Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/625

609 the aspect of a compromise between the old and new schools of psychological thought. The influence of the experimental tendency shows itself not only in those passages where it is expressly recognized, but in a greater sharpness of analysis throughout, a more lavish use of physiological reference, and a slight but significant change of attitude on certain points. For example, the word 'faculty' is used much more cautiously in The Human Mind than in the Outlines. The complete determination of all attention, 'voluntary' as well as 'involuntary,' is asserted with greater distinctness in the new work. Again, the term 'Association' is limited in The Human Mind to what Wundt calls 'Complication,' and its place in the older terminology is filled by 'Suggestion.' Lastly, the elements of Affection and Conation are now more clearly marked off from the more complex phenomena of feeling and will.

Mr. Sully's treatment of psychological and psycho-physical research is in general fair, although on p. 89, Vol. I, he makes the rather sweeping statement that the attempt to quantify sensations "is now generally regarded as futile. ... What we are able to do is to compare different intensities and estimate the amount of their difference, and this can be done to some extent, but not in the exact way attempted by Fechner. Thus one may, judging by his own sensations alone, roughly place a weight, W$3$, midway between a heavier and a lighter, W$1$ and W$2$, so that the difference between W$1$ and W$3$ shall appear about the same as that between W$3$ and W$2$." This reduction of the whole psycho-physical 'plant' to the method of mean gradations is manifestly undeserved. Above, in the same paragraph, the author fails to distinguish accurately between the psycho-physical and psychological interpretations of Weber's Law. "Fechner himself," he says, "as the name 'psycho-physical' signifies, gave it a psychological significance.… Wundt follows the same line."

A certain lack of definiteness is obvious on the question of affective attention. In Vol. I, where attention is discussed, we are told that its objects are "either sensations or their combinations.…, or what we call ideas or representations," and feeling is spoken of as intensifying attention to the presentation it accompanies. In Vol. II, however [p. 12], attention to the feeling aspect of a presentation is mentioned not only as possible, but as more "easy and spontaneous" than attention to the presentative element itself.

The problem of 'emotions of relation' is not solved by Mr. Sully. He makes it perfectly clear in the section on "Feeling and