io8 Analyses of Books. [February, 
hypothesis of the comprehensibility of organic nature,” the sole 
possible hypothesis, adds the author, unless we are willing to 
assume — like the Caffres and Arthur Schopenhauer — that “ trees 
and shrubs have sprung up by their own will.” It is the carrying 
out of the lex continuitatis, as proposed by Aristoteles and 
Leibnitz. 
In the chapter on Psychology the author refuses to adopt the 
materialistic explanation of thought and feeling. He quotes the 
saying of Virchow,* that there is a “ materialistic dogmatism, 
no less than an ecclesiastical, the more dangerous because it 
denies its own dogmatic nature, appears in the garb of Science, 
and professes to be experimental where it is really speculative.” 
With Friedrich Harmsf he reminds us that a state of motion is 
not its own perception, a chemical decomposition is not a sensa- 
tion, nor is a process of combustion, a “ glowing” of the brain 
self-conceptive. Granting vibrations, decompositions, and other 
mechanical and chemical processes, as existing in the brain, to 
assume that they furnish an explanation of mental activity proves 
merely that materialism does not even understand the problem 
which it believes to have solved. 
Very similar is the view of Du Bois-Reymond. “ By no con- 
ceivable arrangement or undulation of material particles can we 
throw a bridge into the realm of consciousness.” 
Thus repelled by the unsatisfactory nature of materialism, 
certain thinkers have turned their attention to a spiritual monism, 
of which Bruno is the chief representative. This attempt to 
find spirit in everything the author thinks not necessary, and 
takes refuge in the hypothesis of Helmholtz and Sir W. Thom- 
son, who people the earth by the aid of a germ-laden fragment 
of some ruined world. Surely little reflection is needed to show 
that this suggestion for the moment evades, but does not solve, 
the mystery of the first origin of life. 
The following considerations of Dr. Von Gizycki merit, how- 
ever, our warmest approval. He points out how radically our 
psychology has been vitiated by considering the rest of the 
animal world as something totally different from ourselves. 
“ Man has thus in a self-deifying spirit misconstrued his posi- 
tion in and his relation to Nature, and has ultimately strayed 
into anti-natural regions.” We forget that humanity includes 
not merely Plato, Shakespeare, Humboldt, but even the rudest 
savage. The chasm between the loftiest and the lowest of our 
species, and that again between the highest and the lowest brute, 
is still deeper than that which severs the lowest man from the 
highest animal. Here the author agrees exaCUy with the con- 
clusions which we, in our turn, have based upon the observations 
of a life-time. But we may still ask whether these same con- 
clusions do not hold equally good if each animal has had an 
independent origin ? 
* Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur wissenschaftlichen Medicin. 
t Abhandlungen zur Systematischen Philosophie, p. 266. 
