attempted. Real or Material Deduction should certainly be made continuous with Induction and with Classification, but Syllogism stands apart from them all; it is as far off from Deduction, in Mill's rendering, as it is from Induction. The consideration of the formal relation of the premisses to the conclusion, which the inversions of language compel us to regard as a serious study, has nothing in common with the Logic of Matter, in any one of its three divisions-Classification, Induction, Deduction. It walks by the side of these, and is no farther connected with them than as ministering to a common purpose. I could not assign any reason for the particular place or order of the Syllogism in Mill's Logic or in any of the systems that include Induction. It might be just as well at the end as at the beginning. Its entire absence would not be felt in any of the problems of Induction or of Classification. It gives a discipline altogether apart.

It may, therefore, in my opinion, be justly objected to Mill's chapter, first, that the ideas, which are individually sound and valuable, are taken out of their proper places, and put together in an incongruous compound; and second, that the title is a misnomer: there is nothing actually said as to the Functions and the Value of the Syllogism. A. BAIN.

J. S. Mill's Philosophy tested by Prof. Jevons.-It has been understood for some time that Prof. Jevons was engaged in a critical scrutiny of Mill's philosophical writings, and recently, in the new edition of his Principles of Science, he announced his intention of publishing a book on the subject. The incidental criticisms on Mill that lie scattered through his previous works had hardly justified the anticipation of very important results from the more formal scrutiny when it should appear; nor was the specimen he gave of it a few weeks ago, on occasion of a controversy in the Spectator about Mill's doctrine of Religion, encouraging, for he then laid himself open to a very smart rebuff from his adversary. Now, in the Contemporary Review of December, he returns to the charge, and, after rehearsing shortly (with some difference) the Spectator dispute and sounding a preliminary flourish, he brings out one of his greater guns and fires it off against Mill. At the same time we are promised a whole series of papers, to follow on the present one which deals with Mill's view of the foundations of geometry. So the regular battle, or rather bombardment, must be understood as begun, and begun it certainly is with no ordinary fury. The plan of attack has its disadvantages, but at all events it leaves the assailant time for reflection after delivering his fire, and it may not be amiss that a bystander should venture to interpose with a few words at the first pause.

For about twenty years past, so we are told, Prof. Jevons has been a more or less constant student of Mill's works, and during the last fourteen years he has been compelled, by the traditional requirements of the University of London, to make them at least partially his textbooks in lecturing. Some ten years of study passed before he "began

to detect their fundamental unsoundness," and during the last ten years the conviction has gradually grown upon his mind that "Mill's authority is doing immense injury to the cause of philosophy and good intellectual training in England". Able writers have fired this shot or that into "the sand of his foundations," but "the assault must be made directly against the citadel of his logical reputation". "For my part," exclaims Prof. Jevons, "I will no longer consent to live silently under the incubus of bad logic and bad philosophy which Mill's works have laid upon us ". "The disconnected and worthless character of his philosophy" shall at length be exposed. As for his logic-his logic indeed! "There is nothing in logic which he has not touched, and he has touched nothing without confounding it."

It is all very curious: curious that it should have taken ten years to discover Mill's defects; curious that in ten years more it should not have been discovered that all of them that are real have been wellknown to philosophical inquirers for a long time past, and that the world has by no means stood still the while. Is it not the fact that those who think most highly of Mill are some of those who differ most gravely from him? They think of him as one who gave an unsurpassed expression -an expression that will now probably never be surpassed-to the philosophy of individual experience, but they have left this behind. They are perfectly familiar with all the inconsistencies that Prof. Jevons would now laboriously bring to light; and yet they can honour the man who, from the point of view that satisfied all the masters of English thought before him, first set himself in a serious spirit, since the sciences have grown, to devise a comprehensive theory of scientific knowledge. His friend, Prof. Bain, who stands perhaps nearest to him in point of logical theory, is far from agreeing with him altogether, (as this very number of MIND bears fresh witness), and never was beholden to him in psychology: rather it was Mill that here professed himself the learner to the last. Mr. Spencer and Mr. Lewes to say nothing of younger men— -have gone ways of their own that are very different from Mill's, and which he was little disposed to follow. Many will acknowledge that they have learned from him, but is it possible to name one thinker or teacher of any standing who is prepared to subscribe himself Mill's disciple? For whose benefit, then, one wonders, is this series of papers to be written?

