NEW BOOKS. In the second work, m which there is special reference to Lotxe, the problem of Activity succeeds that of Causality, and the venue is changed from Epistemology to Metaphysics. The criticism of Lotze is an attractive piece of dialectical work, marred again by a habit of diffuseness. The barrenness of Lotze'a Absolute-the M which is really an X-the futility of a " progress " whioh is merely a perpetual renewal of the status quo, the inconsistency of a " freedom of which the resultant

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... tivity is predetermined by the nature of the whole in which it is containedthese and other similar points are made with great skill. The hypothetical pluralism so established is worked out in a review of the principal spheres of being-dead matter, living organisms, and the physical world -and emerges first of all in a dualism of soul and body-substances. The facts of experience cannot be understood except on the assumption that transient activity, not merely imminent, is real, although the possibility of it can never be understood, because it can never be experienced by us. As in the material world, and in the physical world, substances act and react upon one another, so between the two kinds of substances the same interaction takes place. PsychophyBical parallelism is a delusion : the prinoiple of the conservation of energy has no validity beyond the material facts on whioh it is based ; but even within the material world it has a merely subordinate value, because of the influence of other immaterial substances on the quantity of energy within the world. But after all, one cannot help a feeling of "parturiunt mantes": for the dualuin gives place finally to a trinism-or is it a monism ? There is in the world a certain harmony, order, hierarchy of ends, whioh points to a supreme Substance: it cannot be thought of as an imminent, cause, but is a transcendent being acting upon and from without the world ! and so all the problems solved suggest themselves anew. Is there action only, or also reaction between the Absolute and the finite substances P If reaction, why should not this Absolute be one among many; if aotion merely, where is the freedom and independence of the individual substance ? J. L. M. Gustav Theodor Fechner. Rede zur Feier seines 100 jahrigen Geburtstages.