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NEW BOOKS. 291 Opere Filosofiche di ROBERTO ARDIGO. I. Pietro Pomponazzi. La Psicologia, come Scienza positiva. II. La Formazione naturale nel Fatto del Sistenia solare. L' Inconoscibile di H. Spencer e il Positivismo. La Reliyione di T. Mamiani. Lo Studio della Storia della Filosofia. III. La Morale dei Positivisti. Relativitd della Logica umana. La Goscienza vecchia e le Idee nuove. Empirismo e Scienza. Vol. I., Mantova : L. Colli, 1882 ; Vols. II., III., Padova : A. Draghi, 1884, 1885. Pp. 435, 454, 455. These are three volumes of the collected works of one of the most dis- tinguished representatives of scientific philosophy in Italy. The work by which the author is best known, Psychology as positive Science, first pub- lished in 1870, makes up the greater part of vol. i. It is preceded by a Discourse on "Pietro Pomponazzi " (i., pp. 1-52), delivered at Mantua, March, 1869, and followed by other writings published at various dates since then, of which the most extensive are those on the formation of the solar system (vol. ii.) and on the Ethics of Positivism (vol. iii.). Three more volumes are yet to appear. The present edition is not a mere reprint, the author having filled up some lacuna? of former editions and retouched the expression in parts. His philosophical system, as he tells us, was formed as a whole before he began to publish ; and more by direct study of science than by the influence of modern philosophic writers such as Comte, Mill and Spencer; with "the older metaphysicians" he was familiar before beginning his scientific studies. The most prominent difference of his Positivism from the Positivism of Comte is the import- ance he gives to subjective analysis. As aids and instruments of psychology, every possible use is to be made of physiology, archaeology, linguistic science, &c. ; but it is never to be forgotten that psychology is an indepen- dent science, distinct from all other sciences, and particularly from phy- siology. To think, as many do, that the science of the life of thought must henceforth leave the field to the science of the life of organs, is an error that does not deserve even to be combated (i. 172). For the physiology itself of the nervous system to make progress, the aid of psychology is necessary. The physiologist who is without knowledge of psychology " believes with the vulgar that the acts which are ascribed to the so-called faculties are simple, and those of the one totally diverse from those of the other, and goes in search of the corresponding organs ". Mental facts, from which, and not from " faculties," we must set out, can all be reduced to sensations and their elements, combined in various ways according to the laws of association. The positive study of mental facts enables us to pass beyond not only the "faculties" but even the abstractions of "matter" and " spirit," and to attain to the conception of a " psychophysical reality or substance ". The external states of which this conception asserts the parallelism with internal states are not to be regarded as extra-mental states "mysteriously" connected with the terms of a subjective process; since ultimately even extension can be resolved into data of sensation, just as much as sounds and colours. It is therefore a mere illusion that makes the relation of body and mind seem an insoluble problem ; the illusion, namely, of regarding the distinction of subject and object as primitive when it is only a distinction of two orders of mental facts. The " datum of sen- sation" is anterior to the distinction of Ego and Non-eyo, and may come to be referred by the mechanism of cognition to either term of the contrast. This datum is best described as " psychophysical " because, although the material world is in ultimate analysis mental, it is not "subjective " in the narrower sense that seems to be implied in the statements of idealists, but is " primitively indifferent ". The author arrives by this mode of considera- tion at what he correctly describes as the " ontological " doctrine that " in the world of spirit the sensation, as real and true datum, has the same