Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/216

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
200
THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
[Vol. IV.

Certainly; and we also want time, in which to develop this concept. In fact, Professor Wallace cannot be pleased. While in one breath he fully admits the difficulty of psychological observation (p. xc), and while he is well aware of the youth of the new psychological movement, in another he complains that so little has been done, and that little so scrappily. By way of positive advice we are told to be sparing of illustration, and of recourse to cognate sciences; and to have always a pedagogical end-reference in our work. Finally, there are written out for the psychologist his "five good rules of etiquette" or "maxims of behavior." In the main, most excellent rules, too; but, in the main, not novel.

I have already outrun my space, and can do no more than mention the remaining contents of the volume. Essay III—On some Psychological Aspects of Ethics—has its sections entitled: Psychology and Epistemology; Kant, Fichte, and Hegel; Psychology in Ethics, and An Excursus on Greek Ethics. Essay IV—Psychogenesis—treats of Primitive Sensibility; Anomalies of Psychical Life, and the Development of Inner Freedom. Essay V—Ethics and Politics—discusses Hegel as Political Critic, and the Ethics and Religion of the State. The first part of Essay III contains a great deal of valuable criticism of current psychological modes of thinking. The writer is far more at home, it seems to me, in his strictures upon 'philosophic' than in those upon 'scientific' psychology; though even here I cannot follow him throughout. In Essay IV it is hard to disentangle author and expositor; but the latter appears to be in the ascendant. Professor Wallace underestimates, in § 2, the quantity and quality of psychological work upon hypnotism.

All the essays are eminently readable. And, although I have offered above an adverse judgment upon a portion of No. II, I admit that the reading of this portion will be valuable to experimental psychologists: it will compel them to give a reason to themselves for the path that they are pursuing. Nos. II, III, and IV may be studied with advantage by every one who does his business in psychology.

E. B. T.

The Factors in Organic Evolution. A syllabus of a course of

elementary lectures delivered in Leland Stanford Jr. University.

By David Starr Jordan. Boston, Ginn & Co., 1894.—pp. 149.

Judging by the present syllabus, President Jordan's lectures must deal interestingly with an interesting subject. But, though it may