NOTES AND LITERATURE. 



GENERAL BIOLOGY. 



Baldwin's " Fragments." 1 - The Fragments nre twenty-four phil- 

 osophical and psychological papers which appeared originally in The 

 Psychological Review, The Presbyterian Review, The New York Inde- 

 pendent, and other magazines. The author accounts for their 

 republication in book form by the fact that they relate to larger topics 

 on which he has published, or intends to publish, more extensively 

 in separate works. 



may be said that the author's point of view is idealism, but an ideal- 

 ism whose chief aim is to interpret and to harmonize the empirical 

 sciences. " Philosophy is a new reading of science" (p. viii). This 



which is not only true but also beautiful, and in some sense good," 

 and "it is true and good because it Is beautiful" 1 (p. ix). In fact 



"the aesthetic principle represents the point in our conceptions 



where worth and truth coalesce and become one." Thus truth, it 



This proposition gives the secret of the whole book. The ascetic 

 mind which desires only truth from science or philosophy, that is. 

 the person whose sole aim is to eliminate contradiction from his view 

 of the world, to make it strictly logically consistent, will get very little 

 from the Fragments. Professor Baldwin does not specially aim at 

 simplicity or precise definition, and often lets a metaphor bridge a 



defect of the philosophical essays, - the error of supposing that the 

 psychological explanation of an idea solves epistemological problems 



