Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/284

270 NEW BOOKS. Essentials of Psychology. By C. S. BUELL. Boston : Ginn & Co., 1898. Pp. viii., 238. ($1.10.) This is an elementary psychology for high-school students. It consists of twelve chapters, the text of which is interspersed with problems and exercises. After an Introduction, occupied mainly with the nervous system and its relation to the mind, come four chapters on the senses. These are quite good, in spite of minor slips and inconsistencies (pp. 34, 43, 62, 64, 88, 94). Perception is then denned as the localisation and material reference of sensation. Attention is the intellectual power of focussing upon selected objects. Memory, imagination and thought are the three representative powers of mind, developing in this order. The book ends with chapters upon feeling and emotion and upon will. While the later chapters are interesting as practical essays, they are conceived entirely from the standpoint of the faculty psychology, and are but loosely related to the sense analysis which precedes them. Attention is divorced from will, interest from feeling. The reader will therefore gain from the book no connected idea of psychology as a scientific systematisation of facts. Comparing the work with others with which it challenges comparison, the present writer would rank it somewhat above Ladd's, but considerably lower than Titchener's Primer. Theories of the Will in the History of Philosophy. By ARCHIED ALEXANDER. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons, 1898. Pp. viii 357. In the main this book is more occupied in giving resumes of the doctrine of leading philosophers than in tracing the general conditions which termine the evolution of thought concerning the Will. Greek theorie are first discussed, with special reference to the antagonism betweer reason and passion. Then follow theories of the Will in Christian theology, in which the guiding points of view have reference to the prescience of God, the predestination of all events, original sin, and grace. This part of the work is especially interesting. From Christian theology the author passes to British philosophy from Bacon to Reid. Her though the influence of theology is still marked, the purely psychologic analysis of Will is the main feature. The following chapter discuss the development of continental views during the same period. As cor pared with British philosophy, purely psychological analysis takes relatively subordinate position with these thinkers ; their special doctrii of Will is more determined by their general metaphysical systems. Tl is still more the case with the German theories from Kant to Lotzt which are dealt with in the last chapter. On the whole the book likely to be useful, though it follows too closely the plan of the ordinary History of Philosophy, and though the exposition in some places lacks lucidity. The Philosophy of Greece considered in Relation to the Character and History of its People. By ALFRED WILLIAM BENN, Author of The Greek Philosophers. London : Grant Richards, 1898. Pp. x., 308. (6s.) " The object of this book is to show how Greek philosophy exhibits, under an abstract form, certain ways of acting and of looking at things which characterised the Greek genius before philosophy itself begar how, having come into existence, its evolution was determined by