of the horse and head, the horse and body, the horse and legs, the horse and tail, and then consider the horse as one thing, the head, body, legs and tail as other things? Yet this is the error of those who consider matter as one thing and properties as other things."

"As it is of matter, so it is of space: One man sees the disc of the moon when it is riding high as having the size of the top of a teacup, another as large as a cartwheel. But the moon will be seen larger than a barn if it is seen behind a distant barn, or it may seem to be as large as a great mountain when it rises behind such a mountain. As the moon rides the heavens it seems to be this side of the surface of the sky, although we know that there is no such surface. Such habitual judgments of space and time seem to contradict each other. By a natural process of fallacious judgment the idea of space as void is developed as an existing thing or body. This is the ghost of space-the creation of an entity out of nothing. The space of which we speak is occupied. We can by no possibility consider true space or void as a term of reality. If we reason about it mathematically, and call it a, the meaning of a in the equation is finally resolved by expressing it in terms of body as they are represented by surface. This non-space has no number; it is not one or many in oneit is nothing. It is not extension as figure or structure—it is nothing. The fallacy concerning space is born of careless reasoning. No harm is done by this popular misconception of space until we use it in reasoning as a term of reality; then the attributes of space may be anything because they are nothing."

"The universe is a concourse of related factors composed of related particles. A relation cannot exist independent of terms We may consider a relation abstractly, but it cannot exist abstractly. To affirm a re

lation the terms must be implied. When an abstract is reified, that is supposed to exist by itself independent of other essentials, and the illusion is entertained that there is something independent of the essentials which supports them, a mythology is created so subtle as to simulate reality. So when relations are reified and supposed to exist independent of terms the mind is astray in the realm of fallacies."

All this seems to me to be so important and significant that it cannot be said too often, for it is all so essential to clear thinking upon the significance of science that I believe the author has done good service in repeating it, although it was all said long ago in still simpler and clearer words.

Berkeley tells us that "what seems to have had a chief part in rendering speculation intricate and perplexed, and to have occasioned innumerable errors and difficulties in almost all parts of knowledge, is the opinion that the mind hath a power of framing abstract ideas or notions of things. He who is not a perfect stranger to the writings and disputes of the philosophers most needs acknowledge that no small part of them are spent about abstract ideas. These are in а more especial manner thought to be the object of those exercises which go by the name of Logic and Metaphysics, and of all that which passes under the notion of the most abstract and sublime learning. Whether others have this wonderful faculty of abstracting their ideas they can best tell; as for myself I dare be confident I have it not." (Human Knowledge,' Introduction, 6-10.)

"I am tempted to think nobody else can. form these ideas any more than I can. Pray, Alciphron, which are those things you would call absolutely impossible?"

"Such as include a contradiction." "Can you form an idea of what includes a contradiction ?"

"I can not."

"Consequently, whatever is absolutely impossible you cannot form an idea of?"

"This I grant."

"But can a color or a triangle, such as you describe these abstract general ideas, really exist?"

"When a youth, as I was breaking prairie with an ox team, my labor was interrupted by a rattlesnake, and, during the day, I saw and killed several of these serpents. At one time the lash of my whip flew off. In trying to pick it up I grasped a stick.

"Should it not follow, then, that they can not exist in your mind, or, in other words, that you cannot conceive or frame an idea of them? I do not perceive that I can, by any faculty, whether intellect or imagination, conceive or form an idea of that which is impossible and includes a contradiction." (Alciphron VII., 6.)

"I am of a vulgar cast, simple enough to believe my senses and to leave things as I find them. To be plain, it is my opinion that the real things are the very things I see and feel and perceive by my senses. These I know and, finding they answer all the necessities and purposes of life, have no reason to be solicitous about any other unknown beings. A piece of sensible bread, for instance, would stay my stomach better than ten thousand times as much of that insensible, unintelligible real bread you speak of. It is likewise my opinion that colors and other sensible qualities are in the objects. I cannot, for my life, help thinking that snow is white and fire hot. Away, then, with all that skepticism, all those ridiculous philosophical doubts. I might as well doubt my own being as the being of those things I actually see and feel." (Three Dialogues, III.)

While we are unable to doubt the being of those things we see and feel, we do continually doubt or question the evidence of our senses, for error and illusion and hallucination are, unfortunately, as real as truth; and the part of Powell's book which deals with illusions is that which the reader will find most attractive and suggestive.

degree of expectant attention to which I was wrought, caused me to interpret the sense impression of touch as caused by a rattlesnake. At the same time I distinctly heard the rattle of the snake."

"A soldier in the suspense which precedes the battle, when sharpshooters are now and then picking off a man, may have his gun or his clothing touched by a rifle ball and in the suspense of the occasion may imagine that he has received a serious, perhaps a deadly wound, and may shriek with pain. A mustard plaster on the head may cause a man to dream of an Indian conflict in which he is scalped, as I have observed."

All savages believe that hallucinations are a means of divination, and, as many intoxicants produce hallucinations, all of the North American tribes make use of these, supplemented with many rites, such as dancing, singing, ululation, the beating of drums, and the tormenting of the body by various painful operations, all designed to produce ecstatic states and the consequent hallucinations.

If the Society for Psychical Research were to make a census of those who believe that hallucinations often reveal the unknown past or future, Powell tells us that they would find among the North American Indians one hundred per cent. ready to testify to the truth of this opinion.

Erroneous judgments once made may be repeated in perpetuating fallacies, and myths are invented to explain them. Then the myths become sacred, and the moral nature is enlisted in their defense.

