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VIL CKITICAL NOTICES. Esprits Logiques et Esprits Faux. Par FR. PAULHAN. Paris : Felix Alcan, 1896. Pp. 362. NOTWITHSTANDING the express statement of its author, many of those who read his new work will be apt to regard it as a sequel to Les Caracteres, dealing like it with a problem of comparative rather than of general psychology, or, as M. Paulhan would ex- press it, with applied and concrete psychology. " The mental elements and the laws of mental activity/' he tells us in Les Caracteres, are still the object of his research, " but instead of considering them in themselves, as I have done in a preceding volume, I study here the different types which the different con- crete manifestations of these general laws produce "- 1 Similarly in the present work, we follow out the concrete manifestations of these laws in intellectual processes with the result that we have presented a classification of the different intellectual types of men. In this respect the two works correspond in method and results. But it is one of the noteworthy features of his method that we can with equal justness regard his work from two points of view. The different types of the abstracted intellect as of the character as a whole may either be regarded as stages in a general mental development, or as crystallising themselves in types of men. It is the former point of view which the author emphasises in the introduction to the present work. 2 What then are these laws of mental activity? "The law which dominates the whole life of the mind is the law of syste- matic association which expresses the aptitude of each element, desire, idea or image to excite other elements which are capable of associating with it for a common end." 3 It has its complement in " the law of systematic inhibition " which expresses the ten- dency of the mental element to exclude all elements which cannot further the common end. The degree in which systematic asso- ciation is developed is, other things equal, the degree of mental evolution ; and hence all the types may be regarded as stages in this general development or as typifying classes of men in whom 1 Les Caracteres, p. 13. 2 Esprits Logiques, p. 35. 3 Les Caracteres, p. 12.