Ai'iuL 29, 1909] 



NATURE 



245 



SOCIAL AND EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY. 

 (il An Introduction to Social Psychology. By William 



McDougall. Pp. xv + 355. (London : Methuen and 



Co., n.d.) Price 55. net. 

 (2) Lectures on the Elementary Psychology of Feeling 



and Attention. By Prof. E. B. Titchener. Pp. ix + 



404. (New York: The Macmillan Company; 



London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 190S.) Price 



6s. net. 

 (i) "T^HE g-eneral nature and scope of Mr. McDou- 

 -L gall's book is admirably expressed, in the 

 word^ of his preface, as " an attempt to deal with a 

 dilTicult branch of psychology in a way that shall 

 make it intelligible and interesting to any cultivated 

 reader, and that shall imply no previous familiarity 

 with psychological treatises on his part ; . . . a book that 

 mav bo of service to students of all the social sciences, 

 by providing them with the minimum of psychological 

 doctrine that is an indispensable part of the equipment 

 for work in any of these sciences." After an intro- 

 ductorv chapter pointing out the grave need in the 

 sciences of ethics, economics, history, and politics for 

 a more accurate and thoroughgoing psychological 

 analysis than that employed at the present time, the 

 author proceeds to give a description and classification 

 cf the emotional constituents of the mind, which he 

 vindicates as of paramount importance for social 

 life. 



The principle of classification adopted is new, in 

 that it involves an identification of emotion and in- 

 stinct as the psychical and physical aspects, respec- 

 tively, of the same process. On this assumption the 

 list of primary emotions receives support and con- 

 firmation from the list of principal instincts of specific 

 tendency with which they are individually correlated. 

 These principal instincts and emotions are as follows : — 

 the instinct of flight and the emotion of fear, the in- 

 stinct of repulsion and the emotion of disgust, the 

 instinct of curiosity and the emotion of wonder, the 

 instinct of pugnacity and the emotion of anger, the 

 instincts of self-abasement (or subjection) and of self- 

 assertion (or self-display), and the emotions of subjec- 

 tion and elation (or negative and positive self-feeling), 

 the parental instinct and the tender emotion. The 

 more complex emotions are shown to admit of com- 

 plete description as combinations of two or more of 

 thi-se primary emotions, either by themselves or 

 within a "sentiment." Moreover, this conception of 

 " sentiment," due originally to Mr. A. F. Shand, is 

 given a physiological interpretation by the author. 

 The difficult task of displaying the course of develop- 

 ment of the moral sentiments is remarkably well 

 done, and in a subsequent chapter on volition Mr. 

 McDougall comes to closer quarters with the question 

 of free-will than any other modern psychologist,' 

 giving, inter alia, a good psychological solution of 

 Prof. James's difficulty of " action in the line of 

 greatest resistance." 



The last hundred pages of the book are devoted 

 to the more strictly sociological question of the work- 

 ing of the primary mental tendencies in social life. 



In bringing together emotion and instinct, Mr. 

 McDougall has made an original contribution to 

 NO. 2061, VOL. 80] 



psychological science of the highest value and import- 

 ance, and even if he does not succeed in carrying his 

 fellow-psychologists all the way with him in his 

 identification of the two, he will have set the problem 

 of their relation in a form which is itself at least half 

 the solution. Before the theory can be accepted as it 

 stands, reason must be given for the occasional occur- 

 rence of well-marked instinctive activities unaccom- 

 panied by any clearly defined emotion. Again, the 

 absence of joy and sorrow from the list of primary 

 emotions, although necessitated by the theory, is not 

 easy to justify on purely psychological grounds ; the 

 account given of them in the text, viz., that they are 

 qualifications of other emotions, is not quite convincing. 



The book is full of close reasoning, but is written 

 in so lucid a style that it makes very pleasant reading. 

 Its importance is more than academic; there are poli- 

 tical theorists at the present day who would do well 

 to take some of its teachings to heart. 



(2) Prof. Titchener's book is a publication of lectures 

 delivered at Columbia University last spring. The 

 lectures deal with the problems of feeling and atten- 

 tion from the experimental standpoint, and are pro- 

 fusely annotated with quotations from and references 

 to all the most recent experimental work. This fact, 

 together with a clearness of statement, should make 

 the book very popular. The one and only weakness 

 of the book is its slight bias towards sensationalism, 

 which makes the author very unfair in his treatment 

 of such a theory as that of Prof. H. R. Marshall, and 

 perhaps explains his tendency to quote Prof. Kiilpe 

 as final. The development of a theory of attention as 

 sensory clearness is admirably done, and should go 

 far towards converting psychologists (old style) to the 



experimental method. 



William Brown. 



OUR BOOK SHELF. 

 Die Termiten oder weissen Ameiscn. Eine Bio- 



logische Studie. By K. Escherich. Pp. xii+198; 



coloured frontispiece, and 51 figures in the text. 



(Leipzig: D. W. Klinkhardt, 1909.) Price 



6 marks. 

 Although the termites, or white ants as they are 

 frequently called, belong to the order Neuroptera, and 

 not to the Hvmenoptera like the three other great 

 classes of social insects, the ants, bees, and wasps, 

 yet they closely resemble the ants in their habits and 

 domestic arrangements, as well as in their economic 

 importance, in the countries which they inhabit. As 

 a rule they shun the light, and always work_ in 

 darkness in their underground nests and galleries, 

 and in most places in the tropics they are extrernely 

 destructive to all kinds of woodwork. _ The raised 

 nests of some species are even more gigantic above 

 .o-round than those of the ants, those of one Austra- 

 lian species being built in the form of a solid wall 

 twenty feet high. In South Africa, as shown in an 

 illustration on p. 158 of the book before us, the 

 hoUowed-out nests o'f termites are frequently used 

 by natives and colonists as ovens. 



Prof. Escherich has given us an extremely useful 

 treatise on these insects, which he regards as far 

 superior to the ants; though in his preface he dis- 

 cusses the difference between human reason and the 

 collective and inherited "instinct" of social insects. 



