lower of sect or leader. In many respects his conclusions agree with those of Mr. Herbert Spencer; but he is no imitator of Mr. Spencer's style, and he does not hesitate to express a frank disagreement with his opinions upon occasion—as in the matter of state education, which Mr. Thompson advocates, while Mr. Spencer condemns. A multitude of the pressing problems of our social life are suggested and discussed in this compact volume, with such frankness, sincerity, ability, and good feeling, that we can heartily commend it not only to the professional scholar, but to all thoughtful men and women. The interest which it will awaken will doubtless bespeak far Mr. Thompson's larger work—"A System of Psychology"—a wider circle of readers than it has hitherto had in this country.
The Factors of Organic Evolution. By Herbert Spencer. New York: D. Appleton & Co. Pp. 76.
The two parts of which this essay consists were originally published in successive numbers of "The Nineteenth Century," and also of "The Popular Science Monthly." They are now given in a single volume, together with some passages of considerable length which were omitted, for the sake of brevity, from the magazine publication. Mr. Spencer believes that though mental phenomena of many kinds are explicable only as resulting from the natural selection of favorable variations there are others, still more numerous, which can not be explained otherwise than as the results of the inheritance of functionally-produced modifications. Not only the conceptions we form of the genesis and nature of our higher emotions and moral intuitions, but our sociological beliefs, are profoundly affected by the conclusions we draw on this point. "If a nation is modified en masse by transmission of the effects produced on the natures of its members by those modes of activity which its institutions and circumstances involve, then we must infer that such institutions and circumstances mold its members far more rapidly and comprehensively than they can do if the sole cause of adaptation to them is the more frequent survival of individuals who happen to have varied in favorable ways." Considering the effects which the acceptance of one or other of these hypotheses must have on our views, life, mind, morals, and politics, the question which of them is true, Mr. Spencer adds, "demands, beyond all other questions whatever, the attention of scientific men."
The Ruling Principle of Method applied to Education. By Antonio Rosmini Serbati. Translated by Mrs. William Grey. Boston: D. C. Heath & Co. Pp. 363. Price, $1.50.
Rosmini proposed to apply to education the principles which were independently worked out by Froebel into the Kindergarten—the principles, as the translator describes them, on which Nature herself works. He contemplated a complete treatise on pedagogy, to be worked out in departments corresponding with the several stages of the unfolding and building up of the pupil's mind, having in view, however, not only the child at school, but, to use the words of Francesco Paoli, "the adult and the old, the whole race, in short, because in the man, at every stage of life, there is something of the child; there is a new development going on within him, which requires to be guided and assisted that it may reach a successful issue, and the man learn to educate himself." With this view, he divided his subjects into periods computed by the degrees of cognition which the human mind successively attains in its intellectual development. The first of these periods begins at birth, and includes about six weeks, during which no definite cognitions can be assigned to the child, except that primary and fundamental one of being; the second begins with the first smile and tears, with the simple perception of things as subsisting constituting its cognitions, to which correspond the volitions, which have these things as their object. The third period is marked by the acquisition of speech, which shows that the child has attained the power of analysis and abstraction, with volitions having sensible qualities as their object. The fourth period shows itself in the aptitude to learn to read, and is characterized by the exercise of the faculties of judgment and comparison, and by the development of the moral sense, which was already existing in the germ. Thence are developed conscience, synthetic cognitions, and the free use of the
