Navy, ending with what is perhaps the most interesting chapter of all a miscellaneous collection from many sources. A considerable amount of patriotic fervor would be needed for the connective reading of the entire book, although it contains some very amusing pieces, such as the Delaware Quaker's paper, p. 241. And in many parts it serves rather as a record of what was thought in the past, than as an incentive to present resolve or action. We have "seen life" since the Revolution, and have learnt a few things that the fathers never dreamt of. A similar collection of public papers, popular resolutions, notable speeches and letters, covering the period since 1860, would furnish a curious and not uninstructive contrast to that of Mr. Niles. Yet his book is eminently useful and valuable. It enables us to come into close contact with the words and thoughts of a very remarkable age; of a time when public spirit pervaded all classes of American society, when every' public interest was paramount with the people, and our "multitudinous res privatae" had not yet eclipsed the res publica. It shows us indeed that much of the political theorizing of the time rested on a false philosophy, and that doubtful theories of the "rights of nature" were inextricably blended with patriotic purposes and sensible exertions in behalf of the national interests. It also shows what an important part economic interests played at that time, and how much the determination to win industrial independence of England had to do with the undertaking-a struggle for political independence, as well as for the subsequent establishment of a closer union under the present Constitution. And curiously enough in both cases Baltimore seems to have been more outspoken on the subject than any other American city. THEORY OF SOCIAL ORGANIZATION. By Charles Fourier. With an Introduction by Alfred Brisbane. Sociological Series, No. II. Pp. 72 and 288. New York, C. P. Somerby. This work raises in our mind the question whether when the Fourierites have reconstructed society by gathering men into phalansteries and making labor attractive, the introductions to books—if books are still printed and edited-will always be printed in separate pamphlets, as in this work, instead of following the title pages which announce them. Fourier was the oldest and in some sense the greatest of the modern socialists. Approaching the subject from an economic point of view, he resolved all other questions of social urgency into that of the organization and the reward of labor. Like the American school of Nationalist Economists, he was very much alive to the cost of maintaining and enriching such non-producers as the trader and the soldier, and aimed at such a reconstruction of society as would reduce their numbers and their exactness to a minimum. And although himself a man of reserved and unsocial habits, who often did not exchange a word with persons of his own household for days together, he thought the family too small a group for the proper exercise of man's social instincts. Living at a time and in a country when religion was regarded as a sort of surface varnish, chiefly suited to feminine natures, he had not even Comte's and Saint Simon's insight into its practical importance, to say nothing of Proudhon's. Fourier himself was dead before his system attracted any sort of attention. It was not until 1837, after the final break-up of the school of St. Simon, that young Victor Considerant aroused the public interest by a brilliant and eloquent exposition and application of his master's ideas. Since that time Fourier's name has never ceased to be before the public, although somewhat less prominently since 1848. Cabet "conveyed" wholesale the Fourierite teachings, carried them in some points to their logical consequences, dressed them in a more fantastic shape, and presented himself as an original. His French "Icarian" colony still exists in the Mississippi Valley. Fourier's doctrines came to America in the prestige of their first popularity. They were welcomed by men who afterwards renounced all sympathy with socialism, such as Greeley and Dana. In Mr. Brisbane, however, they found a literary advocate of the staunchest sort, a champion through good report and evil report. Of the many attempts made to carry these views into practice all, we believe, have failed. Mr. Nordhof found for his book not a single one of the host that used to report progress in the Universicælum, and in the Noyes-Macdonald record they figure as things that were. Fourier has attractions for the secular intellect for men of hard heads and common sense who break with the existing order of society and desire a reconstruction, rather than for the poetical and sentimental. He reads like a political economist, a blending of dry facts and dry inferences. When he becomes eloquent, it is with the eloquence of indignation, not of hope. He has therefore, of all the socialists, the best prospect of escaping oblivion, as having the least occupied himself with what is local and temporary. We find nothing attractive in the prospect of a regenerate society which he holds up before us. Life is not worth having on such terms. The phalanstery would be the grave of all that gives it variety, surprise, color. It would be the apotheosis of the commonplace and the millennium of the monotonous. Did Fourier hide anything from us we might have hope. But he has analyzed the passions upon whose strings he means to play, and catalogues the motives by which he means to rule, so coolly and so candidly, that we perceive that this mild, patient, long-headed Frenchman aimed at nothing less than a despotism over the hearts and the thoughts of men. How the new millennium is to be introduced is the problem which has tormented all socialists. Are we to wait until then we faith has converted all but a minority, and then have it set up in their despite by the Government as representing the majority? Or are voluntary associations to illustrate the plan and thus bring conviction to the many? If the latter is the true way why have all such attempts at life in a phalanstery failed? Why has no communism that has not based itself on religion and proscribed marriage and the family ever lived long enough to train a second generation? And what does Fourierism propose to do with this last agency, which rends every communistic society to pieces with the irresistible might of the laws of nature themselves? ORGANIC PHILOSOPHY, OR MAN'S TRUE PLACE IN NATURE. [Vol. I. Epicosmology. Pp. xvi., 399; vol. II. Outlines of Ontology -Eternal Forces, Laws and Principles, pp. viii., 455; vol. III. Outlines of Biology-Body, Soul, Mind and Spirit, pp. viii., 556; vol. IV. Collective Biology and Sociology, pp. viii., 436, xv.] By Hugh Doherty, M. D. London: Trübner & Co. Dr. Doherty, we think, is on the right track in this attempt to