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some points on whether they forced him to act as he did, at others on whether they simply allowed him to get away with it. Moral judgments, in turn, are built into decisions on the last three of these four considerations. They would be absent from a fifth possibility, that of identifying underlying causes that rendered the war inevitable. Dray does not find this kind of alternative promising however. The other four paradigms of causal judgement have the virtue of treating historical agents as moral beings acting for reasons.

The final essay concerns Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West. Dray begins with a superb presentation of Spengler's theory and then evaluates it. Specifying the nature of Spengler's predictions, Dray shows that he eschews causal explanation as a way of showing why things must go in the predicted direction but does not provide any plausible alternative explanation. Concerning the factual foundations of the theory, Dray rejects various arguments of Spengler's critics yet concurs in finding his system empirically inadequate. Finally there are problems of coherence. The inexorable development of a culture requires that it be unable not merely to borrow from but even to understand other cultures. That contradicts Spengler's own pretension to an understanding of non-western cultures and to communication of it to western readers. Also, phases within the development of a culture differ rather like cultures and are unamenable to understanding from other phases. Thus we are apparently restricted to understanding ourselves alone.

This summary of essential theses cannot do justice to the attendant complexities or to Dray's sure-footed exploration of them. A few minor obscurities remain. Beard's questioning of the possibility of knowing the past as it actually was is evidently not identical with his doubts about historical objectivity; the intersection between these two issues calls for delimitation. Also there is an unresolved ambiguity in references both to persons and to policies, actions or situations as putative causes (pp. 72, 78, 82-85). Conversely, much of the value of these essays lies in the elaboration of positions approached or less fully developed in Dray's earlier works, particularly with respect to historical relativism. His review of the Taylor controversy provides a significant addition to Dray's previous investigation of causal judgment. It is, at the same time, an invaluable clarification of the factual issues involved. Therein it exemplifies a pervading virtue of these and Dray's other writings — a rare combination of penetrating philosphic analysis and abiding sensitivity to the realities of historical scholarship. Carleton University G. S. Couse Science, Pseudo-Science and Society, edited by Marsha P. Hanen, Margaret J. Osier, and Robert G. Weyant. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, 1980. x, 303 pp. $7.50. This volume presents papers given at a conference on "Science, Pseudo-science and Society," held at the University of Calgary, May 10-12, 1979. Experience has taught me to look with a jaundiced eye at collections of conference papers, especially those on the history and philosophy of science. All too often one gets a series of dull platitudes, cobbled together by retired Nobel Prize winners, justifying their week or two in the sun courtesy of some tax-exempt foundation — often put out at an inordinate price by some university press or other. I am glad to say however that the volume under review is a splendid exception: credit should go to the conference's

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organizers, sponsors (the Calgary Institute for the Humanities), and most particularly to the publishers. Perhaps small is indeed beautiful. I had heard several of the papers previously on the CBC "Ideas" programme. I hope that we will soon get a repeat broadcast, bringing the published volume to the audience's attention.

The problems addressed at the conference and in the volume are those of the nature of science and of its somewhat disreputable sibling, pseudo-science, of the relationships between the two, and of their effects on society. Properly it was recognized that one simply must go at this problem in two ways: from the perspective of the present and from that of the past. We can all identify examples of real science: Newtonian mechanics, Darwinian evolutionary theory, plate tectonics. We can all identify examples of pseudo-science: phrenology, Velikovsky, alchemy. What we need first however is some means of distinguishing the two, and thus being able to decide on difficult cases. Is Freudian psychoanalytic theory a genuine science or is it a pseudo-science? Then what we need is examination of the importance in the past of pseudo-science. All this then will perhaps help us towards an understanding of pseudo-science and its function today. Purists might not like to see history used to throw light on present understanding — for them the practice of history is a self-justifying Kantian end in itself — but those of us who feel that a vital role played by our knowledge of the past is that of aiding our knowledge of the present, will empathize strongly with the approach taken by the historians who contributed to this volume.

