Western Psychology. From the Greeks to William James: Edited by Gardner Murphy and Lois B. Murphy. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1969. 296 pp.

This admirable volume is the second in a series aimed at integrating and interpreting the central ideas of those outstanding thinkers who have written about human nature in a systematic sense during mankind's history. The first in the series, Asian Psychology, explored the psychology of India, China, and Japan; projected future works will deal with developmental and psychoanalytic psychologies, as well as with the Soviet system of psychology and with altered ego states. In this volume, for each five-hundred-year period since 500 B.C., a historical correlation is attempted by outlining the broad characteristics of each epoch's economy, politics, military development, religion, science, philosophy, and psychological assumptions.

The section on Greek psychology by Professor Richard P. McKeon of the University of Chicago provides a rich commentary on each phase of development. First to be considered are the pre-Socratics: the natural philosophers seeking material principles; the mathematically oriented who emphasized plurality or sought unitary principles; the atomists; and the sophists whose focus on knowledge as sensation resulted in the strengthening of operationalism. The discussion proceeds to consider the contribution of Socrates who turned attention from the world of nature to ethical matters, with major advance in the use of inductive processes; Plato's dialectic method of inquiry into operations of the universe and of man's understanding based on sense experience and reason; and finally, the monumental contributions of