evolve an organic philosophy of the cosmos, for the unity of the different forms of existence in the cosmos is no doubt best interpreted to our minds by the analogies of an organic body. Paul long ago applied that analogy to the Church; Metellus centuries earlier applied it to the state; and the principle of classification evolved by Von Baer, and elaborated by Herbert Spencer, accords it a universal validity. But Dr. Doherty has not advanced the subject in these four volumes as much as might fairly be expected of him. He seems to us to rest too much on mere schematisms, which are but the skeletons of thinking, and often mere artificial skeletons at that. To prove the close, and in a sense organic, independence (1) of the organic and the inorganic world, (2) of the higher and the lower spheres of organic life, (3) of men among each other, and (4) of men and higher spiritual beings up to the very highest-this would have been a great work. But we have here materials only for such a philosophy, and fruitful hints drawn from a consideration' of the natural sciences. His twenty years of study have not been wasted, but neither have they produced any result at all commensurate with their extent. On all the great issues of the day Dr. Doherty is on the side of spiritual and Christian philosophy against scientific materialism. His attitude towards such writers as Tyndall and Spencer is too critical to allow of his using them as much as he might, in furtherance of his own purpose. But his Christianity is not altogether that of the orthodox, for he regards hell as a prison-house for the reformation of spirits. Dr. Doherty's organic schematisms are based on groups of four, but he does not seem aware of the coincidence of this with the Bible. Four is there the sacred number which represents the cosmos, the earth and the fullness thereof. THE ULTIMATE GENERALIZATION. An Effort in the Philosophy of Science. Pp. 56. 8vo. New York. Charles P. Somerby. "The end of philosophy is the intuition of unity," Bacon says, and as the truths of science converge and are gathered up in more embracing generalizations, some sort of final unity, some "ultimate generalization" seems to be brought nearer to our ken. But all science, and in some sort all metaphysics, pause before the final step. Comte warns men never to attempt it. Herbert Spencer denies its possibility, and leaves all the ultimate basis of things in the region of the unknown. All detect dualisms or polarities throughout nature,-evolution and dissolution, matter and force, unity and plurality, rest and motion; but all have failed to disclose to us the open secret that lies beyond these, but is ceaselessly and equally disclosed to us by both members of every polarity. Our anonymous author sets himself to discover this, and thinks he finds it in the law of contrast or polarity, itself. His philosophy and his method are in general that of Herbert Spencer, but he has read widely. We cannot go with him and Spencer (page 9) in the assumption that our experience of resistance necessitates the assumption that matter exists. To say as Spencer does that "resistance is unthinkable apart from matter-apart from something extended" is to confound an unverifiable assumption with a verifiable truth. Space is something extended, and if we suppose parts of space (loci) to be occupied by force-points without dimensions-as Boscovich and Faraday conceived them-and these to be continually vibrating in attraction and repulsion within the locus, we have an extended world which "fills the bill" of our experience of resistance without demanding matter as the "vehicle of force." And if matter, as Mr. Spencer truly says, "is known to us only through its manifestations of force," and if force is perfectly conceivable to us in connection with space and its parts without lugging in the superfluous conception of material atoms, then a philosophic science must cease to talk of matter. THE ECHO CLUB AND OTHER LITERARY DIVERSIONS. By Bayard Taylor. 18mo. Pp. 188. Boston. James R. Osgood & Co. 1876. One takes up this little volume with some reluctance: travesties do not better by age, and the diversions of the Echo Club found their way four years ago into the Atlantic Monthly, where they excited much curiosity and attention. Yet as one reads into the book an interest certainly warms, and he finds much more life than he had looked for. In the first place the conversational form is a very excellent one for a certain kind of literary criticism, and gives the zest of personality to our enjoyment; and then Mr. Taylor's range of taste is so wide, his sympathy so broad and his criticism so thoroughly genial that we are irresistibly drawn into the current of his humor. Anything he may write is at least worth a reading, and although at first it may seem a work of supererogation to have gathered these papers within the two covers of a volume, yet they have a value in criticism beyond the mere amusement to be got from them. A reductio ad absurdum sort of argument may be made very effective in literary analysis, and often throws light on the subject in points that a more serious inquiry may fail to illumine. No one need fear to find a favorite maltreated in Mr. Taylor's pages, the good nature is thorough and the sport honest. We have his word for it that the publication in the magazine did not give other than a very slight momentary annoyance, and that only in one or two cases" of the poets travestied; certainly more than a momentary annoyance would have been inexcusable. The dialogue has nothing that approaches the pungency and fascination of the Noctes Ambrosianae, and the whole structure of the Echo Club nights is slighter, but the book is one to read and to keep. The "other literary diversions" might, however, have been omitted without loss. The volume is in the convenient "Little Classics" style which the publishers have fairly succeeded in making a fashion, although they did not originate it. TWENTY POEMS. By R. K. Weeks. Pp. 167. 12mo. New York. Henry Holt & Co. These poems are generally slight in construction, but they are always graceful, and they always mean something. The opening poems of the book remind us of Mr. Steadman's boast that the close study of nature is evinced by American more than by cotemporary English poetry. To Mr. Weeks poetry seems to be an escape from men and society to commune with nature,—a seeking A larger space above me, A larger space around, A sense of fuller sound, than he finds in the daily contact with his fellow men which life demands of him. And even when human loves and hopes are formally the theme, as in "An Old Play," they seem to be used mainly as a thread whereon to string glimpses of nature's beauties. This is equally true of his "Andromeda's Escape," which fills more than one third of the book. As he wisely forewarns his readers, the poem is |