heard alone, produce a feeling different from that caused by the combination of beats, since it is none the less true that the rapid combination produces a sensation which is felt as one, and necessarily is one in consequence. Mr. Spencer seems to forget that causes in combination can produce results entirely different from those to which each cause separately taken can give rise; or, as Dr. Mivart says, “All that Mr. Spencer really shows and proves is that diverse conditions result in the evocation of diverse simple perceptions, of which perceptions such conditions are the occasions.” Mr. Spencer’s position, bolstered up as it is by the minutest analysis of mental consciousness and by a wealth of marvellously subtle reasoning, is after all but a prejudice. He is indisposed to admit aught but sensation, and hence plies his batteries against every other element which dares obtrude itself into the domain of thought. How suggestive of this fact are the following words: “It needs but to think of a brain as a seat of nervous discharges, intermediate between actions in the outer world and actions in the world of thought, to be impressed with the absurdity of supposing that the connections among outer actions, after being transferred through the medium of nervous discharges, can reappear in the world of thought in the forms they originally had.” With Dr. Mivart we ask, “Where is the absurdity?” For surely He who made the brain might, if he saw fit, and as the facts prove, have so made it that it would perform its functions in this very identical manner. The steps of the process by which the results of nervous action are appropriated by the mind in the shape of knowledge will necessarily remain an inscrutable mystery for ever, but that is no reason why they should not be accomplished in any manner short of that involving a contradiction. This ends what we wish to say concerning Dr. Mivart’s chapter on the “External World.” He has not endeavored to shirk a single phase of the discussion with his formidable opponents, and we feel that if he has worsted them in the encounter, his triumph is as much the inevitable outcome of the truth of the cause which he has espoused as it is of the undoubted abilities he has exhibited throughout the course of the hard-fought contest.