New principles of medical Philosophy,

In our October issue we were only able to announce this work, regretting that the length of the articles, whose publication could not be delayed, had prevented us from appreciating it sooner.

Although, by its specialty, the book seems foreign to the matters that occupy us, nonetheless it is bound to them, by the very principle upon which it rests, because the author clearly brings the spiritualist principle to bear in the science most riddled with materialism. He does not make mystical spirituality, as some understand it, but, if we may so express ourselves, positive and scientific spirituality. He endeavors to demonstrate the existence of the spiritual principle that exists in us, its connection with the organism, aided by the fluidic bond that unites them, the important role that these two elements play in the economy [in the organism], the inevitable errors into which physicians who refer everything to matter necessarily fall, and the lights of which they deprive themselves by neglecting the spiritual principle. The following passage indicates sufficiently the point of view under which he regards the question. “In sum, he says (page 34), the human constitution results:

1st from a spiritual principle, independent, or immortal soul;

2nd from a permanent fluidic body;

3rd from a material organism, dissoluble, animated during life by a special fluid.