Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/133

117 several personalities without conflict, and in the seventh and eighth the various psychical constituents act in a large measure independently. The second book, still abstracting from the nature of the elements themselves, deals with their general characteristics. By taking into account the number of elements, their form of combination, their intensity, persistence, pliancy, and excitability, the following types are obtained: broad, calm, passionate and enterprising, obstinate, plastic, impressionable. The opposites are, of course, added in each case. The third book deals with the tendencies themselves. These are divided into (1) those having relation to the life of the individual (organic and mental); (2) those relating to the individual as a whole (egoistic—pride, ambition, vanity; and altruistic—pity and sympathy); (3) social tendencies (love of family and country); (4) super-social tendencies (love of God, of truth, beauty, perfection). A large number of types are given which are named from the particular element that predominates. The fourth book is of the nature of an appendix. Emphasis is laid on the fact that individuals never conform perfectly to any one of the types enumerated. There is always a plurality of types in the same individual, and opposing characteristics exist even when the character seems, at first sight, a perfectly harmonious unity. It is shown further that certain characteristics may appear and pass away, being only temporary phases in the life of the individual. There are other cases where an element occupies a dominant place temporarily, while the truly characteristic tendency is in process of growth, or is awaiting the circumstance which alone can call it forth and give it opportunity for exercise.

The plan of the work is singularly clear and the method of classification seems a happy one. By taking into consideration the nature of the characteristic elements in any particular case, their relations to each other and the remaining tendencies, their number, intensity, and other general characteristics, a clear conception of the whole character can be gained. The author claims, moreover, that you can thus arrange different characters in the scale of moral worth. By permutation and combination of the types given in the different tables one is able to construct an indefinitely large number of possible varieties of human character, and the chief merit of the method employed seems to lie in the demonstration thus afforded of the possibility of systematizing, in some measure, the most confused field which the study of character has to cover. The details of the classification, however, are occasionally faulty. The emotional type appears in slightly varying form in all three tables; and there is overlapping in more than one point between the types enumerated in the first and second books. All through there is evidence of careful and critical observation of fact; and a good deal of valuable matter is brought together from various sources. There is evidently much to be gained from this much neglected province of psychology. A thorough study of it could not fail to throw light on the principle of human action and the psychology of ethics generally.