as fast as settled social arrangements make accumulation possible; and, that there may arise such settled arrangements, fear of the seen ruler, of the unseen ruler, and of public opinion, must come into play. Only after political, religious, and social restraints have produced a stable community, can there be sufficient experience of the pains, positive and negative, sensational and emotional, which crimes of aggression cause, as to generate that moral aversion to them constituted by consciousness of their intrinsically evil results. And more manifest still is it that such a moral sentiment as that of abstract equity, which is offended not only by material injuries done to men, but also by political arrangements that place them at a disadvantage, can evolve only after the social stage reached gives familiar experience both of the pains flowing directly from injustices and also of those flowing indirectly from the class-privileges which make injustices easy."
We are here brought to another exemplification of the method of scientific morality, as influenced by the doctrine of evolution. If the higher control of conduct is derived from a knowledge of its consequences, then the supreme problem of morals is the study of causation in human actions. Everything here turns on the relation of cause and effect; and Mr. Spencer shows conclusively that the development of the idea of causation is one of the latest results of man's intellectual progress. The conception of causation as necessary and universal has even yet been reached only by a small circle of strict scientific thinkers. This is the radical defect of the earlier and current moral systems. In his chapter on "The Ways of judging Conduct," Mr. Spencer proves that the religious, the intuitional, the political, and the utilitarian schools are here alike deficient: "They do not erect into a method the ascertaining of necessary relations between causes and effects, and deducing rules of conduct from formulated statements of them." Evolution, on the other hand, implying the persistence of forces and the continuity of effects, when applied to ethics must give us a new method of "scientific morality."
We have here touched only upon incidental points in Spencer's work; the fundamental principle of his system could have no justice done to it in such a notice. This idea is that pleasure and pain, in some form immediate or remote, are at the bottom of all good and bad, all right and wrong. The doctrine is involved in the statement that "there exists a primordial connection between pleasure-giving acts and continuance or increase of life, and, by implication, between pain-giving acts and decrease or loss of life"; or that it is "no more possible to frame ethical conceptions from which the consciousness of pleasure, of some kind, at some time, to some being, is absent, than it is possible to frame the conception of an object from which the consciousness of space is absent. And now we see that this necessity of thought originates in the very nature of sentient existence. Sentient existence can evolve only on condition that pleasure-giving acts are life-sustaining acts."
We think that the verdict on this book of all candid readers will be that it accomplishes what it professes to accomplish—it finds for the principles of right and wrong in conduct a scientific basis; and, if this be true, it is needless to say that its effect will be to give a new impulse and a new direction to ethical studies.
The Sportsman's Gazetteer and General Guide. The Game Animals, Birds, and Fishes of North America; their Habits and Various Methods of Capture. Copious Instructions in Shooting, Fishing, Taxidermy, Woodcraft, etc. Together with a Glossary, and a Directory to the Principal Game Resorts of the Country. Illustrated with Maps. By Charles Hallock, Editor of "Forest and Stream," etc. Fifth edition. New York: Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 1819. Pp. 920. Price, $3.
The scope and purpose of this volume are so fully set forth in the title that there is no need of further particularizing its contents. The "Gazetteer" is an indispensable part of the outfit of hunters and fishers throughout the United States and the Canadas. In this fifth edition nothing appears to have been omitted which should properly have a place in such a manual. The Glossary is one of the new features introduced in this edition, and it adds greatly to the value of the work. Here are to be found definitions of common words in local use throughout North America. Strangers are
