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In reading the pages of this book the reviewer cannot help but recall his experiences in the ′80's when he was engaged in the study of physiological psychology, using Ladd's at that time noted book on the subject. The physiological psychology of the ′80's is now conceded to have been but a refined physiology of the special sense organs mixed with a certain amount of philosophizing and generalizations for filling gaps not supplied by the then facts of experience. The Gestalt Psychology seems as one reads it to be largely a development and elaboration of the old physiological psychology, but the experimental method has been introduced to determine what the facts are and a new philosophy governs the entire research procedure. In the ′80's man was being studied by a process of dissection in psychology as he was in medicine, and his relation to his environment was acknowledged only as a way of speaking rather than by any profound significance that such a recognition might have. In the gestalt psychology the relation of man to the world about him is a two-fold one. Not only is he the recipient of various forms of energy which impinge upon his sensory apparatus so that the world may be said, as it were, to do something to him, but he in return does something to the world by way of organizing these sensations into satisfying, meaningful, significant patterns so that man and his environment act and react one upon the other. In this process by which man deals with his environment in accordance with his own needs as well as in accordance with the necessities which the environment imposes there arise the gestalt, or configurations or forms in which the environment is perceived.
In the discussion of all these matters it is rather noteworthy that about the only sense that is discussed is the visual one. The haptic sensations are not mentioned, and hearing and taste and smell only appear by implication. Many terms are taken over from the realm of physics and mechanics, more particu