Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/563

NEW BOOKS. 549 imitation of it," p. 292) must appeal, we think, to the Author of The World and the Individual as more serious. Psychology he may tell us is not philosophy, but he would probably agree that it ought at least to be a preparation for it, and that it scarcely serves this purpose by lending itself, even by implication, to the consecration of one of the principal stumbling-blocks to a philosophical interpretation of experience. J. H. MUIRHEAD. The Mind of Man. GUSTAV SPILLER. London : Swan, Sonnenschein & Co., 1902. Pp. xiv, 552. Mr. Spiller's book exhibits a combination of distinct merits with equally marked defects which is most baffling to the reviewer. To take some of the good points of the book first : the writer is evidently keenly interested in psychological study, he has read unusually widely, he shows great industry in the collection of observations upon the workings of his own mind and some ingenuity in the devising of experiments upon it. He is laudably determined to deal with the facts of mental life at first hand, and not in the least afraid to reject " authority " where it seems to him to misinterpret the facts. His style, at its best, is simple and vigorous. As if to balance these merits, he suffers from certain grave defects of taste and style. His book is almost intolerably prolix, and he has an unfortunate trick of returning again and again in successive chapters to discussions the reader had fondly believed to have been closed. He deals much too freely in the kind of loose and equivocal metaphor affected by the leader-writers of the daily newspapers. What is a more serious fault, he has the habit not only of dismissing views from which he dissents with a contempt an impartial reader must often think out of place, but of imputing unworthy motives to those who hold them. Thus, e.g., in rejecting a view of Brentano, he thinks it becoming to observe that it is a misfortune for psychology that men with anti-scientific interests, like Brentano, profess to be psychologists (p. 135), and in another place declares that the opponents of Bentham's psychology have usually been animated by mere class or religious prejudice; a view which is the more remarkable since Mr. Spiller himself goes farther than any writer known to me in his opposition to the Benthamite Hedonism. As regards the matter of his work, Mr. Spiller deserves credit for insisting 011 the teleological character of mental and neural process, and for treating the whole subject of psychology on the basis of the concep- tion of organised functional needs. Yet I doubt if he really sees the implications of his own doctrine. This doubt is suggested specially by his attempt to deprive both pleasure-pain and will of genuine significance for the course of mental life. It is well enough to say " organised re- action," and not feeling or will, determines our action; but how does reaction get itself organised in the first place ? I can find no intelligible answer in Mr. Spiller ; indeed, if his often-repeated principle that we can do only what we have already done were the last word on the subject, it would seem impossible that life should exhibit progressive organisation at all. I fear Mr. Spiller is not sufficiently alive to the significance of his own rejection of atomistic associationism. By the way, how is his rejection of that -doctrine compatible with his declaration that "psy- chology . . . constructs the total universe out of world-atoms, i.e. sim- plified touch feelings " ? Contradictions of this kind suggest that Mr. Spiller has not altogether digested the results of his voracious reading. The defence of introspection as a method in the Introduction is in- teresting, but I think Mr. Spiller overlooks the difficulty that, apart from