Although the authors presented this subject purely objectively, yet their
studies are extremely interesting and important, and show conclusively the
importance of psychopathological methods in criminology. One who is
interested in this subject will find this monograph of great value and help.
It may also be added that the authors give a complete list of the casuistic
literature of the murder among lovers. MORRIS J. KARPAS.
DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE. AN ESSAY TOWARDS A PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION. By L.
T. Hobhouse, Martin White Professor of Sociology in the University of
London. Macmillan & Co., London: 1913; pp. xxix, 383.
"Development and Purpose" is essentially the complement of Professor
Hobhouse's well-known and valuable "Mind in Evolution," published in 1901;
if it were rather a continuation than the complement, many would be pleased,
for the exposition already made practically guarantees a rich application,
were it undertaken, to matters still further "away" in the realm of thought.
The present volume lacks the multitude of scientific data and references
which make "Mind in Evolution" so important for the study of psychology (as
behavior or not as behavior, as the reader pleases), but it contains in
their space many timely discussions, in some cases seemingly prophetic, of
teleology in its relation to evolution.
The seventeen chapters of the book (there is also an extremely thoughtful
Introduction and a full Index), are divided into two parts, one entitled
"Lines of Development" and the other "The Conditions of Development." The
reviewer's lazy cortex, and possibly those of other and more leisurely
readers, is made glad by a complete chapter-synopsis or syllabus, occupying
seven pages). So much of the whole treatise is suggested in the synopsis of
the first three chapters that it is well to give them in full, as follows:
"I. The Nature and the Significance of Mental Evolution. (1) The biological
view regards Mind as an organ evolved to adapt behavior to the environment,
(2) and tends to reduce its action to a mechanical process. (3) Parallelism
in the end reduces Mind to an epi-phenomenon {an important undoubted fact
which has been often ignored by what are left of the Parallelists!] (4) The
object of Comparative Psychology is to determine empirically the actual
function of Mind in successive stages of development. (5) It involves a
social as well as an individual psychology. (6) The statement of the higher
phases also opens up philosophical questions, (7) and on the solution of
these depends the final interpretation of the recorded movement.
"II. The Structure of Mind. (1) Mental operations are known in the first
instance as objects of consciousness. (2) Mind is the permanent unity
including consciousness and the sum of processes continuous with
consciousness and determining it. (3) These processes involve, but are not
identical with physical processes, constituting with them a psychophysical
unity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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