SOME NEW BOOKS. 



The Psychological Review. Vol. i., no. i, January, 1894. New York and 

 London: Published bi-monthly by Macmillan & Co. Single numbers 75 

 cents. Annual subscription 4 dollars. 



This new periodical makes an excellent start, including long 

 contributions from Professor Ladd (his Presidential Address to the 

 New York Meeting of the American Psychological Association), from 

 Josiah Royce on " The Case of John Bunyan." Hugo Miinsterberg 

 sends the first of a series of studies from the Harvard Psychological 

 Laboratory. Mr. Francis Galton has a note on " Arithmetic by 

 Smell." ProfessorJamesdiscussesWundton "Feelings of Innervation" 

 and the other articles and reviews are well up to the standard implied 

 by the foregoing. 



Professor Ladd's Presidential Address is very interesting. He 

 discusses first the burning question of the relation of Laboratory 

 work in physiological psychology to the general subject. He extends 

 a generous welcome to the young science, but deprecates that ardour 

 of its votaries which sees science in no other method. No doubt 

 Professor Ladd holds rightly that scientific psychology must include 

 not only laboratory work but introspection and "reflective study of 

 that artistic delineation of soul-life in which the best novels, poems, 

 and dramas are so wonderfully successful." But it is not good that all 

 truths should be blazoned abroad and in those sciences that have a 

 side open to the inexact and the amateur, it is specially necessary to 

 distinguish between those who write about things and those who work 

 at them. For this reason our sympathies are with those who insist 

 on the laboratory and the methods of the laboratory. For similar 

 reasons our sympathies are again with the experimental school in the 

 endeavour to get at objective conclusions in psychology. No doubt 

 the result of "series" of experiments and generalisations from statistics 

 must be interpreted in terms of consciousness. But that, in a sense, 

 is true of all science, and though the materials of psychology are 

 peculiarly changing, evanescent, complex, personal, laboratory work 

 has shown already that objective truths can be reached. There is no 

 need to insist upon introspection : we all "introspect " : perhaps we 

 all must do it, but ihere is need to insist upon exact methods. 



. Professor Ladd's treatment of the relation between science and 

 philosophy is very interesting. He traces the events leading to 

 he relation of mutual contempt in which the two subjects stood 

 twenty years ago, and although at the present day " reconciliations " 

 are chiefly effected by " men of second-rate quality," he approves of 

 the spirit. " For philosophy is but wild and mischievous speculation, 

 unless it build itself upon the concrete and particular sciences ; and 

 science is but the unsatisfying husk of knowledge, is without rational 

 self-consciousness and highest import and divinest interest, unless it 

 intelligently lend itself to help, and to be helped by, philosophy." 



P. C. M. 



