536 CRITICAL NOTICES: Instinct and Reason. An essay concerning the relation of Instinct to Eeason, with some special study of the nature of Eeligion. By HENRY RUTGERS MARSHALL, M.A. Macmillan Co., 1898. 8vo. Pp. xiii., 574. Price 12s. 6d. net. THAT ' the half is greater than the whole ' is in brief my impres- sion of Mr. Marshall's book. Its core of psychological thinking I take to be sound enough. That core, however, is enveloped and overlaid by metaphysical and anthropological doctrine of so ques- tionable a character that, in my humble opinion, this careful and laborious piece of writing must be judged to have virtually failed in its general aim and purpose. It may be, of course, that the ' whole,' the general purpose, ought to be condoned as having been the efficient cause of the ' half,' as having led the author to turn his attention to psychology. Surely, however, as readers of the last ten volumes of MIND will already be aware, his analytic faculty is by this time mature enough to exist by and for itself. If I might venture to advise him, therefore, I should urge him either to confine himself to a field that is certain to yield him fruit, or, if the fruit he covet be some far-reaching application of his psycho- logical lore, to undertake a more critical survey of his ultimate postulates, and to carry his study of the history of mind consider- ably further in the direction of the concrete. From the title of the book it might be presumed that its subject was concerned with the respective natures and mutual relations of Instinct and Eeason. The preface, however, informs us that the fundamental purpose of the essay is to " present " a certain conception of Eeligion, the distinctively psychological questions raised in the course of the argument being dealt with in strict subordination to this end, and, in so far as they involve technical treatment, relegated to certain special chapters. In some of these the writer fully establishes his claim to rank as an " analytic psychologist ". In other no less technical chapters, however, he .assumes the more doubtful role of " biological psychologist ". Such an one, apparently, is he who stands back from the results of his introspection and tries to take, as Mr. Spencer would phrase it, a " Biological View " of them. Now in so doing he is aiming at far more than what the author would term the " objectivica- tion " (sic) of his own personal experience by comparing it with the indirectly apprehended experiences of his fellow-creatures. His dream, in fact, is no less than to describe all the activities of human life, physical and mental, in terms of what he takes to be their biological unit, namely, the reaction of a living cell to the stimulus received from its environment. Plainly such a task, were it possible, would involve ' objectification ' with a vengeance. Possible or not, however, it is precisely this task that Mr. Marshall attempts. The inevitable consequences he boldly faces. He as- serts the " parallelism " of mental and neural action (such parallelism, however, being held not incompatible with a certain
