AN INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY.
An Introduction to Psychology. By Mary Whiton Calkins. (Macmillau and Co. 8s. 6d.)—This is, for a philosophical work, wonderfully interesting and—which perhaps comes to the same thing—wonderfully American. The writer does not, indeed, pre- tend that it is quite original. On the contrary, one of the dis- tinctive theories of the book—the existence of elements of con- sciousness which are neither sensational nor "effective "—is, she allows, simply a developed and systematised statement of the teaching of Professor William James, and the frequent quotations from the "Principles of Psychology" are better reading than any original paragraph in the book. Of course even such an irre- pressibly lively writer as Mrs. (or Miss) Calkins cannot help a certain portion of her book being "dry." A large portion of it is devoted to "a study of the normal civilised and adult consciousness," and that means a detailed account of visual and auditory sensations, of the sensations of taste and smell, pressure, pain, and temperature. It is in the second part of the werk, treating of "concrete conscious experiences," such as perception, imagination, thought, emotion, volition, and belief, and "typical personal relations," such as" the religious conscious- ness" and "the social consciousness," that the author becomes most interesting. It is not often that such a book draws on fiction thus :—" It would be a mistake to suppose that malice and envy exhaust the nature of the emotional experience of mingled sympathy and egotism. Barrie has shown us a perfect embodi- ment of mixed emotion in the figure of Sentimental Tommy. Never was anybody more sympathetic than Tommy, boy and man. He entered into the feelings of friend and of foe alike; divined and shared in Elspeth's loneliness, Aaron's bitterness, Grizel's passion and scorn, and Corp's loyalty. He never could have been what he was to all of them had he not, up to a certain point, shared actually in their feelings. And yet all this sympathetic communion with others was merely a stimulus to his own private emotions, a ministry to the luxury of his self-occupation, whether delicious pleasure or equally delicious misery." It may be objected to such an illustration, as it was objected to Mr. Barrie's story, that Sentimental Tommy was an unreality, an impossibility, if not a monster. This objection, however, does not impair the felicity of the author's comparison. But the book abounds in happy interjections and other "asides," and in quotations from such poets as Shelley and Bourke Marston, and may be described as psychology, if not exactly made easy, at all events rendered vastly entertaining.
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