NATURE 



[September 2, 1920 



"resistances" and "ambivalences" and "com- 

 pensations." And for all these concepts very 

 little empirical evidence is adduced. 



Dr. Lay's method of demonstration inclines, 

 too, almost exclusively to an a priori form : " It 

 is inconceivable that all the sights, sounds, and 

 other impressions we have had should not have 

 an effect upon each other and so upon our present 

 constitution . . ."; "It seems in every way more 

 rational to suppose that conscious and uncon- 

 scious thought and action are causally connected 

 in both directions. ..." This is scarcely the 

 soundest type of scientific reasoning. Apart from 

 a casual reference to William James (who 

 incurs Dr. Lay's censure because he devoted to the 

 sex-instinct only one page out of a thousand), 

 pre-Freudian psychology is almost entirely ig- 

 nored. That Ward and Stout and McDougall 

 had constantly emphasised the importance of un- 

 conscious dispositions ; that James, McDougall, 

 and Shand had elaborated a widely accepted 

 theory of instincts and emotions as the true basis 

 of character; that the part played by conflict and 

 repression in the formation of character had been 

 succinctly stated by Stout ; that the formation ot a 

 sentiment of maternal love has been described by 

 Shand and McDougall in terms almost the same 

 as Freud and Jung have used to describe the 

 formation of parental complexes ; that the nature 

 and development of the sex-instinct had been 

 closely studied by Stanley Hall and Havelock 

 Ellis — of this the lay parent and the lay teacher 

 learn nothing. Nor would they gather that for 

 knowledge of the nature of the child's unconscious 

 processes, of his complexes, his repressions, and 

 his fantasies, the psycho-analyst is still almost 

 entirely dependent upon the results gained by 

 analysing the minds of abnormal adults, and can 

 scarcely quote more than tiny fragments of first- 

 hand observation made upon young and normal 

 children. The psycho-analyst will perhaps contend 

 that the earlier writers did not grasp the profound 

 and all-pervading significance of the facts they 

 partly formulated. But it is scarcely fair to sug- 

 gest that upon such problems, before the new era 

 of Freud had dawned, "no really scientific ob- 

 servations had been made." This is not the atti- 

 tude or the method of Freud himself. 



Yet, despite his shortcomings as a man of science 

 and as a psychologist, Dr. Lay, as a practical 

 teacher, has interspersed his somewhat diffuse i.r'd 

 theoretical disquisitions with many shrewd ob- 

 servations upon child life, with many suggestive 

 deductions from his master's principles, and with 

 many opportune recommendations for home- 

 training and for class-room procedure. 

 NO. 2653, VOL. 106] 



Three Philosophers. 



(i) Aristotle. By Dr. A. E. Taylor. Revised 

 edition. (The People's Books.) Pp. 126. 

 (London and Edinburgh : T. C. and E. C. Jack, 

 Ltd. ; T. Nelson and Sons, Ltd., 1919.) Price 

 15. 3d. net. 



(2) Auguste Comte. By F. J. Gould. (Life-stories 

 of Famous Men.) Pp. v-fi22. (London: 

 Watts and Co., 1920.) Price 3s. 6d. net. 



(3) Thomas Henry Huxley: A Character Sketch. 

 By Dr. Leonard Huxley. (Life-stories of 

 Famous Men.) Pp. vii-f 120. (London : Watts 

 and Co., 1920.) Price 35. 6d. net. 



AT a time when constitutions are in process of 

 adoption for so many unfamiliar areas on 

 the map, it seems singularly appropriate that some 

 attention should be diverted from such modern 

 problems as relativity and Bolshevism to the 

 older struggles and the ideas to which they gave 

 rise. An excellent opportunity is provided by the 

 three books under notice. 



(i) Dr. Taylor's "Aristotle" is not quite in the 

 same class as the others, for Aristotle's life occu- 

 pies but little space. The author directs attention 

 to the debt we owe to "the Stagyrite " for many of 

 the commonest ideas in our language, and his 

 avowed object is "to help the English reader to a 

 better understanding of such familiar language and 

 a fuller understanding of much that he will find in 

 Dante, Shakespeare, Bacon, and Milton." It is 

 a pity that he has not managed to avoid the fre- 

 quent use of "logical" terms, probably unintelli- 

 gible to those whose education has been merely 

 commercial. It is possible that this usage has 

 been deliberate, in order to support Aristotle's 

 contention that a curriculum which includes only 

 " useful " subjects does not constitute education 

 at all — a doctrine that has not yet lost all its 

 supporters. The book gives a fairly compre- 

 hensive sketch of Aristotle's progression, from 

 " first philosophy " to physics, and on to practical 

 philosophy — i.e. ethics and politics. It is interest- 

 ing to recall that Aristotle objected equally to 

 democracy and to oligarchy as understood by the 

 Greeks, so that his ideal State would scarcely find 

 favour with many of our present-day politicians. 

 Dr. Taylor is impartial in dealing with points of 

 difference between Aristotle and his quondam 

 teacher Plato, but he does little to help to account 

 for the ascendancy of Aristotle for so many cen- 

 turies. 



(2) It is a far cry from Aristotle to the nineteenth 

 century, though we may regard many of the old 

 Greeks, in spite of their mythology, as rationalists 

 in much the same sense as Comte, though perhaps 



