Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/284

 Hanford Henderson, whose illustrated articles in the Monthly on the present methods of this industry have been widely read. Articles on the Silk, Paper, Pottery, Shoe and Leather, Agricultural Machinery, and Ship-building industries will be furnished by equally competent hands. In describing the methods and the implements and constructions used in manufacturing, a picture is often better than pages of words; accordingly, this series will be fully illustrated. For the account of the iron and steel industry alone, sixty-eight engravings have been prepared. It will be one of the objects of the coming World's Pair to show the most important manufacturing processes of the present day in operation, and for comparison with these the methods used in other countries when Columbus discovered the New World. In view of the wide attention that will be thus drawn to the past and present of our great industries, we feel that we can not. offer our readers anything more acceptable at the present time than the series above outlined. The wonderful increase in the quantity of goods that one man's labor will turn out, the improvement in their quality, the reduction of the cost of manufacture together with the steady rise in wages during the period covered by these articles, are all due to the aid which science has afforded to the world's workers, and this is only a fraction of the field in which the influence of this great agency is active.



is Professor of Psychology in Harvard University, and this work embodies his class-room instruction in that subject. It is a large work. The first volume contains 689 pages and the second 704 pages. The type is admirable and the illustrations are fresh and well adapted to their purpose. The author says in the preface that he has throughout kept close to the point of view of natural science. He rejects both the associationist and spiritualist theories. His ground is that thoughts and feelings exist and are vehicles of knowledge, and that Psychology, when she has ascertained the empirical correlation of the various sorts of thought or feeling with definite conditions of brain, can go no further. By attempting to explain thought and feeling as products of something deeper, she becomes metaphysical, and Mr. James claims that in dealing with psychology he is strictly a positivist—indeed, this is the only feature of the work for which he claims originality. The author says it is "a mass of descriptive details running out into queries which only a Metaphysics alive to the weight of her task can hope successfully to deal with. That will perhaps be centuries hence; and meanwhile the best mark of health that a science can show is this unfinished seeming front." It is thus seen that although Mr. James deals with the science of psychology as a positivist, he still has faith in metaphysics, and it is this circumstance, it seems to us, that gives the work its most characteristic quality. His style, which is always clear and forcible, is never so brilliant as when he is discussing metaphysical questions. In stating the various theories of the different schools of philosophy he does not conceal his own preferences. Indeed, he is too much in earnest in his beliefs not to be a partisan. And being by descent both a metaphysician and rhetorician, while his science is more of to-day, his inherited tendencies now and then get the better of his scientific judgment.

In Chapter I, On the Scope of Psychology, Mr. James limits his field of inquiry by taking as his criterion of mind "the pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment." This view answers his purpose much better than would a nearer approach to the "point of view of natural science." The scientific psychologist usually begins with the earliest phenomena of consciousness and the first traces of nervous organization, and uses his earlier results to explain the more complex phenomena encountered later on in his inquiries. But Mr. James is catholic enough to say that 