Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/265

A. MEINONG, Ueber die Bedeutung des Weberschen Gesetzes. 251 vliich distinguishes them is that " activity lives for itself, is not subordinated to feeling ", l With regard to their intelligence it " sins always by defect of reflexion, has no interest in what is unattainable in the ideal ". 2 We have now passed in review the main features of M. Malapert's classification. No one who has experienced the diffi- culties of the task could expect it to be final. At least it is better and more complete than any that has preceded it. It is interest- ing as an attempt to unify the disconnected classifications of popular thought ; and its success would have been greater had the author discerned the limits within which alone the quantitative conception of ' predominance ' is applicable. Constrained by this conception of his predecessors, his fundamental types sometimes appear arbitrary, because they are not in harmony with it, and the arguments to justify their concordance, sophistical. ALEXANDER F. SHAND. Ueber die Bedeutung des Weberschen Gesetzes. Beitrage zur Psychologie des Vergleichens und Messens. Von A. MEINONG. Hamburg und Leipzig : Leopold Voss, 1896. Pp. 164. THE present w r ork consists essentially of a single thesis proved by a single argument. The thesis is at once simple and ingenious, the argument at once lucid and subtle. The author avoids almost all the mistakes and confusions which beset writers on psychical measurement, and makes several important distinctions which are rarely, if ever, to be met with elsewhere. Herr Meinong's thesis is, briefly, as follows : The true import of Weber's Law is, that equal dissimilarities (Verschiedenheiteri) in the stimuli correspond to equal dissimilarities in the cor- responding sensations ; while the dissimilarity of two measurable quantities of the same kind may be regarded as measured by the difference of the logarithms of these quantities. Thus where sensations are what the author calls extensive, they are directly proportional to their stimuli, though wherever the sensations are quantitative, their dissimilarity is proportional, as in Fechner's formula, to the difference of the logarithms of the stimuli pro- vided these be measurable quantities of the same kind. This double contention depends upon the distinction between dis- similarity (Verschiedenheit) and mathematical difference (Unter- schied). The use made of this distinction demands a careful account of quantity and measurement, of indivisible quantities, and of relations which are quantities. I am unacquainted with any better discussion of these topics than that contained in the present volume, and the points where the author appears mistaken do not, I think, invalidate the most important part of his thesis. 1 P. 286. 2 Ibid.