REVIEWS.
Naturalism and Agnostidsm. (The Gifford Lectures delivered before the University of Aberdeen in the years 1896-8.) By James Ward, Sc.D., Professor of Mental Philosophy and Logic in the University of Cambridge. 2 vols. The Macmillan Co.
In these days the teleological and sociological conceptions are hav- ing their innings in the interpretation of experience; and their last and one of their strongest is to be found in Professor Ward's lectures. The first statement of the preface is : " These lectures do not form a systematic treatise. They only attempt to discuss in a popular way certain assumptions of 'modern science' which have led to a wide- spread, but more or less tacit, rejection of idealistic views of the world." The preface says also : " I take it for granted that till an idealistic (/. e., spiritualistic) view of the world can be sustained, any exposition of theism is but wasted labor." While such statements tend to place the writer somewhat in the attitude of an apologist, and perhaps help to account for what wili appear to some an undue polemical spirit in certain passages, they do not, of course, affect the inherent weight of the argument. The limits of this notice will permit mention of only a few central points — especially of those more likely to be of some interest to readers of this Journal.
Vol. I is occupied with a detailed account of the difficulties encountered in the attempt to state experience in terms of matter and motion. The conclusion is that the "mechanical theory" is valuable as a descriptive formula of one aspect of experience only — the quantita- tive one ; but utterly inadequate for a description of experience as a whole, since all experience cannot be reduced to quantitative terms. Perhaps the best parts of this volume are the discussions of the con- ceptions of matter — motion, space, time, mass, energy, and force — rather than the long cross- — sometimes very cross — examinations of Mr. Huxley and Mr. Spencer.
In Vol. II, after a thoroughgoing criticism of psycho-physical parallelism as an attempt to escape the difficulties of the mechanical
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