Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/125

 NEW BOOKS. Ill These are exceedingly primitive and probably universal mental traits, and combined with them are nervous instability and a great lack of inhibitive control. The author gives examples of what he terms ' normal nervous instability ' among certain Siberian tribes, but he could have amplified with advantage his meagre reference to the latta of the Malay peoples who, however, are by no means " artless, unsophisticated children of nature ". The bulk of the book is devoted to unbiased but sympathetic accounts of the Ghost-dance of the North American Indian, the religion of the American Negro, the Scotch-Irish revivals in Kentucky in 1800 and in Ulster in 1859, the New England awakening under Jonathan Edwards which began in 1734 and lasted till 1750. The Scotch-Irish revival in Ulster was imitated from America, but that associated with the name of John Wesley was at first independent of American influence, though Edwards' account of the movement and of the wonderful ' bodily effects ' was read by John Wesley in 1738, and a great outburst of emotional enthusiasm with bodily movements associated with physical and mental agony sub- sequently resxilted from the preaching of Wesley. The descriptions of these and other revivals afford material for the student, though possibly they might have been extended with advantage. The author has also attempted to place before the reader the sociological condition of the people at the time of the appearance of the several evangelists. The author says he has " endeavoured to present a sociological inter- pretation of religious revivals ". He belongs to that school of social psychologists who are content with the use of such vague terms as sug- gestibility, imitation and the like, in lieu of an explanation which is the result of a more exact and fair analysis. The explanation of the phenomena of revivals which he offers is that they are due to " mental and nervous instability," in other words to the power of being swayed by emotional excitement. This he regards, prob- ably rightly so, as a primitive trait ; but the explanations he offers are fairly obvious, they have been recognised by others, though they may not have been translated into technical phrases. Speaking generally, it is in the main true that savages have little power of emotional control, but we constantly find primitive peoples who make a point of not ex- pressing certain emotions, and they may even undergo a definite training to this effect. The lower or the less educated classes of civilised com- munities often have less power of control than many so-called savages, and it is among such that revivals spread like wild-fire. The power of controlling the emotions is one of the signs of civilisation, and the greater is this power the less likely is religious awakening to manifest itself in bizarre actions. One cannot help feeling that the book would have had a greater value if the author had paid more attention to primitive religions, a field which contains much instructive material for the psychologist. A. C. HADDON. Le moralisme de Kant et I'amoralisme contemporain. Par ALFRED FOUILLEE. Paris : F&ix Alcan, 1905. Pp. xxiii, 375. The present work of M. Fouille"e is a critical study preliminary to further ethical work of a more constructive nature. In it he examines two ex- treme types of ethical theory which stand in the way of a true ethical synthesis on the one hand, the a priori formalism of Kant (which would appear to be much more a living force in France than in this country), and, on the other, the diametrically opposed type of ethical, or rather anti-ethical, theory, which is exemplified by Hedonism, or again by Nietz-