loses itself in barren tautology and the infinite regress. The necessary logical equivalence of cause and effect in any impersonal scheme makes all real explanation and progress impossible, and shuts us up to an unintelligible oscillation between potentiality and actuality, to which there is no corresponding thought.... Philosophy is still militant and has much work before it, but the omens are auspicious, the problems are better understood, and we are coming to a synthesis of the results of past generations of thinking which will be a very distinct progress. Philosophy has already done good service, and never better than in recent times, by destroying pretended knowledge and making room for the higher faiths of humanity. It has also done good service in helping these faiths to better rational form, and thus securing them against the defilements of superstition and the cavilings of hostile critics. With all its aberrations and shortcomings, philosophy deserves well of humanity. PHILOSOPHY: ITS FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTIONS AND ITS METHODS BY GEORGE HOLMES HOWISON [George Holmes Howison, Mills Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity, University of California. b. Montgomery County, Maryland, 1834. A.B. Marietta College, 1852; M.A. 1855; LL.D. _ibid._ 1883. Post-graduate, Lane Theological Seminary, University of Berlin, and Oxford. Headmaster High School, Salem, Mass., 1862-64; Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Washington University, St. Louis, 1864-66; Tileston Professor of Political Economy, _ibid._ 1866-69; Professor of Logic and the Philosophy of Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1871-79; Lecturer on Ethics, Harvard University, 1879-80; Lecturer on Logic and Speculative Philosophy, University of Michigan, 1883-84. Member and vice-president St. Louis Philosophical Society; member California Historical Society; American Historical Association; American Association for the Advancement of Science; National Geographic Society, etc. Author of _Treatise on Analytic Geometry_, 1869; _The Limits of Evolution_, 1901, 2d edition, 1904; joint author and editor of _The Conception of God_, 1897, etc. Editor Philosophical Publications of University of California; American Editorial Representative _Hibbert Journal_, London.]