W. WUNDT, ETHIK. 285

quick from the dull. The progress in facility, says M. Perez, was clearly due to exercise, for children coming fresh to school at this age managed in a number of cases to overtake and even to pass those who had had three or four years of schooling. It might be said, however, that the facts tell quite as much the other way that is to say, bring out the limits of improvement due to exercise ; and this result harmonises in a striking way with the conclusions respecting the effects of practice in improving sense- discrimination, active response to stimulus, and other actions reached by recent psychological experiment, and suggests that in each case progress may really be due to a more perfect adjust- ment of the attention. This whole account of the progress of the learning faculty in a school may be specially recommended to teachers as much as to psychologists. It is to be wished indeed that it may stimulate some of the former to attempt a similar table of pupils' progress for their own and others' use. It would be a real boon to the psychologist to have carefully prepared school statistics showing the changes in the acquisitive power at different ages, and the variations observable in these among different children. JAMES SULLY. Ethik. Eine Untersuchung der Thatsachen und Gesetze des sittlichen Lebens. Von WILHELM WUNDT. Stuttgart : F. Enke, 1886. Pp. xi. } 577. That the paradox of the identity of virtue with knowledge no longer finds defenders is rightly regarded as an advance in psychological and ethical theory. There seems to be some danger, however, that the opposite paradox of the identity of thought with will may come to take its place. Prof. Wundt's doctrine of "Apperception/' as set forth in his Logik, is, in truth, an elaborate statement of this paradox. The passive material of thought given in association is supposed by him to receive all its distinctive characters as thought from an act of "apperception" having the essential nature of an act of will. Under the name of Attention, this activity of apperception is assuming with some recent English psychologists the central position that it has in the psychology of Prof. Wundt. The final judgment on the apperception-doctrine can, of course, only be passed by psycho- logists after examination of it on its merits ; but if, as we may suspect a priori, the modern, like the ancient, paradox is a one- sided expression of the facts of the mental life, we should expect it to fail, as that was at length seen to fail, in its application to practice. Prof. Wundt's ethical treatise furnishes us with the desired opportunity of testing his psychological doctrine . For there can be no doubt, from the very beginning of the book, that the connexion of his ethical with his psychological principles is as close as he conceives it to be.