EINLEITUNG IN DAS NEUE TESTAMENT. By Heinrich Julius Holtzmann. Dritte verbesserte und vermehrte Auflage. Freiburg, i. B.: J. C. B. Mohr. 1892. Pp. 508. Price, 9 M.

It has been said that the scientific purpose of an academical text-book should be to educate the student to scientific independence, and its practical purpose to make it available for the adherents of all parties and denominations; and these two purposes are the surer attained the less the author represents his own conception as that which alone can be justified. This is the principle according to which Professor Holtzmann’s Lehrbuch has been written. That he has fully attained his aim, will not be doubted by those who know his previous and painstaking labors, in which he proves himself as a theologian fully imbued with the spirit of science and scientific critique.

The first edition of this work appeared in 1885, the second in 1886, and the present and third edition can make the just claim of being carefully revised and perfected in every respect, so that it is to be regarded as a comprehensive, concise, and clear review of the critical materials of the New Testament. There is no doubt that the work as it now stands will remain the best book for reference of its kind.

Professor Holtzmann in a brief introduction of seventeen pages sketches the history and literature of New Testament criticism. The book is divided into two parts, the first treating the subject in a general way, the second entering into its several details. In the first part the author presents us with a history of the text and of its traditions, explaining the causes of the alterations that were introduced either unintentionally or by mistake; he reviews the critical apparatus for text-revision and also the history of the printed and revised editions up to the present attempt at emendation. Then a history of the canon is given, from the oldest Christian literature down to the radical criticisms of the present time. In the second and special part we find a careful compilation of all the criticisms concerning the single books and epistles of the New Testament. The first chapter treats of St. Paul’s epistles to the Thessalonians, Galatians, Corinthians, Romans, to Philemon, the Colossians, Ephesians, Philippians, the pastoral epistles; further, the epistle to the Hebrews, which is non-Paulinian, the two epistles of St. Peter, the epistle of St. Jude, and that of St. James. The second chapter introduces us into the historical books of the synoptic gospels and the Acts, where, in a brief review of fifty-seven pages, we find the same data presented which are more fully explained in another publication of our author, reviewed in The Monist, Vol II, No. 2.

A new period in the development of Christian literature begins with all those writings which go under the name of St. John. A discussion of these books is contained in the third chapter, which treats of the apocalypse, the fourth gospel, and St. John’s epistles. Not the least interest attaches to the fourth chapter, the subject of which is the vast domain of the apocryphal books of the New Testament, the number of which has, of late, been greatly increased by several new discoveries. The subject divides itself naturally into apocryphal gospels (Chap. II), apocryphical stories about the lives and deeds of the apostles (Chap. III), apocryphical epistles (Chap. IV), and apocryphical apocalypses (Chap. V).

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SAMMLUNG VON POPULÄR-WISSENSCHAFTLICHEN VORTRÄGEN ÜBER DEN BAU UND DIE LEISTUNGEN DES GEHIRNS. By Professor Theodor Meynert. Vienna and Leipsic: Wilhelm Braumüller. 1892. Pp. 253.

This latest publication of Professor Meynert’s was mentioned in the last number of The Monist by Mr. Christian Ufer, in the department “Literary Correspondence.” Since its appearance Professor Meynert has died. His name has stood foremost for a great number of years in the ranks of psychiatrical investigators, and his contributions to the science to which he was devoted, have, perhaps more than those of any other, tended to its permanent advancement. The activity of his life has extended over a great number of years, and his labors have not only been applied to the theoretical interests of his science alone, but have also been directed—and this is the most important part of every scientist’s work—to bringing the results of his investigations into connection with the great body of knowledge at large, and especially to putting in popular form, and bringing within the reach of the general reader, the facts of the science which he contributed so much to establish.

