"III. The General Function of Mind and Brain. (1) The generic function of
Mind, as of the nervous system, is correlation (2) The special organ for
effecting fresh correlation is consciousness. (3) The deliverances of
consciousness arise from stimuli acting upon structures built up by
experience, (4) on foundations laid by heredity, (5) which supplies not only
specific adaptations, but a background to the entire life of consciousness."
It would be hard to find a more concise, complete, and timely
formularization of the seeming trend of present resultants in this
particular direction than these sentences set forth for whomsoever will
ponder each carefully-built statement and really understand what it means as
part of a system. "Mind is the permanent unity including consciousness and
the sum of processes continuous with consciousness and determining it. These
processes involve, but are not identical with, physical processes,
constituting with them a psychophysical unity,"--this quotation might almost
serve as the motto of early Twentieth Century scientific philosophy. It
seems to the present reviewer to have almost as much philosophy in it as
Harold Hoffding's well-known sentence has of psychology: ("the unity of
mental life has its expression not only in memory and synthesis, but also in
a dominant fundamental feeling, characterized by the contrast between
pleasure and pain, and in an impulse, springing from this fundamental
feeling, to movement and activity"). It might be the creed of the
Neoidealism.
Hobhouse's discussion of mechanism in relation to teleology and to the
universal harmony and reality is fairly representative of the drift of
thought as set forth by recent English and French writers such as J. S.
Haldane, Oliver Lodge and some of the prominent biologists, and by Henri
Bergson: "An organic whole is therefore like a machine in being purposive,
though unlike it in that its purpose is within." "A purposive process is one
determined by its tendency to produce a certain result, purpose itself being
an act [sic] determined in its character by that which it tends to bring
about. As such it differs fundamentally from a mechanical cause." "The
empirical and philosophical arguments point to the same general conclusion,
that reality is the process of the development of Mind." As a guide to
one's thinking, and as integrators of one's subconscious intuitions and
resultants, such concise formulae certainly have much value, especially
when, as here, clearly and ably expounded in the text proper. Tufts College.
GEORGE V. N. DEARBORN.
BOOKS RECEIVED
ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY. Isador H. Coriat. Pp. xvi and 428. 2d Ed. Moffat,
Yard & Co., 1914. $2.00 net.
MENTAL MEDICINE & NURSING. Robert Howland Chase. Pp. xv and 244. J. B.
Lippincott Co., 1914. $1.50.
THE TEACHING OF DRAWING. S. Polak and H. C. Whilter. Pp. 168. Warwick &
York, Inc. 85 cents.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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