The Energies of Man: By Wm. McDougall. New York: Scribners, 1933. xii+395 p.

Few authors of merit have enhanced their reputation by writing a textbook, and still fewer by an abridged edition of it. Professor McDougall's The Energies of Man, which is an abridgment of his Outline of Psychology and Outline of Abnormal Psychology, is no exception. But having noted this fact, one must hasten to report that it is the best introduction to psychology that has appeared in America since James's Briefer Course, and the first textbook by an academic psychologist, the author of which has had the courage to discard in its entirety the hodgepodge of naïve (and often bad) physiology which, since Wundt, has burdened all textbooks of so-called scientific psychology. Here for the first time we find more space devoted to men and motives than to axones and reaction time. Instead of chapters on the nervous system, color sensation, and explicit bodily reactions, it contains pages devoted to such topics as Disposition, Temperament and Character, The Rôle of Pleasure and Pain, and even Subconscious Working of Tendencies. In brief, the student will find discussed precisely those subjects which common sense and his own experience had led him to suppose might be the proper matter of psychology but whose omission or scant treatment in the usual introductory course causes his bafflement, and explains why a recent graduating class in a leading eastern college voted Introductory Psychology as the most useless of all courses taken. It is quite certain that had they