Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/264

This page needs to be proofread.

250 CRITICAL NOTICES : The final section contains a discussion of the bases of the natural sciences, as well as that of psychological principles, and this is of great interest as a statement of the matured views of this veteran thinker. But this too is infected with that artificiality which arises 'from a too subjectivistic tendency, which instead of facing and attempting to solve the great problems, reduces them to a purely verbal plane, so robbing them of all reality and interest. This is best illustrated by Wundt's proposed reconciliation of causality and teleology. All series of changes are both causally and teleologic- ally determined because, the later term being given, we can argue to the earlier just as well as from the earlier to the later; both causation and teleological determination are but applications of the logical principle of ground and sequent. How simple ! But how unsatisfying ! Is it not better to admit that some problems remain insoluble still? The translation by Prof. Titchener, of which the first part has now appeared, will be welcome to all English and American stu- dents, for Prof. Wundt's style is never easy for the foreigner. The translation is all that can be desired ; the only complaint I have to make is that a number of unfamiliar technical terms appear, e.g., myel for spinal cord, cinerea for grey matter, oblongata for spinal bulb, sectioning for severing, and that ' psychische Lebensvorgcinge ' is translated ' phenomena of mental life,' a loose and undesirable phrase, which, I think, is everywhere avoided by Prof. Wundt. W. MCDOUGALL Psychologie und Pathologie der Vorstellung. Von EICHABD WAL- LABCHEK. Leipzig : Verlag von Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1905. Pp. x, 323. THE present volume by Dr. Eichard Wallaschek is in some sense a continuation of the positions. expounded in his Primitive Music, recently re-issued and expanded in a German edition. In that book he presented an elaborate inductive argument, based on a multitude of facts, to show that music arises out of rhythm and the time-sense. Incidentally, he offered some suggestions towards a proof that music is an essential condition of the highest mental life. In the present volume he works up to this conclusion in an entirely different way. Prof. Sully, in reviewing the previous book (MIND, N.S., iii., p. 134), suggested that Dr. Wallaschek might work out certain points in his theory somewhat more in detail. The book now before me is not precisely what seems to have been in Prof. Sully's mind at the moment, but again incidentally it does supply somewhat of the elements then found wanting, among others cer- tain points in the relation of the " time-sense " origin of music to the melodic scale. But the present volume covers much more than this. It starts with a definite theory of aesthetics as the thesis and shows by an objective analysis of certain pathological conditions,