xl Journal of Comparative Neurology. 



The stupor which marks the final stage of melancholia is regarded 

 as a condition in which feeling exists in a pure state, dissociated from 

 thought. The reviewer questions whether in such a case any form of 

 consciousness whatever would be possible. It may well be doubted 

 whether even the most typical and uncomplicated case of any one of 

 these forms of alienation ever results in so perfect an isolation of the 

 psychic factors as is here implied ; yet it is freely granted that such is 

 their tendency and the author's principles, if not over-worked at the 

 outset, may be of service to us in the sequel. 



In Chronic delirium the author finds "a definate and constant 

 succession of different affective states ^ corresponding to definate and 

 constant modifications of the association of ideas ; such that the evo- 

 lution may be the transcription or better the 'justification' of the 

 affective states." 



In the second part it is first shown that in normal life the same 

 general relations prevail between feeling and thought as those so 

 greatly exaggerated in pathology. The association of ideas is rarely 

 normal and perfectly systematized. It constantly tends toward inco- 

 herences differing in degree only from those found in the types of men- 

 tal alienation. Consciousness, in other words, is rarely in a state of 

 equilibrium. 



The author vigorously combats the popular idea that the associa- 

 tion of ideas is a self-explanatory mechanism ; and he does more than 

 most other critics, he puts a more sound idea in place of it. Those 

 vague, unlocalized somatic prpcesses whose psychical equivalent is 

 found in the "affective state" lie at the basis of most associations; 

 other are due to emotions.^ The affective life, or "inner life" is the' 

 fluid medium upon which floats thought. Thought then (and this 

 seems to the reviewer a non sequihir) grows out of feeling. This is 

 true for the individual only, not for for the species. "If in the race, 

 it is thought which produces feeling, since it is the external excitations 

 easily registered in the organism which establish little by little the ten- 

 dencies or emotions ; in the individual, on the contrary, it is feeling 

 which produces thought, since it is only in obedience to hereditary 



1 •'Affective state" is a term employed to designate feeling in its undiffer- 

 entiated form ; regarded as corresponding in tlie motor realm to phenomena of 

 excitation or depression. 



"^ "Emotions," as defined by the author, are concrete, well-defined forms of 

 feeling which arise when the somatic processes have been coordinated into 

 tendencies. 



