84 



SCIENCE. 



[K S. Vol. XXII. No. 551. 



On Friday afternoon a large number of 

 members availed themselves of a boat trip 

 in the harbor on the city fire tugs, while 

 others visited the soap plant of the Larkin 

 Company. In the evening about eighty 

 attended a subscription dinner at the Hotel 

 Iroquois. 



The whole of Saturday was devoted to 

 an excursion to Niagara Falls. A visit to 

 th€ Power House was followed by a 

 luncheon given by the Natural Food Com- 

 pany, and this by a trip over the Gorge 

 Route. 



The total registration at the meeting was 

 178. The secretary, Dr. W. A. Noyes, an- 

 nounced that as the result of a mail vote 

 with reference to the establishment of an 

 abstract journal in cooperation with the 

 Chemical Society of London and the So- 

 ciety of Chemical Industry, seventy-nine 

 adverse votes had been cast out of a total 

 of about 700 so far received. Four eminent 

 scientists were elected honorary members 

 of the society: Svante Arrhenius, Walther 

 Nernst, H. W. B. Roozeboom and Julius 

 Thomsen. 



The next meeting will be held at New 

 Orleans, December 29 to January 1, 1905-6. 

 Austin M. Patterson. 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS. 



A System of Metaphysics. By George Stuart 

 FuLLERTON. IsTew York, The Macmillan 

 Company, 1904. Pp. x + 627. Price, $4. 

 Professor FuUerton makes in the work be- 

 fore us a very creditable attempt to be true 

 to the promise of his title-page; he constantly 

 bears in mind that he has set himself not 

 merely to produce a series of essays on meta- 

 physical subjects, but to set forth the whole 

 scheme of his science in a complete and 

 orderly manner. Only a reader who, like the 

 present reviewer, has himself had occasion to 

 do the same thing can fully appreciate the 

 difficulties of such a task and the recognition 

 fairly due to even a partially successful execu- 

 tion of it. Under Mr. Fullerton's hands the 



subject falls into four main divisions : Part I., 

 ' The Content of Consciousness,' starting from 

 the standpoint, assumed by the author to be 

 that of psychology, of a world of experiences 

 primarily given as states of the individual 

 consciousness, aims at showing the unsatis- 

 factory nature of such a general conception 

 of the real, and the need for some more fun- 

 damental metaphysical interpretation of ex- 

 perience. Part II. discusses the ' external 

 world ' in a series of chapters devoted mainly 

 to the doctrine of space and time, and con- 

 cluding with a rather perfunctory defense of 

 the conception of existence as a perfect mech- 

 anism against the ' descriptive ' view of 

 mechanical science championed by Kirchhof, 

 Maeh, James Ward and others. Part III., 

 'Mind and Matter,' deals at length, and with 

 much acuteness, with the problem of the rela- 

 tion of mind and body, and contains, besides 

 a very vigorous and damaging attack upon the 

 subjective idealism which denies the reality of 

 any knowledge of things as distinct from our 

 own mental states. Professor Fullerton's own 

 ingenious version of the doctrine of psycho- 

 physical parallelism. Finally in Part IV., 

 ' Other Minds and the Realm of Minds,' the 

 author deals with the traditional problems of 

 the old rational psychology and natural theol- 

 ogy. Speaking summarily, it may be said 

 that Professor Fullerton's position in meta- 

 physics is that of a critical realist. He holds, 

 that is, that there is a real physical world of 

 extra -mental objects, and that of that world 

 we have a direct, and not merely a symbolic 

 or representative, perception. Further, he 

 maintains that the whole world of minds and 

 bodies alike forms a complete and perfect 

 mechanism, the relation between the bodily 

 and mental aspects of it being a purely logical 

 ' parallelism,' and consequently adopts a purely 

 determinist view of moral action. Finally 

 he so far follows in the footsteps of Kant as 

 to regard the existence of God and the reality 

 of a future life as matters beyond the limits 

 of demonstrative science, but as affording 

 scope for a legitimate exercise of faith. 



It is hardly to be expected that the execu- 

 tion of so extensive a work should be equally 



