Page:Philosophical Review Volume 9.djvu/560

544 complex conscious contents in which one or another of the elemental forms predominates. Thus the predominance of 'substantive' elements makes the complex either a percept or an image; when the 'attributive' elements predominate the complex becomes an emotion, a belief, or a volition; and when the 'transitional' elements predominate the complex is a 'feeling of wholeness' (the judgment), 'a feeling of familiarity' (the recognized or the remembered), or a 'feeling of generality' (the general notion).

This systematic account of one instance of a remarkable tendency to personify and sexualize, not only numerals, and letters of the alphabet, but everything else as well, follows a brief statement of the sex and gender problem of philology. Seven is for the consciousness of Mrs. X, "a decorative old piece of bric-a-brac," the apple tree is a "devoted foster mother," and three and six, as also four and eight, "stand for assorted couples, the smaller number being the female and its double the male." Mere chance, the looks of the thing, its quality or virtue, its situation, and many other properties and contingencies, are said to account for these associations. The paper concludes with a few considerations touching the influence of the passion of Mrs. X on her religious life.

This essay—a companion article to a paper on analytical minds in an earlier number of the review—proceeds to consider psychologically the characteristics which mark the predominantly synthetic mind in art, literature, industry, science and philosophy. Such minds are always distinguished, it is held, by a certain forcefulness, and generally by breadth and ardor, but their reluctance or inability to examine with care the ground of their conclusions limits, or even destroys, the value of the conclusions themselves. The tendency is to make the synthesis too hastily. Synthetic minds are of all ranks, rising from the semi-idiot to the genius, but this bent for subordinating fact to theory is visible throughout. The most notable minds among them are those in which the powers of synthesis and analysis are nearly balanced. Herbert Spencer, in particular, is cited as an example of such a balanced synthetic mind. Indeed the last section of the essay is devoted to a study of those minds which whatever their natural gifts are "in equilibrium."

In this study of those abnormal states of mind which find expression in fanaticism or, what M. Dugas considers much the same thing, in