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This book, which is based on lectures given at an elementary course in the Department of Pedagogics of the New York University to those 'occupying themselves with problems of education and psychology' (p.v), instructs by the modern conversational method. While reading one is a little regretful that even for educationalists and psychologists everything must be made easy and that 'fundamental conceptions' must be so simplified that they can be taken in at a glance. It is a pity that this book, whose title makes such a strong appeal to the student, does not utilise to the best advantage the good material collected in its pages—except in 'anecdotage' (if we may have the author's permission to borrow the term)—and that the examples are not so correlated that the reader is led to understand the deeper meaning which they often contain.
To take an instance: 'We may define a symbol as an imperfect comparison between two objects which in reality may have very little resemblance; it is nothing but a form of comparison' (p. 59). Later we read that in the 'unconscious, however, the same process of imperfect comparisons prevail' (p. 64); and of symbols occurring in dreams he says, 'as we are usually ignorant of their origin they strike us as mysterious and foreign' (p. 64), and again 'many symbols have lost their original meaning for us to-day, though they are still commonly used under different forms' (p. 66). Thus, as we turn these pages, we see the concept of Symbolism growing and becoming more significant, then (p. 68) we find the subject rounded off with this: 'In brief, a symbol is simply an analogy between impressions of the present and the past and depending on the individual it is either simple or complex'.
Other subjects are dealt with in the same manner. In discussing dream analysis great stress is laid on the relation to present problems, the infantile sources being hardly mentioned, and we are confronted with a great number of superficial analyses, when a f