Instinct and Personality.: By A. Campbell Garnett, M.A., Litt.D., Lecturer to Tutorial Classes in Philosophy in the University of Adelaide. (George Allen & Unwin, London, 1928. Pp. 218. Price 8 s. 6 d.

We have learnt to expect that books on 'personality' shall possess a certain element of 'uplift.' In the present case this element is to be found in the 'urge of life' which cannot, the author maintains, be explained in terms of instinct, but which expresses itself independently of instinct in such activities as play and the pursuit of ideals. It is in the treatment of this latter that a certain mystic tendency becomes apparent. 'The altruistic motive satisfies something in our nature which the instinctive impulses cannot account for—some urge which is above them or more fundamental than they. … This evaluation of altruism is but a particular instance of a general trend of the human mind— the tendency to place a higher value on the goods of the spirit [italics in original]. The Good, the Beautiful, the True, possess a magnetism for mankind that cannot be explained by any alchemy of instincts, ' and one suspects that Dr. Garnett does not wish to explain it at all. At any rate there is no serious attempt to grapple with the psychological problems connected with ideals—such as the attempts that have been made by McDougall and by Freud. Dr. Garnett has no use for the doctrines of Sublimation or of the Unconscious. He accepts most of the facts that have led other psychologists to adopt the latter concept, but explains them to his own satisfaction as cases of unclear consciousness. The most useful part of the book is that which attempts a classification of the instincts on the basis of the end-experience which produces satisfaction and a cessation of the instinctive creation—a chapter which has already appeared elsewhere in less extended form.