nual Record." By so doing, he is enabled to give more space and fuller treatment to the "Summary of Scientific Progress," and the result is a remarkably satisfactory review of the scientific work of the year in the various departments of research. Each particular science, and, in some instances, particular departments of a science, are treated by writers eminent in their respective specialties.
The Ethics of Positivism: A Critical Study. By Giacomo Barzellotti, Professor of Philosophy at the Liceo Dante, Florence. New York: Charles P. Somerby. Pp. 327. Price, $2.
This book, the first edition of which appeared in Florence a few years ago, and is now translated into English and printed in this country with a new introduction by the author, is a study of those more recent aspects of philosophy which have culminated in the British school of psychologists. It seems to have been written with a principal view of instructing the Italians in regard to the great modern movements of thought that are going on most actively outside the limits of that country. But the writer's object is by no means purely expository of current thought: he dips into controversy with opinions of his own, and avows his aim to be to defend "the principles of morality against the attacks of an empirical utilitarianism." The appellation of positivism, which the author connects with his discussion, he informs us has been criticised by leading authorities as inexact, and we think the objection was certainly well taken. At any rate, the propriety of the term, as designating the English school of thinkers with which he is chiefly dealing, has been so strenuously contested as misleading by prominent members of that school, that it seems somewhat assuming in Prof. Barzellotti to persist in this questionable or disputed application of the word in the title of his book.
The work is similar in scope to Masson's "Recent British Philosophy," and its topics are discussed in an excellent spirit and in an intelligent and instructive manner; but it will be more valued as a delineation of a system of ideas than for any contribution it offers toward their further development. We notice that Prof. Barzellotti differs very widely from President Porter in his estimate of the philosophical position and influence of Herbert Spencer. For, while to the President of Yale College Spencer is little better than a pretender and a verbal trickster, whose illusive reputation is destined to vanish so speedily that the world will wonder how the delusion lasted so long, the Italian professor, on the other hand, accords to him a regnant place as the commanding mind of the most vigorous and powerful philosophical school of the present age. He says, "Modern psychological inquiry reaches its highest degree of development in Herbert Spencer." He closes an elaborate account of the doctrines and methods of this thinker as follows:
"Such is in outline the psychology of Herbert Spencer. The idea that rules it is that of a harmony of things which extends by degrees from one form of life to another and culminates in mind. It is not an original idea, but it acquires particular aspects when thus treated according to the positive method; and, in the intermediate path which Spencer pursues, between popular empiricism and a priori speculations, the conception of an evolutionary process certainly assumes an original character. Spencer has been led into this course by his closely inductive genius. He is opposed to too abstract generalizations, and likes generalizations to imply carefully-observed facts; but, by a bold synthesis, he surpasses all that his predecessors have achieved by analysis only. This equilibrium of faculties makes Spencer worthy of being considered in more aspects than one. He marks in the history of psychological inquiry the latest stage that the inductive method has attained in England by the work of a powerful mind impressed with the refinements of modern science; and this is not less true, although some traits, and particularly a certain metaphysical touch in the works of this most distinguished philosopher, remind us of Schelling and Hegel. The tendency of the method of the English school, as it is applied by Spencer, seems to become ever more and more distinct from the general tendency of psychological studies on the Continent, and marks in him the climax of the course of thought exhibited, in successive phases, by James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and Alexander Bain. It is a movement of thought, implying the tendency to find the basis of mental science in the knowledge of concrete facts, and the progress of that tendency we can estimate by the successive advances made in psychological analysis by Hartley, James Mill, Bain, and Spencer. The inquiry into the facts of the world of consciousness, as we have indicated, had no definiteness in the vague mechanism of Hartley and James Mill; it was more logical in John Stuart Mill, more minute in Bain, and is to-day broader and more comprehensive in Spencer, who is the one so
