Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/330

314 first place, Professor James has the gift of sight and insight. When he looks into his mind, he actually sees what is a-doing or a-happening there. In power of introspective vision, he has no equal among living psychologists. In the second place, he has the gift of tongues, — the artist's faculty of vividly and accurately describing what he has observed. Accordingly, the book before us is a wonderfully graphic portrayal of the concrete facts of our mental life. This in itself is a great matter. For if, as I agree with Professor James in thinking, psychology is still in the condition of chemistry before Lavoisier (p. 468), the great desideratum, without which theorizing will be of little avail, is facts, more facts, and more accurate facts. But apart from this service to the science, what a service it is to the student to force him to look steadily at his entire conscious states as they are concretely present to him! Professor James casts out the definite images of traditional psychology. He bids us look at every state of consciousness in connection with the "halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it" (p. 166).

But though by endowment an introspective psychologist, Professor James is thoroughly at home in experimental and physiological psychology. The results of such objective investigation he combines most happily with his own descriptions. When he figures as a physiologist merely, as in the chapter on the Functions of the Brain, he evinces a rare power of interpreting technical subjects to the apprehension of the unscientific intelligence. Here and everywhere throughout the volume he has a way of gathering up the substance of an exposition or argument, and discharging it in a brilliant flash that makes the dullest vision tingle. "Splice the outer extremity of our optic nerves to our ears, and that of our auditory nerves to our eyes, [and] we should hear the lightning and see the thunder" (p. 12). "The Object ... of the baby [consciousness] is one big, blooming, buzzing Confusion" (p. 16). "The impulse to pray is a necessary consequence of the fact that whilst the innermost of the empirical selves of a man is a Self of the social sort, it yet can find its only adequate Socius in an ideal world" (p. 192).

The standpoint of the text-book is the conception of psychology as a natural science. The aim is to describe and explain states of consciousness. We have already spoken of the descriptive work, let us now turn to the explanatory. Here Professor James seems scarcely consistent. He insists, in accordance with the postulates of current psychology, that mental action, as to its happening, though not as to its nature, is the effect of brain-action, that is, of mechanical processes. But if this is, as he holds, the fundamental working hypothesis of the science, then, just because it explains everything in a general way, it explains nothing in particular. Suppose we knew the cerebral processes