Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/153

 TH. RIBOT'S MALADIES DE LA VOLONTE. 141 ower, and lowest organisations." The disintegration of the social )rganisation will be accelerated by the " poisonous products of its >wn putrefaction." The aspirations which have done so much to lerve and cheer mankind, are " perchance " due to a " cosmic nstinct of the matter of which we are constituted," and have no eference to the future of ephemeral human insects. We are ated to dwindle and decay, until all that is left of us be " a few scattered families of degraded human beings, living in snow-huts icar the equator." Verily, of all follies, prophecy is the most nratuitous. /^ -c- c- G. F. STOUT. L- 1 Maladies de la Volontt. Par TH. RIBOT. Paris : Germer Bailliere, 1883. Pp. 177. [. Ribot here follows up his interesting study of the Diseases of Memory (see MIXD XXIV., p. 590). Both works are characterised by sound psychological knowledge, and by a wide acquaintance with pathological literature. Both illustrate the value to the psycho- logist of studying those disturbances of complex psychical processes which are brought about by disease. For if, on the one hand, the pathologist needs some knowledge of psychological principles in order to give an intelligible account of the phenomena which he studies, on the other hand, the psychologist gains a much more exact and certain knowledge of the co-operant factors in psychical processes by noting the displacements effected by disease. In point of fact such morbid conditions may supply him with just those ' negative instances ' which he often needs so badly in psycho- logical investigation. What we call our willing or our sum of volitions is (says M. Ribot) a highly complex product, involving lower and higher impulses, and a certain relation of subordination (or control) among these, or, as M. Ribot expresses it, a " hierarchical co-ordination ". It depends on a delicate balancing of forces which can be easily upset. These active tendencies may be arranged according to the order of the intellectual states which immediately precede them. All movement is of the reflex type, says M. Ribot, and ever}- idea has a tendency to pass into move- ment, which tendency varies according to the intensity of the emotive accompaniment of the idea. Thus abstract ideas, though having this tendency, have it hi the weakest degree. The co-operant impulses making up our volitions have two great sources. Of these the first is what M. Ribot calls character, and which might also be termed active or moral idiosyncracy. This is " the principal element, the effect of internal causes, which is not an entity, but the resultant of that myriad of states and of tendencies, infinitely small, of all the anatomical elements which constitute a particular organism ". It is " the psycho- logical expression of a certain organised body ". The other