— 
Ocroper 11, 1918] 
ever we call it suggestive.” The present re- 
viewer has long cherished this saying as pro- 
foundly apposite, but occasionally one en- 
counters a thinker who can be both sane and 
stimulating, at once clear and suggestive. 
That Professor Woodworth is such a thinker 
is perhaps more apparent than ever before in 
this little volume containing his Jesup lec- 
tures. Withal it has great charm of style. 
Professor Woodworth’s conception of dy- 
namic psychology is that, maintaining friendly 
relations with both behaviorism and the intro- 
spective school, it treats experience from the 
causal rather than the merely descriptive 
point of view. Its problem is twofold, that 
of drive and that of mechanism; of the im- 
pelling forces behind various forms of experi- 
ence and of the method by which these forces 
operate. From this general point of view the 
several lectures, after an introductory discus- 
sion of “The Modern Movement in Psychol- 
ogy,” deal with the topics of “ Native Equip- 
ment,” “Acquired Equipment,” “ Selection 
and Control,” “Originality” and with ab- 
normal and social behavior. 
The characteristic feature of the author’s 
conception of mental dynamics is that the 
various nervous mechanisms for the perform- 
ance of mental function are not apparatus 
waiting to be filled with energy from a few 
great drives or instincts; that, on the con- 
trary, every mechanism has a drive of its own. 
The mere fact of its existence as an adequate 
mechanism means that there is a special tend- 
ency to use it. He takes issue with Mc- 
Dougall on this point. Special interests and 
aptitudes, for instance, are not, Woodworth 
thinks, based on nervous mechanisms that are 
driven solely by great general impelling forces 
called interest, pugnacity, and the like; the 
motive forces are inherent in the mechanisms 
themselves and are impelling interests for 
their own special objects. 
A drive, according to him, involves the ad- 
- vance excitation of the final or consummatory 
reaction of a series: this incipient reaction 
sets into operation all the associated move- 
ments which tend to bring it fully about. A 
mechanism which thus possesses its own drive 
SCIENCE 
373 
must be an innately good mechanism; thus 
the “interest” which impels the student of 
musie is due to the fact that his musical 
mechanisms, by innate endowment, work well. 
The author is thus led logically to take 
issue with Freud. The various creative activi- 
ties which the latter refers to the redirected 
energy of the sex instinct as their sole driving 
force, have in Professor Woodworth’s opinion 
driving forces of their own. Of “sublima- 
tion ” he writes that when an intellectual in- 
terest, say, is made to supplant the sex im- 
pulse, the latter “is not drawn into service, 
but is resisted.” It is true that a drive may 
enlist other mechanisms into its service, but 
these are “ mechanisms that subserve the main 
tendency, whereas ‘sublimation’ would mean 
that the tendency towards a certain consum- 
mation would be made to drive mechanisms 
irrelevant or even contrary to itself. There 
seems to be really no evidence for this, and 
it probably is to be regarded as a distinctly 
wrong reading of the facts of motivation.” 
Professor Woodworth’s idea that only in- 
herently good mechanisms possess drives of 
their own is also in curious contrast to the 
perverse view of Adler, whom he does not 
mention; the view, namely, that special inter- 
ests are due to inferiority of the organic 
mechanisms involved. 
It is a refreshing doctrine that makes our 
intellectual interests thus self-supporting and 
independent of the great impelling forces 
which we share with the lower animals. 
Whether it can be carried as far as the author 
carries it without departing from probability 
the reviewer is inclined to doubt. The ad- 
vantage of the opposed conception, which ap- 
peals solely to the primitive drives, is that we 
can see a biological justification for activities 
thus motivated. We can understand why or- 
ganisms that failed to be driven by sex, 
pugnacity, gregariousness, must have been 
eliminated in the struggle for existence; it is 
not easy to see why an individual who failed 
to exercise for its own sake a nervous mechan- 
ism for music or mathematics should have 
been biologically unfit. Again, as Professor 
Woodworth points out, although a nervous 
