but which is at the same time the very reality of phenomenal existences, and causes them to appear as well as to vanish. Thus the mind on this stage has become a REALIST, as much as William of Champeaux or Thomas Aquinas, and believes that "universals" are ealities and not mere names.)

(3) If the mind has seized the foregoing description of the "persistent force," let it now attend with even greater care to further peculiarities of its nature. There are two phases which must be carefully defined and then united (hic labor, hoc opus !) in one thought. The "one persistent force" is not alone destructive of specialty, it is also creative of it. (a) As destructive it clashes the particular forces against each other and annuls their characteristics; in its vast process every particular individual is a vanishing phase-(let one, at this point, study the eleventh chapter of the Bhagavad Gita-the "Vision of the Universal form of Vishnu" for a poetic description of this thought; or also the speech of the Erd-Geist in Goethe's Faust, or Carlyle's chapter on "Natural Supernaturalism" in the Sartor Resartus). Now what happens in this negative process of annullment of all distinctions?--of course the restoration of the original unparticularized universal-the "persistent force." The particular is swallowed up in the universal. (b) But on the other hand, the negation of the one particular is through the origination of another equally evanescent. Looked at from the stand-point of persistence of the finite, the process is entirely negative, a perpetual destruction of special forms. Looked at from the stand-point of the formless universal, the process is perpetual creation of individual forms-continual specialization-realization of the universal "persistent force." (c) But both phases are one; the annullment of one force is the creation of another; and all proceeds from the one "persistent force." It is the one force which creates special forms by determinations or active self-limitation and the same Force which annuls or removes the special limitations of forms thereby created. It acts wholly on itself -for there is no other-and is an essential energy; it gets no impulse from without, for thus it would not be a "persistent" force, but rather one of the special forces which belong to the manifestation of that persistent force. This One "persistent force," which is creative in its destructive activity, and destructive in its creative activity, is a being which is so widely different from the ordinary idea of force that it has no right to the name "force." It betrays in its name only the source of its psychological evolution, (i. e., its genesis from the conception of special forces and their interdependence

in a One or totality). From analogy this One is called Force; and is called "persisting" Force to indicate its radical, essential difference from finite forces. The latter only exist in opposition in a tension with others, mutually limiting and mutually limited,-they evanesce, it abides and there is no "other" to i--it has no teusion except what arises through its spontaneity.

(4) Here enters the stage of freedom from Maya or illusion (of the senses; the senses and their picturing mode of thinking impose up, n us this veil over the nature of things; material form is posited by them as ultimate substance, and hence we carry with us up to this last stage of finite thinking the illusion that time and space condition absolute existence; here we have arrived at an idea which refuses to be thought under sense-forms modified as much as we please by reflection).

Such a One "Persistent Force" is a Self-Determining Totality which, as One, is neither in space nor in time. Space and time appertain only to its process as forms thereof; to its specialization by creative and destructive acts. Space and Time therefore belong to its Manifestation or Self-Revelation. For the special forms which it originates reveal or manifest its nature. Its negative, or determining act, by which it imposes a new form on what is old, is a creative act and reveals its energy. Again, every old form is a form that has proceeded from the same source of energy; hence the creation is selfdetermination. The special form does not reveal the whole of the energy, and hence the residue of energy continues to act upon the created form and thereby destroys it. Thus creation is only a halfrevelation of the Absolute, and destruction only another half-revelation of the same; both taken as One are the complete revelation as an Eternal process. The phase of negation is a tendency to the formless void of a pure abstract generality, an utterly indeterminate vacuity (which of course has no limitation by time or space, for it his no extension nor "shadow of change). The phase of creative activity is the tendency to complete specialization in time and space. The thought of such a being is not that of a force but of a self-related force the infinite possibility of forces-their endless and unlimited generation-inexhaustible, omnipotent. It is not only this, but it is the thought of infinite, unceasing return to itself out of all form, out of all time-and-space relations into its own absoluteness or utter generality devoid of all determination or relation to others.

Now we see (or may see) that it is only a question of names; what shall we call this being-what shall we recognize under this definition?

Certainly not a mere force. If we invest gate the world of experience for similar attributes we shall find only one existence corresponding to this being, in any adequate degree, and that existence is mind, or thinking activity. If we name it "Force," it is all the same, we shall think under that name an absolute unity, like the Ego, whose process is one of self-opposition in the form of subject and object, or self-objectivity, whose very act of specialization (or self-duplication) is an act of return to its unity or generality. For the Ego is a process of self-objectivation in which the outcome or result is RECOGNITION of self. It is a self returning light which arrives at clearness and consciousness. A "blind force" it could be only when as finite it stood in antithesis to other forces and was thereby limited, annulled, and prevented from return into itself. No absolute totality could be unconscious, for its self-relation is complete. Dependence on others is the characteristic of a finite being. At the point where this dependence begins to be a self-relation we have a semi-conscious state that of feeling, desire, appetite, instinct; when this dependence reaches a higher form of self-relation it becomes sense-perception; this gives place to reflection, wherein the dependence on the without is recognized as itself dependent on a within (a general essence lying beyond the objects of sense); and this again through the recognition of self-determination as the true Objective Reality arrives at the freedom from Maya.

