Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/410

396 CRITICAL NOTICES : covery of Avenarius was that every psychical event, even the most rudimentary (p. 96), consisted in a psychical series that had a beginning some disturbance of psychical equilibrium a middle a series of movements or means for remedying the disturbance and an end the re-establishment of the mental equilibrium (p. 305). Such an event constituted a vital series, and the mental life was nothing more nor less than a wondrously complex inter- branching system of vital series. Avenarius explained his meaning fully both by presenting each of the three sections of the series in a vast, almost bewildering, array of psychical lights (pp. 96-98), and also by means of a number of concrete instances. Here is one out of many : " B wants to go out while it is still raining, but cannot find his umbrella in its customary place series opened. He looks for it in all likely or possible places middle terms of the series. Finally he finds the umbrella series closed." The reader does not require to read through all the many instances of this kind given by Mr. Petzoldt to convince himself that Avenarius had here got hold of a very real psychical fact. But no sooner has he got firmly fixed in his mind the conception of the pyschical unit as a series, the members of which are knit together by a single tend- ency or interest, and is beginning to become enthusiastic over it, than there begins that disappointing process of disillusionment which, according to Mr. Petzoldt, constitutes the crowning merit of Avenarius's work. The first step in this process consists in shifting the centre of importance from the psychical to the parallel biological series (p. 98), until the reader finds that the main result reached is not that the essence of the psychical life consists in an incessant stirring to appease an appetite, put away a discomfort, satisfy an interest, or work out some problem or end, in a word, to answer questions, practical or theoretical ; but that the essence of the life of the brain consists in warding off whatever threatens its state of equilibrium (p. 108). The full force of this transference is not felt at first. For the next step, and the main step, consists in a prolonged process of psychological analysis, the issues of which are not clearly trace- able at first. The object analysed is the vital psychical series, and the immediate aim of the analysis is to discuss the parts and aspects of such a series its fundamental forms, in fact and to classify these in an orderly and comprehensive system. This is of course an excellent procedure, and its accomplishment, in detail, by Avenarius, is a valuable contribution to Psychology. But if the reader fondly expects, as the natural sequence of this analysis, a synthetic reproduction of the psychical life, he is fond indeed. A skilled analyser like Avenarius can not fall, we are told, into the old blunder of explaining a psychical act or a synthesis of psychical elements as an atomistic Psychology might be expected to do (p. 270). What he does is to renounce psychi- cal synthesis altogether as beyond the reach of Science, and