■864 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. VII. No. 182. 



who has hypnotized him, will be, as a rule, ab- 

 solutely obtuse to the most direct of suggestions 

 given by any other person. Rapport, although 

 not an inevitable, is perhaps one of the most 

 constant traits of heightened suggestibility, and 

 this Dr. Sidis' second law ignores. Further- 

 more, it puts in an inverse relation traits that 

 usually vary directly. 



In his theory of the 'subwaking self,' Dr. 

 Sidis takes ground between Myers and Pierre 

 Janet. With Myers he holds that the sub- 

 waking self is a normal constituent of every 

 human being and is not merely a ' disaggrega- 

 tion phenomenon.' With Pierre Janet he 

 denies to it personality and self-consciousness, 

 save in rare cases, and describes it as a congeries 

 of ill coordinated, extremely suggestible, dream- 

 like states. He further concludes that it is pos- 

 sessed of acute senses, but lacks sense and all 

 power of criticism, is servile, cowardly, devoid 

 of morality and of the power of willing. The 

 relation between the primary and secondary 

 selves is not clearly defined. Intercommunica- 

 tion exists, however, to some extent, and the 

 phenomena of hypnosis, suggestibility, au- 

 tomatism, amnesia, insanity and of crowd and 

 mob psychology are ascribed to a dissociation 

 between the two selves wherebj' the inhibition 

 of the primary is removed and the peculiar 

 traits of the secondary are allowed to come to 

 light. 



To frame his physiological theory, Dr. Sidis 

 simply substitutes for his 'moments content,' or 

 psychic element, the nerve-cell, for association, 

 contact of terminal filaments, for dissociation 

 retraction of the terminal filaments and conse- 

 quent loss of contact. Quite apart from the 

 doubt cast upon ' no-anastomosis-but-approxi- 

 mation-only ' theory by the recent publication 

 of Ap4thy's work, there never has been any 

 physiological evidence for the theory which Dr. 

 Sidis adopts. It rests solely upon anatomical 

 observations and should not be put forward 

 without due recognition of its speculative char- 

 acter. 



But if Dr. Sidis' passion for logical clearness 

 and exact formulation has betrayed him into 

 making generalizations upon insuflBcient data, 

 it has none the less made his book the more in- 

 teresting. Even where the daring of his state- 



ments challenges dissent, one cannot but feel 

 sympathy for these bold attempts to introduce 

 order into chaos, and for the scientific enthu- 

 siasm which inspired them. Attention should 

 also be called to the interesting case of amnesia 

 of which a brief account is given in Chapter 

 XXII. and to the even more interesting series 

 of experiments upon subconscious perception. 

 Wm. Romaine Newbold. 

 University of Pennsylvania. 



Erkenntnistheoretische Grundziige der Natur- 

 wissenschaften und Hire Beziehungen zum 

 Oeistesleben der Gegenwart. P. Volkmann. 

 Leipzig, Teubner. Pp. xii-f-181. 

 Etude critique du materialisme et du spiritual- 

 isnie par la physique experimentale. Eaoul 

 PiCTET. Geneva, Georg& Co. Pp. six -f 596. 

 Readers of Science who see also the columns 

 of Nature may remember that the former of the 

 above-named books was made not long ago the 

 occasion of a rather sharp polemic by Dr. Karl 

 Pearson on ' the departing glory of German 

 science.' Now it may well be that Dr. Pear- 

 son's extended reading justifies his contentioii 

 of the decadence of science in Germany, but 

 certainly his illustrative examples were hardly 

 well chosen. The Grundziige is not a great 

 book. It may even be one of a class of books 

 not worth writing — an attempt to explain and 

 to justify to a popular audience the scientific 

 movement of the time. The critic justly 

 charges the book with vagueness ; with incom- 

 pleteness ; with failure in a labored effort to 

 distinguish between certain scientific terms, as 

 law, rule, principle, hypothesis ; and especially 

 with pushing too far loose analogies drawn from 

 natural science aiid applied to other fields of 

 thought. 



But he is particularly severe upon Professor 

 Volkmann for not seeming to h'ave clear 

 vision of the truth that all so-called natural 

 laws are simply laws of the mind. Now the 

 fact is that the book before us is as emphatic as 

 Dr. Pearson himself could be in declaring that 

 scientific laws are always and everywhere, like 

 those of mathematics, constructions of the mind ; 

 only the author adds, these constructions must 

 conform to experience. See p. 57, etc. 



But the criticism is mainly unsatisfactory in 



