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 NEW BOOKS. 471 the necessity of estimating them by sense and not by strictly rational com- parison, no hedonical calculus is possible. Rational calculation, however, is possible when, instead of pleasures, " utilities " or the means to pleasures are compared. " The effort of virtue is exerted in trying to make that idea the strongest as an idea of a cause of pleasure, which reason judges is the best." It is not merely in opposition to the desires of sense, by which the value of that which gives immediate pleasure is exaggerated, that virtuous effort is necessary. " Sympathy " also is a " natural impulse ". It is a "good" but not a "virtuous" impulse, for no impulse as such is virtuous ; all impulses, the higher as well as the lower, are in themselves "involuntary and unreasonable ". Sympathy, therefore, may have to be resisted by virtuous effort as much as any other natural impulse. Virtue is in the end definable as effort made by " the personal will " against the " natural impulses," for the sake of the interest of "the self" as pointed out by reason; the "self" of which the interest is to be sought being not "the private or exclusive self," but "the highest self," the self so conceived "that nothing shall be foreign or strange to me, because all things are part of myself, and I am part of all ". Sensation et Mouvement. Etudes experimentales de Psycho-mecanique. Par CH. F^RE, Medecin de Bicetre. Avec 44 graphiques clans le Texte. Paris : F. Alcan, 1887. Pp. 164. M. Fere's monograph consists in the first place of a series of varied and exact experiments made both on normal and pathological subjects with a view to determining the relations of sensation or peripheral excitation, action, or the putting forth of muscular energy, and the distribution of blood in the system. The most general result of his researches is that " all peripheral excitations, whether they bear on the organs of general sensibility or on those of special sensibility, determine first a functional super-activity, translating itself, especially on the excited side, by an increase of general and special sensibility and a parallel increase of muscular force, which coincide with a dilatation of the peripheral vessels manifesting itself by an increase in the volume of the limbs" (p. 120). Motion, therefore, may be made the common measure of sensation, and all sensation may be estimated to a certain extent quantitatively by the dynamometer. When excitation is excessive or long-continued, exhaustion follows. Pleasure is the accom- paniment of increasing energy of the organism or of a high state of its "potential energy," pain of diminishing energy or of a low state of potential energy. Happiness, individual or social, is summed up in the " accumula- tion of force". Subjects presenting "hereditary or acquired degenerescence," manifest in an exaggerated form the phenomena of " exhaustion ". Among the various forms of "degenerescence," the author would include pessimism, and in some brief ethical applications of his results he arrives at the con- clusion that " there is only one cardinal virtue : energy, manifesting itself by production under all its forms and by moderation of the needs of excitation and of the desires," while " vice is all that destroys ". He has some remarks at the end, not in the usual strain of mental pathologists, on the relations of criminality, "degenerescence" and punishment. The volume is so full of interesting experimental results of which no more succinct summary than the author's is possible that injustice seems to be done by selection of single positions. Esquisses de Philosophie critique. Par A. SPIR. Avec une Preface par A. PENJON, Professeur a la Faculte" des Lettres de Douai. Paris : F. Alcan, 1887. Pp. xi., 189. The author, whose collected German works were noticed in MIND xi.