34 
REVIEWS. 
losophieal, and actually unphilosophical ? There is a way that creeps as 
well as one that soars, both ending equally in the foggy region of doubt 
and the mire of materialism. We have no desire to forge or find intel¬ 
lectual fetters—to circumscribe the sphere of observation or to depreciate 
the gains of induction. Revelation behoves not to be racked for secrets 
which nature will yield unreluctantly to patient investigation. The natural 
sciences have objects different from those of faith; but the spirit of this is 
all-pervading. Without this direction, the material world lies there—body 
without spirit—dead and deadening, and the boldest flight of speculation 
is but to attain a pinnacle, from which to dash itself down, and perish more 
signally. And in the by-ways of philosophy there are broken bones many ? 
lying about for others’ warning. But it happens often that the errors 
perish with the authors, or after them ; while the good that they may have 
found survives, an enduring inheritance. The history even of the errors is 
instructive ; there seems to be a sort of chronological fluctuation in opposite 
directions, so that from the extreme point it is not difficult to anticipate a 
regress towards the other. The oscillations, all the while, may be dimi¬ 
nishing in their range, and the extremes alternately tending to approach to 
each other, and so to the point of rest and equilibrium. In which d irec- 
tion, let us ask, is the deviation now ? 
Hinrich, in the little volume named above, approaching the highest pro¬ 
blem of the natural sciences—life as the principle of organization—deems 
that he has found more that is suggestive in a former era than in the pre¬ 
sent. “ The purest ideal in nature is life, and just this it is attempted now 
to account for by the properties of matter.” In the opening chapter, “ life,’ 
the two aspects of natural philosophy, the materialistic and the teleological, 
are contrasted and examined. The former, as it represents organization as 
a mere mechanism, and life as a complex of physical properties, is a thing 
of the past; but the chemical, or electro-chemical explanation, survives. 
Liebig, whose writings, by their popularity, have exercised so wide an in¬ 
fluence, does not himself escape out of the sphere of materialism. He is 
not always consistent, indeed, and thus has laid himself open to reproach 
from those who, like Moleschott, have not shrunk from pushing the doc¬ 
trines of organic chemistry to their most rigid consequences. But life is 
no result of the chemical forces, which unless it can subordinate and resist, 
it must perish of necessity. Neither is an organism a chemical product 
any more than it is a mere mechanism. Chemistry has succeeded in imi¬ 
tating some excretions ; but these are not organic products, but what the 
organism rejects as incompatible. 
The teleological view is in advance of the materialistic; but it also has 
