302 NEW BOOKS.

the author's effort is due. For the present it is only noted that, after an Introduction dealing in two chapters with the " Nature and Method of Psychology " and " Mind and Modes of Activity," the division is into "Knowledge" (pp. 27-245), "Feeling" (pp. 246-346), "The Will" (pp. 347-416), a fair and equitable disposition of the available space ; and that Knowledge is treated under the three main rubrics of " Elements " (giving the exposition of Sensation), " Processes " (including Apperception, Association, Dissociation, Attention, Retention), "Stages" (Perception, Memory, Imagination, Thinking, Intuition). Experts may already form some judgment on the book from so much indication of its scheme. La, Vie et la Penstfe. Elements reels de la Philosophic. Par EMILE BURNOUP, Directeur Honoraire de l'!cole d'Athenes. Paris : C. Eeinwald, 1886. Pp. viii., 452. The eminent Orientalist has here written a book of rare and curious philosophical interest, upon which his studies in eastern lore have not been without influence. It is written in the interest of a revival of metaphysical philosophy as against mere psychologising, yet of a philosophy that not only takes account of the results of psychology but starts explicitly from a basis of natural science. An understanding of Thought, in the author's view, is not to be obtained apart from an understanding of Life, and if this already leads beyond physical to properly metaphysical consideration, the science of inorganic as well as organic nature still supplies the only real ground of the whole inquiry. Accordingly a great part of the work is taken up with a somewhat detailed " Picture of Life " upon earth (pp. 69-193), after a first analysis of life has been attained in an introductory dialogue between the author and a newly-buried friend, who is found revisiting the glimpses of the sun one day for a few hours just before his bodily form becomes finally dissolved into its constituent atoms. The dialogue is fanciful enough in its general conception, and is not always consistently carried through, yet is managed on the whole with good dramatic effect, and is made to serve the author's purpose of preliminary -exposition both strikingly and well. In the " Picture " that follows, the course of the development of plant and animal life in its varied forms is traced, on the one hand in relation with general cosmical conditions, and on the other with a view to the appearance of man as its highest term (thus far), since it is in connexion with the thinking nature of man that the questions of philosophy take their rise. These are then treated in a .second part, " Man, Thought, God," in which passage is made from consideration of the living human organism as it gradually assumes form, through a survey of the conditions and products of human feeling and thought (with death as limit), to a general speculative conclusion on the subject of God and the world. The author comes here to rest in a sort of Spinozistic pantheism, after having dealt, in the body of his work, with the facts of life and thought or at least the facts of life in the spirit rather of Leibniz's monadology. Not that there he does not pursue a line of his own, starting from assumptions and passing to conclusions which he opposes to those of Leibniz ; yet their main conceptions have an un- questionable affinity, and it is in the author's thorough-going application of the monadic notion that the chief interest of his work lies. Explaining life, at whatever stage, by the organising action of a " central atom " in relation with a group of other atoms of lower degree action which he finds better expressed by the word "analysis" than evolution, as applicable equally to all that goes on in the phase of thought (from which indeed it is borrowed) he concerns himself specially with the facts of generation,