Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/589

 NEW BOOKS. 573 composed of pure memories on the one hand, and perceptions, coloured by memory in its form of habit taking effect in movements, on the other. These stages are represented as different layers, but this is probably to be understood figuratively. Apart from the artificial conception of the soul, and from some questionable neurology, there is much good psychological analysis, which is indeed familiar in principle in England from the recent criticisms of associationist writers, but is presented here in an individual form (reminding the reader of Prof. Baldwin) through M. Bergson's insistence on the motor character of perception, and on the motor element involved in recognition. Perception then, not pure, but in its familiar form, is a junction of two processes : the one working from the soul downwards, from memory to movement ; the other upwards, from the external object to the finite centre which is the brain. The author then proceeds to show how the two apparent disparates, matter and mind, can thus meet by resolving the chief oppositions of the extended and the unextended, the quantitative and the qualitative, the free and the necessary. As to the first he maintains that matter is divided into pieces only for practical purposes, being in fact continuous, that both perception and matter are ' extensive,' while the space or extension which in thought belongs to matter as dis- tinguished from mind is but a ' schema ' which represents its practical divisibility. The quality of sensations as distinguished from the quanti- tative character of the movements of bodies he supposes to be due to the contraction produced by memory every sensation containing the memory of the immediately preceding vibrations, and several millions of vibrations (as in light) being contracted into a second, whereas to perceive each separately would require years. Sensible qualities and quantitative movements differ thus in respect of ' tension,' and the author declares that the difference of body and mind is thus to be expressed in terms of time rather than of space. The meaning of liberty (so far as it can be made out from this work) has already been indicated in con- nexion with the selection produced by the organism in perception. There is much to be learnt from M. Bergson's book. But there are some great difficulties left unresolved. (1) Perception which is said to select images may distort them all the difficulties of the Kantian criticism are suggested thereby and they need notice. (2) The assumption of a peculiar memory which is aware of the past as such (with this may be compared Mr. L. T. Hobhouse's chapter on the subject) and which has no physiological substrate. The conception of the faculty itself offers diffi- culties enough, and the pathological evidence is surely quite insufficient. Even if there is no loss of images in psychic blindness (as the author contends) there may be loss of communication between image and per- ception. (3) Things are described as images ; whose images are they ? If only the observer's, why deny the sensorial character of the brain on the ground that the brain being itself an image cannot have images ? Such an image might still have imagination. If things are images in the ^c of psychic existences, the assumption is a very large one. Nor do we understand M. Bergson to say this ; but the difficulty of the alternative remains. S. ALEXANDER. Lti Logique de Hegel. Par GEORGES NOEL. Professeur de Philosophic au Lyce"e Lakanal. Paris : Felix Alcan, 1897. Pp. viii., 188. Mr. Noel's book forms a most admirable introduction to the study of Hegel. He has grasped the great truth, which so many commentators ignore, that Hegel produced something which he asserted to be a demonstrated