426 NEW BOOKS. brings the conclusion that attention plays the same part in controlling processes of proximately central origin as in controlling those of peripheral origin. The conditions of the formation of association and recall are, apart from the intensity and repeatedness of the sensa- tions, practically identical with the subjective conditions of attention above mentioned. Two interesting chapters discuss the relation of attention to perception and memory. The treatment of the theories of apperception rests naturally on Leibnitz, Herbart, Wundt and Stout, and leads to the following conclusion : Every one admits that nothing beyond the limits of consciousness can serve as an explanation of the facts of consciousness, at least in psychology. But every one seems to feel also that the simplest explanation would be to assume that an external agent, called conation, apperception or will, determines mental states, rather than to imagine them determining themselves. This is evident from the constant fluctuation in the theories of the last three of the authors named. The only decision we can cling to has its funda- ment in the facts of consciousness themselves. All we can say is, that consciousness changes in certain ways and that the changes in the present stand in definite relations to those of the past and to the primitive states of consciousness. Leaving aside completely all that is not psychology, we shall resolve the difficulty perhaps by saying " ap- perception is a term which expresses the fact that every event in con- sciousness differs in some degree from what it would have been had the preceding history of the individual been different, all present circum- stances remaining identical. Apperception would then be merely a general term expressing the conditions of attention, the relation between the observed facts." The same broad conclusion results from a dis- cussion of the theories of attention, which are all found to be in- complete. " Attention is not one of these things, individually, it is all of them taken together and more still. We cannot consider feeling or the sensation of the moment as an explanation of the process of attention, even in its simplest form. To understand it we must look back to the impressions received at more distant periods of our life and to the dispositions with which man is endowed at birth." Anatomical, physio- logical and pathological theories lead on to the chapter of general con- clusions which closes the volume. Prof. Pillsbury has written a useful book. His conclusions, however, seem to me to be too broad to be useful, unless he is consistent and dismisses the problem as illusory. Attention can be influenced by past experience, heredity, the social milieu and the like, but it surely has as little itself to do with these things, as a theory of digestion as such requires a survey of all we have eaten and been. Unless the problem is illusory, there must be facts which a clear eye for the phenomenology of consciousness will see and a functional basis for these, which psychology can discover. Entirely subordinate to this chief relation are any theories which spring from the hvpothesis of evolution. H. J. WATT. Kanfs ' Privatmeinungen ' ubcr das Jenseits und die. Kant-Ausgabe der Koniglich premsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Ein Protest von LUDWIG GOLDSCHMIDT. Gotha : E. F. Thienemann. 1905. Pp. 104. Price 2s. 6d. This little book contains two essays which are essentially polemical in character, and will interest mainly those who have made a special study of Kant, and more particularly of the details of the text and the ques- tions of interpretation arising out of them.
