August 22, 1902.] 



SCIENCE. 



301 



of free balloons ascended from the grounds 

 carrying military and civil members of the 

 Congress, one of the latter ascents being for 

 meteorological purposes and another for 

 physiological experiments. A sumptuous 

 breakfast, given by the officers of the 

 Balloon Battalion in their Casino, was 

 attended by the Minister of War, and at a 

 banquet given in the Zoological Garden in 

 honor of the Congress, Prince Frederick 

 Henry presided. It is evident, therefore, 

 that the organizers of the Congress suc- 

 ceeded in pleasing their guests and in 

 giving the foreign military officers, who 

 represented the chief European powers 

 excepting France, an idea of the high 

 efficiency of military ballooning in Ger- 

 many. As regards the exploration of the 

 atmosphere, nowhere is there a station so 

 completely equipped as the one directed by 

 Dr. Assmann, and yet, notwithstanding the 

 time and money expended to bring it to this 

 condition, the site near a great city having 

 proved unfavorable for kite-flying, the 

 observatory will be moved into the open 

 country about a hundred miles northeast of 

 Berlin. The observatory of M. Teisserenc 

 de Bort has likewise been removed from 

 the neighborhood of Paris for similar 

 reasons, and this action by both a govern- 

 ment and a private institution shows that in 

 Europe 'the sounding of the ocean of air' 

 is regarded as being of sufficient impor- 

 tance to justify its prosecution under the 

 best possible circumstances. 



A. Lawrence Rotch. 

 Blue Hh-l Meteoeological Obseevatoey. 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS. 

 The Varieties of Religious Experience: A 

 Study in Human Nature. Being the Gifford 

 Lectures on Natural Religion delivered at 

 Edinburgh in 1901-1902 by William L\mes, 

 LL.D., etc.. Corresponding Member of the 

 Institute of France and of the Royal Prus- 

 sian Academy of Sciences, Professor of Phi- 

 losophy at Harvard University. New York, 



London and Bombay, Longmans, Green and 



Co. 1902. 



In the portion of this book which is wholly 

 novel in academic philosophy, that which gives 

 a careful statement and a deliberate discussion 

 of 'the religion of healthy-mindedness ' (in- 

 cluding 'mind-care,' 'Christian science,' etc.) 

 the reader has a fair gauge of the author's 

 spirit and method throughout. We have the 

 'human documents,' the religious feelings and 

 ideas as set forth in extracts chosen with the 

 happiest discrimination, the analyses and ex- 

 planations of psychology, and the author's hos- 

 pitable-minded but critical summing-up. We 

 meet with that reluctance to deny, that wist- 

 ful sense of 'more beyond,' which is so singu- 

 larly blended in his writing with sceptical 

 science. We have that vivid perception of the 

 concrete in aU its variety, that distrustful in- 

 terest in abstract theory in aU its variety,, 

 which make us feel somewhat tossed about 

 on the waves of suggestion, and yet distinctly 

 safer than in the hands of the artificer of con- 

 sistent systems. And lastly we have the care 

 for results, for the difference a theory makes 

 to life, joined with an individualism, a will- 

 ingness to live and let live in matters of be- 

 lief, which would encourage diverse theories 

 to bring forth practical fruit after their kind 

 and so put themselves to the proof. We un- 

 derstand how it could happen that Professor 

 James has been falsely set down as a spiritist, 

 merely because of his completer suspension of 

 judgment in subjects where to hesitate is 

 deemed hardly consistent with scientific pro- 

 priety. On this point he has elsewhere made 

 his views explicit.* In these peculiarly frank 

 pages there is no trace of any taste for the con- 

 ception of spirit-possession; it figures, indeed, 

 not at all; but there is repeated refusal to 

 assume that human consciousness is subject to 

 no impressions but those of sense. 



Highly characteristic of their author, these 

 lectures stand in marked contrast with the 

 other philosophic courses of the GifFord series. 

 Such lecturers as Professors Caird, Ward and 

 Royce offered abstract reasoning in proof of a 



* See review of Hodgson, ' Further Report on 

 Certain Phenomena of Trance,' Psychological Re- 

 view. 1898. 



