Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/419

 v BOOKS. Aiiliitt',;i/ .; VITMBU. Boston and London: ThU manual U written for he^'inners in psveholo^y and for students of in normal nhooli. It is an attempt to apply a semi-hei, method in introductory psychology. Tin- preface is a useful pedagogical introduction which points out and justifies the method adopted, wiiich. broadly >pe ikint,'. is as foil
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 * mple diagram or an experiment involvinu' little apparatus is ;_

Stud piii-.-d to oh-erve and, appaivnilv. locoinr to their own conclusions, though the plan of the book include >onn- discussion as to explanation after most of the experiments indicated Perhaps it is in- ule that the explanations oft.-n enough involve so niueh more than depends upon the particular experiment or, indeed, upon preceding ones. It is doubtless good to refrain from "catchy definitions,' 1 hut I incline to think that, for adult students, some sort of preliminary delimitation of the terms employed, ;./., sensation, apperception, conception, etc., may nly he useful to the pupil, but may tend to preserve greater uni- formity of meaning for the same term on the part of the writer. The term ' apperception ' seems indeed to owe its importance to the fact that it is used in a vague way for any operation from the side of the subject. Sometimes it is selective activity, sometimes it is the result of accumulated experience, sometimes it refers to purely individual mental characteristics and innate aptitudes ; the various senses in which the term is used being far from clearly indicated. The treatment of 'attention' again is curiously mixed; it seems at one time to be a coefficient of sensation, and at another time to be inde- pendent of mental contents, causing them to wax and wane periodically. as in the elementary teaching of Natural Science it is better to begin with unquantified notions which the common experience of daily life may t, r iv. and from this su.^estive knowledge to proceed to definite, detailed, and quantified experiment, so it would be well to let the common psycho- logical experiences of daily life yield preliminary notions as to the meaning of terms, and thus lead to the specific experiments which are, in this book, alone treated. There U. I venture to suggest, too much talk of images ; their function is overrated ; recognition is certainly prior to imagery, and it would seem from recent experiment that even accuracy of comparison is not assisted by them. It cannot be too frequently insisted upon that the modification due to past experience and influencing present experience may have little relation to imagery at all. It is satisfactory to find that attention and physiological adjustment are not confused. Eye-movement is one thing, attention-movement is another. Frowning and hard breathing indicate effort, but are they pro- portional to activity ? The most attentively active persons do without them. Voluntary movement requires "the apperception with great vividness of those ideas which initiate the various mo enients of the body". Does not this approximate to ideo-motor action, and is the vividness of the idea of the movement necessary to voluntary action as such ? Colour contrast receives an unusual explanation ; " apperceptional expectancy" solves the dilVieulty. You expect so much of a colour because you see a lot of it ; in fact you expect it so much that when, in the space not thus coloured, you see something else, you tend to see the very opposite of what you expected. It does not seem impossible to explain certain illusion- of weight in connexion with volume by such a