Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/350

336 influence of states of excitement and exhaustion on the mind; physical signs and emotional status in mental disease; physical concomitants of hallucination; morbid emotivity (all the various 'phobias,' etc.); the organ of emotional life (M. Féré, like Dr. Bucke, thinks it to be mainly the sympathetic nerve); individual predispositions and idiosyncracies in emotional disease; diagnosis; social bearings; and finally treatment – some 400 pages of detail, and little of it, except some highly interesting cases, very new. Let me say that M. Féré's pathological experience leads him to look with mistrust on all lively emotional susceptibility. "L'homme bien constitué et absolument en bonne santé est incapable d'éprouver des émotions violentes" (p. 494). Neither does he believe that mental disease should constitute an exemption from punishment for crime – this is a very radical doctrine (pp. 557-566)! He has had no success in trying to treat morbid emotional states by hypnotism (p. 549), and he refuses to subscribe to the formula that genius is a 'neurosis' (p. 529).

The main impression that emanates from the book is the somewhat unsympathetic one that man is primarily a museum-specimen; but the author's curiosity, granting that basis, is worthy of unqualified praise.

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A stout octavo volume, with Feeling for its subject, is, perhaps, more apt to repel than to attract the psychologist. But Dr. Lehmann does not serve up the crambe peretita of descriptive Psychology; and his scheme of classification of the emotions occupies no more than five and thirty pages. The two principal sections of his book are devoted to a discussion of the nature of Feeling, as psychological and psychophysical process, and to the elucidation of the "special laws" (dependencies) of Feeling. Under both heads, much is said that deserves careful consideration.

The book has defects of form and arrangement. Based on an Essay which gained the gold medal of the Danish Royal Academy of Sciences, – and which itself included elements of an earlier investigation, – it has suffered curtailment and received accretions at many points, and bears the marks of its growth. Moreover, the author's way of recapitulating every few sections, and italicising each