Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/350

338 and uncertainty of modern life in various professions, the freedom of women, etc. Fortunately, the reserve of health, strength and ability in the people is still very great; and, fortunately, the tone of public opinion may be changed by the influence and example of those who are awake to the danger. Mr. and Mrs. Whetham accordingly end their work, in a fairly hopeful spirit, with the following appeal: "Encourage in all ways early marriages and large families for men and women of health, strength and ability; discourage both marriage and offspring where either parental stock is unsound in body or mind."

The advice is admirably sound, and the hopefulness, in all probability, is not misplaced. For there is nothing that so much strikes the outside observer of recent public opinion in England as the steady progress made, in spite of prudishness and conservatism, by the new creed of eugenics.

In this Journal, xix, 415, I called attention to the first volume of Professor Misch's Geschichte der Autobiographie, a work planned and in part executed with the traditional German thoroughness. Mrs. Burr has, in the volume now before us, treated of the autobiography in lighter vein. Writing on the basis of "two hundred and sixty capital autobiographies," she has produced a very interesting book, literary in flavor, psychological in suggestion, which should do much to arouse her readers to further and more intensive study of a fascinating subject.

Mrs. Burr may be quoted, in large measure, as her own reviewer.

"The indication is plain," she writes, "that a subjective trend of thought made its appearance in literature, rather suddenly than slowly, during the first three hundred years of the Christian era. Examination of its early manifestations shows the primal cause to be religious emotion: for the second type of the subjective document the scientificdid not make its appearance until the sixteenth century [ch. iii, History]. When one turns to the documents themselves, an investigation begins most naturally with a comparison of the reasons for writing them, and of the attitudes they take, with like attitudes in diaries and in letters. . . Works written according to the autobiographical intention are written 'as if no one in the world were to read them, yet with the purpose of being read' [ch. ii, Classification and the Autobiographical Intention; ch. v, The Autobiography, the Diary, and the Letter]. Conformation to this standard permits us (always within recognized limits) to believe in their sincerity and to trust their information " [ch. iv, Sincerity; ch. ix, the Autobiography in its relation to Fiction]. Julius Cæsar, St. Augjistine and Girolamo Cardano are considered as the three great archetypes of autobiography, and the latter's De vita propria liber receives a chapter to itself [chs. vi, vii]. After tracing the influence of these models upon later times [ch. viii], the author reaches a formulation of the law of the subjective self-study, which is "that its manifestations invariably precede and accompany movements of intellectual significance; and that, conversely, in times when great warlike activities and political upheavals make their special demand upon the objective energies of a people, the subjective record diminishes in proportion, or wholly disappears from literature" [ch. x]. This same chapter [The Autobiographical Group] also " attempts to give some conception of the part these documents may be permitted to play in sociological and historical investigation."

So far the first and general part of the book. The second and special