NEW BOOKS. 141

Tn the course of his exposition he gives a clear and interesting account of the principal results of modern researches, historical and anthropological, on the origins of civilisation. Morality and religion, he finds, were at first independent, and in classical antiquity with its " laic morality " they always remained so to a great extent. The supernatural sanction, having become powerful, has often helped to enforce the precepts of a sound morality ; but " from the moment when the conduct of men is regulated by the caprice of the gods, everything becomes possible " ; and it is now of importance for social progress " to remind them that their kingdom is not of this world ". " Metaphysical morality," of which in ancient times that of Plato and in modern times that of Kant may be taken as types, is merely <( the shadow of religious morality ". The definitive utilitarian morality sketched out by Epicurus and carried further by Bentham has been pro- vided with its scientific basis by Mr. Herbert Spencer. Existing " moral instincts " are to be explained as the result of a process resembling the training of domestic animals by man : nothing being taken for granted except experiences of social good and evil, the power of "the nerve-cell" to retain impressions, and the fact of heredity. It is on the educating agencies, social and governmental, by which moral discipline is imposed, rather than on the fact of heredity, that the author lays stress in his actual exposition. There may be a struggle, he remarks, between "ancestral influence " and the action of " the social medium," but in the end the latter is all-powerful. " Education, the manner of life, fabricates morality." He liolds it as proved " that there is a law of social evolution superior to the influences of race and environment, and that, to advance, human groups must pass through a successive series of social forms, analogous in all coun- tries". This results from "the fundamental identity of physical and men- tal organisation in all the human race ". The stages of moral evolution are, up to the present, (1) the " bestial " stage of the primitive man and of the lowest modern savages inferior to the moral level of some of the higher animals in which cannibalism is an ordinary fact ; (2) the " savage " stage when cannibalism has been transmuted normally into slavery, although it may still survive as " religious" or "juridical" cannibalism ; (3) the "bar- barous " stage, marked by the formation of a more or less complete code of laws out of the old customary morality, society being still based on slavery ; (4) the " mercantile " stage reached only in quite modern times when for slavery the payment of wages has been substituted. To the anticipated objection that this classification takes no account of the higher moral types, the author replies that moral elevation is in all ages very rare, though "never entirely absent ; it is the lower social facts that are character- istic. Yet progress, although slow, is real, and there is no reason to fear that the mercantile stage of morality will be the final stage. The origin of justice is found by the author in the primitive "reflex movement of defence," which first takes social form in the lex talionis. ^Retaliation, having been commuted into various compensations, is at length taken out of the hands of private individuals altogether, and the chiefs of tribes become the justi- ciaries. It is then that the disinterested notion of " ideal justice" begins to be formed. All societies have passed through a communistic stage, such as that which fixed itself in the ancient Peruvian monarchy. It was probably in this stage that the " altruistic instincts " were formed which have con- tinued to resist " the egoistic influences of private property," manifest above -all in mercantile societies. Victor Cousin et son (Euvre. Par PAUL JANET de 1'Institut. Paris: Cal- mann-L6vy, 1885. Pp. vii., 485. The time having at length arrived when it appeared possible to set forth