268 NEW BOOKS. of value, and more especially that between ' good ' and ' evil,' which rend the universe in twain from end to end, and render a real monism such a pathetically unreal view of life. The smoothness of the translation deserves a word of praise, and I have discovered only one (a curiously amusing) error. On page 168 we read that " history is the great voting place for standards of value ". But history, unfortunately, still displays a barbarous predilection for breaking heads instead of counting them, and so the German Wahlstatt (or its Danish equivalent ?) still means a battlefield and not a voting place ! F. C. S. SCHILLER. The Unit of Strife. By E. K. GARROD. London : Longmans, Green & Co., 1905. Pp. i, 194. The aim of this work is to discuss how far similarity of conditions charac- terises development in the merely animal and in the human sphere ; and how far evolutionary conceptions fail to explain the facts of human society. The problem is not a new one, nor can any substantial novelty of treatment be discovered. The opening chapters perhaps the best part of the book show how the " unit of strife " has been successively the single cell, the individual organism, the family, the tribe, the nation ; and that development throughout depends on differentiation and co- operation, " the fittest unit at all times being the most cohesive and extensive " (p. 67). This resumZ of current biological doctrine serves as an introduction to the main purpose of the author to explain the dis- tinctive character of human progress. The reason, after the work e.g. of Green, Eitchie and Fouillee, one might have thought 'an old story,' and one is therefore surprised to find that the suggestion tentatively offered with a (modestly expressed) conviction of its novelty (pp. 5, 180) is " the development of an abstract consciousness " (p. 33) (why ab- stract ?) through which man gains a knowledge of nature, of the condi- tions of development, and acquires the power of consciously adapting means to a conceived end. But according to our author the influence of mind on conduct is mainly " evil ". It perverts the natural instincts which " when unconcerned with mind, work . . . sanely to their end " (p. 72) the unity and cohesion of the whole and introduces or exaggerates disruptive qualities. This doctrine is enforced in a passage of amazing rhetoric, which is typical of the author's style : " The instincts of self- importance and self-gratification feed and fatten on thought, and grow to hideous proportions. Cruelties and lusts come into being which, with agile minds to conceive them and sensitive minds to suffer them, degrade man far below the level from which he began his upward course, and compel the imagination to conceive of hells, peopled by similar degraded beings, where punishments suitable to such offences may hereafter be enforced" (p. 72). The social tendency, in spite of the remarks on " sympathy " (p. 52), is therefore not natural. (We are thus thrown back to the days of Hobbes, and the progress of thought is as if it had not been. ) The "morbid influence of mind" (p. 170) has to be counteracted by a " Force from without man," and so Religion belief in God, the " Power at the back of law " (p. 84) enters as a deus ex machina to supply the condition of social unity against which mind continually battles. Such a doctrine hardly deserves serious consideration. An erroneous psychology which assumes as absolute the antithesis between religion and reason, and a perversion of history which makes religion the one and unfailing principle of unification, are strange foundations on which to rest a Sociology. The teaching of the Greeks and of modern Idealists that Reason is the ' Source of the idea of a Common Good ' has ap-
