difficult, not to say cruel, to avoid all mention of Spencer in this connection; but the author has in previous works abundantly acknowledged his manifest indebtedness to the author of the Synthetic Philosophy; and in the present instance he has a large order to fill within the limits of less than four hundred pages, and he never deflects the reader's attention from the main course of his argument by a single foot-note or reference.
Not to pause over the advantages and disadvantages of such serene pursuit of one's own way, there can be no doubt of the attractiveness of the volume for the general reader. Of its value for the more specific purpose for which it is written, I am incompetent to speak. Dr. Mercier is a well-known psychiatric physician and the author of several psychological treatises written primarily for alienists and from the stand point of the alienist; and he here reiterates his 'favorite tenet' that a systematic knowledge of conduct as a whole is especially important for the study and treatment of insanity, which is, in the main, disorder of conduct. That is a proposition not likely to be disputed. But more lies behind. The author thinks that while alienists are open to the grave reproach of having neglected the study of the normal mind as a necessary preliminary to knowledge of the abnormal, this neglect of normal psychology on the part of alienists is in the main due to the method of introspective psychologists who altogether ignore the association between the phenomena of mind and those of nervous action and conduct.[1]
The fact that Dr. Mercier writes as an alienist and that the foundations of his psychology "are built on the ground prepared by Mr. Herbert Spencer" not only indicates his point of view, but it explains, if it does not justify, some statements that may otherwise appear paradoxical to the general reader. If one's aim is to find explanations that are not psychological but biological, it is of course true that in this connection an explanation of conduct in psychological terms is irrelevant (p. 7); but this of itself throws no light upon the statement that in treating of conduct it is "desirable to eliminate, as far as possible, references to mental states and processes" (p. xix). This statement is not less paradoxical, but it is more intelligible, when we know that the 'psychological unit' is regarded as a nervous process and mental states as purely epiphenomenal. Again, if there are some acts which are not "initiated or directed by the will," that is a good reason for not making "the intervention of volition the ground of the
- ↑ Cf. The Nervous System and the Mind, to the Introduction of which I am indebted for some of the statements that follow.
