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NEW BOOKS. 127 should confine themselves to describing and analysing the facts of moral consciousness as exhibited in all countries and at all times. Above all they should keep clear of contemporary interests and not let themselves be influenced by the spirit of the age. On this principle Pasteur should have left the cure of disease severely alone. Yet, oddly enough, ' science to constitute morality and life and to direct them along new paths ' (p. 121). But its principal duty is to register the foregone conclusions of a certain school, and to play into the hands of theology. It must recognise the feeling of obligation, that is of a superior force imposing itself on us, as an ultimate fact that it cannot explain. And it must also recognise a necessary relation between the fulfilment of the Ideal, which is an objectivation of that force (whatever that may mean) and the complete satisfaction of life, that is happiness (p. 119). As usual with the anti-hedonists, personal happiness is after all the supreme end. Else- where we learn that ' our ignorance of the force whence obligation proceeds is the very thing that makes its incessant action possible' (p. 245). But at any rate we know that it is rather changeable, since it has been ' objectivated ' in all the ideals ever set up by human beings (i6.). The real object of this ethical agnosticism is to leave a vacuum for faith to fill up (p. 295). ' The foundation of morality must be sought in God,' but apparently one God will answer the purpose as well as an- other (p. 296). Prof. Vidari fancies that he speaks for science ; in reality he only speaks for a particularly feeble and sterile form of reactionary thought. ALFRED W. BENN. La psicogenesi dello istinto e della morale secondo C. Darwin. Di PIBTKO SCIASCIA. Palermo, 1899. Pp. xii., 178. Darwin when he traced back the descent of man to a lower animal found himself confronted by the difficulty of accounting for the intellectual and moral faculties which have long been regarded as what chiefly distin- guishes him from the brutes. He explained the growth of reason by the use of language, and language as evolved out of animal cries. And he accounted for conscience by the instinct of sociality common to all gregarious animals combined with the sympathy to which that instinct in its higher development leads. Signor Sciascia, who writes as a disciple of M. Fouillde, combats this position. His arguments are not very methodically stated, nor is it very easy to follow them. His exposition of Darwin's theory is lucid and interesting ; but the polemical sections of his essay resemble the contents of a disorderly notebook. Nor does their scientific value make up for their literary deficiencies. Misconceptions and inconsistencies abound, and too often assertions and quotations do duty for facts and reasonings. The leading points seem to be as follows : Instincts cannot be acquired by individual experience, nor can they be transmitted by inheritance, because the animal could not begin to live without them, and because they cannot be embodied in the nervous structures. They result apparently from an immaterial principle by virtue of which the living creature, when it comes into contact with the external world, has an intuition of the means for attaining its ends, a process however which passes below the threshold of consciousness (pp. 66, 73). It is not stated whether this remarkable power is shared by plants whether, for example, sempervivum arachnoideum has an intuition of the means for catching insects before spinning its web. We may observe that the intuition called into play by contact with reality