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544 NEW BOOKS. than to a select class another motive for studying clearness and simplicity of style, and also a motive for pushing their theories to practi- cal conclusions. A foreign critic may observe that this boasted French clearness has often been too dearly purchased by the sacrifice of com- prehensiveness and subtlety ; that the appeal to a popular audience has, so far, not won a verdict for pure philosophic truth ; and that the philosophies of England and Germany are proving at least as rich in practical results as the philosophy of France. Prof. Levy-Bruhl has appended a very useful bibliography to his work ; but it does not quite compensate for the total absence of references at the bottom of his pages. One would like to know where Descartes says that " the existence of the thinking mind, far from being dependent on any other existing thing, is the essential condition of every other existence conceivable to us " (p. 20). Is not this confounding the causa essendi with the causa cognoscendi : ! And was Pascal really so ignorant as to fancy that the Epicureans were represented by Montaigne (p. 89) 1 In the celebrated conversation with M. de Saci the name of Epicurus does not once occur, and Montaigne is throughout regarded with perfect accuracy as a representative sceptic. Something more, too, might have been made of what it is the special task of histories of philosophy to elucidate the debts of philosophers to their predecessors. We hear nothing of what Rousseau owed to Hobbes and Locke ; nor is it men- tioned that Coiute's law of the three stages had been clearly formulated more than seventy years earlier by Turgot. Indeed, Prof. Lt-vy-Bruhl, while giving prominence to thinkers of less importance, has not a word to spare for the two lectures in which Turgot, according to Cousin, " created the philosophy of history ". In conclusion a word of recognition must be given to the translation, the work of Miss G. Coblence : it reads almost like an original composi- tion. ALFRED W. BENN. A Study of Lapses. By H. HEATH BAWDEN, A.M. Psychological Review, Monograph Supplements, vol. iii., No. 4 (whole No. 14 April, 1900. New York : The Macmillan Company. Pp. iv., 122. An excellent study of the conditions and characters of lapses of tongue and pen. Mr. Bawden starts by emphasising the fact that he is here concerned with automatic rather than voluntary mental processes, for the lapse can be conscious not as process but only as a product due to confusion or conflict in ' fringe '-processes. Hence the vagueness of intro- spective description of its conditions. In general these conditions arc (1) fatigue, in a very wide sense ; (2) conflict or coalescence ; and physio- logically the explanation of the lapse can only be widely given as neural mal-co-ordination, such as is at the base of certain forms of aphasia and agraphia. The division of lapses into sensory-motor (in imitation) and ideo motor is next discussed and put aside as unfruitful ; the principles of division first adopted are into (1) oral and graphic, (2) verbal and literal. Oral may be subdivided into visual-vocal and auditory-vocal ; graphic into visual-manual and auditory-manual ; but in practice it is found that the common mechanism of speech is auditory-kinsesthetic, and that of writing visual-kinsesthetic, the other types being rare. The verbal-literal distinction is adopted for practical convenience only ; the length of a word is never the chief determinant of the lapse. The psycho- logical unit is a unit of meaning, and this is never constant but shifts and varies from a letter to a paragraph. Now errors follow the meaning. In