NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 57 1 



of ideas, or the idea in relation to a variety of individuals or 

 types. Attempting the latter with the so-called " ideas of 

 the French Revolution, " liberty, fraternity, equality, reason, the 

 natural goodness of man, and the rights of impulse, spontane- 

 ously advocated in literature, we find that different phases of 

 these ideas must first be distinguished. As regards the ideas in 

 these phases, the sympathy or antipathy of authors is found to 

 depend in a determinate manner on the temperamental type. 



Dr. MacDougall, in his paper discussing the organic levels 

 in the evolution of the nervous system, said that the relation 

 of organization to discriminative reaction may be stated in 

 terms of four types, the non-nervous, the ringed nervous, the 

 segmented, and the cephalic. The types were described. 



In his second paper, Dr. MacDougall said that by number 

 habit is meant the distribution of frequency in the recurrence 

 of each of the digits when the choice is determined by mental 

 constitution rather than objective evidence. Previous reports 

 have given two types, a curve (Minot's) in which the changes 

 from figure to figure are slight, presenting a high plateau in 

 the middle of the series with a depression toward either end; 

 and a curve (Dresslar's and Sanford's) in which maxima system- 

 atically appear in the odd numbers and minima in the even. 

 From an apparently similar series of guesses in the present case 

 a curve was obtained presenting three different levels. Zero 

 and five formed maxima in relation to which all the other 

 digits fell in a low plateau, and of the rest the even numbers 

 formed maxima and the odd minima throughout. 



Dr. Montague stated that the new movement in favor of a 

 relational theory of consciousness is to be welcomed in the 

 interest of a scientific psychology. It is, however, seriously 

 hampered by a failure on the part of most of its advocates to 

 realize the incompatibility of any form of idealism with the 

 view that consciousness is a relation between its objects, and 

 not something in which they adhere. Things must be before 

 they can be related; hence if consciousness is a relation no 

 object can depend for existence upon the fact that it is per- 

 ceived. In short the realistic theory of the world is a necessary 

 implication of the relational theory of consciousness; while, 



