Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/428

 412 CRITICAL NOTICES : newly acquired word " bird " (p. 124). The passage is well worth reading as a good example of the writer's happy combination of observation and thought. JAMES SULLY. Psychologic du Caractere. Par ALBERT LE"VY, Docteur en Philo- sophic et Lettres. Paris: Felix Alcan, 1896. Pp. 207. THE reader of this work will be struck at the outset by the curious position which the author assigns to ethology. He places it be- tween "experimental psychology" on the one side and "rational psychology" on the other (p. 1). Rational psychology considers "the origin, essence and destiny of the soul" (p. 2). It is purely "synthetic and disdaining the contingencies of terrestrial life "; while "experimental psychology" is "purely analytic" (p. 1). The author does not explain what he means by ' experimental psychology,' whether he takes it to include all psychology as ordinarily understood, which is confined to " the contingencies of terrestrial life," nor what ground there is for supposing its method to be purely analytic. We have been accustomed to regard ethology, since Mill wrote his famous chapter in the Logic, as an applied psychology. This standpoint M. Paulhan has con- sistently maintained. M. Levy has not brought forward any reasons for showing that this view is incorrect, nor has he ex- plained whether he dissents from it, nor what precise meaning can be attached to the position he assigns to ethology as falling between these two departments of " the science of the human mind " (p. 1). Having at last separated psychology from metaphysic, we do not wish to see it again sucked into its vortex through an attempt to represent " rational psychology " as one of the departments of " the science of the human mind ". But I suspect that M. Levy thinks differently. In taking up the position of a psychologist, he does not leave his metaphysical beliefs behind him, or use them only as scientific hypotheses where the facts cannot be explained without them. He imposes them alike on the mind of the reader and on the facts. The first part of his work is in large measure an apology for free-will, special creation, the principium individtta- tionis, as an ego innate in us, yet not inherited or altogether in- herited, but with which we are endowed at birth by an act of special creation. What the author precisely means by free-will he does not tell us, nor how it can be reconciled with an attempt to construct a science of character ; still less does he point out, what any man who adopts a scientific attitude is bound to do, that type of will, if there be any, which cannot be explained without the assumption of free-will. Such a type of will must in the first place be proved to exist ; and its analysis must conclusively show that