unsatisfied. Some are capable of forming convictions, others not. The former, to whom we owe the great constructive moral movements, find authority in their own moral passion; the latter are sceptical and tend to find authority in force. At the present time we are in danger from the latter. We need more authority of the former type. It is of four kinds, the authority of law, of religion, of public opinion, of great men. The permanent element in the four is the moral feeling of the society involved. The authority of public opinion is stronger than the former two, but is itself dominated by the authority of the leaders of moral feeling and of intellectual activity. Yet even their influence is permanent only in proportion as it tends to improve society. All permanent authority rests on a social basis. The seat of authority for the individual is his own conscience; where this is in doubt recourse should be had to the records of past experience especially of great men as a guide in conduct, and to living leaders as a guide in thought.
Are there, in reality, for every malady or morbid diathesis certain pronounced psychical manifestations? Psychological physicians must guard themselves from hasty generalizations; they are too ready to show to psychologists that their science cannot be an independent one without being chimerical. P. makes this reproach to the authors of two theses which he examines here: O Pessimismo no ponto de vista da psychologia morbida. J. de Magalhāes. Typ. Universell. Lisbonne, 1890. (2) Des Rapports de l’arthritisme avec les manifestationes nerveuses. Dr. G. Huyghe. Jouve, Paris, 1890. Is pessimism really a malady or the result of a morbid diathesis? M. Magalhaes has found in the personalities of several men who are considered as in a sense pessimistic as, e.g. Schopenhauer, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Amiel, Byron, and in others such as Tolstoi, Swift, Shelley, A. de Vigny, Schiller, Berlioz, etc., etc., the mental state of which pessimism is the literary or philosophical form; such morbid indications as nervous instability, irritability, hyperæsthesia, hyperalgy, irresistible impulsions, etc. Pessimism according to him is a neurasthenia, of which the fundamental character is nervous instability with alternation or constant combination of irritability and feebleness; from this fundamental hyperæsthesia result discords between the sentiments and the intelligence, between the sentiments, between the ideas and volitions. All these characters reveal excess of subjectivity. P. finds that we must get more proofs before we can grant that the alterations of character attributed to the pessimist are pathological phenomena; at least, if we regard pessimism as a malady we cannot
