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36 their "blank unmediated correspondences, term for term"? Is it because he knows quite well that the chances are against any such attempt at scientific precision remaining uncontradicted by empirical data for a period of three successive years?

The chapter on "General Conditions of Brain-Activity" is unexpectedly meagre for a writer who proposes to treat psychology as a natural science, without metaphysics, and from a point of view which finds the ascertainable conditions of psychological phenomena solely in brain-processes. What is the nature of these processes? And how do they change, not simply in locality but in character, as the thoughts and feelings change, of which the processes are the conditions? I have already said that modern science cannot answer this question. But Professor James seems to have done far less for this subject than he might easily have done. For, surely, here is the part of physiological psychology in which we might reasonably expect him to be especially interested. His contribution to the department of cerebral psychology in these volumes consists very largely of simple schematizing. The inadequacy of the method is confessed. In a note to the first page of this chapter (I, p. 81), we read: "I shall myself in later places indulge in much of this schematizing. The reader will understand once for all that it is symbolic; and that the use of it is hardly more than to show what a deep congruity there is between mental processes and mechanical processes of some kind, not necessarily of the exact kind portrayed."

On the confession made in the note just quoted, the following remarks seem to me in place. All such schematizing is, of course, "symbolic"; but what it symbolizes is not at all what Professor James would have the reader suppose. Such schematizing can only symbolize certain conjectural relations between places where the nerve-processes take place. It contributes nothing toward symbolizing the nature of the nerve-processes themselves. These processes do not admit of any such symbolical representation. Much less does it serve even to suggest those possible changes in the character of the processes, by virtue of which they become conditions of different and varied