Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/129

NEW BOOKS. 115 Fragments in Philosophy and Science, being Collected Essays and Addresses. , Stuart Professor in Princeton University. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1902. Pp. xii., 389. Price $2.50 net.

Prof. Baldwin explains that these papers, twenty-one in number, have been brought together in one volume because they are related to larger topics which he has treated more systematically (or will so treat) in separate works. And certainly their chief interest rests on the light they throw upon doctrines that their author has developed elsewhere. They do not form a collection of popular essays in philosophy, for many of the papers are highly technical, and many of them almost obscurely curt. Nor do they appear to develop or even to illustrate any single central idea; indeed, their heterogeneity is artificially emphasised by an arrangement which leads us from 'Philosophy and Life' through 'The Cosmic and the Moral' to 'The Memory for Square Size,' and thence, again, through a discussion of "The 'Type-theory' of Reaction" to 'The Psychology of Religion'. The more technical papers here reprinted are already so well known that they do not demand separate mention. With regard to the others, expectation is aroused by the opinion expressed in the Preface that our ultimate view of the world must be aesthetic rather than logical or ethical, and it is disappointing to find that after all they rarely touch on this topic. In the essay on 'Philosophy and Life,' Prof. Baldwin argues that, in a general way, and when historically interpreted, the effects of a philosophical theory on life are a legitimate test of its validity, and similarly in another essay on 'Theism and Immortality' he maintains that the demands of our aesthetic and of our moral consciousness have as just a claim to satisfaction as those of the intellect. This is valuable, of course, as against the philosophies which refuse to take any but intellectual postulates into consideration at all; but Prof. Baldwin scarcely tries to meet the argument that philosophy is an intellectual discipline and that within its own province the intellect must be allowed supremacy. Other articles are on 'The Idealism of Spinoza,' 'Recent Discussion in Materialism' (containing some interesting criticism of Bain, Wundt and Maudsley), 'Psychology, Past and Present,' and 'The Postulates of Physiological Psychology'. That on 'The Psychology of Religion' is suggestive, but a little unsatisfactory. Concentrating attention on religions as organised in society, it almost disregards the religious experience itself, and tends to find the value of religion only in its external effects as a conservative factor in social progress and as a prop to morality.

Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. Part 41, 1901. Pp. 649. Part 44, 1902. Pp. 275.

The first of these volumes contains a further investigation of the phenomena connected with Mrs. Piper's trances, in the shape of detailed reports and critical discussions by Prof. Hyslop, of Columbia, of sittings in which the chief communicating intelligence professed to be his deceased father; the second is similarly made up of the experiences of Sir Oliver Lodge, the late Mr. Frederic Myers, Dr. F. van Eeden, Dr. Hodgson, Mr. J. G. Piddington, Mr. "Wilson," Miss Alice Johnson and Mrs. Verrall, with an English psychic, Mrs. Thompson. Neither series perhaps contains anything quite so striking as Mrs. Piper's "G. P." communications (Proc., pt. 33), but Prof. Hyslop's full discussion of the question of