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 NEW BOOKS. 569 Dynamic Sociology, or Applied Social Science, as Based upon Statical Sociology and the less Complex Sciences. By LESTER F. WARD. Vol. i., pp. xxix., 706 ; vol. ii., pp. vii., 633. Second edition. New York : D. Appleton & Co., 1897. Dynamic Sociology is the art of improving society ; happiness is its end ; and its means is the universal diffusion of scientific information. The first volume traces the development of human society from an originally homogeneous matter which suffers primary aggregation in cosmogony, secondary aggregation in biogeny, psychogeny and anthropogeny, and tertiary aggregation in sociogeny. The second volume works back from the end of happiness through a chain of means progress, dynamic action, dynamic opinion, knowledge to education. In developing the main thesis of his work, the author abstracts to the last degree from man's practical nature. The social unit is a centre of more or less information ; truth is a large number of facts and gener- alisations which it is the business of education to impart. In so far as education leaves this task in order even to ' develop the intellect ' it for- sakes its proper function and is lost labour. The author does not show how the diffusion of abstract information is to be adequate to the realisation of a more perfect society ; but he is convinced of its paramount importance, and seems to regard his theory as almost self-evident. He says, for instance, that ' the complete ignorance of so-called cultivated people as to the nature of cells in biology and of the fact that they have each been evolved from a simple cell, shuts them off from a knowledege of the most important truth of their existence '. This sentence is quite typical of Mr. AVard's whole point of view, which confuses importance within special sciences with importance in relation to conduct. G. SANDEMAN. Pseudo-philosophy at the end of the Nineteenth Century. By H. M. CECIL. I. An Irrationalist Trio : Kidd, Drummond, Balfour. London : The University Press, Limited, 1897. Pp. xvi., 308. This, the first volume of Mr. Cecil's Pseudo-philosophy, is an elaborate castigation of the authors of Social Evolution (MiND, Oct., 1894), The Foundations of Belief (MIND, July, 1895) and The Ascent of Man. The writer lashes his irrationalist trio very much as Mr. J. M. Robertson in a recent work lashed the critics of Thomas Buckle. His position and purpose are frankly avowed : " the primary object of this volume is the refutation of the fallacies and errors contained in three books . . . which at the time of their publication caused a literary sensation . . . without stirring the scientific world. . . . The state of the intellectual world in which such works can command an enormous sale . . . serves to enforce the lesson . . . that the conflict between science and religion, between rationalism and irrationalism, is by no means a thing of the past. . . . There can be no truce between the rationalist and the irrationalist." It is not quite easy to see what kind of public Mr. Cecil expects to reach by his criticism. His book is too bulky, and too little independent of the books it attacks, to form palatable reading for the average edu- cated man ; while the philosophers von Fach will have passed their own criticism upon the ' trio '. Moreover, the doctrines so repellent to Mr. Cecil are notoriously such as appeal to bias and temperament ; no amount of argument on either side will decide a man for or against them. On the other hand, the author is fully entitled to print his protest, if he will ; and there is a tickle of suggestion in the bracketing of the three names