NEW BOOKS. 317 An Examination of the Philosophy of the Unknowable as expounded by Herbert Spencer. By WILLIAM M. LACY. Philadelphia: Lacy, 1883. Pp. iv. 235. "To the scheme of nescience" the author opposes "the doctrine that we are capable of realising something of the nature of things occupying the region outside of consciousness. It is not meant by this that immediate knowledge of anything not present in consciousness is possible. No one is more firmly convinced than " the author " that there can be no conscious- ness, strictly so-called, of what is beyond consciousness. But that there can be genuine thought of something not within consciousness, is an inde- pendent proposition, and the one here urged as true." " To the issue the doctrine of Evolution is not a party." The Philosophy of the Unknowable " is not indispensable to the Philosophy of Evolution, but is rather a com- plication from which that philosophy should be glad to extricate itself. That evolution is only a law of appearances, not a law of things, is a thought fraught with disheartenment and burdened by a weight of complex subtleties. No evolutionist should harbour sentiment repugnant to the tenet that realities are the subject-matter of the process of evolution and of the Evolution Philosophy." Common Sensible* : Die Gemein-Ideen des Gesichts- u. Tastsinns nach Locke u. Berkeley u. Experimenten an operirten Blindgeborenen. Yon Dr. THEO- DOR LOEWT. Leipzig : Grieben, 1884. Pp. 70. This is a careful study of the early modern treatment of the question of KOIVO. aladijrd first signalised by Aristotle. The author, regarding Locke as the proper founder of psychological analysis in modern philosophy and recognising the immense stride in advance of his predecessor taken by Berkeley, compares their doctrines of sight and touch as to how far these two senses yield common elements of perception. He notes that, while Hobbes, in a merely passing reference to the subject, continues to speak, with Aristotle, of common sensibles, but confines them within the field of sight and touch, Locke, in other language than Aristotle's, but within Hobbes's narrower limits, expressly raises anew the old question by asserting that simple ideas of space or extension, of figure and of rest and motion are got by both sight and touch. How Locke's very unsatisfactory account of these " ideas " is contradicted by the better psychological doctrine implied in his references to Molyneux's problem introduced into the second edition of the Essay, is set forth at length. The author then passes to the exposi- tion of Berkeley's greatly more developed theory of sight and touch, and brings clearly into view the circumstance that this theory, disposing as it does utterly of Locke's version of the doctrine of common sensibles, obtained experimental verification after being wrought out originally by way of speculation. A final section (pp. 62-70), after citing the earlier experi- mental cases from Cheselden's (1728) onwards to Nunnely's (1858), adds a short account of later ones observed by Hirschberg and von Hippel and reported in Grafe's Archiv, 1875, 76. In the author's view, all of them, " in spite of many discrepancies, yield the result that congenitally blind subjects on obtaining sight by way of operation do not at first recognise by sight forms which they have previously learnt to distinguish sufficiently by touch, also do not at once distinguish form even visually." Die Philosophie als Idealicissenschaft u. System. Eine Einleitung in die Philosophic. Von J. FHOHSCHAMMER, Professor der Philosophic in Miinchen. Miinchen : Ackermann, 1884. Pp. 98. A plea for the continued independent existence of Philosophy as dis-