The present lectures date from the year 1868. They owe their origin to the identification in later years of the interests of medicine with the interests which every human being has at heart, of resolving the mysteries of mental operations generally. Their main subject is the description and investigation of the structure of the cerebral organs; and the elucidation in the light of such description of the psychical operations of the brain. The fundamental facts of this province are not difficult. The main thing required is to free ourselves from the impediments which artificial thought on this subject has at all times imported into the consideration of intellectual facts. Our knowledge in this domain is founded on observation and introspection; not upon dialectics. Phenomena, simply, are presented to observation, and not the ultimate essences of forces. So, too, the apparatus of observation and introspection give only their own phenomena. Their contents are the animated external world as it affects conscious beings, and involves, besides intuition, the facts of memory. Unpersonal inherited memories, which take the form of instinct, are not forthcoming. The present lectures do not pretend to give instruction in the anatomy of the brain per se, but simply in so far as it is necessary to the understanding of the brain’s mechanism. All things viewed, all things intuited are contents of consciousness, which in its limitations to the sense-impressions of the individual being, we term the ego, or I. In so far as the external world is the intuited contents of consciousness, the extent of the latter is increased, the ego, the I, expands into the secondary ego, or I. In this doctrine of a secondary ego the problems which grow out of the behavior of individuals towards the external world are resolved in the single explanation that the ego of each particular group of things seeks to preserve itself by internal and external motions. The ego is simply in the possession of itself in every extension which it acquires; if such extension consists of a common possession, its desire and tendency to preserve such is simply explained by the fact that such possession is the ego itself. Amongst the intuited objects of the ego are to be classed also as component parts of the secondary ego of every individual, the other living individualities of the world. From the point of view of this fact, the ego appears in its social rôle. The present lectures consequently extend to the consideration of the interactions of brains in society, to culture and civilisation, and seek to establish the phenomena of these domains as facts of physical knowledge. The method of physical inquiry is that of comparison by the alteration of the attendant circumstances in which the psychical mechanism acts. Physiology bases it on experiment. Nature also supplies experiments with the results that also embrace phenomena of culture. In the directions indicated here, the diseases of the mind afford a comparative means for the investigation of the phenomena of consciousness, a doctrine of natural cerebral experiments, and a foundation for a knowledge of the phenomena of mind.

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PERIODICALS.

ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR PSYCHOLOGIE UND PHYSIOLOGIE DER SINNESORGANE.

CONTENTS: Vol. III. No. 5.

UEBER EIN OPTISCHES PARADOXON. By Franz Brentano.

“FLATTERNDE HERZEN.” By Adolf Szili.

UEBER BEGRÜNDUNG EINER BLINDENPSYCHOLOGIE VON EINEM BLINDEN. By Friedrich Hitschmann.

BEMERKUNGEN ÜBER DIE VON LIPPS UND CORNELIUS BESPROCHENE NACHBILDERSCHEINUNG. By Otto Schwarz.

CONTENTS: Vol. III. No. 6.

BEITRÄGE ZUR DIOPTRIK DES AUGES. By M. Tscherning.

OPTISCHE STREITFRAGEN. By Th. Lipps.

CONTENTS: Vol. IV. Nos. 1 and 2.

UEBER DIE SCHÄTZUNG KLEINER ZEITGRÖSSEN. By E Schumann.

ZUM BEGRIFF DER LOKALZEICHEN. By C. Stumpf.

ZUR KENNTNISS DES SUCCESSIVEN KONTRASTES. By Richard Hilbert.

LITTERATURBERICHT.

The first article is on an optical paradox. Let two equal parallel lines be drawn, as in the cut below; then let two small straight lines be drawn from the extremities of these in such a way that in the first they form acute angles with the line and in the second, obtuse angles. The first, it will be seen, appears shorter than the second. What is the explanation of this phenomenon?

The author’s answer is, that this phenomenon is a consequence of the well-known fact that we overestimate small angles, and underestimate large ones. The presence of the lines has nothing to do with the optical illusion, as the inserted cut, in which the lines are omitted, shows. (Cut 2.) The optical illusion is also not present when the lines are rectangularly attached, as is Cut 3. These facts prove that angular inclination is the decisive factor. The following cuts show this, the first in a more and the second in a less marked degree. (Cuts 4, 5.) The simplest case in which the explanatory factor of this phenomenon is involved, is that of the estimation of the distance of an isolated point from the extremities of a short straight line. The estimation of this distance is dependent upon our estimation of the angle made by lines drawn from the point to the extremities of a short line. If this estimation is false, it produces by an exact trigonometrical law, an error in the estimation of the corresponding distance. This explains all. In our first figure the factor of illusion is eight times presented: hence its marked character.

