Literary Notices. clxxxix 



tions of Weber's law but very truly states that Weber's law is a relation 

 between stimulus and judgment and not between stimulus and re- 

 action. 



The treatment of " centrally excited sensations" is much more 

 extended. It is recognized at once that the English associational 

 doctrine that a reproduction differs from the original only in intensity 

 and phantasy images sustain the same relation to reproduction makes 

 any study of the quality of central sensation superfluous. Recogni- 

 tion is only a special case of discrimination, but recognition usually 

 applies to images of perception, not those of memory. It is easy to 

 see that recognition greatly modifies the effect of a reproduced presen- 

 tation. A result of this is that abstract ideas are better remembered 

 than concrete for they have been recognized more frequently. 



To centrally originated sensations may be ascribed quality, in- 

 tensity and spatial and temporal attributes. Under this head the au- 

 thor describes the two chief methods employed for determining them. 

 That of Miinsterberg is familiar ; it consists of writing words in which 

 some letters are blurred or omitted and by shouting a word having a 

 suggestion implied causing the reader to firmly believe Triest is Trost 

 or Furcht is Fracht. The words pronounced in the two cases were 

 Verzxveiflung and Obst. Various imperfections may be suggested 

 which limit the application and trustworthiness of the method. The 

 author's experiments were carried out by placing the observer for a 

 long time in a dark room with instructions to report all visual impres- 

 sions and his judgment as to their subjective or objective origin. In 

 many cases great confusion resulted while the stimuli were small. In 

 other cases all judgments were correct and no subjective sensations 

 were experienced. The author thinks eye sensations, light flashes, 

 etc., were excluded, but our own experience shows that a sensitive 

 subject may have eye sensations with objective basis hours after the 

 positive sensation. The real net gain by either method seems very 

 small. A considerable section is devoted to a criticism of the Associ- 

 ation doctrine. The frequent occurrence of spontaneous reproduc- 

 tions the author thinks is not sufficiently accounted for by unconscious 

 or unnoticed connecting links of association. Again the chains of 

 association contain many elements not before experienced. A pic- 

 ture makes an impression in its totality and it is difficult to discover 

 that the associated concepts, etc., have any relation to elements con- 

 tained in the picture. The subsumption of concretes under a gen- 

 eral notion is not, according to the author, an association of such con- 

 cretes with the general name. 