No doubt, his books are much in the hands of students; but there is a good reason for that. Since Mill's System of Logic appeared, has there been any other work half so well fitted to stimulate thought on the subject? Prof. Jevons appears, by his way of printing the word, to have some special contempt for Mill's assumption of having produced a "system". If this is what he means, surely never was contempt so little in place. Mill's book is a model of orderly methodical exposition, and, though never specially intended for academic use, fairly conquered the attention of teachers and students It must have been because of its inherent merits, for no writer could have started from a more unfavourable position than Mill or cared less, in edition after edition of his work, to make it accessible to the mul

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titude. Accordingly, it is open to any one at any time to oust the book from its academic standing. One has only to write a system " as carefully articulated as Mill's, as clearly grounded in its philosophical basis, and, if it reflects the present enlarged conceptions of Experience as faithfully as Mill's philosophy embodied those of a past time, no fear but the writer will quickly deliver the Universities from their "incubus "-particularly if he has an intimate knowledge (Mill had none) of students' needs. For the present, if it be the fact-as Prof. Jevons has somehow convinced himself though he must be singular in his belief-that the voice of Mill alone is heard in the schools, let us be thankful that it is no worse than it is. We may remember, too, that it is the way of academic instruction to lag somewhat behind the pace of advancing inquiry.

At this time of day there is no need to spend many words on the objections brought by Prof. Jevons against Mill's view of geometrical science. The case is very cleverly put and will duly impress the imagination of all those who can believe with himself that the like was never heard before; but everything in his argument that has any force has been urged by others over and over again, and what is new is not very happily urged. His great point is to show that Mill, after asserting that perfectly straight lines do not really exist, ends by implying and even asserting that they do exist, because the imaginary lines with which the geometer is said to work (or "experiment ") are declared to "exactly resemble real ones". But here he misconceives Mill's plain meaning to begin with, and before he reaches his conclusion he has to interpolate a premiss for which Mill is not in the least responsible. In denying (with whatever reason) that straight lines really exist, Mill never says that we have no perception of lines as apparently straight. So, when he comes to deal with the imaginary lines by which he supposes the geometer able to increase his experience indefinitely, he may very well say that these exactly resemble the lines that are perceptibly (without being really) straight. The premiss interpolated by Prof. Jevons, in order to convict Mill of self-contradiction, is the assertion that "if these imaginary lines are not perfectly straight they will not enable us to prove the truths of geometry"; but of course Mill would allow nothing of the sort. Did he not from the first declare, with Dugald Stewart, that there is a purely hypothetical element in the definition of geometrical figures, and that it is this, and not anything we can actually see or imagine, that enables us to prove the truths of geometry? (See moreover a note added to his old statements in the latest edition of the Logic, p. 261.) However it is no affair of mine to defend Mill's positions. I, for one, cannot think of basing the knowledge of geometrical principles on individual experience, least of all on that kind of passive experience, received by way of the senses, which Mill, without making proper use of the psychology he accepted, generally was content to assume. That all his ingenuity should fail to prove his case, and that, in his anxiety to solve so great a difficulty, his very ingenuity should land him in such really discrepant assertions as Lange, for example (Gesch. des Mate

rialismus, Vol. II., p. 18), points out, is only natural. I will add but one other remark on Prof. Jevons's polemic, namely, that he seems to me particularly unfortunate in singling out for especial rebuke that which Mill calls "geometrical experimentation" with imaginary lines. Mill there had come imperfectly (as I have elsewhere tried to show, art. "Axiom," Encycl. Brit., ed. 9th) upon an equivalent for that work of the "productive imagination" which plays so important a part in Kant's classical explanation of geometrical synthesis. He had come upon it imperfectly because he did not ground this process of free "experimentation," as he might have done, in the psychological fact that we apprehend extension through muscular activity that we consciously put forth, and not through any sensations passively received. But his recognising the process at all was a proof of no ordinary insight; and if Professor Jevons would only think of it as something not quite absurd, he might arrive at some rational explanation of the difference that he always notes in his own works, but never in the least accounts for, between geometrical and physical induction.

