This philosophic relation of Ethics to the cosmical process is referred to in the preface as being, in fact, the main object Mr. Spencer had in view in his elaborate series of volumes, and is more explicitly stated in Chapter IV. of the work under review, in which Mr. Spencer considering "The Ways of Judging Conduct," justifies the course he thus pursues. Here it is pointed out that in the systems of all preceding authors the idea of causation has been insufficiently recognised or has even been altogether ignored--an assertion which is thereupon justified by a review of the Theological, Political, Intuitional, and Utilitarian schools of moral philosophers. Mr. Spencer thereupon proceeds (¶ 22) "Thus, then, is justified the allegation made at the outset, that, irrespective of their distinctive characters and their special tendencies, all the current methods of ethics have one general defect--they neglect ultimate causal connexions. Of course, I do not mean that they wholly ignore the natural consequences of actions; but I mean that they recognise them only incidentally. They do not erect into a method the ascertaining of necessary relations between causes and effects, and deducing rules of conduct from formulated statements of them. "Every science begins by accumulating observations, and presently generalises these empirically; but only when it reaches the stage at which its empirical generalisations are included in a rational generalisation does it become developed science. Astronomy has already passed through its successive stages; first, collections of facts, then inductions from them, and lastly deductive interpretations of these, as corollaries from a universal principle of action among masses in space. Accounts of structures and tabulations of strata, grouped and compared, have led gradually to the assigning of various classes of geological changes to igneous and aqueous actions; and it is now tacitly admitted that geology becomes a science proper, only as fast as such changes are explained in terms of those natural processes which have arisen in the cooling and solidifying Earth, exposed to the Sun's heat and the action of the Moon upon its ocean. The science of life has been, and is still, exhibiting a like series of steps; the evolution of organic forms at large is being affiliated on physical actions in operation from the beginning; and the vital phenomena each organism presents, are coming to be understood as connected sets of changes, in parts formed of matters that are affected by certain forces, and disengage other forces. So is it with mind. Early ideas concerning thought and feeling ignored everything like cause, save in recognising those effects of habit which were forced on men's attention and expressed in proverbs; but there are growing up interpretations of thought and feeling as correlates of the actions and reactions of a nervous structure, that is influenced by