Jakuabt 23, 186S.]
��to tncor{>orate in this ooe the new materia] tliut. aa he tells ub, he has prepared for a coDtinua- tion of lus discussion. This new material 19 to appeiir bood in another form; and, until it ap- pears, ire must postpone any detailed critJcisiu in these columns of our author's known views. That the book contains much fair discussion of tboories. and a very readable collection of bets, is plaiu enough ', and. ou the other hand, one ueed not dwell on the consideration, that, in tbeir present form, these lectures cannot be considered aa abreast with the advance of so ra{ndly growing a study as this. We shall add here only one criticism; namely, that there is. in this work, one obvious imperfection that has especially to do with our author's principal porpose itsell'. Professor Chadbourne studies instinct in aniraala that he may throw more light OR the place and relations of instinct in man. But, Just when he comes to speak of buniaD nature, his psychological foundation is •0 antiquated, that all his learning helps us, his readers, but a little way. It is the old kchematixed and abstract psychology that is in his mind throughout, with its ' rational ' and ' moral nuturcfii ' of man, with its more or less eoniplex scheme of subdivisions in each of these ' natures,' and with its notion of an ab> stmctly defined hierarchy of human powers. For very elementary instruction, not in psy- chology as such, but in morals, this old psy- chology will still do weH enough, no doubt, as a sort of rough working hypothesis; but the scheme is unreal, and modern psychology finds little use for it.
For this reason it is, that, when onr author draws an elaborate parallel between the func- tions of the sense of obligation and those of the instincts, we feel that the undoubted actual likeness of these two sets of phenomena is distorted in his description, for the sake of fitting the facta to nu a priori notion about the ' higher spiritual nature' of man. When he gives us an elaborate diagram, representing the place of the instincts among human facul- ties, we feel that this diagram represents a sort of stuffed soul, badly mounted, as it were, and no living soul of man at all. When, again, an argument for immortality peeps out fK>m behind our author's classification of the belief iu immortality as an instinctive human belief; when, in fact, we arc told that one instinct ought to be aa well founded as another, and that the belief in immortaUty is as much an instinct as is the instinct of an insect to lay eggs in autumn, — we feel only a sense of vexation that an ill-conducled analysis of hii- nature, accepted by our author from tradi-
��tion, should be used by him for such a purpose in a scientific course of lectures. Why mix to- gether utterly separate lines of consideration? Our belief in the real goo<lness of things, and in the worth of life, gains no whit, and can only lose force, by being confused with investi- gations into external physical pbeuomeua. or even into the laws of the sequence of mental states. That tradition has long since sanc- tioned this confMsion is no justification for it
��RECENT TECHNICAL BOOKS.
Cain's algebra contains two entirely dis- tinct essays. In the first of them, with the hope of making the treatment of negative quantities clear to the student of clemeutary mathematics, the author represents real quanti- ties in the usual way, ~^ by lengths laid off upon a straight line, towards the right from a fixed origin on the line if the quantities are positive, towards the left if they are negative. — and develops succeesively the rules for algebraic ad- dition, subtraction, multiplication, and divis- ion, by the help of this concrete conception. The rules thus obtained are then shown to be generall]' applicable to all problems, whether the difference between positive and negative qaantities in them is one of opiiosition in direc- tion or uot; and the essay closes willi some remarks on the generality of formulas of trig- onometry and analytic geometry proved for a
In the second essay, Professor Cain describes some methods common to all sciences of rea- soning, compares and illustrates by examples the analytical and synthetical methods for the solution of problems, and finally discusses a few examples in finding the equation of loci, where some solutions are lost in the course of the work, or where some strange ones are in- troduced. The distance of the point /" from the point P seems to be written indifferently PP' or P'P. The little hook would doubtless prove interesting and suggestive to any student
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