Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/476

460 etc., and then afterward takes up in some detail the methods and instruments of government.

In considering the Legislature, the Executive Department, the Judiciary, the relations of one of these to the other, political parties, etc., the author does not describe, as has been before intimated, the real form of organization of these departments in any one specific state, but he rather considers the form that is most desirable in the most civilized states of the present. Incidentally, of course, many items of information with reference to the different governments are given.

It would be difficult to speak in too high terms of the general temper of the author. One rarely finds a book on political questions that shows the same sanity of judgment as does this, or one whose author, following the deductive method, keeps so prominently in mind the limitations that must be placed upon the application of his conclusions. One might wish often, in reading the book, that more had been given with reference to political forms and methods and ideas in different states, but the limits of the book would not permit more; and, taking the book for what it pretends to be, I do not know where to get one that it will pay students of politics or practical politicians better to read.

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The remarkable growth of interest in the study of Psychology in America within the last five years is, perhaps, not less shown in the establishment of psychological laboratories in most of the larger universities than in the multiplication of text-books. Within the short six months of the life of the, the manuals of Baldwin and James have called for recognition, and the ink is hardly dry on the last-named work before Professor Davis's Elements of Psychology appears in the field. But if Professor Davis's Elements is in part a result of the awakening interest in the study of psychology, there is little evidence that those especial tendencies of the "Zeitgeist" which have led to the establishment of the laboratories, have had a strongly formative influence in the writing of the book, unless perhaps in a reactionary way. If it cannot be said that the work is as it would have been had no advance in psychological investigation been made during the last fifteen years, it must be said that neither by references to literature nor by summaries of results is there any indication of the existence of most of the later experimental researches.