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This sizeable book by a well known author who is a Professor in the Catholic Institute of Paris and in Stanlius College is a well digested
compilation of nearly all phases of psychology. It concentrates and throws light upon the more important results obtained from the researches of several types of psychological approach and attempts to evaluate many of the more obscure principles and theories.
The work has been presented in six parts: the first of which is concerned with methodology and discusses the methods of research employed, including not only historical ones but those recently devised by the Russian, French and American schools of psychology. The second part reviews mental synthesis and the various diverse aspects of mental life including the complex biologic and psychologic laws of habit, the problems of the unconscious and of the instincts and the operations of mental dynamics. The third part is an extensive account of the fundamental structural elements in psychic behavior where many pages are devoted to emotional or affective life principally from the standpoint of “orthodox” psychology. Polarities, dimensions, dispositions, inclinations and tendencies, are discussed and classified. In this chapter reflexes of all sorts, simple, conditioned and automatic and sensations with their properties, qualities and some of their abnormal expressions are reviewed at length.
The phenomena of images, mental associations, inhibitions, spatial synthesis with comparisons of early and recent theories concerning them are presented in part four which also includes a short survey of the theories of the “Concept of Time.” The structure of memory, with its experimental data and its abnormal expressions as seen in lightning calculators, morbid mental states, and the manner in which it is influenced by various emotions is described in part five. Memory is also considered in its practical applications and expressions in concrete types, in pedagogical fields and testimony situati