You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The author titles his book “An Essay on the Psysiology of Mind,” and subtitles it an “Interpretation Based on Biological, Morphological, Physical and Chemical Considerations.” To the reviewer such a title and such a subtitle would seem to indicate that the author was after all not dealing with the mind at all. The biological sciences are freely called upon to interpret the mind, but the mind itself seems to escape; it is not even interrogated; it slips out between biology and physics and chemistry and physiology just as in the olden days it slipped out of the broken pane in the window when the patient died. This is a book on the mind with nothing about the mind in it. It shows that inevitable tendency of certain types of individuals to reductive analysis. Everything must be expressed in terms of something lower or something simpler. Mind must be reduced to terms of physiology and physiology must be reduced to terms of chemistry and physics. There is an identification of the psychological and the physiological much to the disadvantage of the former and an identification which to the reviewer is pushed to unwarrantable extremes, as, for example, the absolute identification of mental and cortical (p. 126).
The reviewer wonders just exactly to what audience the writer is addressing his book. It is an interesting summary and correlation and association of a large number of biological facts and facts from other