Page:Philosophical Review Volume 23.djvu/111

No. 1.] thought. Holding such a view of the subject with which he aims to acquaint the student, it is inevitable that Dr. Cooley should present his material entirely from the familiar common-sense and scientific standpoints, and thus, in the eyes of many of his colleagues, fail to introduce them to philosophy at all. Here, in the opinion of many, is where the work misses its greatest opportunity. Had this same material been set forth from some current and well-defined philosophical standpoint, the book would possibly have gained both in breadth and freshness of treatment, and, in addition, have lived up more nearly to its admirable aim that of introducing the undergraduate in a natural way to philosophical conceptions.

The present volume, as the sub-title indicates, is presented as a psychological study. The book is divided into two parts. Part I, entitled "Historical Introduction," is a brief statement of the historical treatment of the problem of universals. In the words of the author: "This part is written from a frankly selective stand-point, and is in no sense to be considered an exhaustive, or even a complete statement of the history of the subject. Its main object is to provide a point of view which we wish to adopt in the subsequent treatment of the experimental data afforded by our research; and for this purpose it is given as a suitable introduction to the main part of our essay" (Preface, p. vii, note 1). Of the three sections of Part I, Section III, which deals with the present status of the problem of universals in contemporary psychology, more nearly serves the purpose which the author has assigned for Part I than does either of the other sections. Section I, "The Problem of the 'Universals' from Plato to the Rennaissance," and Section II, "The Problem of the 'Universals' from the Rennaissance to the Present Day, both interesting enough in themselves, seem to have but little bearing on the study of the "Phenomenology of the Thought Processes" except in so far as these sections indicate the steps by which modern psychology became disentangled from metaphysical or logical questions and methods. The metaphysicians and logicians of the remote past have relatively little, or nothing at all, to contribute toward the solution of a problem which has had a distinctly modern origin and for the solution of which we have adopted a method of a highly technical character. Therefore, in tracing the problem of 'Universals' with our author through what he calls the three main periods—"the metaphysical, the epistemological, and the psychological" (p. 3)—it would be a mistake to suppose that the later periods have supplanted the earlier, or that the metaphysical or logical question can be answered by 'experimental psychology.' Present-day philosophy may well be suspicious of attempts to divide the history of thought into precise stages of interest, after the manner of Comte. It is safer to treat the so-called stages as persistent, if somewhat divergent, lines of human interest.