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116 NEW BOOKS. interpretation is notable (with its conclusion in favour of the spiritistic hypothesis), as are also his experiments on the modes of recognition used by communicators who had to establish their identity through telegrams, without giving names. By this most ingenious method Prof. Hyslop was able to show that the general character of the communications was very similar to those proceeding from trance-mediums, and that very slight and apparently trivial indications were effective in leading to recognition, so that their use by the supposed ' spirits ' seems quite consonant with normal human psychology. To the evidence itself it is impossible to do justice in an abstract ; its effect is necessarily cumulative, and all that can be said is that these volumes add materially to a mass of carefully recorded and digested evidence which ought (one would have supposed) to have excited widespread scientific interest. And yet, outside the S. P. R., there is as little indication of any serious determination to investigate the matter as there was twenty years ago, and less than there was fifty years ago, and so even reports like the present pass unread and un- heeded. It is true that our knowledge of these phenomena is still in its rough beginnings, that their interpretation is still disputed, and that upon any view they present difficulties as yet unsolved. But why do not these very features, as in all other subjects, attract, rather than repel, attention and research ? The explanation would seem to be that no real scientific desire to know has yet been aroused with regard to such phenomena, and that, until it has been, the utmost that the labours of psychical researchers can expect is neglect. F. C. S. SCHILLER. The Cambridge Platonists. Edited by E. T. CAMPAGNAC, M.A. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1901. Pp. xxxvi., 327. This is a volume of selections from Benjamin Whichcot's Select Sermons and Aphorisms, John Smith's Select Discourses, and Nathanael Calverwell's Discourse of tlie Light of Nature, together with an introduction and index. It is a pleasant book of very pleasant writers, and the introduction is well written. Although it omits Ralph Cudworth and Henry More it is a useful complement to the second volume of Principal Tulloch's National Theology in England in the nth Century. The Cambridge Platonists do not lend themselves easily to selection, and the editor has wisely con- fined himself to complete specimens, and complete specimens of Cud- worth are overlong. Diffuse, digressive, pedantic though most of the Cambridge Platonists were ; though they lived in backwaters and kept aloof from the great political and ecclesiastical controversies of a grasping and distracted age ; though they devoted themselves to the revival of an ancient philosophy overlaid with fantastic assertions and in any form singularly alien to the English temperament and singularly remote from practical issues, yet their influence was rather practical than intellectual. It was their eleva- tion of character, sweetness and charitableness of disposition, sincerity and unselfishness, which chiefly appealed to their contemporaries and appeal to us now. They graced manners and religion more than they advanced philosophy, and their graces still blossom in the dust of their ponderous learning. In many respects their labours invite comparison with the latest attempt to base a philosophy of religion on a revived idealism which is associated rather with Oxford and Cambridge. The writers in Lux Mundi, like the Cambridge Platonists, make the ' spiritual element in knowledge ' the starting point for the vindication of respon- sibility in action and faith in religion. Both schools stake too much on