NEW BOOKS. 421 positively heliotropic only through imitation of others. His off-hand treatment of psychological questions is well-illustrated by the following passages, " The worms lack associative memory and consequently also consciousness, which is only a function of the former. By associative memory we understand that arrangement of the brain by virtue of which a stimulus brings about not only the effects corresponding with its nature and the specific structure of the irritable tissue, but also the stimulating effects of other causes, which at a previous time once affected the organism at the same or almost the same time with the stimulus." "Whether the sensations of pleasure and pain are possible without ansciousness cannot be absolutely decided." W. McD. The Anatomy of Knowledge : an Essay in Objective Logic. By CHARLES E. HOOPER. London : Watts & Co., 1906. Pp. 226. Price 3s. 6d. The author of this book has no lack of self-confidence : ' Knowledge being quasi-organic,' he tells us in the preface, ' the philosophic analysis of knowledge may be appropriately regarded as concerned with the anatomy of knowledge. I shall venture to trace a parallel between the philosophy of the past and the pre-natal state of the organism ; also between the post-natal state and that of the philosophy to which all arnest thinkers aspire, and at the birth of which I have the ambition to assist ' (p. 14). Whether the author's philosophical equipment is equal to his ambition to excel in philosophical midwifery may well be doubted. The very analogy between the growth of knowledge and the growth of a human organism seems little better than a piece of ingenious trifling. To call the 'least item of knowledge,' viz. a thought in its relation to the object thought about, a knowledge-cell ; to compare the sciences to the different organs of the body, and certain fundamental principles present in all sciences to the ' vascular system of arteries and veins, and the nervous system, with its afferent and efferent branches,' is but an idle ' spielerei,' throwing no light on the real nature of knowledge or on those funda- mental problems with which the author attempts to deal. The author's own philosophical standpoint is not easy to indicate, because it does not seem altogether self-consistent. The following positions appear to be essential to what he calls 'objective logic': (1) The distinction between ' object-matter,' i.e. that about which we think, and ' subject-matter,' i.e. the thinking itself and the various 'symbols' (language, etc.) by which it is carried on. (2) Truth is the correspon- dence or ' symbolic reference ' of this subject-matter to some real object- I matter. (3) Real object-matter has a distinction of place, time, and kind from its corresponding subject-matter, and thus reality ' transcends " knowledge. If, on the other hand, the object-matter has no real dis- tinction from the subject-matter, it is said to be unreal. (4) Object- matters may be concrete or abstract, singular or general (p. 33), but ' the only object-matters of the known world which are truly objects or con- crete entities are material bodies or parts or systems ' (p. 71). All else,. <.<!. consciousness, is merely an attribute or relation of material bodies. (5) If we inquire how we are to find out whether or no a given subject- matter corresponds to a real object-matter, we are told that 'there is no- law of thought, as such, by which the correspondence of subject-matter to object-matter can be established. ... It is therefore in the relation of thought to the not purely intellectual elements of experience, and to the objective world inferred from those elements, that we must look for I
