Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/418

 404 NEW BOOKS. other properties of living substance to those tissues in which they ai most evident may be advantageous from a practical standpoint. Bu philosophicaUy, who can define where, for example, feeling ends c consciousness begins? What is "that which observation shows to fc the necessary physical basis of consciousness " ? Our physiologies knowledge, too, is all against the view urged on page 24 that "th actual living molecule which is spent in function does not renew itse and live again. . . ." Again and again (pp. 53, 113, 144, 346, 347), th old notion, perhaps last suggested by Erasmus Darwin, is revived, tb. the future qualities of the offspring are directly influenced by the feeling of the parents during the act of procreation. The weakest side of the book is the psychological. One might hav expected some interesting application of the writer's long experience in the management and behaviour of the insane to the problems unde consideration ; but there is little said under this head, and nothing of : new or suggestive. We read (p. 43) that the "idea is impotent to ac it has no motive force in it ; it is simply the form, clear or obscun distinct or vague, through which the force of feeling works well or i to its end." "Although feeling supplies the motive force of. will, ye feeling itself is not original but derivative, being the conscious outcom of the fundamental attraction or repulsion in the nervous elemer whose excitability has been affected by the impression. . . . Will come out at last as organic irritability raised to its highest terms of cerebn expression . . ." (p. 47). Imagination " does duty for a noble faculty ( mind working independently of other faculties, owing little or nothin to them, needing no physical basis for its flights, moved by a quas divine influx" (p. 82). "No one then need flatter himself that he ca have sound imagination without sound reason, or the highest imagim tion without the highest reason " (p. 83). Compare, likewise, the discus sion as to the relative importance for the offspring of the " intellectual and " affective " elements of the parents (p. 347 ff.), or the absur dilemma raised to explain the cries and struggles of the anaesthetise animal (p. 398). . Yet this is the author, who urges that " the stud of mind ought to be prosecuted patiently by the objective method c scientific inquiry used in all the other sciences, the hope to know it true nature and function by the purely subjective method of introspec tion being given up as exhausted, if not as barren . . ." (p. 209) ; wh disdains " to be ruled by authority, tradition, custom, words and phrases (p. 191) ; who is well awave of " the custom to mistake familiarity of word for understanding of things when there is no real understanding c them . . ." (p. 5). A paragraph in the chapter on Love starts : " All this because th nervous molecules of two brains thrill intensely in unison ! " (p. 307 On page 205 the " requisite nervous tension " of attention is compared t " the polarisation of molecules ". Indeed the style and language varie with the value of the material which it has to clothe. We have brough forward some of the most prominent instances, showing that even th author is sometimes " completely captured and captivated by forms an< phrases " (p. 116). Doubtless " the erections (sic) of such unsubstantis fabrics of speculation is a wonderfully pleasing exercise of the imagina tion uninformed and unruled by positive knowledge " (p. 191) ; doubtles greater self-control would have saved the author from being so ofte] hoist with his own petard. The book contains so much that is interest ing, well written and worth reading, that it is a thousand pities that mucl which is uncertain, erroneous, or ill expressed should have been permittei to pass unexpunged. C. S. MYERS.