The second article consists of a rather long series of experiments on the so-called “flatternde Herzen” by Adolph Szili.

The third article is on the foundations of a psychology of the blind, by a blind man, Friedrich Hitschmann, of Vienna. This article contains a number of interesting facts concerning the sensory, intellectual, and emotional life of blind people, and affords a great many valuable hints for the development of the special psychology which the author has in view.

The first article of No. 6 of the Zeitschrift is a very exhaustive one, some sixty pages in length, filled with special and technical investigations concerning the dioptrics of the eye. When light passes from one refracting medium into another it is partially reflected at the dividing surface, and transmits by reflection the objects from which it has proceeded. This is also the case with the human eye, which is itself a lens. The refracted pictures are the only pictures of importance to the possessor of the eye; but just as in the construction of optical instruments, the reflected or “lost” images are of supreme importance to the optician in the determination of the properties of his productions, so these same pictures in the human eye are of supreme importance to the physiologist and the psychologist. This is the subject of Dr. Tscherning’s researches.

In the second article Dr. Th. Lipps discusses some mooted questions of optics. The first part of the article is a reply to Schwarz’s criticism in the preceding number of the Zeitschrift. The second part is a review of Franz Brentano’s explanation of the optical paradox, discussed in the second paragraph of this notice. Lipps declares, that, though there is some truth in Brentano’s explanation, it is nevertheless an error to believe that acute angles, as such, are overestimated, and obtuse angles, as such, are underestimated. On the contrary, every time such errors in estimation occur, there exist particular reasons for it, the character of which renders the attempt impossible to derive the estimation of distance directly from the estimation of angles. Lipps supports his position by actual facts. His chief and most philosophical remark is, that it is a perilous and improper thing to do to explain isolated optical illusions by isolated and independent hypotheses; optical illusions are not exceptions: they constitute a class of phenomena in themselves, and they should be considered in their natural and logical connection. (Hamburg and Leipsic: Leopold Voss.).

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VIERTELJAHRSSCHRIFT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTLICHE PHILOSOPHIE. Vol. XVI. No. 3.

UEBER REAL- UND BEZIEHUNGS-URTHEILE. By J. v. Kries.

WAS IST LOGIK? By A. Voigt.

ZUR PSYCHOLOGIE DER LANDSCHAFT. By R. Wlassak.

DES NIC. TETENS STELLUNG IN DER GESCHICHTE DER PHILOSOPHIE. By M. Dessoir.

The articles of this magazine are usually very rigorous and learned; and the contents of the present number are in keeping with its reputation. Prof. J. v. Kries discusses in an essay, evoked by the recent articles of Riehl, the subject of “real and relational judgments”; his object is to establish a classification, and display the logical connection, of judgments generally. Real judgments are predications concerning reality or actual facts; relational judgments predicate simple relations of concepts, etc. The first requisite of a scientific exactness of thought, says Kries, is the distinction and determination in any given case of judgments which are real and judgments which are relational. In the second article, which is long and exhaustive, Dr. Voigt endeavors to determine the characters and functions of the different kinds of logic. In view of the great prominence into which algebraical logic of late years has come, this article is one of considerable interest. Voigt defines the pretensions and powers of the two opposing systems of philosophical and algebraical logic, and attempts to set forth the justification of each. Voigt, as opposed to Husserl, cordially recommends the study of algebraical logic to philosophers, that both disciplines may profit by the intercourse. (Leipsic: O. R. Reisland.)

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PHILOSOPHISCHE MONATSHEFTE. Vol. XXVIII. Nos. 5 to 8.

CONTENTS: Nos. 5 and 6.

DIE WIRKLICHKEIT ALS PHÄNOMEN DES GEISTES. (Concluded.) By A. Rosinski.

WESEN UND BEDEUTUNG DER IMPERSONALIEN. By R. F. Kaindl.

ZUR GESCHICHTE UND ZUM PROBLEM DER AESTHETIK. By E. Kühnemann.

CONTENTS: Nos. 7 and 8.

UEBER DIE GRUNDFORMEN DER VORSTELLUNGSVERBINDUNG. Psychologische Studie. By M Offner.

