8 to 10 pages

BOOK REVIEWS 313

is worthy of a careful examination by everyone with systematic interests in physiological psychology.

E. G. WEVER. Princeton Psychological Laboratory.

HARTSHORNE, CHARLES. The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensa- tion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934. Pp. xiv+288. The author of this book is philosophically an absolutist and a

totalitarian. His absolutistic belief about the universe is that it is continuous or dimensional instead of discontinuous and atomistic. As a totalitarian Hartshorne believes that the universe is not only psychic (he describes himself as a panpsychist) but ultimately affec- tive. For him, Gefiihl ist alles. His preoccupation with the psy- chology of sensation is to establish what he calls the theory of the affective continuum. This theory may be formulated in the proposi- tion that the stuff of which the entire content of consciousness is composed is affective tone (p. 7).

The argument of the book takes the form of an attack upon the Helmholtzian doctrine that the different modes of sensory qualities are irreducibly heterogeneous. For the atomic and separatist theory Hartshorne wants to substitute one of dimensions. The grays are not molecular combinations of white and black atoms, but rather points on a line. Grays are the intermediate values of a single variable, of which the extremes are black and white. The same thing is true for the chromatic series. In this respect the author aligns himself with Goethe rather than with Newton. The further develop- ment of this dimensional idea is that colors, sounds, and other sensa- tion qualities are degrees of a single continuum.

But not only are sensations all continuous; there is no funda- mental differentiation between them and feelings. For example, for the author there, are only four real primary colors: scarlet (warmth-activity), buttercup yellow (brightness and joyfulness), sea-green (cold-passivity), and violet (dullness and sorrowfulness). The joyfulness or gaiety of yellow, it must be understood, is the yellowness of yellow (p. 7). The principle behind all this is the essential unity of the mind and its contents. In being aware of a color one is at the same time feeling a mood, while both feeling and awareness are the same as the color and the feeling quality.

Hartshorne claims to find a basis for his continuity view in the experimental findings of psychologists, although he really relies as

314 BOOK REVIEWS

much upon the evidence of word-usage (for example, pp. 58, 66r 68, 73, 77, 85, 88, 202, 233). Of course he rejects the evidence of word-usage when presented by Brentano (p. 139), but is just as selective in experimental material. For example, Bichowsky's and Nafe's experiments are acceptable because the former is presumed to show how feelings become objectified as sensations, while the latter is taken to break down the distinction between feelings and sensa- tions. On the other hand, an experiment of Burnett and Dallenbach on the experience of heat is not so agreeable to the author unless he can reinterpret it to show the comparability of different sensory modes.

It would be a mistake to dismiss this attractively made volume as mere philosophical speculation, for it has the merit of showing how much philosophical speculation there is in the psychology of sensa- tion. Nor can its value be mitigated as an excellent illustration of how careful experimental work can be assimilated to and made evi- dence for some sort of philosophical speculation.

One may, however, complain that this little book does not give any indication that in recent years psychology has reached so high an objective peak that it is now possible to describe psychological phenomena without dissipating them in a darkness in which all cats are gray. What shall we do when a subject describes a temperature experience as a large, dense, gray square with a strip of gray smoke at the top, as a protocol of Burnett and Dallenbach indicates one subject did? Do we have to interpret this to mean that warmth and cold and gray squares and smoke are all at bottom psychic feelings? So far as scientific psychology—which investigates the concrete behavior of observable things—is concerned, the response to a warm or cold object certainly can be satisfactorily described as an inter- action between an organism and an object with all its properties, quite in the same manner that the interaction between hydrogen sulphate and sodium chloride is described by a chemist.

J. R. KANTOR. Indiana University.

GILLILAND, A. R. Genetic Psychology. New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1933. Pp. xii+351. The evolutionary point of view and the application of the genetic

method have been familiar since Lamarck and common to all the sciences since Darwin. In psychology likewise, the brilliant specu- lations of Spencer were a preface to the formal acceptance of an