"The stars were seen to move along the firmament, or the surface of a solid, from

east to west, as men run along the surface of the earth at will. But the heavenly bodies move by constantly repeated paths, and so primitive man invents myths to explain these repeated paths."

"Fallacies are," as our author clearly points out, "erroneous inferences in relation to things known. If there were no realities about which inferences are made, fallacies would not be possible. The history of science is the discovery of the simple and the true; in its progress fallacies are dispelled and certitude remains."

These extracts from Powell's book will show how much that is valuable and suggestive and instructive is to be found in it. I regret that I am forced to form a very different estimate of the constructive part of the book, for, as the author expounds his own system of philosophy, he seems to me to be one of those ungracious pastors who, while pointing out to others the steep and thorny way, themselves the primrose path of dalliance tread, and reck not their own read.

The book begins with a delightful and instructive anecdote of a party of Indians throwing stones across a cañon. The distance from the brink to the opposite wall did not seem very great, yet no man could throw a stone across the chasm, though Chuar, the Indian Chief, could strike the opposite wall very near its brink. The stones thrown by others fell into the depths of the cañon. "I discussed these feats with Chuar, leading him to an explanation of gravity. Now Chuar believed that he could throw a stone much farther along the level of the plateau than over the cañon. His first illusion was thus one very common among mountain travelers—an underestimate of the distance of towering and massive rocks when the eye has no intervening object to divide space into parts as measure of the whole."

"I did not venture," says our author, "to

correct Chuar's judgment, but simply sought to discuss his method of reasoning."

He explained that the stone could not go far over the cañon, because the empty space pulled it down, and, interpreting subjective fear of falling as an objective pull, he pointed out how strongly the empty void pulls upon the man who stands on the brink of a lofty cliff.

"Now, in the language of Chuar's people, a wise man is said to be a traveler, for such is the metaphor by which they express great wisdom, as they suppose that a man must learn by journeying much. So in the moonlight of the last evening's sojourn in the camp on the brink of the cañon, I told Chuar that he was a great traveler, and that I knew of two other great travelers among the seers of the East, one by the name of Hegel, and another by the name of Spencer, and that I should ever remember these three wise men, who spoke like words of wisdom, for it passed through my mind that all three of these philosophers had reified void and founded a philosophy thereon."

The system of philosophy which it is the aim of this book to expound is, so far as I can gather it from a single reading, about as follows:

"It was more than chance," our author tells us, "that produced the decimal system, for the universe is pentalogic, as all of the fundamental series discovered in nature are pentalogic by reason of the five concomitant properties. properties. The origin of the decimal system was the recognition by primitive man of the reciprocal pentalogic system involved in the two hands of the human body." P. 112.

"Thus, in geonomy, p. 43, we deal with an earth composed of five encapsulated globes enclosing a nucleus, and presenting: (1) the centrosphere, (2) the lithosphere, (3) the hydrosphere, (4) the atmosphere, (5) the etherosphere."

"In the human mind, again, we have the

five psychic faculties: (1) sensation, (2) perception, (3) apprehension, (4) reflection and (5) ideation." P. 418.

"These five psychic faculties arise in the mind through the cognition of the five properties of the ultimate particles of matter. Every body, whether it be a stellar system or an atom of hydrogen, has certain fundamental characteristics found in all. These are number, space, motion, time (p. 13), and (p. 14) the fifth property here called judgment."

"All particles of plants, soils and stars have judgment as consciousness and choice; but having no organization for the psychical functions, they have not recollection or inference; they, therefore, do not have intellections or emotions. Only animal beings have these psychical functions. Molecules, stars, stones and plants do not think; that which we have attributed to them as consciousness and choice is only the judgment of particles, but it is the ground, the foundation, the substrate of that which appears in animals when they are organized for conception." P. 413.

"These things are necessary to a primitive judgment: First, a sense impression; second, a consciousness of that impression; third, a desire to know its cause; fourth, a choice of a cause; fifth, a consciousness of the concept of that cause; sixth, a comparison of one conscious term with the other; and seventh, a judgment of likeness or of unlikeness."

For all I know, that which chemists call affinity may be the choice of particles to associate in bodies.' All the chemist tells us of the matter is that the word 'affinity' is a sign or symbol to generalize his observations and experiments, and it is clear. that this is no reason why he who finds reason to do so may not regard it as evidence of consciousness and choice. The question the chemist is likely to ask is whether Major Powell can so play on the

emotions of an atom of hydrogen as to persuade it to do anything which we have not every reason to expect in course of nature. If he cannot do this his hypothesis is worthless, not because we can disprove it, but because we find no evidence of its truth and no value in its practical application. In fact, it seems to me to be one of the ' reified voids' of which he has warned us.

"The Utes say that the Sun could once go where he pleased, but when he came near the people he burned them. Tevots, the Rabbit-god, fought with the Sun and compelled him to travel by an appointed path along the surface of the sky, so that there might be night and day."

Truly, "It is a good divine that follows. his own instruction. If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, had been churches, and poor men's cottages princes' palaces. I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching."

Powell tells us that he has been robbed of his 'beautiful world' by Bishop Berkeley, but his attempt to neutralize the evils of 'idealism' by a new philosophy seems to me to be anything but a happy one, for the application of his own principles to his system of philosophy seems to carry idealism to dizzy heights where even Berkeley never dared to soar.

If every particle of matter has conscious judgment of number, space, motion and time, as he tells us that it has, what becomes of these concomitant properties? Why may not an ultimate particle assert that, while it cannot doubt the reality of the number, space, motion and time of which it is conscious, belief in these properties, as distinct from the judgment of particles,' reifies a void' and carries us into the realm of 'ghosts,' since the essence of these properties is to be perceived or known, in