ZUR GESCHICHTE UND ZUM PROBLEM DER AESTHETIK. (Concluded) By E. Kühnemann.

WERKE ZUR PHILOSOPHIE DER GESCHICHTE UND DES SOCIALEN LEBENS (Second Article: G. de Greef, Introduction à la sociologie). By F. Tönnies.

RECENSIONEN.

LITTERATURBERICHT.

A. Rosinski’s contribution is a metaphysical essay on reality viewed as a phenomenon of the mind. The results of his discussion are these: that the world of experience, with all its laws and phenomena, and all we assume to exist per se, is referable wholly to ourselves; that the primal source and cause of all reality is not a something which lies absolutely outside us, but is simply our own self, or ego. In what sense reality is reality, the author proposes to discuss in future articles.

Dr. Raimund Friedrich Kaindl discusses, in the second article, the character and meaning of the impersonal verbs. The discussion is made both from the psychologico-logical point of view, and from the point of view of comparative philology.

The Philosophische Monatshefte contain, in each issue, a very exhaustive bibliography of all the works which have appeared during the month in the provinces connected with philosophy. This department is conducted by Dr. Ascherson, the librarian of the Berlin University library, and forms a very important and valuable feature of this magazine. (Berlin: Dr. R. Salinger.)

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ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR PHILOSOPHIE UND PHILOSOPHISCHE KRITIK. Vol. 100. Nos. 1 and 2.

This well-known magazine, formerly edited by Dr. J. D. Fichte and Dr. Ulrici, is now presided over by Dr. Richard Falckenberg, of Erlangen. It has reached its hundredth volume, and with the present two numbers begins a new series. Its reviews and lists of newly published works are comparatively complete. Its articles, though generally tinged with scholasticism and chiefly treating of philosophico-historical subjects, deal, nevertheless, with some modern and living questions; for example, Dr. Max Schasler’s discussion of the proceedings on the recent Prussian school law; Dr. Eugene Dreher’s consideration of the law of the conservation of force; and Dr. Nikolaus von Seeland’s discussion of the deficiencies of the current theory of force. The other articles are contributed by A. Wreschner, G. Frege, J. Zahlfleisch, and Robert Schellwien. (Leipsic: C. E. M. Pfeffer.)

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THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY. August, 1892. Vol. IV. No. 4.

CONTENTS:

THE EXTENT OF THE CORTEX IN MAN, AS DEDUCED FROM THE STUDY OF LAURA BRIDGMAN’S BRAIN. By Henry H. Donaldson.

SOME INFLUENCES WHICH AFFECT THE RAPIDITY OF VOLUNTARY MOVEMENTS. By F. B. Dresslar.

EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH UPON THE PHENOMENA OF ATTENTION. By James R. Angell and Arthur H. Pierce.

SOME EFFECTS OF CONTRAST. By A. Kirschmann.

REPORT ON AN EXPERIMENTAL TEST OF MUSICAL EXPRESSIVENESS. By Benjamin Ives Gilman.

PSYCHOLOGICAL LITERATURE. (Worcester, Mass.: Clark University.)

MIND. New Series. No. 3. July, 1892.

CONTENTS:

LOTZE’S ANTITHESIS BETWEEN THOUGHT AND THINGS. (I.) By _A. Eastwood_.

THE FESTAL ORIGIN OF HUMAN SPEECH. By J. Donovan.

THE LOGICAL CALCULUS. (III.) By W. E. Johnson.

THE FIELD OF ÆESTHETICS PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED. (I.) By _H. R. Marshall_.

DISCUSSIONS: The Influence of Muscular States on Consciousness. By Edmund B. Delabarre; Dr. Münsterberg and his Critics. By E. B. Titchener. The Definition of Desire. By _Henry Rutgers Marshall_. Feeling, Belief, and Judgment. By J. Mark Baldwin.

CRITICAL NOTICES. (London: Williams & Norgate.)

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ETHICS. July, 1892. Vol. II. No. 4.

CONTENTS:

NATURAL SELECTION IN MORALS. By S. Alexander.

WHAT SHOULD BE THE ATTITUDE OF THE PULPIT TO THE LABOR PROBLEM? By W. L. Sheldon.

ETHICS OF THE JEWISH QUESTION. By Charles Zeublin.

