superior, although the superior may supervene only when certain conditions of the inferior are fulfilled. Thus human germs may in the fulness of time have developed in anthropoid wombs. Renouvier talks much in these chapters of the pre-existence of material germs of the higher forms awaiting the proper conditions to unfold; but one does not well see why, on his non-substantialist principles, he should need pre-existent germs at all. The word germ in his pages does but give a body the potentiality of a being of specific nature, and potentiality is always expressible, as Renouvier himself so often insists, in terms of 'law.' Mechanical laws of gradual modification of a continually reproduced germinal matter are imaginable; and other 'laws' of correlation with the various grades of this matter of the specific inner natures of the creatures which successively appear, can be conceived.
The pre-existence and permanence of material germs also plays a great part in a bold and interesting speculation which closes the book. M. Renouvier, comparing the cosmical speculations of our generation with our rational demands on the Universe, naturally finds them unsatisfying. The materialistic ones (of cyclical periods of formation and destruction of worlds) are inhuman; and the teleological ones (of optimistic progress) are inane. In casting about for something better, he comes upon the notion of an originally entirely animated world, from which this partly dead one is a fall, and the return to which will be redemption. In an appendix to the book he prints an essay on the same subject by an anonymous friend, which is an elaborate, ingenious, and extremely striking piece of work. It would be unjust to these speculations to abridge them. They are so out of the line of thought to which we are accustomed that a brief statement might make readers smile who yet, on reading the originals, would probably agree with the present critic, that if we are to have cosmogonies at all, (and with Spencer, Haeckel, & Co., we are well in for it) we had better take a wide view of all their possible variety, and that these writers really do gather together in their speculation many elements commonly kept apart. Moral teleology, material evolution, and religious tradition, all are cared for on their theory. It is congruent, moreover, with a biological hypothesis of which we seem likely to hear more: I mean the notion that dead matter has evolved from living rather than living matter from dead. Finally, it is in its way a genuine theodicy, and proceeds on the assumption that in this universe something is really wrong. It is a little odd, just at the time when Oriental cosmogonies and doctrines of rein-
