defined, and is grasped more completely and intelligently, as we come upon it over and over again, put in many different ways and with great variety of illustration.  It is a humiliating confession for a reviewer to make, but, to say the truth, I do not know what to make of this book.  If its author should succeed in indoctrinating the race with his views, he will produce an intellectual revolution.  Every man who thinks at all will be constrained for the remainder of his days (I must not say of his life) to think upon all subjects quite differently from what he has ever hitherto thought.  As for readers for amusement, and for all readers who do not choose to read what cannot be read without some mental effort, they will certainly find the first half-dozen pages of this work quite sufficient for them.  Without pretending to follow the author’s views into the vast number of details into which they reach, I shall endeavour in a short compass to draw the great lines of them.

There is an interesting introduction, which gradually prepares us for the announcement of the startling fact, that all men hitherto have been entirely mistaken in their belief both as to themselves and the universe which surrounds them.  It is first impressed upon us that things may be in themselves very different indeed from that which they appear to us:  that phenomenon may be something far apart from actual being.  Yet though our conceptions, whether given by sense or intellect, do not correspond with the truth of things, still they are the elements from which truth is to be gathered.  The following passage, which occurs near the beginning of the introduction, is the sharp end of the wedge:—­

All advance in knowledge is a deliverance of man from himself.  Slowly and painfully we learn that he is not the measure of truth, that the fact may be very different from the appearance to him.  The lesson is hard, but the reward is great.  So he escapes from illusion and error, from ignorance and failure.  Directing his thoughts and energies no longer according to his own impressions, but according to the truth of things, he finds himself in possession of an unimaginable power alike of understanding and of acting.  To a truly marvellous extent he is the lord of nature.

But the conditions of this lordship are inexorable.  They are the surrender of prepossessions, the abandonment of assumption, the confession of ignorance:  the open eye and the humble heart.  Hence in all passing from error to truth we learn something respecting ourselves, as well as something respecting the object of our study.  Simultaneously with our better knowledge we recognize the reason of our ignorance, and perceive what defect on our part has caused us to think wrongly.

Either the world is such as it appears to us, or it is not.  If it be not, there must be some condition affecting ourselves which modifies the impression we receive ffom it.  And this condition must be operative upon all mankind:  it must relate to man as a whole rather than to individual men.