MACHIAVELLI’S PRINCE. By W. R. Thayer.

ON THE FOUNDING OF A NEW RELIGION. By B. Carneri.

AN ANALYSIS OF THE IDEA OF OBLIGATION. By Frank Chapman Sharp.

REVIEWS.

Prof. S. Alexander, in his lecture delivered before the Ethical Societies of Cambridge and London, here reproduced, points out that the growth and change of moral and social ideals are the result of a process of mental conflict. Professor Sheldon thinks only a partial solution of the labor problem is possible until the second coming of men somewhat of the type of St. Francis of Assisi, “who will sacrifice their personal opportunities, abandon their station in the world, and go down to apply their gifts and acquirements to the cause of the lower stratum of society.” The religious as well as economic opposition to Judaism, according to Mr. Charles Zeublin, is caused by the exclusiveness of the Jew, and his ultimate welfare and that of his neighbors requires a humanitarian treatment within and without Judaism. Mr. William R. Thayer shows that Machiavelli merely described things as they were in his time, and deduced the laws which actually controlled the public deeds of rulers; and that it is now “the duty of all men to sweep away the old falsehood that rulers and governments are absolved from paying heed to those ethical principles to which every individual is bound.” According to Mr. B. Carneri, the living at peace with oneself and one’s fellow-men is possible only without religion, “because there is no morality without contentment, and it is the highest degree of discontent to strive for something beyond this world.” Mr. Frank Chapman Sharp concludes that when the element of the good is taken out of the conception of obligation, this degenerates into mere submission to an arbitrary imperative; the foundation for the distinction between right and wrong must be sought in something that appeals to us as good, and its ultimate criterion can be given only by our chosen ideal. (Philadelphia: International Journal of Ethics, 118 S. Twelfth Street.)

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THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. July, 1892. Vol. I. No. 4.

INHIBITION AND FREEDOM OF THE WILL. By Dr. James H. Hyslop.

A CLASSIFICATION OF CASES OF ASSOCIATION. By Mary W. Calkins.

THE ORIGIN OF PLEASURE AND PAIN. By Dr. Herbert Nichols.

ON PRIMITIVE CONSCIOUSNESS. By Hiram M. Stanley.

REVIEWS OF BOOKS.

SUMMARIES OF ARTICLES.

The confusion incident to the old controversy about freedom is due, says Dr. James H. Hyslop, to a failure to distinguish between the proof of freedom and the conditions of it, that is, “the circumstances that are necessary to it, or the characteristics that constitute it.” Freedom consists in “self-initiative and independence of external causes, whether there be any choice between alternatives or not,” and inhibition and deliberation bring about both of these circumstances. Miss Mary W. Calkins rejects the ordinary division into association by contiguity and association by similarity, and gives detailed summaries of the fundamental characteristics of consciousness on which association depends and of the characteristics of association proper; the ultimate fact of association, whether it be psychical or physical or both, we do not understand. Dr. Herbert Nichols, in the first part of his article on the “Origin of Pleasure and Pain,” considers the phenomena of pleasure and pain associated with the action of the senses, and concludes that there is no “tangible evidence indicating that pleasures and pains are inseparable attributes of other senses or polar complements of each other,” and that separate sensations of pain and of pleasure are probable. Mr. Hiram M. Stanley regards pure pain as primitive mind, and pleasure as the polar opposite to it, although they are neither absolutely essential one to the other, pleasure being traced to “an intermediary feeling between pain as produced by excess, and pain from lack as differentiated form.” Consciousness is fundamentally pain and pleasure as serving the organism in the struggle for existence. (Boston, New York, Chicago: Ginn & Company.)

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THE NEW WORLD.

CONTENTS: Vol. I. No. 2.

THE SOCIAL PLAINT. By E. Benjamin Andrews.

RELIGIOUS EVOLUTION. By Minot J. Savage.

THE ORIGIN AND MEANING OF THE STORY OF SODOM. By T. K. Cheyne.

THE FOUNDATION OF BUDDHISM. By Maurice Bloomfield.

IMAGINATION IN RELIGION. By Francis Tiffany.

THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY. By S. D. McConnell.

THE IMPLICATIONS OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. By Josiah Royce.

