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American psychologists may well be thankful to the author for this book. They should feel indebted to him not only for having brought together under one cover the recent advances in physiological psychology still scattered in periodic literature, but even more so for having rendered "explicit", to quote his own words, "the assumptions that underlie the accepted physiological thinking of to-day." This thinking, notwithstanding its hard-boiled scientific terminology, has been extremely naïve. Like the proverbial ostrich, it has thought that by burying its head under such concepts as nerve impulse, semipermeable membranes and other constructions borrowed from physics, it was escaping its intrinsic logical difficulties. Professor Boring has done an excellent job in showing how futile such a mode of defense is, and how much more effective a bold frontal attack on these difficulties can be. He has done this by examining searchingly the primary sensory attributes of conscious experience, and analyzing the logical assumptions underlying the experimental and introspective data on which they rest. It is these fundamental modalities of sensation: quality, intensity, extensity and protensity (duration) which the author calls the physical dimensions of consciousness.
He begins by calling attention to the fact, generally overlooked both by psychologists and physiologists, that all psychological "reality" is of necessity an inductive inference. There is no such thing as direct or immediate experience. "Real experience is what the psychologist knows about it, and is mediate and not direct." All reality is made up of what he terms "conceptual reals", that is, concepts of inductive experience. This is frankly a logistic approach which, though it does not eliminate the problem of psycho-physical dualism, as Professor Boring seems to believe, does clear the path for a logical attack upon the whole problem of psycho-physiological correlations. The