researches of phrenology, the experiments of Hitzig and Ferrier have but given us facts which the true theory of mind must confront and harmonize; but they all leave the problem of mind where they found it. It is when men are searching for the truth without reaching it that they talk most actively-when they have found it they are silent; the existence of a great literature on any theme of science is a proof that philosophers in that sphere have not yet arrived at the journey's end.

A defect in these works, which belongs to all writings on these subjects during these hundreds of years, is the slavery to the delusion in the belief in what is called the will. With the extension of systematized researches in psychology, and the general increase of courage and refinement in those who think, and, above all, with the birth and adolescence and maturing of the scientific sense, this delusion of the will is insensibly, unconsciously, and illogically dying out of our civilization; but, even now, it is sufficiently alive to vitiate and make ludicrous, if not to paralyze, all our literature of psychology. The belief that there is a will, a volition, a force outside of or independent of the brain or the mind, a separate, distinct, special, isolated faculty or aggregation of faculties, is as baseless as witchcraft, astrology, alchemy, and spiritualism, and is as universal among philosophers and among the people as were all these delusions in the fourteenth century. When we define the will to be the coördinated action of all the faculties, we have given a definition that is clear and verifiable, and one that harmonizes all the phenomena that have for thousands of years been referred to that supposed faculty; and we have also given a definition which the philosophers of the twentieth and thirtieth centuries may regard as a basis for reason. Just as the true theory of trance dissipates the worldlong delusions that have been intrenched behind the phenomena of trance, just as the theory of gravity dispelled the superstitions of the sky, so the theory of the nature of volition dispenses with half our metaphysics and philosophies.

These works of Bastian and Maudsley, like all writings that skirt the borders of philosophy, show a deficient appreciation of the nature and the limitations of deductive reasoning. In this defect the whole world, scholarly and unscholarly, the masses and the teachers, share, and, under great public excitement, grotesquely manifest it. The Tanner fast-the chief interest of which is psychological-has brought to public view myriads of bad reasonings, all of which are useful as impressing the need of a reconstruction

of our logic. Deduction is knowledge beforehand; induction is knowledge afterhand. Science does not know, although individuals fancy they know, how long human beings can live on water alone, in voluntary and easy abstinence from food. The question is one wholly of induction-of knowledge afterhand for the case under which the experiment is made; and the present is the first systematic attempt at an experiment of this kind ever organized. To attempt to decide beforehand how long or how successfully one can live under such conditions is to commit an error in reasoning; to use deduction where only induction is available.

Of the authors here under review, Bastian seems to know nothing of deductive reasoning; and, where induction or knowledge afterhand fails, he becomes as a little child. A thorough master of deductive reasoning-the rarest of all Nature's evolutionswould never have written the majority of the chapters of this work; would never have essayed, as he has elsewhere done, to establish the doctrine of spontaneous generation, a doctrine which, if true, is and must for ever remain as far outside of human demonstration as the existence of a supernatural universe.

The little work of Dr. Dowse on "Neurasthenia" (nervous exhaustion) is a fragment, but noteworthy as the first attempt at a scientific treatise on that subject in Great Britain. Our knowledge of this most important and interesting department of science is not extended greatly by this treatise; but these three merits impress us at once: 1. That the author has, in general, a correct philosophy of the subject, a compliment that can not be given to most of the writers on the several branches of this theme; 2. That he confesses that he adopted the term only after overcoming educated prejudices against it, he having been brought up, as all physicians have, in the school of the demonstrably false on functional nervous diseases; 3. Like Professor Erb, of Leipsic, who introduced this subject to Germany, as Dr. Dowse introduced it to England, he gives full and fair credit to the one who organized neurasthenia, vitalized it, made it live and begin to grow.

These works are all English, and, like all English treatises of this class, suggest to us on nearly every line these two psychological phenomena: First, the intellectual cowardice of English-speaking people everywhere. Under all suns, in every continent, beneath every phase of government, in every realm of thought, those who call themselves Anglo-Saxons, who have the physical courage of

the lower animals and the moral heroism of saints, are timid and feminine in the presence of ideas.

