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Rh shorter sketch must needs seem inadequate; and when we say that M. Pillon has avoided technicalities and that his point of view is less that of the physicist than that of the philosopher, we have sufficiently indicated both its shortcomings and its merits. This writer has a remarkably clear style, and a peculiar talent for weaving quotations from the original historic sources into the tissue of his own exposition without interrupting the continuity of the latter. He shows us how atomism, which began by being an atheistic speculation, became, as it triumphed in Newton's hands, both scientific and theistic. He shows how the explanation of such properties of matter as hardness and figure by the attraction of atoms led naturally to the evaporation of the supposed original figure and hardness of the atom itself, so that by Boscovich these attributes were conceived as due to repulsive forces emanating from unextended points of space. Boscovich first used the argument of the impossibility of an actualized infinite to prove the discreteness and finite number of his force-atoms. These, however, remained a purely physical conception. It was Maupertuis who, basing himself on Locke's argument that we might conceive the Almighty to have made matter think, added desire, memory, and habit to the atoms, and laid the foundations of the hylozoism of the present day. Crystals and organisms are best explained by the habits of union of the several atoms inter se; variations of organic species by lapses in the atoms, memory and new habits consequent thereon; and finally the elementary intelligences of the atoms integrate (just as with Spencer and Taine) into the consciousness of the entire organism. But the real elaborator of hylozoism as a philosophy distinctly opposed to theism and spiritualism is, according to M. Pillon, Charles Lemaire, whose two volumes, Initiation à la philosophie, à la liberté, published in 1842-43, are, it is safe to say, quite unknown to any reader of these lines. By the number of the atoms, by their activity and their instinct, all the phenomena of the world can be explained, according to Lemaire, of whose work Pillon gives a very interesting account. The conclusion of the article is that, since along one line of thought the atoms have "evolved" into the unextended and dynamic centres of Boscovich, and along another line into the extended but perceptive and instinctive entities of Maupertuis and others, spiritualizing themselves, so to speak, negatively by losing extent, positively by adding mental life, the natural conclusion is that Atomism necessarily resolves itself into Monadism if clearly thought out. The ultimately real entities can only be spiritual forces which exist for themselves consciously and for each other under spatial form. In establishing this position, M. Pillon criticises Leibnitz for blowing hot and cold in the matter of the realized infinite, and ends with some strictures on M. Evellin’s recent work, Infini et Quantité. The