of physics and physiology, while the larger problems, both practical and theoretical, have been persistently ruled out of the laboratories as unfit for scientific treatment. It was denied that they could be scientifically handled because they could not be subjected to exact experimental measurement. We are now in the midst of a striking reaction against this point of view. The practical problems are being attacked everywhere as problems of education, behavior, and the like. The theoretical problems, too, have recently been brought into the laboratory and successfully dealt with as problems of systematic introspection by Külpe and his pupils, and by Binet, Woodworth and others. But the question of psychological method has yet to be thoroughly worked out. The Wundtian method was definite and clear cut, modeled as it was on physico-mathematical principles. The more advanced methods are frankly tentative and incomplete.
To put the question quite simply, we may affirm a body of purely psychological phenomena which demands scientific treatment. Equally, we may deny that science, in the broadest sense, can work alone with mathematical formulæ. The descriptive stage precedes the exact stage in every science. This stage necessarily involves analysis, and analysis involves classification. The logical outcome of classification is an irreducible element. The objection to psychological elements has been that they are not real. It apparently does not occur to the critics of psychological analysis that the elements of the chemist are perhaps not real, nor even necessarily irreducible, as has been evident in the successive pushing back from molecule to atom, and from atom to corpuscle.
It is, indeed, doubtful, in the light of modern research, if the conscious complex is reducible to sensational elements as was formerly held. But this by no means prevents the search for other elements of a different nature to supplement or even displace those of the early associationists. My own conclusion is that psychology may be no less a pure and independent science because its methods are as yet uncertain, and its results incomplete. It was the lasting merit of William James, the psychologist, that he insisted on a broad and catholic tolerance in his presentation of the problems and guiding principles of the young science, and that he denied the ultimate value of a narrow objective treatment. I do not find in my reading of the Principles any indications of lack of faith in man's ability to handle psychological problems in a true scientific spirit.
University of Tennesee.
Those who are familiar with Professor Baldwin's earlier writings will find in this latest volume little that is new, it being only, as the author himself tells us, "in a sense a sort of popular resumé" of his own larger and more reasoned works.
The two most fundamental doctrines of the book are brought out clearly
