Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/144

 130 NEW BOOKS. an imaginative process which involves the feeling of mystery, and the impulse to chase what is fugitive and seems to be disappearing? But then the ' sweetness ' of the harmony always appears to return on our hands as a sensuous phenomenon, pur sang. Here is the paradox which I trust Prof. Stumpf's fine analytical skill will yet help us to resolve. J. S. Kraepelin's Psychologische Arbeiten. Band ii., 2 u. 3 Hefte. We have here, as indeed the title leads us to expect, a record of plenty of good work. The second Heft gives first an account of a method of measur- ing Auffassungsfdhigkeit (facility of apprehension) for written characters and words, and then of some experiments on the psychological effects of trional, which happens to bear upon the same subject. To measure Auffassungsfdhigkeit a number of printed words of one or two syllables were pasted in spiral lines on drums, which were rotated so as to carry them at a uniform rate past an opening in a screen, whose width could be varied so as to alter the time of exposure ; an arrangement which had the drawback that the word while in view was also in motion, and with long words it even happened that the whole word was not all in view at one time. An arrangement like that in the kinetoscope would apparently have been preferable. The words as read out were taken down by a shorthand writer and the conclusions deduced from the number and nature of the errors and omissions made. Six observers took part in the investigation, three of whom were normal individuals and three patients of Prof. Kraepelin's who suffered from more or less pronounced mental defects. Perhaps the most interesting of the conclusions are those the author draws with respect to the individual differences among his six observers. One of them apprehended so rapidly that the various lengths of exposure of the words made no difference to him he made practically no mistakes in any case ; while the other observers exhibited varying degrees of facility, down to B. who with a short exposure did not read half the words correctly. And B. was a dipsomaniac. It is true that S. on the other hand, whose observations were not sensibly worse than those of two of the three normal observers, was also subject to attacks of alcoholism, but these Prof. Kraepelin attributes to an epileptic origin. But besides these Herr Cron and Prof. Kraepelin draw some further interesting inferences from a detailed examination of the figures, while at the same time they are careful to point out that it is absurd to expect these, or even very much more complicated psychometric ex- periments to enable us to form a complete estimate of a man's char- acter or capabilities. In the next article Herr Haenel gives an account of a series of experi- ments he made on himself to test the effects of the hypnotic drug trional ; a drug which one does not often hear of in England but which is very similar to the more familiar sulphonal, only more rapid in its action. Herr Haenel took the drug on alternate days during each set of experiments, in such doses as would be ordinarily used to obtain sleep, and studied its effects by experiments on reaction, association, dis- crimination times, and by all those methods which Prof. Kraepelin has done so much to elaborate, including that described in the last article. The conclusion at which he arrived is that the drug works chiefly by reducing the Auffassungsfdhigkeit for external impressions, and to a less extent by impeding the execution of co-ordinated movements. It does not seem to affect the inner mental processes such as association and imagination, with the curious effect that though the number of erroneous