résumé, tends to place on the same plane of importance results of very various worth. The use of a third set of type would have greatly assisted the reader, at the cost (as there are comparatively few foot-notes) of but a slight defacement of the page.
But these faults are not essential. More serious is an objection suggested by a glance at the Table of Contents. We find there references to paragraphs dealing with the relations of the affective process to bodily states, to expressions of volition and to sensation or idea, and with its dependence on ideational content. Nothing is said as to a possible correlation with stimulus.[1] And yet I believe it can be shown, that the quality of sense-feeling is directly conditioned by stimulus-intensity: while the other properties of stimulus either admit of translation into terms of intensity (time, and, though not so simply, space); or are inoperative as regards affective quality, except in so far as their differences imply different points of origin of the feeling-curve above the intensity-abscissa, – different values for just noticeable pleasure, – and, consequently, a displacement of the whole movement along this abscissa, from liminal pleasure to pain (quality). It is impossible to set down one's reasons for adopting such a theory, within the limits of a review. The maintaining of it would simply involve, in many cases, the alteration of Dr. Lehmann's word "idea" to "stimulus": in others, there is more at issue than a choice of expressions.
We may pass over the brief Introduction, which contains paragraphs on the development of the doctrine of Feeling from Sulzer to Wundt, and proceed at once to consider the first chapter of Section I: The relation of Feeling to Sensation and Idea. The initial difficulty is, of course, terminological. The author reserves the word "feeling" for the concrete mental process; the pleasure and unpleasantness which are the outcome of psychological abstraction he calls "emotional elements" or "feeling-tones." Neither phrase seems so good as the terms "affection," "affective elements." To the orthodox or Kantian theory of Feeling, as here stated in outline, and to the objections urged against the Herbartian position, I can readily subscribe: though I do not think that the latter could be affiliated to any of the modern forms of the Kantian view (p. 31). Dr. Lehmann is admirably clear as to the nature of pain (p. 39). Pain is neither sensation, nor abstract affection, – unpleasantness: it is a fusion of unpleasantness with sensation, and is always specially colored by its sensational constituent. The reaction-times
- ↑ See, however, p. 144 ff.
