Literary Notices. cxli 



The first suggestion is that psychology should be a science and a 

 science of observation. But he nisists that physiological psychology 

 is but physiology masking behind a high-sounding name. He well 

 says, " Certainly any possible science of physiological psychology is 

 conditioned upon the authenticity of consciousness, for its ' cortical 

 irritations' are only disjecta membra, to whose disclosure conscious- 

 ness holds the key of witness." 



"There is no apparent justice in arrogating to physiological psy- 

 chology exclusively the designation empirical psychology, as has been 

 strangely done of late. It seems like the forwardness of unripe intel- 

 legence, the crudity of a late arrival in the realm of metropolitan 

 science." 



What physiological psychology may claim to be is the elementary 

 instructor whose work is essential to a proper approach to the study of 

 mind as such. If empirical psychology is to sit in judgment upon the 

 sanity of this mind of ours it at least ought to learn to understand the 

 elements of the language the mind speaks. In the teaching of psychol- 

 ogy the author depreciates the restriction of the term laboratory practice 

 to practice in a laboratory, but wishes to enlarge it to include experi- 

 ments where consciousness only is employed. But the present writer 

 fails to see that the fact that Garfield and a certain college president on a 

 log constitutes a college compels us to convert a Plato plus Socrates 

 into a laboratory, unless, indeed, an older method well loaded with 

 honor is jealous of the untested laurels green on the brow of experi- 

 mental science. 



Again Professor Blaisdell objects to the conventional order of 

 presentations — intellect, sensibilities, will. He says : " The prelimi- 

 nary question ought to be fairly discussed, which one of the two con- 

 ceptions ought to rule the teaching of science. 



Mr. Hebert Spencer would, no doubt, answer that the various 

 sciences ought to be taught entirely in the interests of one comprehen- 

 sive natural procedure of the universal. . . . There is but one 

 science in this view, that of evolution. Some others of us believe in 

 the reality of final causes, and that man's being is determined by ref- 

 erance to that moral final cause. . . . We think him disengaged 

 from the tyrannic current of natural processes, and that he has in 

 himself, and not in nature, the law by which he is to be studied and 

 held responsible." 



With more of this sort the author ignorantly or disingenuously 

 seeks to array in hostile ranks the laws of nature as expressed in evo- 

 lution and the laws of God as expressed in human freedom. One is 



