Integrative Psychology: A Story of Unit Response. By William M. Marston, C. Daly King, and Elizabeth H. Marston. (International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1931. Pp. 558. Price 21 s. net.)

This volume embodies a very ambitious attempt to systematise the facts of descriptive psychology. The point of view of the authors is expressed in the Foreword, as follows:—

In the first place, it has seemed to me that psychology, to be practical, must have its own, elementary units of human behaviour. Psychology's units, or primary elements, should be discoverable in fact, according to available methods of experimentation, and objective, clinical observation. They should not be hidden in the genes of the germplasm like instincts, nor should they be artefacts of another science, like the conditioned reflex. The present volume takes its point of departure from a critical examination of various psychological, and semi-psychological attempts to classify fundamental, human activities; and thereafter attempts to postulate elementary behaviour units which may serve psychology precisely as the atom, the electron, and the proton have served chemistry. Regardless of whether these concepts are metaphysically ultimate, there are essential chemical facts which correspond to protons and electrons, and there are, I believe, essential psychological facts which correspond to the four elementary types of unit response postulated in this book.