Mr. Bray's theory is embodied in the title of the work under review, and its key-note is "order in nature." His object is to show "that the mind of man is not an exception to nature's other works; that like everything else it has received a determinate character; that all our knowledge of it is precisely of the same kind as that of material things, and consists in the observation of _its order_ of action, or of the relation of cause and effect." According to this view we can know the real nature of neither matter nor mind, Nature herself having fixed the boundaries beyond which human knowledge cannot extend. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that Mr. Bray regarded Nature as something apart, giving to man laws from the operation of which it is itself free. A little consideration shows that such is not his idea. Nature is with Mr. Bray only another name for God. Moreover, man is nothing, God is all; "individuality, or anything separate from Him, is a mode of thought, and has no real existence." Electricity, heat, light, and other forces of nature are modes of the Unknowable, and are transformable into each other and into the other modes which we distinguish as sensation, emotion, thought. The qualities or properties of matter are mere force or power, and as they are qualities of God, the assumption of the existence of matter is not necessary. God "is the Universal Being, of which all things are the manifestations. Every thing is a mode of God's attribute of extension; every thought, wish, or feeling, is a mode of His attribute of thought."
To Mr. Bray the only _reality_ is God, the great Unknown, and as He is also the Unknowable, we have in the Philosophy of Necessity a system of Agnosticism. And yet Mr. Bray is hardly consistent with himself. For, unlike Mr. Herbert Spencer, he speaks of God in terms of Spirit, which becomes in his system identical with force. When, moreover, he declares that "the whole sensitive existence is but the innumerable individual eyes with which the Infinite World Spirit beholds Himself," we have a kind of Monism. This view however recognises God as "the only real and efficient power in the universe," and, as the Great First Cause and the Great Last Cause of all things, a Divine Being. Mr. Bray does not enter into the question of the personality of God, but that he supposes the Deity to possess consciousness is evident from his reference to the Great Soul of Nature, and his statement that the operation of its forces is governed by thought. His ideas are summed up in the words, "we feel ourselves a part