(5) The process of creation and annullment of special forms is no idle play of forces. Force is manifested as return always to equilibrium and always presupposes a destroyed equilibrium. Force can act of itself only towards the restorarion of the equilibrium, and hence all force in the universe tends to "run down" or to cease-there can be no "perpetual motions" on the idea of force, per se. But the totality must destroy equilibrium (i. e., create the tension of self-opposition which is the occasion of the manifestation of force as restoration of equilibrium) as well as restore it. The activity which destroys equilibrium is an activity which determines IDEALS. Equilibrium arises when the real (in time and space) has attained its ideal; i. e., its potentiality coincides with its actuality. A finite process would "run down." But a world process that has not run down in all the infinite past, evidently belongs to a self-making ideal process-to one wherein the Absolute points to an infinite ideal in the world of the real, so that the process of forces may never "run down" but always run up towards the realization of higher and higher forms.

The Absolute therefore does not idly create and destroy, but wills

the realization of himself in the realm of specialization or objectivity and hence where there is chaos otherwise there rises a chain of being which we call nature-in which each lower is cancelled or annulled for and by the realization of the higher ideal-mineral, plant, animal, man -ever approaching the "stable equilibrium" of the "persistent force," which is conscious personality. Hence in this realm of phenomenality, where the play of forces seems to an incomplete investigation to result in the void indeterminateness of annihilation, we shall find an inevitable progress toward conscious personality as the goal. This is the road to the "many self-conscious beings" which formed the second difficulty named by Mr. Ames.

In a brief "discussion" like this, we cannot expect to answer objections at all points. On the contrary, we are aware that we have raised unanswered objections at all points of the way. We have only outlined the answer as it lays in our mind, and as we find it in the systems of all great "speculative" thinkers under varying modes of expression-Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, Jacob Boehme, Leibnitz, Spinoza and Hegel.-[Ed.

BOOK NOTICES.

Prometheus, Dionysos, Sokrates, Chrsstos. Beitraege ReligionsGeschichte von Heinrich Karl Hugo Delff. Gotha: Friedrich Andrcas Perthes. 1877.

It is with sincere pleasure that we welcome this new work from the hand of Mr. Delff, whose previous works on the fleld of philosophy we have had occasion to notice already. That which lends a particular zest and interest to Dr. Delff's works is the supremely antagonistic stand-point he takes against every view advanced by the philosophy and civilization of the present time. It is not only the theoretical propositions of Darwinism or Orthodox Theology which he fights with inexorable, animosity; but the whole mode of life of this age, with its railroads, factories, corporative enterprises and noisy machinery in general, is extremely obnoxious to him. The same complaint, however, namely, that the extraordinary industrial development of this age, which has so largely taken the place of the development of our agricultural resources, to which the earlier days of our Republic were devoted, may be heard from the lips of many an old American, and even from many a gloomy-minded statesman and journalist of the present day.

In the present work Mr. Delff has proposed to himself, as he expresses it in

his dedicatory preface, "to place the true ideals, the true problems of mankind in a new light, and to make them again recognizable in unmistakable clearness, from out of the dust and ashes under which criticism and changing public opinion have buried them. And since at the present day all the decisive vital questions that have agitated mankind from earliest times, have been thrown into confusion by a very chaos of old, inherited-and perhaps still more by modern-opinions and notions, whereof even yet each day brings forth new ones, it seems to be imperatively demanded that we should go back to the originals of history, and take hold of and interpret them with historical and philosophical spirit. The truly philosophical spirit is the truly historical spirit, and vice versa. The truly historical is the spirit of history, and not the spirit distilled from history, but the spirit which lives in it and impregnates it. This spirit is the unity of the Divine and the human."

Without specially characterizing the present work of Mr. Delff, except in so far as to say, that Prometheus is to him the originator of manufacturing as distinguished from agricultural life, that both the Prometheus and the Dionysos myths are in his view prototypes of the pure "Christos" religion, and that Sokrates was a meddlesome, though well enough meaning man of reflection, who laid the foundation for the destruction of Greek life by leading the Greeks away from their immediate, cheerful belief in Zeus, without substituting another faith in its place-we cannot do better to characterize Mr. Delff's general views on the relation of religions than by quoting again, and this time from the latter pages of his work.

"The whole process, the whole life-work of mankind has for its objects to overcome death. But this object is morally conditioned. Or rather it results as a consequence of a higher, internal development of life. The more man develops himself within himself humanly, spiritually, and the more he feels himself in his inmost, spiritual being, as therein distinguished from and elevavated above nature and nature's laws, the more peculiarly he also becomes conseious of having overcome death. This is the life-conflict of mankind, the conflict between spirit and nature, that is, of nature as it is in itself, of wild nature; and the last enemy of mankind is death, the end of nature. Nature begins in order to end, and ends in order to begin; creating and destroying unite in nature. Man, comprehending himself within himself in a higher being, transcends the beginning as well as the ending of nature; he has overcome the world and death. This is the best proof of immortality, the Being, the Eternal Life, which man lives in himself; and there is no other proof than this. To believe in a heaven and yet 'to hold it a beautiful fairy tale' is all the same. Miserable men! Live heaven, and you will remain in heaven, and nobody will expel you from it. What is all this vanity about, this coquetry to look with heroic resignation into the face of death, of annihilation? Aye, if you feel nothing, it may well be that in such nothingness even the nothing shall not appear to you any longer wondrous. But you forget the Will. Who can extinguish the fire of the Will? It must burn, I apprehend, unto all eternity. But immortality, true immortality, eternal life, is a need of the soul, and is the deed which it does with and in God.

"Hellenism and Christianity are not opposites, but Judaism and Christianity are opposites absolutely irreconcilable and excluding each other. Judea the dead remnant of which is Judaism, was merely the hull wherein which