This volume even though brief will be highly appreciated by very many
students of normal and of abnormal psychology because it is the first book
to afford them just what, in an elementary way, they need concerning the
nervous system, the essential musculatures, and the epithelia, whose
manifold activities are in some certain mode concomitant to the succession
of compound mental events. Surely, and widely, those who a few years ago
"came to scoff" at the ever-rising scientific stream of mind-protoplasm
relationship will "remain to pray" to the rising and satisfying goddess of
the new philosophy. The body with its unimagined intricacies and beauties of
still unguessed adaptation and its marvels of Someone's ingenuity is surely
now at length coming into its own. And when, after the years, it has come
into its own in a reasonable measure, "the continuity of mind-and-energy"
and "the dynamic-spiritualism of the Cosmos" when they are mentioned will no
longer draw that quasi-withering smile of toleration to the face of the
orthodox psychologist with which some of us are familiar.
This volume, happily devised by Professor Dunlap to meet this real need, at
first in his own pupils and later in a wider public, will materially help
this progress, for it has within it in fairly up-to-date and simple form
much of the structure and function, always of surpassing interest when
understood, of the human action-system. Seventy-seven excellently clear and
well-chosen illustrations make the well-printed text still more informing.
There is a good index; and short lists of books at the ends of the chapters.
The present reviewer notes only one omission of substantial importance from
the neurologic part of the book, and that is the very recent, howbeit
important, matter of the functional opposition between the sympathetic
proper and the other, the cranio-sacral, portion of "the autonomic." The
work lacks also, in this first edition, a statement and discussion of the
important all-or-none principle which is now applicable to voluntary muscle,
probably, and to the neurones. And it is to be hoped too that the author
will take the bull by the horns and, in the next edition, show the nature of
protoplasm in general in an homologous way, as the basis, through its
uniquely complex kineticism, of the onward rush of the mental process. With
this addition the essential nature of irritability too might be set forth in
this already valuable (and inexpensive) treatise. GEORGE V. N. DEARBORN.
Sargent Normal School.
PSYCHOLOGY, GENERAL AND APPLIED. Hugo Munsterberg New York and London: D.
Appleton and Co., 1914; Pp. xiv X487 1.75.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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