HOW I CAME INTO CHRISTIANITY. By Nobuta Kishimoto.

NEW FORMS OF CHRISTIAN EDUCATION. By Mrs. Humphry Ward.

CONTENTS: Vol. I. No. 3.

THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. By Otto Pfleiderer.

ECCLESIASTICAL IMPEDIMENTA. By J. Macbride Sterrett.

NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. By Orello Cone.

THOMAS PAINE. By John W. Chadwick.

SOCIAL BETTERMENT. By Nicholas P. Gilman.

THE RÔLE OF THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS IN MODERN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. By Jean Réville.

A POET OF HIS CENTURY. By E. Cavazza.

DIVINE LOVE AND INTELLIGENCE. By James C. Parsons.

BOOK REVIEWS.

SUMMARIES OF ARTICLES. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, & Company.)

REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE.

CONTENTS: June, 1892. No. 198.

EXISTENCE ET DÉVELOPPEMENT DE LA VOLONTÉ. I. Existence de la Volonté. By A. Fouillée.

SUR QUELQUES IDÉES DU BARON D’HOLBACH. By A. Lalande.

ESSAI SUR LA PHILOSOPHIE DE PROUDHON. By G. Sorel.

TRAVAUX DU LABORATOIRE DE PSYCHOLOGIE PHYSIOLOGIQUE.

CONTENTS: July, 1892. No. 199.

L’INCONNAISSABLE DANS LA PHILOSOPHIE MODERNE. By _G. Fonsegrive_.

LA MUSIQUE D’APRÈS HERBERT SPENCER. By J. Combarieu.

ESSAI SUR LA PHILOSOPHIE DE PROUDHON (concluded). By G. Sorel.

CONTENTS: August, 1892. No. 200.

ÉTUDE CRITIQUE SUR LE MYSTICISME MODERNE. By Rosenbach.

LE DÉVELOPPEMENT DE LA VOLONTÉ. By A. Fouillée.

LA BEAUTÉ ORGANIQUE: ÉTUDE D’ANALYSE ESTHÉTIQUE. By _A. Naville_.

ANALYSES ET COMPTES RENDUS.

According to M. Fouillée, the principle which tends to dominate psychology and physiology is the ubiquity of will and of feeling, and consequently of consciousness. Psychology will end by recognising the continuity and the transformation of modes of psychical energy, as physics recognises the continuity and the transformation of modes of physical energy, and philosophy will see in physical energy the external expression of will.

M. Fonsegrive maintains that the rejection of metaphysics as science, which marks the modern theory of the unknowable, is the consequence of Kant’s a priori theory as to the origin of our knowledge. The laws of the mind have no real existence prior to experience, and universal and necessary notions can be discovered only by mental analysis. In this manner the existence, and even the essence, of metaphysical beings may be known, but only of such as experience puts in communication with ourselves. Thus we know God as the necessary first cause, although our notion of God is one of negation, of experimental notions.

After showing that Spencer’s theory of music had numerous antecedents, and that its conclusions are unacceptable on various grounds, M. Combarieu affirms that the secret of the musical art is the identity of the musical idea with the imitation or expression of the real world. All music contains a double verity; it is the meeting place of the senses and of the rational world confounded in a unity which is the work of art, as man is the combination of a soul and a body confounded in the real unity of life. Spencer is an excessive simplifier, and does not see the complexity of certain questions, which he seeks to resolve by undervaluing them. But he has thrown light on one of the aspects of the musical problem.

In this final essay on the philosophy of Proudhon, M. Sorel considers the theory of justice by the light of the notion of free will. He differs somewhat from Proudhon, and affirms that “the just man is the upright man such as our ideal conception of antiquity represents him to us, but transformed by our consciousness as refined by the influence of Christianity.” In dealing with the real organisation of societies it is necessary to distinguish between matters of justice and those of right, which includes that of force, of which war is an application. After showing the connection of the economic contradictions of Proudhon with the state of war, and the value of education for the realisation of equilibrium in the state. M. Sorel affirms that education ought to be based on manual labor, for the explanation of which science should be taught; and that instruction should endure throughout life, so that men can elevate themselves and that an equilibrium may be obtained between knowledge and industrial needs. (Paris: Félix Alcan.)

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