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NEW BOOKS. 617 nothing more than certain forms of so much Energy transforming itself in certain ways." " Energy alone is the real thing, of which we have no immediate experience, but experience only its results." Space, the primary and secondary qualities of body, and the different chemical kinds of bodies, are all explicable in terms of Energy and its transformations (pp. 69-74). Energy is really indestructible. Matter is "historically indestruc- tible, real as an event, but not real as an independently existing entity ". "The conception of material bodies, if freed from the erroneous assumption of independent reality, is a most useful abbreviation like an algebraical symbol of what would in terms of Energy alone take much longer to express." " In the grand doctrine of Energy, as a thing not perceived by the senses, but apprehended by the intellect and discovered by the reason alone," Science has " furnished Philosophy with the long-sought conception of a consistent rational, unsensational, real ' universal ' ". Morality and Utility. A Natural Science of Ethics. By GEORGE PAYNE BEST, B.A., M.B., Cantab. London : Triibner & Co., 1887. Pp. vii., 200. This study had its origin in the author's conviction that the Moral Law, having the characters of Absoluteness, Universality and Permanence, cannot be identical with Utility. The conclusions to which he has been led on from this starting-point are, he says, somewhat different from those at which he expected to arrive. For while he arrives at the distinction between " truth of Utility " and " truth of Morality," corresponding to the distinction between approval of actions for their useful effects and approval of them for their conformity to the Absolute Eight, Morality or Justice of intuitional moralists, he also finds that "truth of Morality" is "not the kind of truth that can be put into practice ". The absolute* moral ideal is only applicable in an ideal world, the conditions of which are inconsistent with reality. An absolutely uniform law can only apply to an absolutely equal population ; and for a population to be absolutely equal, it must consist entirely of adult members, all asexual and immortal (p. 77). Buddhist and Christian Monachism and modern " Social Democracy " are alike attempts to realise parts of the moral ideal (which can only exist as a whole) in the world of facts. The result of the socialistic " attempt to take parts from the ideal world, and mix them with the world of facts," must be " to make the world of facts infinitely worse than it is for every- body". " The Moral Sense, truly, declares that men are equal. Observa- tion of the world of facts shows that men are altogether unequal." " The existing order of things is not moral, but utile." The explanation of the discrepancy between Morality and Utility is that Morality, like mathe- matical science, feigns a greater uniformity than really exists. " In the case of Mathematics, we are really dealing with our own ideas ; and, even when we apply those ideas to the concrete, we apply them only to certain abstract elements of that concrete. But with Morality it is otherwise. We are dealing with the world of men, women and children, in all their con- creteness and difference ; but we are treating them as if they were mere ideas. The upshot is that, though Morality may be true enough for our ideas ; or for men and women, if they were, as treated in thought, really equal ; as applied to actual men and women, it gives a false result." Absolute Morality, then, is an illusion, but an illusion that has had good effects, not only in the production of ideal characters, but in the gradual improvement of things as estimated by the utilitarian test. "Suppress Morality (as the Utilitarians have done), and you have destroyed at least in theory the golden bridge by which man passes out of the category of personal considerations to those of a wider sphere. Morality is the decoy 40