Naturally, given the intentions, the volume falls into three parts. The first section, "The Problem of Demarcation," tries to tease out precisely what it is that makes for a pseudo-science as opposed to a science. Some old hands who have been trying for years to separate out real from apparent give good displays of their powers here. I particularly enjoyed Antony Flews analysis of parapsychology. Several years ago he argued that "although there was no repeatable experiment to demonstrate the reality of any of the putative psi-phenomena, and although the entire field was buried under ever-mount­ing piles of rubbish produced by charlatans and suckers; nevertheless one could not with good academic conscience dismiss the case as closed" (p. 56). Today his position is much the same, although perhaps more skeptical. Flew stresses that the absence of any remotely plausible causal theory behind parapsychology makes one very uneasy about its status. Also valuable in this first section is Paul Thagard's discussion. He points out that there is a fundamental distinction between resemblance and correlation thinking. The latter tries to correlate instances ("How many teenage girls get pregnant?") whereas the former works from superficial resemblances ("Fires are red, therefore red-headed people are hot-tempered"). He points out that much pseudo-science relies extensively on resemblance thinking (e.g. astrological claims about association with Mars leading to war, because Mars is reddish and this is the colour of blood).

The second section, "The Impact of Pseudo-science on the Development of Science," will have the most direct interest for the straight historian. The gem in this section, perhaps the high-point of the whole collection, is Richard S. Westfall's "The influence of Alchemy on Newton." Drawing from his vast knowledge of and sympathy with Newton, Westfall demonstrates conclu­sively the hold that alchemaic thinking had on the greatest of English scientists. For twenty-five years (yes, for twenty-five years) Newton worked constantly on alchemy. Let us be clear that we are talking about an extensive application of effort to which an extensive body of surviving papers testify. I have

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devoted some time to a reliable quantitative measure of these papers. They appear to contain well over a million words in Newton's hand. An activity that left behind a record that large was clearly more than an incidental diversion (p. 153).

Indeed, Westfall argues that alchemy was so far from being a diversion for Newton, that from it he extracted the key notion for which he is justly famous, namely gravitational force, attraction at a distance. By all the criteria of the day, the force was not genuinely scientific. Newton was able to convince his fellows that it should enter the realm of science; but its ancestry, Westfall argues, was distinctly unsavoury. Obviously this provocative thesis will have to be assessed by knowledgeable scholars of seventeenth-century science; but if true will call for drastic reassessment, both of the status of Newton and of alchemy.

Third in this volume we have, "Social Dimensions of Science and Pseudo-science." I particularly enjoyed the essay by one of the co-editors, Margaret J. Osier. She shows convincingly the extent to which science can be blurred into pseudo-science, and how all sorts of values can thus be incorporated into what is being purveyed as genuine, objective knowledge. Notoriously, women in the nineteenth-century were excluded from education and power on the basis of "scientific" claims about their general inadequacy. I do however wonder whether what Osier discusses should really be called "pseudo" science, or just plain "bad" or "false" science. As the earlier contributors to the book point out, there is a difference between something like Ptolemaic astronomy and something like Ptolemaic astrology, even though both may be false. Were nineteenth-century claims about women really "pseudo," or was it simply that they were wrong?

Let me repeat in conclusion: I think that this volume is an excellent discussion of interesting and important questions. It is a very worthwhile contribution to scholarship in Canada. University of Guelph Michael Ruse Dr. Bernard Gordon: Professor and Practitioner, by Luke E. Demaitre. Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, 1980. xii, 263 pp. $18.00. Around the year 1300, when the Faculty of Medicine at Montpellier was at the high point of its prestige, the two most noted scholars to teach there were Arnold of Villanova and Bernard Gordon. Yet while Arnold did not think of his stay with the university as a final stage in his career — indeed ensuing history shows him as a doctor to kings and popes — Bernard Gordon seems to have thought of his much less lucrative position in the Studium as permanent. He concentrated mostly on teaching, and on composing medical treatises for the use of students and practitioners. Arnold's spectacular career left many traces in our archives, be it in royal or papal chanceries or in notarial records. For Bernard, on the other hand, we do not seem to have much more than his own writings, treatises and compendia, which tend to be very sparse in terms of historical information. This scarcity of data might account for the fact that we have not had until now a full scale monograph about this highly important figure in European intellectual history.

Professor Luke Demaitre's work therefore fills a serious gap in modern scholarship. But his book may be appreciated on its merits as well, the result