1894. SOME NEW BOOKS. 231 



entitled " The Message of Monism to the World," in order to give a 

 very brief account of the doctrine. Until a few years ago, in the 

 minds of most people who reflected upon the meaning of things, and 

 in the minds of each of the great mass of men who accepted with easy- 

 going indifference what was thrust upon their consciousness, mental 

 images of the universe were broken up among a series of separate 

 identities. Thus, in the sphere of theology, there were the Creator 

 and the things created ; in psychology, there was the central ego, and 

 the surrounding swirl of sensations and states of consciousness, 

 there were mind and body acting and reacting upon each other. In 

 science there was matter, and force acting on matter, while even to 

 different kinds of matter and varieties of force there were ascribed 

 separate existences. 



In all these the attitude of the thinking world is slowly changing. 

 Formerly, man attempted to express his sense of the dependence of 

 all things upon a Supreme Being in the phrase "Omnipresence of the 

 Deity " ; now^ we attempt to express the same relations in the phrase 

 " Immanence of the Deity." The change of phrase marks an 

 attempt to destroy the sense of separation between the Deity and the 

 universe, or, rather, to destroy the idea of the co-existence of two 

 separate identities. Similarly, in psychology there is a tendency to 

 be rid of a separate abstract metaphysical " ego," to merge the 

 abstraction in the sum of states of consciousness. There is not an 

 " I " which has sensations, emotions, and ideas ; the sensations, 

 emotions, and ideas are part of the " I." The change is better 

 known in things scientific. When now we speak of matter and force 

 acting and reacting upon each other, we are ready to admit that 

 matter in the last analysis resolves itself into the action of forces, and 

 that we know force only through its action on what we call matter. 

 In the separate sciences the change of tendency is still plainer. We 

 seek to interpret the elements in terms of each other, perhaps as 

 unsuccessfully as Lord Salisbury seems to think, but with a hope 

 greater than his, and we believe in the conservation of energy and in 

 the transformation of chemical, electrical, physical, and perhaps even 

 vital forces. 



" Monism " is the pointed, progressive, and polemical expression 

 of all this change of attitude. It is, to use the words of Dr. Paul 

 Carus, " the new philosophy that is dawning upon mankind : the 

 theory of oneness, which indicates that the world, we ourselves 

 included, must be conceived as one great whole. All generalisations, 

 such as m.atter, mind, and motion, are abstractions representing 

 aspects of reality, but not entities or things-in-themselves, by a com- 

 bination of which the universe has been pieced together. And all our 

 notions of nature can be formulated in exact statements, which, when 

 properly understood, form one harmonious system of natural laws." 

 No doubt, like the active and aggressive form of every idea, it has 

 coated itself with a certain brusque and repellent dogmatism ; but 

 soldiers actually on campaign are not beautiful objects : fine feathers, 

 necessarily, are reserved for parade. But anyone who studies it may 

 see that it is an honest attempt to combat the arrogant narrowness of 

 agnostic and religious dogmatism. 



Alaska. 



Those interested in Alaska will find in the August number of the 

 Scottish Geographical Magazine an epitome of the knowledge we possess 

 of that little-known land, from the pen of Israel C. Russell. Mr, 



