February 12, 1920] 



NATURE 



625 



serious study of one of these branches might be 

 btg'un. 



Necessarily the accounts g-Jven are summary, 

 and perhaps dogmatism is also necessary, but 

 some of the matter included might give way to at 

 least a brief statement of the other side of the 

 case. The enunciation of the James-Lange theory 

 of emotion at the present day without reference 

 to anv opposition except a footnote controverting 

 deductions from Sherrington's dog is somewhat 

 misleading. 



A similar lack of proportion in what is intended 

 to be a text-book is noticeable throughout. Undue 

 prominence is given to observations and theories 

 in which the author is specially interested, but 

 which are by no means universally accepted. .As a 

 single example, three pages are devoted to the 

 enumeration of many specific tendencies and ac- 

 tions as separate instincts, some of which it would 

 be very difficult to bring within any modern defini- 

 tion of instinct known to the present writer. On 

 tile other hand, there is no reference to McDou- 

 gall's grouping of such actions under a limited 

 number of heads as instincts with associated emo- 

 tions. The usefulness of the latter concept is 

 sufficiently widely recognised to deserve mention. 



Dr. .Stoddart, in his adherence to the doctrine of 

 Freud, shows all the devoutness of the convert. 

 He accepts the literal truth of the whole gospel, 

 including such generalisations as that dreams are 

 invariably distorted wish fulfilments, and that 

 neuroses and psychoses are without exception the 

 results of repression of sexual impulses. 



Surely the battle dreams of the war neuroses 

 have rendered the former statement untenable 

 except by the exercise of the most perverse in- 

 genuity. As to the second, the employment of the 

 usual evasion that Freud and his followers use the 

 term "sexual" in a much wider sense than is 

 usual renders discussion meaningless. The sexual 

 instinct is not a phenomenal reality, but a concept ; 

 the extent to which it is useful to group observed 

 phenomena of conduct under the term is a question, 

 not of fact, but of opinion. However, in practice 

 Dr. Stoddart, like other extreme exponents, refers 

 all abnormalities of thought and conduct to the 

 crudest anomalies of this instinct in its narrowest 

 sense. 



The reviewer accepts most of Freud's descrip- 

 tion of the manner in which thinking is distorted 

 by " complexes " in the normal and the neuropath, 

 in dreams and similar states. But he failed to 

 repress a smile on comparing two statements in 

 this book, first, that in psycho-analysis suggestion 

 is most scrupulously avoided, and secondly, that 

 with sufferers from anxiety neurosis, terrified by an 

 air raid, the most superficial analysis — presumably 

 NO. 2624, VOL. 104] 



to elicit the meaning of the terror — revealed the 

 phallic significance in their minds of Zeppelins, 

 aeroplanes, and bombs ! It is the ill-concealed 

 satisfaction of the psycho-analyst with this type of 

 association that evokes them. 



The description of the clinical forms of the 

 neuroses and psychoses is excellent apart from a 

 few examples of the disproportion and excessive 

 dogmatism referred to. But with the author's 

 change of views it requires more careful revision 

 to render it consistent. 



ASPECTS OF MODERN SCIB:NCE. 

 The Realities of Modem Science: An Introduction 



for tile deneral Reader. By John Mills. Pp. 



xi + 327. (New York : The Macmillan Co. ; 



London : Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1919.) Price 



los. 6d. net. 

 Modern Science and Materialism. By Hugh 



Elliot. Pp. vii + 2ii. (London: Longmans, 



Green, and Co., 1919.) Price ys. 6d. net. 

 (i) •"T'HE first of these works is evidently that 



T' 



of an enthusiastic scientific student, 

 rather than teacher, who has found the systems of 

 school and college instruction in physical science 

 prevailing in .\merica unsatisfacliory. He desires, 

 commendably enough, to see them replaced by 

 courses based fundamentally upon the modern 

 conceptions which have been arrived at only within 

 the last two or three generations, not only for the 

 few specialist, but also for general, students. 

 This praiseworthy motive is, however, not likely 

 to be much furthered by the book under noticed 

 The author would have done better to write a book 

 for science teachers and to assume throughout 

 a knowledge equal to that obtainable from the 

 despised college courses. As it is, it is difficult 

 to understand for whom exactly the book is in- 

 tended. In the first half the reader is assumed 

 to be the veriest tyro in science, and there is much 

 gilding of the philosophic pill. The beginnings of 

 knowledge, of machinery, and of experimentation, 

 weights and measures, the molecular theory, the 

 "realities of science," electrons, the nucleus and 

 energy are discussed rather desultorily. Then 

 follow three chapters on the most obvious and ele- 

 mentary algebra, to which the non-mathematical 

 reader is advised to give only cursofy and mech- 

 anical reading in order to reach the second part of 

 the book. 



Then the author lets himself go. The reader is 

 absolutely forgotten, or at least he must have had, 

 in an interim, the advantage of several years of 

 serious study of science sufficient to enable him to 

 understand, if not to profit by, the particular parts 

 of the last half-century's advances in physics. 



