VI. NEW BOOKS. [These Notes do not exclude Critical Notices later on.] The Metaphysics of the School. By THOMAS HARPER, S.J. Vol. III. Part i. London : Macmillan, 1884. Pp. xix., 414. The author (whose first two Volumes were reviewed at length in MIND XXV.-VI.) has felt compelled to break up his Vol. iii. into two Parts, reserving for the second Part the Discussions on Free-will, and the Chapters on Final Cause, Exemplar Cause, &c., which conclude, according to the design, his 5th Book on "Causes of Being". The present Part is wholly occupied with the exposition of Efficient Cause ; Formal Cause and Material Cause having been disposed of in the previous Volume. The treatment follows the careful arid exhaustive method to which Father Harper has accustomed, and indeed introduced, the degene- rate present-day readers of his previous Volumes. A feature of special interest is an Appendix (pp. 79-152), in which he brings face to face with modern science the teaching of S. Thomas concerning the efficient causes of the generation of living bodies, having already in Vol. ii. done the like for the teaching concerning the genesis of the material universe : to this Appendix and the Part generally, we hope to return in a future Number. The Discussions on Free-will, to come in the next Part, will alone occupy from three to four hundred pages, it being deemed " advisable to give due prominence to a question of such paramount importance . . . more particularly in view of the fact that the most strenuous efforts have been made by a certain class of writers to erase the idea and term [Free-will] out of our modern 'philosophy'." All genuine philosophical students must hope that the author's illness which has interfered with the comple- tion of his present Volume (though much of the second Part is already written) will soon leave him free and in full vigour to finish not only the Volume but all that still remains of his vast undertaking. Essays on the Philosophy of Theism. By the late WILLIAM GEORGE WARD, Ph.D., sometime Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and Professor of Moral Philosophy and Dogmatic Theology at Old Hall College, Ware. Eeprinted from the Dublin Review. Edited with an Introduction by WILFRID WARD. 2 vols. London : Kegan Paul, Trench, 1884. Pp. xxviii., 390 ; viii., 349. The seventeen Essays reprinted in these volumes range, in the time of their original appearance, from April 1867 to January 1882, the author's death having followed six months after the publication of the last of them. The three earliest, " Science, Prayer, Free-will and Miracles," " Explicit and Implicit Thought," " Certitude in Religious Assent," written before April 1871, but placed here towards the end of the second volume (xiv.-xvi.), give by themselves a fairly exhaustive notion of the extent and limits of his philosophical interest, also no inadequate representation of his peculiar gift of incisive argument ; after these, is placed last of all (xvii.) an Essay on " The Extent of Free-will," published in July 1881, in reply to a challenge thrown out by Professor Bain in MIND XVII. and not sufficiently met when in the following No. (April 1880) Dr. Ward was willing for once to break a lance before less sympathetic spectators than the fellow-Catholics
