Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/142

 NEW BOOKS. 131 first in French (pp. 1-168) ; the second and shorter (pp. 171-242) in German (here accompanied by a French translation). The thesis maintained in the first essay is that no statement of the law of causation by any modern philosopher has had or could have had the smallest influence on science, but that Aristotle's theory of causation is capable of perfectly explaining all the scientific discoveries of modern times. Aristotle, indeed, has had no direct influence on modern science ; his statement of the law of causation is confused, and in the sixteenth century could only be misunderstood along with his other doctrines ; but after three centuries of scientific discovery, it has at length become possible to see in Aristotle's principles the ground of all the progress that has been made. Aristotle's two principles, when disentangled from the confusion in which he leaves them, are (1) that the cause is that which is primitive in the ' kind ' to be explained, (2) that induction gives the universal by the discovery of ideas between which there is no difference. " It was Galileo, by his great discovery of the laws of the fall of bodies, who gave the most remarkable example of the accuracy of the Aristotelian rules. Stones fall because bodies attract one another in the direct ratio of the masses and the inverse ratio of the squares of the dis- tances, that is to say, stones fall because the parts of matter, the primitive of the kind in question, the cause according to Aristotle, fall towards one another in the direct ratio of the masses and the inverse ratio of the squares of the distances, ideas the same contained in the same manner in each of the parts of matter." In the second essay it is argued that all modern statements of the law of causation involve a vicious circle, but that Leibniz has supplied a basis for scientific discovery in the principle of sufficient reason, of which the law of causality is "an elementary and incomplete form ". It has been the author's intention, in a paper read before the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences and printed at the end of the volume (pp. 245-264), to reconcile the answers given in the two essays bj 7 showing the agreement between " the law of causality interpreted according to the theory of the greatest philosopher of Greece and the principle of sufficient reason as it was formulated by the most illustrious thinker of Germany ". E. SPENCER ed E. MORSELLI. Scienza e Religione. Milano-Torino : Fra- telli Dumolard, 1884. Pp. 47. The Director of the Rivista di Filosofia scientifica here reprints a (translated) article of Mr. Herbert Spencer's on " The Past and Future of Religion" (an extract from Part vi. of the Principles of Sociology) which has already appeared in his Review, along with a criticism of Mr. Spencer's general doctrine of the relations of science and religion, published in the same number. His first line of criticism is that, Mr. Spencer's point of view (in First Principles) being admitted, the ultimate conception of reli- gion and of metaphysics, the conception of the unknowable, or of the ideal, cannot be identified with the ultimate conception of science, the conception of an unknown reality, an " infinite and eternal energy ". The sentiment of philosophic "admiration" which, according to Mr. Spencer, is excited by this energy, has nothing in common with the religious sentiment of "veneration". The attitude of the human mind towards nature has gradually passed from the emotional to the intellectual, in other words, from the religious to the scientific phase ; and the scientific and religious attitudes are inconsistent with one another. But further, Mr. Spencer's point of view is inconsistent with positive philosophy. The desire to frame some hypothesis of an " absolute " or " unknowable " is, it must be admitted, ineradicable from the human mind ; but to the problem of satis- fying this desire neither science nor positive philosophy has anything to say.