to hand: Holt rightly rejects the abstractions of the ordinary sensationalistic and ideistic psychology. When, however—in this study of moral behavior—he is discussing a social situation, then, though he neither acknowledges nor even realizes the fact, he is taking as primary unit of his psychology neither the reflex arc nor the wish, but rather the morally behaving, wishing, willing, self—the “mother” or “father” or “boy” of his masterly illustrations. Thus, to take almost random examples, when Holt says[1] that “the child is frustrated, but not instructed,” or when he insists[2] “that one untruthful word of father or mother will often undermine the child’s confidence forever,” his teaching gains its force from the implicit reference to frustrated or confiding child and to truthful or untruthful parents, not as higher organisms of integrated reflexes, but as purposing selves in social relation.
Wellesley College.
Reviews and Abstracts of Literature
Intercourse Between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome. H. G. Rawzinson. Cambridge, England: University Press; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1916. Pp. viii +196.
However much “the meeting of East and West” has become a cant phrase, it retains a depth of fascinating mystery. For the student many great problems attend the contact of the two worlds in ancient times, especially if he seek to determine what religious and philosophical ideas in each were borrowed from the other. To our existing bibliography of Greek references to India, we can not, of course, look for important additions. Indian literature also has been pretty well ransacked for its meager allusions to the Mediterranean countries. But in excavation of old Helleno-Asiatic sites, the surface of the earth—metaphorically as literally—has hardly yet been scratched. The Greco-Buddhist sculptures of Gandhara are indeed well known and many interesting proofs of Western influence have been found in Chinese Turkestan by Stein, Von Lecoq, and Grünwedel, but except on coins there is a deplorable lack of inscriptions or other writings that might afford us intimate knowledge of Alexander’s border colonies. Every archeologist should pray his stone gods to soften the heart of the Amir of Afghanistan to permit exploration at Balkh, where the edifices of Bactria lie concealed.
