Literary Notices. XXXV 
As this, to the present reviewer, is the most significent feature of the 
entire treatment, it may be instructive to show in what ways action is 
here made fundamental. 
(1) The author says, ‘‘Fhe single facts of sense, and the single 
movements which we make, are always related to, or, as one may say, 
are differentiations of our general orientation” (p. 147). This is con- 
nected with the ‘‘tropisms of orientation.” ‘‘The reactions of orien- 
tation are among the most fundamental phenomena of healthy life.” 
‘Our sensory experience at any moment will stand partly for our more 
general activities of orientation, and partly for our more special reac- 
tions to individual objects” (p. 143). ‘‘The special acts are always 
superposed upon the general acts.” ‘‘All our particular sensory ex- 
perience will be related, not only to our special acts, but to our gen- 
eral acts of orientation, and to those experiences which result from 
these acts.” <‘‘All such sensory experiences appear to our con- 
sciousness as facts existent within a certain primitive whole, which, 
apart from differentiation, is our experience of the general orientation 
of the entire organism” (p. 146). The author, in other words. is in- 
sisting that our motor or kinaesthetic experiences (sensations and 
images) form the very core of consciousness. The kinaesthetic sensa- 
tions supply the fundamental imagery of meaning. This is equivalent 
to saying that action is the fundamental category of experience and the 
various forms of conscious experience are special developments within 
this. Here, by the way, was an excellent opportunity to clear away 
at a stroke the whole difficulty of the relation of the psychical to the 
physical, in so far as psychology is concerned, since consciousness 
here appears simply as action passing through a tensional or recon- 
structive stage. ‘‘Tension,’’ he says on a previous page, ‘‘the mu- 
tual opposition and balancing of numerous tendencies, is absolutely 
essential to normal life.” Why should consciousness any more than 
habit be hypostasized, if both are equaliy developments of action ? 
(2) The statement which the WeBEeR-FECHNER law receives Js a 
good illustration of the tendency to interpret experience from the 
standpoint of the act, from the standpoint of the organic circuit, as 
the functional psychologists would say, rather than from the standpoint 
of any one of its contained minor activities. ‘‘The law is that in 
order that differences of sensory experience should have, in two differ- 
ent cases of comparison, the same value for our reacting consciousness, 
or should appear to be equal differences, the stimuli that are compared 
in the two different cases must differ from one another, not by the 
same absolute physical difference in their magnitude, but by the same 
