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VII.—NEW BOOKS.


Dissertations on Leading Philosophical Topics. By Alexander Bain, LL. D., Emeritus Professor of Logic, University of Aberdeen. (Mainly Reprints from Mind.) London, New York and Bombay: Longmans, Green & Co., 1903. Pp. vi, 277. Price 7s. 6d. net.

It is hardly necessary to commend this volume to the readers of Mind, as the larger part of it consists of reprints from that journal, with which, doubtless, they are already very familiar. The papers on "Association Controversies," "Some Points in Ethics," "The Empiricist Position," "Pleasure and Pain," "Physiological Expression in Psychology," "Definition and Problems of Consciousness" are known to every psychologist; and few would think of writing on the malevolence of human nature without turning to the controversy between Dr. Bain and Mr. Bradley on that subject. Not the whole of Dr. Bain's contributions to Mind, however, are here reproduced, and we should have been glad to see several omitted articles included. We miss in particular the discussion with Dr. W. G. Ward on the Freedom of the Will—which is one of the most luminous discussions on that topic anywhere to be found. But the writer's main design has been to bring together the papers that deal specifically with controverted points in his own system, or that help to supplement or to expand what has been treated by him elsewhere. "I have reproduced in full," he tells us in the prefatory note, "and with almost no change, the principal articles to which reference was made in the Preface to the Fourth Edition of The Emotions and the Will. They contain, with some little difference in statement, my latest views on such of those debated issues as were not adequately expounded or not given in final shape in either of my two volumes on Psychology. … They are avowedly my sole amends for inability to execute that thorough revision of The Emotions and the Will which, although at one time resolved upon, had to be abandoned for the reasons given in the Preface to the Fourth Edition." In this way, the volume has a special interest and value, and will be widely welcomed not least by the student of philosophy, who will find the treatment of the leading philosophical problems here exceedingly helpful and in convenient form.

But, while the greater part of the volume consists of reprints from Mind, there are three papers that have not appeared there, viz., one on "The Respective Spheres and Mutual Helps of Introspection and Psycho-physical Experiment in Psychology," originally read to the International Congress of Experimental Psychology held in London in August, 1892; one on "The Scope of Anthropology, and its Relation to the Science of Mind," read to the Anthropological Section of the British Association, at the Aberdeen meeting, in 1885; and one on "The Pressure of Examinations," being Criticism of a Protest issued by Mr. Auberon Herbert, in