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This volume is the reprinting of James's famous 'longer course', published first in 1890 and not reprinted since 1907. It is not only the American classic of psychology but, to this reviewer's mind, is unequalled in breadth and scope in the entire psychological literature.
It is reprinted at just the right time. The hegemony of conditioned response in psychology has been broken. Gestalt psychology, Tolman's purposive behaviorism, Allport's psychology of the personality and the ego and, last but not least, the attacks of physiological psychologists (Lashley, Kluever, Hebb) delivered the decisive blows. The impact of psychoanalysis on psychology—partly through the growth of clinical psychology, though planless and untutored—also did its share. Conditioned-response psychology—'the psychology of the empty organism'—is dead, but it does not seem to take cognizance of the fact. It attempts to rejuvenate itself by a marriage of convenience with psychoanalysis: 'you give me the goods, and I'll give you the respectability'. And Sears's, Dollard and Miller's, as well as Mowrer's attempts to this end will be sooner or later recognized as showing that psychoanalysis has to be emasculated before it will fit the conditioning robes of academic respectability, and that conditioning theory, when trying to adapt itself to clinical reality and psychoanalysis, produces wilder flights of speculation, and more striking disregard for established clinical fact and psychoanalytic theory than any disregard for experimentally established facts and theory built on them to which accusing academic fingers could point in psychoanalysis. The main reason that conditioning theory, though dead, does not lie down is that no broad and bold synthesis has arisen to sweep it aside.