Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/577

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PHILOSOPHICAL PERIODICALS. 563 other ideas and feelings. Thus passive attention is a state of pure expecta- tion of a certain intensity. The expectation is not capable of reduction to simpler factors, it must for example be added to images in order that they may represent the future and not the past : on its side it accounts for the increased intensity and clearness of the presentation when it arrives. This paper is followed by an interesting study of ' Mirror- writing,' by CK Abt. The subjects were normal adults and children, both normal and defective. The best conditions for spontaneous mirror-writing with the left hand he found in those who did not visualise the forms of the letters in writing, but who imaged rather the movements necessary for their tracing. The movements, imagined part by part, are exactly the same for the left hand going from right to left, as for the right hand in the opposite direction : while the reason for the choice of the former direction for the left hand is that centrifugal movements are easier than centripe- tal. M. Marage contributes a full appreciation and critique of ' Recent Works Published in France on Phonation and Audition ' (Guillemin, Rousselot, Marichelle, Gelle and Bonnier). On the ground of some ' Experiments on Estimating Weights,' M. Renault d'Allonnea holds that every perception is the resultant of a process of " circular activity," involving a series of hypotheses, successively tested by reference to the original object. M. Bourdon's ' Researches on Habit ' prove experi- mentally, for varied types of work, the long persistence of the effects of habituation : even after seven years' disuse, the initial time of an opera- tion was shorter, the errors fewer, and the progress more rapid than in the original experiments. There remain several papers by M. Binet on Cephalometry : the ' Growth of the Skull and of the Face in Normals ' between four and eighteen years of age [the skull as a whole develops in the proportion of 12 per cent., while the face develops in that of 24 per cent., but the rate of growth is not uniform, an acceleration occurring at puberty, again more marked in the face than in the skull] ; ' Correlation of Cephalic Measures ' [compensation is not the rule in cranial develop- ment, if one measure is very large, the others will probably prove to be also very large ; some diameters vary along with, others independently of, each other] ; ' Studies of the Crania of the Blind and of Deaf-mutes, at Different Ages ' [disproving the idea that the tendency towards micro- cephaly in certain diameters arises from atrophy of the sensory centres in the brain.] ZEITSCHRIFT FUR PSYCHOLOGIE UND PHYSIOLOGIE DER SINNESORGANE. Bd. xxxi., Heft 2. M. Sachs mid J. Meller. ' Untersuchungen iiber die optische und haptische Lokalisation bei Neigungen urn eine sagittale Achse.' [Experiments, by aid of an extremely ingenious apparatus (1) with head inclined, body upright; (2) with body inclined, head upright ; and (3) with head and body inclined together in the same direction, upon the position of the apparent vertical (optical and haptical) and the apparent position of head and body (haptical). In (1) the apparent verticals tend in the direction opposite to the inclination of the head ; in (2) they go with the inclination of the body ; in (3) the haptical goes with, the optical against, the combined head-body inclination. Inclina- tions of the body with head upright, and inclinations of the head with body upright, are both alike (haptically) underestimated. "While we are not able to show separately the influence of the separate sensation categories upon our idea of direction in space, we are justified (in view of the difference of position of the apparent vertical, according as optical or haptical sensations predominate in its determination) in regarding our results as a proof a fortiori of the specificity of the sensations endowed with the spatial quale." The results as a whole indicate the mosaic