NATURE 



465 



THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1903. 



THE WORTH OF EXPERIMENTAL 

 PSYCHOLOGY. 

 Experimental Psychology and its Bearing on Culture. 

 By George Malcolm Stratton, M.A., Ph.D. Pp. 

 vi + 331. (New York: The Macmillan Company; 

 London : Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1903.) Price 

 8s. 6d. net. 

 'T^HE aim of this well written and interesting book, 

 1 we are informed, is " to present ... the character 

 and value of the laboratory psychology, especially as 

 bearing on our moral and philosophical interests. . , . 

 Considerable attention has thus been given to the in- 

 terpretation of the experimental results— to their more 

 immediate scientific meaning, as well as to what they 

 suggest for life and for speculation." The work, how- 

 ever, contains little that is really relevant to " the bear- 

 ing of psychology on culture." Such topics as the 

 value and significance of memory, suggestion and 

 illusions, and the relation of psychology to the body 

 and to the soul, ably as they are treated, are hardly 

 synonymous with culture; indeed, from start to finish 

 the object of the book is by no means evident. 



It is to be regretted that Prof. Stratton did not con- 

 fine himself to "the immediate scientific meaning," 

 the range and the worth of psychological laboratory 

 work. Once or twice this task has been already 

 attempted in our language, but it has not yet been 

 satisfactorily performed. The need for such a work 

 has never been greater than now, when the number 

 of psychological laboratories and their workers is 

 multiplying rapidly, while physicists and physiologists 

 are for the most part ignorant of, and hence are prone 

 to ignore and to condemn, the aims and methods of ex- 

 perimental psychology. To this class of readers the 

 present work is not well suited, and will hardly carry 

 conviction. It appeals more to an educated public, 

 which prefers to nibble at the significance of experi- 

 mental psychology, and to swallow certain inevitable 

 crudities of statement, rather than to digest th^ subject 

 with proper care. The ground covered by the book 

 is too vast, and departures from purely experimental 

 topics are too often and too far made to allow of a 

 really accurate and critical exposition. For this 

 reason, no doubt, the author has made little attempt 

 to exhibit the various themes of experimental study in 

 their proper perspective. He has been forced to neglect 

 some of the most important advances in purely psycho- 

 logical method, e.g. the work of G. E. Miiller and his 

 Gottingen school, and the genetic and comparative 

 sides of experimental psychology; while undue space 

 is given to some trivial experiments in eesthetics that 

 have scant meaning or interest, and a few others are 

 made to bear interpretations which are far Irom being 

 justified in fact. 



"Some recent experiments by Dunlap," savs the 

 author (pp. 88, 89), "show that lines, so draw^ as to 

 produce an illusion of distance [i.e., the angle-formine 

 lines in the well-known illusion of Muller-Lverl mav 

 influence our estimate of space even when these lines 

 are quite imperceptible." 



Reference, however, to the statistical results of the 

 NO. 1768. VOL. 68] 



original paper and to its writer's own convictions 

 shows that this conclusion is by no means so certain. 

 The author uses these and other considerations in his 

 chapters on the evidence for unconscious ideas. He 

 ends with the statement (p. 92) that 

 " the results are not in favour of unconscious ideas, 

 but rather of certain unconscious materials out of 

 which conscious ideas arise." 



One is tempted to ask how he can be sure, if the 

 " materials " are unconscious, that they are 

 "materials" and not "ideas." His psychological 

 treatment of poetical rhythm is not convincing, the 

 subject being too complex to tolerate an acrobatic 

 arithmetic which connects all measures with " the 

 pulse-time of attention." Probably the latter bears 

 about the same relation to our appreciation of rhythm 

 as our range of hearing to the enjoyment of a 

 Beethoven symphony. Nor is it the whole truth, albeit 

 the fashion to say (p. 269) that " what goes on in our 

 minds never is really there until it is expressed," and 

 that " in all manner of mental action there is some 

 physical expression." 



The chapters on the general character of psycho- 

 logical experiments, on imitation and suggestion, on 

 illusions, and on the spatial perceptions of the blind, are 

 quite ably and entertainingly written. The author's 

 classification of illusions leads to curious results. He 

 groups the illusion, in which a large box is judged 

 lighter than a smaller box of equal weight, in the same 

 class with the two fundamentally different illusions, in 

 which truly isochronous intervals are subjectively re- 

 solved into rhythmic series, and in which a space of 

 time filled with sounds is adjudged of different length 

 from an equal but " empty " space of time. This class 

 of illusions is said to arise " from stress of attention " I 

 We are told also (p. 106) that within this class " the 

 symbols themselves do not seem to be misinterpreted, 

 they have been distorted ... by our mental states." 

 Elsewhere the author admits that all illusions " involve 

 a misinterpretation." 



But sufficient has been said to give a general notion 

 of the faults and virtues of this book. In broad prin- 

 ciples there is little to which the psychologist can take 

 exception. Its style and language appear to be ex- 

 cellently suited to its readers, and the author has an 

 adequately wide grasp of his subject. If he has failed 

 in his task, the reason is because he has attempted too 

 much. For to treat of the problem, which he has set 

 himself, in three hundred or more pages is as im- 

 possible as it is to do justice to his bold endeavour 

 within the compass of this review. C. S. Myers. 



HYDRAULICS. 



Treatise on Hydraulics. By Mansfield Merriman, Pro- 

 fessor of Civil Engineering in Lehigh University. 

 Eighth Edition, Rewritten and Enlarged. Pp. viii + 

 585. (New York : John Wiley and Sons ; London : 

 Chapman and Hall, Ltd., 1903.) Price 215. net. 

 T^HIS book bears the same title, has practically the 

 J- same number of pages, and is published by the 

 same firms, as a book by Prof. Bcvey, of McGill 

 University, Montreal, which appeared in 1901, and was 

 reviewed in these columns in February last year. 



