August 7, 1896.] 



SCIENCE. 



173 



gists. The present report, although smaller 

 than some of its predecessors, contains the 

 usual array of important articles, the most in- 

 teresting of which are the account of Phora 

 agaraci, a little fly which damages mushrooms, 

 and which is largely the cause of the impracti- 

 cability of mushroom cultivation during the 

 summer months ; an account of the 1894 oc- 

 currence of the seventeen -year locust in New 

 York State, and of the grasshopper plague in 

 western New York. The present report contains 

 a valuable appendix in the shape of an article on 

 scorpion flies, by Dr. Lintner's assistant, Dr. E. 

 P. Felt, who describes the heretofore unknown 

 larvse of Panorpa rufescens. The report also 

 contains an elaborate index to Reports I. to X., 

 which renders at once available nearly all of 

 the results of Dr. Lintuer's able work since he 

 has held the position of State Entomologist of 

 New York. This general index means more 

 than appears at first glance, on account of the 

 custom which Dr. Lintner has followed of late 

 of publishing full bibliographies of the insects 

 treated. Thus it becomes an easy matter for a 

 person possessing the ten reports to familiarize 

 himself to a very considerable degree with the 

 literature of a very large number of species. 



L. O. H. 



La psychologie des sentiments. By Th. Ribot. 



Paris, Alcan. Pp. xi+443. 



The indefatigable Th. Ribot has given us in 

 his last work, La Psychologie des Sentiments, a 

 clear, forcible and succinct summary, professedly 

 from the James-Lange point of view. How- 

 ever, this interpretation is not adhered to very 

 rigorously, and sometimes, indeed, seems di- 

 rectly contradicted (see p. 383 and compare pp. 

 108 and 187). Yet M. Ribot's main position 

 undoubtedly is that all feeling is a reflex, or, as 

 he would prefer to state it, an aspect of organic 

 changes. But this constant reference to the 

 nature and constitution of the nervous system, or 

 otherwise set forth as tendency, instinct, need, 

 impulse, seems to us highly unsatisfactory ex- 

 planation. To explain mental forms as knowing 

 and egoism by intuitive fixed tendencies thereto 

 (e. g., p. 192 ff.) appears to us quite on a par 

 with the old intuitive psychology, and not far re- 

 moved from the much derided metaphysics that 



explains lion by leoninity. It appears to us 

 that the word 'tendency', whether interpreted 

 physiologically or psychically, is like the word 

 'chance' in physics and biology, a mere ex- 

 pression to cover ignorance. And it does not 

 better things to assume that physiological and 

 mental are only modes of an unknown some- 

 thing. To explain the known by the unknown 

 may be good metaphysics, but it is certainly 

 bad science. Further, when M. Ribot endorses 

 Spinoza's dictum that desire and appetite are 

 the bases of all emotion, we must ask what is 

 desire but an emotion, and what is appetite but 

 pure pain mingled with a feeling toward an un- 

 recognized objectivity? 



However, we fully recognize the value of a 

 physiology of feeling, and of a physics and 

 chemistry as well, and we wish that M. Ribot 

 had adhered rigidly to this interpretation, but 

 he often encroaches on psychology where his 

 descriptions are only of the most general and 

 obvious sort and his analyses (e. g., jealousy, p. 

 264) are greatly lacking in accuracy and 

 thoroughness. 



M. Ribot regards fear, anger and sympathy 

 as the universal primitive emotions, closely fol- 

 lowed by the self-feeling and sexual feeling, 

 which five are basal, all other emotions being 

 derived by evolution, by arrest of development 

 and by composition. We do not think that the 

 author has here made clear how hate is arrested 

 anger, or how platonic love is arrest of sexual. 

 As to the latter, indeed, he at one place (p. 18) 

 assigns it a rank as culmination of sexual evo- 

 lution. But, however, this may be, it certainly 

 seems contrary to the first principle of evolu- 

 tion, that any high and late form can be ex- 

 plained as arrest of development of an early 

 form. The whole treatment of this and other 

 principles is far too slight. 



M. Ribot touches upon the curious pleasu- 

 rable pain and painful pleasure, but the treat- 

 ment is rather unsatisfactory. The taking a 

 pleasure in a pain or vice versa is, we think, not 

 uncommon, and merely shows that emotion can 

 develop upon any subject. The child in taking 

 a certain pleasure in picking its own sores has 

 a relief from ennui and an emotion of effective 

 activity. The desire to feel, to do, to know, 

 help explain this pleasure. Alphonse Daudet 



