The Science of Psychology. An Introductory Study. By Raymond Holder Wheeler, University of Kansas. Published by  Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York. Pp.  525 + References, Appendix and Indexes.

This volume is a new departure in textbooks of psychology. The author has bravely made a complete break with the old academic psychology and gone over bodily to the organistic and configurational points of view in writing his work. In order to do this the whole material of psychology has had to be presented differently. In fact the difference is no less than a complete revolution, or at least a revolution of 180 degrees, while the point of view assumed necessarily requires that the material be presented in the reverse order from that usually chosen. The old structural academic psychology assumed that on the psychological side the finished product, the idea for example, could be traced back to its elemental constituents, which in this instance were sensations. The sensation was the unit of psychic structure and the psychic state at any particular moment was a mosaic of such sensations, very much as one might conceive a bit of matter to be a mosaic of molecules. Similarly the nervous system was constructed of units. In this case the unit was the reflex, and the complicated processes of the higher centers was but a mathematical summary of reflex arcs. During the present century, however, these views have been slowly changing. The study of child psychology, for example, has demonstrated that the child does not acquire first a series of discrete sensations and then put them together so as to form perceptions, etc., so that these perceptions are nothing more nor less than the sum of the sensations which compose them. This limiting mechanistic hypothesis has been headed for the discard for some time and is now definitely in the waste-basket. The child's first experiences are not of such a nature. The first experiences are comparable, using a biological analogy, to the protoplasm which is the basic substance of life. The first experiences of the child are already perceptions, perceptions