ABSTRACT
It is somewhat difficult to form a definite opinion on Mrs. Swiney's book, which represents a phase of thought commoner in the United States, where what, for want of a better name, we may call unbalanced mysticism finds a congenial soil, than in England. Mrs. Swiney, we should imagine, has been strongly influenced, . directly or indirectly, by the philosophy of Swedenborg, which was so great a. factor III the" transcendentalism" of New England and its subsequent developments. Her book contains much valuable truth, but its force will be discounted for most people, who regard Nature with reverence and are content to take facts as they find them, by her theory of the inherent superiority and (if we understand her rightly) the destined eventual predominance of women over men. The exposition of this theory is supported by an imposing list of references to works on biological science, a subject in which we have not specialised enough to be competent critics; but even an outsider may be permitted to doubt whether the facts adduced (granting them to be faots) will in all cases warrant Mrs. Swiney's conclusions. It is quite true that in the lowest forms of life there' is no such thing as either sex or death; the parent ceasing to exist as an individual as soon as the act of division (which takes the place of reproduction) is accomplished. But the more complicated conditions of a higher stage of evolution seem to require the inter-action of two separate and mutually complementary beings. Many passages, indeed, would seem to indicate that Mrs. Swiney herself takes this view; others, again, leave us in doubt as to how far this is the case, while yet others point to conceptions which seem to us little short of extravagant.
