278 NEW BOOKS. Proceedings of Hie Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. V., containing the Papers read before the Society during the Twenty-sixth Session, 1904-1905. London : Williams & Norgate, 1905. Pp. 188. The volume opens with a paper from the President, the Eev. Dr. H. Rashdall, on " Moral Objectivity and its Postulates," which contends that our moral ideas must be regarded as more or less adequate revelations of the divine standard of values, and that there can be no real harmony, or perfection, or absence of contradiction in any system of the universe in which our highest ideals of value are contradicted. To other postu- lates of an objective morality, he should like to add the negation of an unqualified optimism. The natural inference from our actual ideals and experience is a belief in a God who wills the good (as we inadequately and imperfectly know it) but does not wholly attain it. Mr. Henry Sturt finds " The Line of Advance in Philosophy " to lie along a fuller recognition of the importance of striving in human experience, and of the self as a creative force able to strive with a world of forces, growing thereby increasingly self-conscious and purposeful. Mr. W. B. Boyce Gibson deals with " Self- Introspection," contending that we must accept the point of view of the experient of self-consciousness. Self-con- sciousness, as the true and ultimate form of psychical observation, is the self's observation of itself as such ; it is not a relation between subject and object, but the existential oneness of the subject that knows and of the subject that is. The bearing of this analysis on the starting-points of Descartes and of Hegel is discussed. Mr. J. L. Mclntyre's paper on " Value-Feelings and Judgments of Value " is an effort to throw some light on vexed questions by giving an analysis of the value-phenomenon and considering its relation to feeling, desire and presentation. The value of an object is its relation to the activity of an individual as a whole. Value is never the character or quality of an object, but always a relation between an object and a subject. The origin of the value-phenomenon lies in the transition from one situation to another mediated through a change in the subject himself of the nature of voluntary activity. Every life, so far as successful in its striving to be a whole, modifies, subdues, perhaps con- verts into their opposites the individual values with which it sets out. If there is an absolute end to which our limited and subjective valuations are instrumental we cannot say what it is. Mr. A. T. Shearman in his paper on " Some Controverted Points in Symbolic Logic " deals with Symbols as representing Classes and Propositions, Symbolic Logic and Modals, Symbols of Operation, the Province of the Logic of Relatives and the Utility of Symbolic Logic. Mr. Clement C. J. Webb gives a paper on " The Personal Element in Philosophy " insisting inter alia on the importance of finding out what is meant by Personality. A person aware of himself as unique knows also that he is part of a whole which is all of it his concern and apart from which he would lose his own signifi- cance. The greatest personality is most fully conscious of its character as an organ of the universal and of the special function which it, and it alone, discharges in the economy of the universal life. In " The Meta- physical Criterion and its Implications," Mr. H. Wildon Carr subjects Messrs. Bradley and Taylor to criticism, examining the proposition that the criterion of reality affirms the existence and nature of the Absolute, and maintaining that a criterion by its nature cannot itself constitute our positive knowledge of the existence and content of any object of experience. The proposition that the Absolute is an individual experi- ence is based on a meaning of reality quite distinct from that demanded by the criterion ; while the two positive characteristics of the Absolute, that it is self-consistent reality, and that it is indissolubly one with ex-