And this last observation suggests the one other word I will take the liberty of addressing to my friend Prof. Jevons on the present occasion. It will doubtless occur to many readers that Mill's vehement critic comes upon him after all only in the guise of Nemesis for his own treatment of Hamilton. Neither am I one of those who rate the Examination of Hamilton most highly. But if to some extent Mill did then no better than Prof. Jevons is now doing, in one respect he did in that book very well. In the midst of all his criticisms on Hamilton, he offered some very notable independent contributions to philosophical theory; and but for the Examination we should not know Mill's mind on many of the most pressing questions of philosophy. Whole chapters and many parts of chapters are constructive. Now may one hope that Prof. Jevons will not fall below this example? He is very indignant over Mill's "false empirical philosophy," but guards himself against being supposed to deny the experiential foundation of all knowledge; and the caveat is very much in point from one who can write about the senses and what we get from them in the naïf way of the author of The Principles of Science. Will he then, for once in a way, tell us quite plainly what he considers are all the elements of a true empirical philosophy? If he does, he will supply a much-needed foundation for his logical theories, and, though the work would be done better without the accompaniment of a war-dance over the prostrate form of Mill, he has a right, if he pleases, to that kind of amusement. If he does not, his exhibition may win him a great deal of applause from the prejudiced and the unthinking, supposing always that he manages to remain to the end as piquant as in the first act; but at the end, Mill will be found to hold just the place that he holds now in the estimation of all serious thinkers who know what is and what is not. Will Prof. Jevons retain his place?

EDITOR.

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IX.-NEW BOOKS.

Lessing: his Life and Writings. By JAMES SIME. 2 vols. London : Trübner & Co., 1877. Pp. 327, 358.

LESSING is a name which, in addition to its charm for lovers of literature in general, has special attractions for the student of philosophy, and English readers are to be congratulated on the almost simultaneous appearance, though at this late hour, of two accounts of the man and his work-Miss Zimmern's, which for some time has been announced, and Mr. Sime's. Mr. Sime's volumes embody the results of careful scholarship and independent reflection. He renders, on the whole, ample justice to the philosophical side of his subject. Chapter xxix., which treats of Lessing's philosophy, with which chapter xxvii., containing an account of The Education of the Human Race, should be taken, defines Lessing's position in relation to the leading philosophic questions of his day. Lessing was one of the first to formulate that idea of progress which was one of the most valuable products of eighteenth century thought, although Mr. Sime appears to go too far when he says that "in The Education of the Human Race, the idea of progress was first formally stated," and that it became the possession of cultivated Europe, through Lessing and Herder. It is probable that Priestley-who wrote before Lessing and who stimulated Condorcet —did as much at least as Lessing to give shape and stability to the new doctrine. In the more abstract department of philosophy, Lessing's services consist mainly in the exposition and popularisation of Spinoza, a thinker whose claims up to that time had been grossly neglected. Lessing had found his way to Spinoza out of the intricacies of the dominant Leibnitzo-Wolffian philosophy, and the little he has left us in writing and recorded conversation illustrates, as Mr Sime very clearly points out, the condition of mind of one who was a careful and thoughtful learner from both Spinoza and Leibnitz, a learner who drew now from the one, now from the other, without seeking to reduce the ideas thus acquired to a harmonious and systematic shape. Of Lessing's work in Esthetics, which is, perhaps, after all his most valuable bequest to students of philosophy, Mr Sime gives us a full and appreciative account. The method followed in the Laokoon, and in the Hamburg Dramaturgy, was nothing less than a fruitful discovery in the science of criticism, as the permanent results attained amply testify. No doubt Lessing's field of observation was limited, and in the case of dramatic theory he was (as the present writer has elsewhere maintained) unduly influenced by classic authority. Yet, though some of his conclusions may at first appear narrow and arbitrary to us, this generally arises from the fact that he is not concerned to limit and qualify the principles he reaches. art is a compromise between many principles or ends, and this Lessing knew well enough, though he had no special occasion to enforce the

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