In general Dr. Gamertsfelder's criticisms add nothing to criticisms that have frequently been made; but he works out in detailed and careful fashion some of the crucial difficulties in the system. Nevertheless he leaves himself open to the reply which Dr. Bosanquet makes to his critics in his discussion concerning "Appearances and the Absolute" in the November number of this Review. For, as the preceding quotations at least suggest, he constantly tends to take finite appearances at their face value. Moreover, the careful reader will not fail to note that the disjunction between the finite and infinite experience implied in the above quotations, and many other of the author's critical assumptions, are contrary to the fundamental principle of Dr. Bosanquet's whole philosophy.
Gertrude C. Bussey.
Goucher College.
Baltimore, Md.
In this voluminous work Dr. Deschamps develops the conception, akin to that of Janet but much more thoroughly elaborated and widely applied, that the fundamental problem in all mental troubles is insufficiency and incompleteness. The mentally sick person is an asthenic: he never finishes the constructive psychic work necessary for complete adaptation to reality. The cases most amenable to psychic treatment are those where the incompleteness is on the logical plane and is due to an emotional shock (an emotion is defined as a momentary psychic incapacity to suit the reaction to the stimulus): here the patient can be reasoned with and enlightened as to the causes and mechanisms of his insufficient adaptations to reality. Freud's doctrines are, Dr. Deschamps thinks, more novel in words than in ideas, psychoanalysis having been widely practiced before his time; on the exaggeration of the sexual motive in the Freudian theory the author comments that in the Latin societies suppressions of this type are perhaps less common than in Protestant countries.
Psychic treatment has its limitations, however; where the lack of energy is manifested on a lower plane than the logical, physical means must be sought, and in all cases the most exhaustive physical diagnosis must be made. Thus the author ranges himself against such psychotherapists as Dubois. Asthenia is at bottom a defect in biological energy: the asthenic person is one who, whether the cause is accessible by physical or psychic means, has become a poor transformer of the chemical energy of his nourishment into the kinetic energy of his movements.
Margaret Floy Washburn.
Vassar College.
This little book is a translation of a late edition of Einstein's popular account of his "special" theory of relativity, and of the later and more highly
