4 

Isaac was not the almost superhuman moral para- 
gon which for long it was the fashion to suppose 
him; he had a petulant dislike of opposition, a 
tendency to keep his discoveries to himself in- 
stead of letting the world have the benefit of them 
—in which he compares badly with the frankness 
of Leibniz—and a rather mean revengefulness, as 
in his treatment of Flamsteed, whose observations 
had been pre-eminently useful to him. On the 
other hand, De Morgan readily acclaims him 
as the greatest scientific genius of all time, and 
indeed above the average level of his time as to 
character also. His protest is merely against 
excessive veneration. Section viii. of the last 
essay is on Newton’s religion, which has been the 
subject of much debate. The Unitarians claim 
him, and, in spite of Brewster, they are probably 
right. 
There is a small mistake in the footnote on 
p. 21—‘‘Uranus” should be ‘‘ Neptune ’—but we 
mention it only in order that it may be put right 
in the next edition. We see no other slips, and 
the editor is to be congratulated on a piece of 
good work. 
(3) This book is not so much a new edition of 
the English translation of Prof. Mach’s ‘“ Contri- 
butions to the Analysis of the Sensations,” pub- 
lished in 1897, as an entirely new work; for it is 
considerably enlarged. Its contentions, however, 
are the same, and the expansion is in the details. 
Mach disclaims the title of philosopher, consider- 
ing himself a physicist; but inasmuch as he seeks 
a unifying principle applicable to all sciences, he 
philosophises. According to his view, all experi- 
ence is made up of elements which are best re- 
garded as of one kind. ‘The distinction of material 
and psychical, of subject and object, is mis- 
chievous. All experience is of one stuff, and the 
task of science is to investigate relations. A 
psychical fact is as real as a material fact; indeed, 
each element exists in both the worlds, according 
to our purposes of the moment. And as this web 
of experience—and its threads of relations—is all 
that need concern ourselves with, we can 
throw overboard the Dinge an sich which modern 
philosophy inherits from Kant, and with these 
useless noumena lying behind material phenomena 
we can throw overboard the nowmenon which lies 
or was supposed to lie behind our own mental 
phenomena. 
This radical abolishment of the ego is the 
main difficulty. Mach counters the inevitable 
question “TVho experiences?” by saying that 
the question itself shows the questioner to be still 
in the bonds of the fatal habit of subsuming every 
element (sensation) under an unanalysed complex 
(p. 26), and this is admittedly a neat and sugges- 
NO. 2366, VOL. 95] 
we 
NATURE 

[March 4, 1915 
tive answer. It does not prove that there is 
nothing in that complex but its elements and their 
relations, but, on the other hand, the ego-advo- 
cates cannot prove that there is something. J. S. 
Mill reached this same stalemate, being unable to 
see how a chain of memories can be conscious 
of itself. (‘Examination of Sir William Hamil- 
ton’s Philosophy,” particularly the chapter on the 
“Psychological Theory of an External World.”) 
The fact is that we can no more circumnavigate 
and exhaustively comprehend the totality of our 
own self, than we can lift ourselves off the 
ground by pulling at our own bootstraps. It 
follows from this, and quite harmoniously with 
Prof, Mach’s principles, that our attitude towards 
possible survival of death should be entirely non- 
committal, so far as a priorism is concerned. He 
himself decides against it, somewhat vehemently— 
which perhaps indicates human prejudice over- 
coming philosophic calm. But he writes for the 
most part with a saving humour and modesty, 
and in moments of quiet reflection he would prob- 
ably admit that his ‘‘ Weltanschauung ” does not 
necessitate the annihilation of the large complex 
which is himself, when the portion of that com- 
plex which he calls his body is detached. 
(4) The Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 
are for exceedingly athletic thinkers, and are prob- 
ably the cause of many headaches even to them. 
The papers are highly technical, and in so far as 
they are philosophic rather than scientific, they do 
not call for detailed review in Nature. The 
present volume contains, among other things, the 
following : ‘“‘ Appearance and Real Existence,” by 
G. Dawes Hicks; ‘ William of Ockham on Uni- 
versals,” by C. Delisle Burns; “Philosophy as 
the Co-ordination of Science,” by H. S. Shelton; 
“Tntuitionalism,” by N. O. Lossky; ‘‘ Discussion 
—The Value of Logic,” by A. Wolf and F. C. S. 
Schiller; ‘The Psychology of Dissociated Person- 
ality,” by W. Leslie MacKenzie (who inclines too 
| much to Miinsterberg and Freud, and does not 
mention F. W. H. Myers); “Freedom,” by S. 
Alexander ; ‘“‘The Status of Sense-Data,”’ by G. E. 
Moore and G. F. Stout; and “The Principle of 
Relativity,” by H. Wildon Carr, who discusses 
difficulties about the objectivity of the ether, etc., 
and finds absolute reality in life or consciousness 
itself only. 
(5) Probably no one can read M. Bergson with- 
out feeling the fascination of his style and the 
persuasiveness of his apt imagery; and the same is 
true of his chief disciple and expounder in this 
country. Mr. Carr gives us a sincere and careful 
account of the new philosophy as he sees it, em- 
phasising its fundamental stress on change, and 
pointing out that with regard to science it is 
