266 



sciEJsrcu. 



[Vol. VIII., No. 189 



head, who have brought to light many striking 

 and remarkable facts about these abnormal con- 

 ditions. This work suggested to M. Binet that 

 some light might be shed on the nature of the rea- 

 soning process by observing the half-conscious 

 actions of hypnotics ; and the book before us is 

 the result of this suggestion. The volume has 

 been called out upon a slight provocation, and its 

 argument in brief is as follows. A perception 

 may be compared to the reading of a book : we 

 attend to the sense, and not to the letters ; we 

 read something into these black marks. So, too, 

 our sensations are taken, not for what they are, 

 but for what they stand for, for what they tell. 



By means of these perceptions the mind forms 

 images, which are its fundamental elements. It 

 is these images that form our stock in trade, and 

 their prevalent nature determines many of our 

 peculiarities of mind. They constitute one's 

 mental background, one's apperceptive bent. 

 These images come into combination and suggest 

 each other as well as fuse together. The laws 

 that condition this process are the laws of associa- 

 tion of ideas, on which the English psychologists 

 lay such stress. A close analogy can be traced 

 between a syllogism and the process of percep- 

 tion : the perception is the conclusion ; it expresses 

 a judgment ; it says, for example, this is an 

 orange. The remembered images which enable 

 me to recognize this as an orange play the part of 

 the major premise, for this too expresses the re- 

 sults of past experience ; and the minor premise 

 vphich is brought into relation with the major by 

 a certain similarity is the sensation itself. The 

 analogy is closer than this crude outline indicates, 

 and is really a highly suggestive view of the mat- 

 ter. It makes the syllogism the fundamental 

 process of the human mind. It makes the triad, 

 in which a middle term acts as the go-between for 

 two others, of the utmost importance. This is 

 the mechanism of reasoning, the general formula 

 for getting valid deductions, as well as a 

 fundamental natural process of the human mind. 

 Man is thus in a new sense a rational animal ; 

 reasoning is a sort of new sense. 



In the course of the development of this argu- 

 ment many interesting and valuable facts are 

 brought out. It is only just to the author to 

 notice a few of these. One result of his experi- 

 mentation on hypnotics, and one physiological 

 point, will serve as samples. 



The subject, an hysterical young girl, was told 

 that M. Fere (an associate of M. Binet) would be 

 invisible to her. From that moment on, she ran 

 against him, and thought it a miracle that she 

 should be opposed by something she could not 

 see : a hat on his head seemed suspended mysteri- 



ously in the air. At the close of the session they 

 forgot to disabuse her of this forced idea, and 

 three days later M. Fere was still invisible ; and, 

 what was more remarkable, it was found that she 

 had lost all remembrance of him : she knew 

 neither his name nor his person, although he had 

 been her friend for ten years. When he was 

 made visible, she did not recognize him. At this 

 period she had an hystero-epileptic attack, and 

 from then on, M. Fere was her old friend as be- 

 fore. This case is used to illustrate the law of 

 regression, which requires the most unstable and 

 latest acquired knowledge to go first in dissolu- 

 tion, and to be re-acquired last in evolution. The 

 patient, in recovering, first recognized M. Fere as 

 an object, then generally as a man, and lastly par- 

 ticularly as her old friend. 



In discussing the topic of the criterion of the 

 difference of two sensations, the i)oint is made 

 that two sensations are distinct when they have a 

 different local sign, a differently arranged group 

 of accessory, secondary sensations. Two compass- 

 points are felt as two when they have sufficiently 

 different local signs. This local sign means that 

 they can be localized. M. Binet tries the experi- 

 ment, and finds that when two points are at such 

 a distance apart as always to seem distinct when 

 simultaneously touched, then, when either is 

 touched separately, one can decide with confidence 

 whether the touched spot is to the right or to the 

 left, i.e., one can localize the sensation ; but when 

 the distance between the compass-points is less 

 than this, the jjoints are localized correctly only 

 half the time, i.e., as often as the action of mere 

 guessing would bring about. This point is a real- 

 ly valuable contribution to the psychology of 

 touch. M. Binet's study can be recommended 

 for its suggestiveness and the facts incidentally 

 noticed, as well as for his ingenious analogies 

 between psychology and logic. J. J. 



The Medical and surgical reporter gives the 

 following interesting facts concerning the water- 

 supply of the Em-opean capitals : Rome heads the 

 list with her 204,000,000 litres of pure water every 

 twenty-four hours (her population being 345,036, 

 every inhabitant can dispose of 591 litres per 

 diem) ; London comes next, for every one Df 

 whose 4,085,040 inhabitants there are 300 litres 

 daily ; Paris takes the thu-d place, her population 

 amounting to 2,240,124, and each inhabitant having 

 for alimentary uses 58 Htres per diem, and for 

 secondary pm-poses 169, — a total of 227 litres ; 

 Berlin has 1,302,283 inhabitants, with 140 litres 

 daily to each ; Vienna, 770,172, 100 litres each ; 

 Naples, 463,172, with 200 litres ; and Turin, 278,- 

 598, with 98 litres a head every twenty-four hours. 



