This page needs to be proofread.

556 NEW BOOKS. On the whole the author has succeeded. The tone is one of apprecia- tion and disinterestedness. Nor is this marred by his preponderant admiration for the great work of Wundt as marking the furthest advance in the psychology of to-day. His materials are rich and comprehensive and no branch of modern research is omitted. Nevertheless for all the trees one can see the wood. The specific character of German psychology stamped upon it by the tendencies of German philosophy is indicated in broad lines ; the conditions and growth of the psycho-physical movement broadening into a thorough-going experimental development and the quest of the individual as a psycho-physical unity is fully gone into. The " intellectualism " shared by both German and English psychology i.e., psychologising by way of Vorstellungen with a corresponding re- lative neglect of the more intimately subjective activities, but working in England by associationism, in German by the concept of syntheses, is shown as having been upset in Germany by the influence of Schopen- hauerism, the " volontaristic " tendency paving the way to a truer con- ception of the essential unity of the psychical continuum. In England we are found to be still holding by our intellectualistic psychology, although the great analysis by Dr. Bain of emotion and will is duly appreciated. Full justice however is done to the great work accomplished by English psychologists of extricating their subject-matter from philo- sophy and of raising it by their experiential methods to the threshold of a science among the sciences. In our anxiety, however, to set out an analysis of mental phenomena as we find them, the author holds us too descriptive merely, too little explanatory. Is it perhaps the fact that he has not succeeded in obtaining a clear grasp of the real explanatory work done by English "intellectualism"? Berkeley stripped our philosophy of the independent reality of the external world as knoicable. Hume stripped our philosophy of a subject entity as inferable. They left us instead a world of sensations and ideas to analyse and to classify, and the construction therefrom of an intelligible theory of how we come to interpret them as external world. It is this attempt, continuously handed on, to explain the external world as known a task to which the doctrine of association is only ancillary which is the chief output hitherto of British psychology in a progressive line of development from Hobbes, Locke and Berkeley, down to Bain, Sully and Groom Robertson. And herein may be found wealth enough, not only of descriptive analysis but of explanation as well. Prof. Villa doubtless knows all this far better than his present critic, but I do not find it clearly set out, nor justice done to the realisation of the importance of explanation as end in British psychology. Yet Berkeley's theory of vision and Brown's theory of muscular sense, as wrought up by English nineteenth century psychology into its theory of external perception, are alone sufficient to vindicate that school on a charge of mere descriptive analysing. But its modern representatives do not seek only to explain the externality of the not- self. They are turning from what Berkeley left us to the subjective world without subject left us by Hume. In the works of Drs. Ward and Sully we have the beginnings of an explanation in terms of psychic pro- cess of the growth of the concept of the self. Prof. Villa has gone at some length into the metaphysical hypotheses involved in the essential concepts of psychology, and has given interesting aperpus into such modern speculative developments as neo-materialism, neo-Thomism, neo- vitalism and the like. But what we chiefly seek, in a conspectus of contemporary psychology is a succinct account of how far the latter has gone in explaining, in terms of mental procedure genetically treated, " the crowd of facts concerning our mental life revealed by analysis of ordinary experience ".