Apbil 27, 1906.] 



SCIENCE. 



659 



ment for the realistic implications intrinsic 

 in the judgment as such seems, after all, 

 curiously like a mere relapse into a pre-Car- 

 tesian, even a pre-Protagorean, dogmatism. 

 Doubtless a cognitive process purports to be 

 * connected with something other than itself,' 

 and the truths which thought thinks are meant 

 to be 'true, not about thought, but about 

 things.' But it is also a peculiarity of the 

 mind that it has the power of self -conscious- 

 ness, and so is capable of doubting its own 

 success in achieving this ' transcendent refer- 

 ence.' Such a self-conscious ' going-behind ' 

 the immediate content of consciousness, such 

 a distinguishing of the thought-process from 

 its potential object, necessarily supervenes in 

 the history of philosophy and in any thorough- 

 going reflection by the individual; and for 

 any modern logician or metaphysician this 

 reflective situation is already presupposed. 

 The implications of the proposition that man 

 is a self-conscious animal, Woodbridge hardly 

 seems to have sufficiently considered. 



At a moment when a renascence of realism 

 is in fashion among metaphysicians — Dr. W. 

 P. Montague even contending, in one of the 

 shorter papers here printed, for the physical 

 reality of the secondary qualities — it is inter- 

 esting to turn to Poincare's remarkable essay 

 on the present condition of theoretical physics. 

 He exhibits — in a fashion that will seem para- 

 doxical enough to physicists of an older school 

 — all the working principles which physics has 

 long employed, as now subsisting in a very 

 problematical and parlous state, and the con- 

 cepts of matter and energy as surviving only 

 in a singularly eviscerated form. The uncer- 

 tainty and provisionality which are thus re- 

 vealed in the theoretical foundations of the 

 most fundamental of the physical sciences, by 

 one who is perhaps its most eminent living 

 representative, make this paper a noteworthy 

 document in the history of science. 



Erdmann's new rehabilitation of the con- 

 cept of necessary causality appears in a rather 

 bafflingly unidiomatic translation; but so far 

 as one can follow the argument, it does not 

 seem likely to render obsolete Ostwald's re- 

 mark in the immediately preceding paper, that 



" all attempts to prove the general validity of 

 the law of causality have failed, and there has 

 remained only the indication that without this 

 law we should feel an unbearable uncertainty 

 in reference to the world." Erdmann's reason- 

 ing, however, is (though distantly related to 

 the argument of Kant's ' Second Analogy of 

 Experience'), original and gedankenreich, 

 and it would be profitable to attempt an an- 

 alytical discussion of it; but the paper is the 

 longest of the series, and a commensurate 

 treatment of it here is forbidden by considera- 

 tions of space. Like considerations make it 

 necessary to mention a ntmiber of the more 

 specialized papers only by title: those of Or- 

 mond on ' Present Problems of Metaphysics ' ; 

 of Pfleiderer and Troeltsch on the ' Philosophy 

 of Eeligion ' ; of Sorley and Hensel on 

 ' Ethics ' ; of H. E. Marshall and Dessoir on 

 * Esthetics ' ; of Pierpont on the ' History of 

 Mathematics in the Nineteenth Century'; of 

 Picard and Maschke on ' Algebra and An- 

 alysis ' ; of Darboux and Kasner on ' Geom- 

 etry.' As has been sufficiently shown, the 

 volume covers a very wide and very mixed 

 field. The selection of these last-named 

 papers for so brief mention is not due to any 

 lack of interest and value on the part of most 

 of them; it is rather due, partly to the limits 

 of the province of this journal, and partly to 

 the limitations of the present reviewer. Those 

 who attended the sessions of the congress will 

 remember that a number of the ' ten-minute 

 papers' were by no means the least profitable 

 part of the proceedings. Of these a few in 

 philosophy, but none in mathematics, are 

 printed — in each case in abridged form. The 

 volume is not free from bad misprints; and 

 most of the translations from French and 

 German (that of Dessoir's paper, by Miss E. 

 D. Puffer, is one exception) seem to be hasty 

 renderings into that unknown tongue which 

 only translators employ. 



Arthur O. Lovejoy. 



The Eolithic Problem, — Evidences of a Rude 

 Industry Antedating the Paleolithic. By 

 George Grant MacCurdy." 

 ' American Anthropologist , N. S., Vol. 7, pp. 



425-479, with five half tone plates reproduced 