Maudsley is to be counted among the most heroic of Englishmen, since his work in the first edition was, in this country, pointed out with warning, as a steamer loaded with dynamite, and in his own country made more antagonists than followers; and yet its philosophy was of German birth, and long since had there attained a certain maturity, strength, recognition, and admission to psychological fellowship. England and America tremble at truths so old that Germany has forgotten when they were born.

Lastly, these works suggest the need of less expression and more repression in scientific as well as in all other literature of England and America. The friends of truth may well have a concert of prayer for the reappearance of a tyrant among us, since the very greatest of the world's few great contributions to literature and science, as well as art, have been made not under the patronage of liberty, but under the eyes of kings and beneath the shadows of despotism. Liberty, by tempting the cerebral forces to easy discharge, is the cruelest enemy of ideas. The face that is daily shaved never develops a full beard; the woodland constantly cut over always remains a scrub; only by damming a stream can we get its full reserved power; even a fruit-tree has its non-bearing year; and the first works of modern writers are ofttimes their best -for this cause they are so long in finding a publisher. Let some tyrant command silence for even a decade, and a Newton in biology might arise. Intellectual courage is a measure and companion of original force, and, when those who speak our language shall attain that liberty of thought that despotic Germany has so long enjoyed, our scientific discoverers shall cease to apologize to the non-experts they have vanquished and the delusions they have destroyed.

GEORGE M. BEARD.

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

No. CCLXXXVII.

OCTOBER, 1880.

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY JUDGED BY ITS HISTORY.

THE time is far distant when the people of this country can be persuaded to judge a political party by its platform and professions, without reference to its practices and history. Having been taught this lesson in the severe school of experience, the Democratic party is now earnestly striving to unload its history; to cast off its old and bad character. Unfortunately, it makes no satisfactory effort to substitute, in place of the old one, a new history which will be beneficial to the country or creditable to itself, or to build up such a new character as can only be done by a complete change of conduct.

The Democratic party of to-day is substantially the Democratic party of 1860. It had a solid South then; it has a solid South now. It rallied around its banners then the great mass of the dangerous classes in the large cities; it rallies them still. The draft-rioters of 1863 in the city of New York were Democrats; those who survive are still Democrats. The Democratic party in 1860 counted for its success upon the States of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Indiana, to add to its solid South; it counts upon those States still.

In 1860 it asserted the sovereignty of the States, and denied the right of coercion; in 1880 it, to all intents and purposes, announces VOL. CXXXI.-NO. 287.

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the same doctrine in its denial of the authority of the General Government to enforce its laws, even after their constitutional validity has been affirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States.

Time has made ravages in its ranks, but nevertheless its membership is practically the same to-day as in 1860. Toombs, Jefferson Davis, Hampton, Hill, Gordon, and Lamar, were among the leaders of the Democratic party South in 1860; they are to-day. Hancock, Seymour, Bayard, English, Thurman, and Ben Butler were among the leaders of the Democratic party North in 1860; and they are so still. The rank and file remain substantially the same. Occasionally a new recruit wanders in from the Republican party; but, in the main, the places made vacant by decease or casualties are made good by immigration and by the natural increase of population in the quarters where Democratic majorities are usually found.

In 1856 the Democratic party declared that "Congress has no power to charter a national bank; that we believe such an institution one of deadly hostility to the best interests of the country, dangerous to our republican institutions and the liberties of the people, and calculated to place the business of the country within the control of a centralized money power and above the laws and the will of the people." It affirms this doctrine in 1880, for its platform asserts, "We pledge ourselves anew to the constitutional doctrines and traditions of the Democratic party."

In its platform of 1856 it resolves: "That the Democratic party will faithfully abide by and uphold the principles laid down in the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798, and in the report of Mr. Madison to the Virginia Legislature in 1799; that it adopts. those principles, as constituting one of the main foundations of its political creed, and is resolved to carry them out in their obvious meaning and import." Having pledged itself anew to its constitutional doctrines and traditions, the conclusion is inevitable that the Democratic party of to-day is as thoroughly committed to the doctrines of "State sovereignty" as it has ever been. Endorsing those doctrines in 1856, as "constituting one of the main foundations of its political creed," and resolving to "carry them out in their obvious meaning and import," it renews that pledge in 1880. In 1860 both branches of the Democratic party reaffirmed the platform of 1856.

In 1864 it resolved, "That, in the future, as in the past, we will adhere with unswerving fidelity to the Union under the Constitu