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Professor Spearman, Emeritus in Psychology in the University of London, here offers in two well conceived volumes of about 800 pages, an exceptionally able and readable history of psychology. Following a short epilogue pointing out the great spread of popular interest in psychology, he writes some 42 chapters, arranged as Parts. What Psychology is About, What the Psyche Can Do, How the Psyche is Constituted, these in 25 chapters in Book I. What Follows What and What Goes With What are the part headings of the 16 chapters in Book II, the which headings show the author's tendency to put the general principles of ‘common sense’ in the foreground.
The avalanche of books, magazines, lectures, radio broadcasts supposedly dealing with matters psychological calls forth his ironic reminder of an expressed thrust, “that psychology” was “putting what everybody knows into language that nobody understands.” Hence this book that would discount exaggerations, outline advances and offer a readable, authoratatur and stimulating work on the progress of scientific psychology.
Thus he would start out with the subject matter itself and outline what psychology really deals with from the ancient days of primitive doubles, of the meanings of psyche, amina, spiritus, the soul, etc., and the early efforts of understanding life. The story of the first split of body and mind is well told and brought from Homeric times to the present touching on important ideas on the way. Thus physiology per se has been set apart, thus came the way through philosophy at the parting from these academic groves so fascinating and full of allure. Then down to the actualities, of psychological methods from rumination, intention to experiment, mathematics and the gradual pushing into the foreground of a definite discipline. Here emerge classical intellect, modern intelligence, attention, sensory and other “faculties,” appetites and (orexis is resuscitated for desires) interests.
Psychical Constitution is presented as s