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NA TURE 



[Atigust 23, 1883 



cation of unimportant and especially of local details, 

 would be better able to concentrate their strength on 

 large questions, to the notable increase of the value of 

 their Transactions or Proceedings. That such a re- 

 arrangement of effort would involve many practical diffi- 

 culties is sufficiently obvious, and that the machinery 

 might ne-fer be made to work smoothly may likewise be 

 granted. Yet surely it would be well worth while to try 

 whether some of the energy which at present is wasted or 

 misdirected could not be utilised to the manifest advantage 

 of that progress which all have sincerely at heart. 



Students who have occasion to keep themselves ac- 

 quainted with the current literature of their respective 

 sciences naturally grumble at the constant increase in the 

 number of journals, Proceedings, Transactions, &c, which 

 they must painfully look over. But this increase is in- 

 evitable. What we should aim at is not its curtailment 

 so much as its methodical arrangement. If certain 

 societies would only publish papers in particular depart- 

 ments of a science, it would be infinitely easier to follow 

 the yearly advance made in that science. The metro- 

 politan societies might annually issue with their own 

 Proceedings brief digests of the additions to our know- 

 ledge made by the country organisations and otherwise, 

 so as to comprise within the boards of one volume a view 

 of the whole progress in theory and detail achieved by each 

 science in this country. At all events some means should 

 be devised of enabling the older and the younger and 

 less ambitious societies to draw together into concerted 

 action, either by formal arrangement or by informal and 

 friendly correspondence. 



ESS A YS IN PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM 

 Essays in Philosophical Criticism. Edited by Andrew 

 Seth and R. B. Haldane, with a Preface by Edward 

 Caird. (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1883.) 



ONE of the most interesting among the intellectual 

 movements now taking place in this country is the 

 growth and development of that system of philosophical 

 thought which began with Kant, flourished in Germany, 

 and, spreading to England, has only just begun to take 

 root in the minds of some of our ablest thinkers. It is a 

 curious thing to see this exotic springing up thus 

 vigorously side by side with our endemic productions — 

 the one like a vine creeping with the tendrils of its subtle 

 and sensitive analysis ; the others, like our British oaks, 

 contented sturdily to rest in the stiff soil of experience 

 without seeking for any supports in the thin air of meta- 

 physics. So rarely has this foreign plant found its way 

 across the Channel that until within the last few years it was 

 scarcely ever to be met with even in the more cultured of 

 our philosophical pleasure-grounds. Probably the last of 

 all the gardens into which it is likely to find its way is 

 that of natural science, and therefore we publish this 

 short notice in order to inform any of our readers who 

 may desire to see the plant in question where they may 

 profitably go to see it, and have all its main features ex- 

 plained to them in admirable English and with the least 

 possible expenditure of time. For these " Essays in 

 Philosophical Criticism " only cover 277 pages, are all 

 written by men of marked ability, who are well saturated 

 with the philosophy which they undertake not only to 

 expound but to extend. 



The pages of Nature, however, are not adapted to a 

 criticism of such a " Criticism " as a whole ; were such the 

 case we should of coursehwe taken the works of Professors- 

 Green and Caird as the representative expositions in this 

 country of the German school of philosophical thinking. 

 But there is one important point of contact between this 

 school of thinking and that of natural science which does 

 come within the province of the latter to examine, 

 and it is because this point is prominently put forward in 

 the book before us that we have chosen these " Essays " as 

 the subject of our review. The point to which we allude 

 is the doctrine that science can no longer afford to dis- 

 regard the revelations of transcendental analytic ; that if 

 any considerable progress is henceforward to be made in 

 the investigation of the facts of nature, it can only be 

 done in the light which is shed by the " theory of know- 

 ledge," and that if " a man of science" does not happen 

 to be acquainted with the use of the "categories," his 

 education is in as sorry a case as that of a young lady 

 who has never been taught the use of the globes : " he 

 perpetually raises difficulties insoluble for himself in his 

 own department by the do;_;rnitic application of mistaken 

 categories." Now we have had the good fortune to meet 

 no small number of young ladies who know their 

 geography sufficiently well without ever having attained 

 to the use of the globes, and we have met with a still 

 greater number of " men of science " who have done 

 exceedingly good work " in their own department," with- 

 out ever having heard of the " categories." May it not 

 be that both the schoolmistresses and the philosophers 

 are alike in somewhat unduly magnifying their office ? As 

 regards the philosophers, this is the only point with 

 which we are here concerned. 



In the concluding paragraph of a highly interesting and 

 ably written essay by Mr. R. B. and Mr. J. S. Haldane, 

 on "The Relation of Philosophy to Science," it is said 

 by way of summary : " Such considerations point towards 

 what seems to be beco ning the conclusion of the present 

 time— that science and philosophy can no longer be 

 kept wholly apart from one another.'' The consi- 

 derations which lead to this conclusion briefly stated 

 are as follows :— Science has hitherto been concerned 

 only with the lower categories of substance, quantity, 

 causation, mechanism, &c, to the exclusion of those 

 higher conceptions of organism and teleology, without 

 which it is impossible to take a full or comprehensive 

 view of all the facts which fall to be explained. Thus, 

 for instance, if biology restricts itself to investigating 

 the phenomena of life only under the categories of 

 mechanism and causation, it can never attain to the all 

 round understanding of the facts of its own subject-matter 

 as afforded by that changing of the points of view 

 which is rendered possible by the use of the conceptions 

 above mentioned. These conceptions amount to regard- 

 ing an organism as something more than a mechanism ' 

 which stands to be investigated by measurement and the 

 tracing of physical causation alone— to regarding an 

 organism as that which exhibits the peculiarity of every 

 part being acted on by the other parts, and by the environ- 

 ment, so as to form a self-conserving system, of which it 

 is "the essential feature of each part that it is a member 

 of an ideal whole"— morphological structure, physio- 

 logical function, growth, development, decay, and death 



