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NEW BOOKS. 269 patently no significance for the popularisers of Comte and readers of Mr. Benjamin Kidd, whose influence in the present volume is supreme. The superstition which hypostatises or deifies laws of nature a relic of primitive Animism (of, Ritchie, Philosophical Studies, p. 105) is certainly not to be expected in any serious work. Yet the author ap- parently regards such laws (e.g. Natural Selection) as "Powers" or " Agencies " which " operate from beyond the world " (p. 34) and force things into obedience with their will. Ordinary forms of language may be responsible for much, but when we read about the "leverage of the Force " and the " arm of the lever " (p. 81) a suspicion arises that we have passed from an apparent confusion due to language to a very real confusion in thought. JOHN SIME. Life and Matter : A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's " Riddle of the Universe ". By Sir OLIVER LODGE. London : Williams & Norgate, 1905. Pp. viii, 200. The Interpretation of Nature. By C. LLOYD MORGAN, LL.D., F.B.S. Bristol : J. W. Arrowsmith ; London : Macmillan & Co., 1905. Pp. 164. These little books deserve to be widely read, above all among those who, without any special scientific knowledge, are yet intensely and intelligently interested in the conclusions of men of science regarding the ultimate nature of reality. They ought to prove a wholesome cor- rective to such precipitate efforts at simplification and unification as that of Prof. Haeckel, efforts which, as Sir Oliver Lodge says, not only underestimate some classes of fact, but also stretch scientific theory into regions of mere guesswork where it loses touch with real science alto- gether. Some may think that Sir Oliver Lodge is not altogether free from the latter defect himself ; but his book remains a calm and weighty protest against the grim attempt to sacrifice the reality which is best known and most precious to us on the altar of methodological assump- tions. Sir Oliver Lodge upholds the view that Life is neither matter nor energy, or even a function of matter or energy, but something be- longing to a different category ; that by some means at present unknown it is able to interact with the material world for a time, but that it can also exist in some sense independently, although then not apprehensible by our senses. Its essential existence is continuous and permanent : its interactions with matter discontinuous and temporary. Moreover he conjectures that it is subject to a law of linear advance. Except in the last particular, he considers magnetism to offer the best analogy to life : we now know that electrically generated lines of force need no matter to sustain them, although they need matter to display them. This is held by Sir Oliver as a working hypothesis, the only one which enables him to fit the known facts of vitality into a thinkable scheme. Dr. Lloyd Morgan seeks to prove that the conception of purpose is for rational thought not less valid than that of mechanism. If purpose underlies and rationalises our thought and experience, it must underlie the per- ceptions of daily life and the conceptions of science in their objective reference. His own experience assures him that there is a causal agency underlying the sequence of mental configurations ; that there is some- thing within him which unifies and relates and orders them. This is what he understands by purpose, and utilises in the interpretation of nature as an ideal construction founded on experience. If one believes that, in the purpose which unifies, directs and determines the course of