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THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY. By W. B. Pillsbury, Ph.D. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc. 1929. $3.50.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Commander A. H. Rooks, U. S. Navy Modern navies are very complicated affairs, and they daily grow more so. It is said that there is no branch of science unrepresented amongst us, and that we demand practitioners of most of the arts as well. We need technical knowledge of every conceivable variety and are forced by our increasing responsibilities to so saturate our minds with it that we are apt to lose sight of our primary individual functions—leadership, the art of command, the management of men; the elemental business of so directing the activities of our men, and of so arousing their spirit and enthusiasm, that they will form an invincible body. We have had such leadership in the past, and we will continue to have it, but even so there will always be room f or improving its quality down through the ranks and files. Improvement will come through a better understanding of the nature of men, and it is the psychologist who has undertaken to instruct us in that. So we share in the present tremendous popular interest in psychology, finding it useful in our art, and fascinating in itself. There is nothing so important in the life of a man as what he thinks about himself and his fellows, and, specifically, about that part of him which is the most mysterious and the most baffling, his mental processes.
We are all practical psychologists of sorts: we observe the behavior of ourselves and our associates, attempt to classify the knowledge thus obtained, to educe therefrom laws which will assist us in predicting future behavior, and then to modify our own actions accordingly. But, admittedly, this process is imperfect, and as life becomes more complex our predictions and our adjustments become increasingly unsatisfactory. So we find the booksellers shelves crowded with volumes on the mystery of psychology, promising to solve our problems. Many of these are of the type which set out to transform morons into intellectual giants—bilge of the muddiest variety. Some, however, are attempts, worthy of our profoundest interest, at popular expositions of psychological systems which are the result of sincere, patient, and laborious investigation, and which, while incomplete, add something of value to the mass of knowledge which will some day be sufficiently organized to be worthy of the name of a science.
Dr. Pillsbury’s History of Psychology makes a valuable contribution, I believe, to the organization of that knowledge. The publishers, who specialize in this sort of literature, state that it can be relied upon to present an accurate account of the more important events in the development of psychological thinking. Dr. Pillsbury is a graduate and Ph.D. of Cornell; he has been a professor and lecturer at Cornell, Columbia, the Sorbonne, and the University of Michigan; in 1910-11 he was president of the American Psychological Association; and he is the author of several other books on his specialty. This book was written for laymen and therefore may be reviewed by a layman, I hope, without impertinence.
Unfortunately for those of us who approach psychology hoping for a clear understanding of ourselves and of our relation to the world we live in, the psychologists do not agree among themselves. There are hundreds of theories, but most of them are merely that—theories, untested, controversial, unorganized. There is a great mass of literature, but to one not gifted with Job’s patience or Herbert Spencer’s ability to generalize, it appears as a chaos. Frequently brilliant in its separate parts, it lacks a comprehensive, acceptable system. There are probably no two psychologists who agree completely as to the nature of man. There are one-man systems, largely theoretical, incomplete, and certain to the attacked by others of the profession. Nowhere can you find a scientific exposition of the central problems; nowhere is it stated succinctly: this is the nature of man, this the way his nervous system reacts, this is how and why he thinks, and these are the causes and motives behind his behavior.
H. L. Mencken, in a particularly savage attack on the military, says that the art of the soldier calls for the least professional competency, that the simplest problems of his ancient business flabbergast him. But Mencken’s slur is no more true of the military than of the other professions. So, too, do the simplest problems of his art flabbergast the psychologist—and the biologist and the economist for that matter. And with all due respect to Mr. Mencken, the editor, if the public is able to arrive at an approximate agreement as to the precise meaning of the thousands of books and periodicals flooding the stream of literature, it is more due to the resiliency of the human mind than to the skill of those who so solemnly undertake to edit them.
The biologist cannot tell us what life is; the psychologist has failed to tell us the how and why of its behavior; and the philosophers cannot agree as to what gives it value and significance. It would be cheap and absurd to condemn them en masse for these failures, for they are dealing with phenomena of extraordinary complexity. But it is equally as cheap and absurd to condemn the military for their failure promptly to extricate the nations from the bloody and dangerous angles into which their leaders sometimes hurl them; they are dealing with problems as complex as those of the biologist and the psychologist, for they, too, are dealing with life itself.
Dr. Pillsbury begins his account with the earliest speculations as to the nature of man. Psychology was at first merely an unimportant branch of philosophy, as, indeed, were all the sciences, and was very little differentiated from philosophy until the beginning of the nineteenth century. The very earliest theories credited man with a mind or soul as an active principle superior to, and working to control, the body. Plato described it in detail, and discussed its faculties. He also attacked the problem of knowledge; for him, ideas were the prototypes of things, that existed before objects in the universe or in the mind of God, and were part of the original endowment of the soul before any experience. At the other end of the history of psychology we find the behaviorists denying the soul and even consciousness, and asserting that the human infant is born without any innate ideas or instincts and with only three emotions, fear, rage, and love, all else being acquired by contact with the environment. Between these extremes lie all shades of opinion, and the casual reader is warned that it will be no light task to undertake their mastery. Among the older theorists we find the faculty psychologists, the atomists, the associationists, the sensationalists, the empiricists, and so on to many another; among the moderns there are the structuralists, the functionalists, the psychoanalysts, the behaviorists, the hormic school, the Gestalt school, and the understanding school.
Dr. Pillsbury gives a resume of the theories of each of these schools, and although he writes as an historian rather than as a critic, what is of great importance to the layman, a perspective by which to judge their relative importance. Of all the modern schools, psychoanalysis probably has had the greatest popular discussion. Of it he writes: “It stands as a strange episode in the history of psychology but one that has not been without many beneficial by-products.” And it is interesting, too, to hear him say of James’ Principles of Psychology: “The book is probably the most interesting work on psychology ever written…The most striking of the chapters are those on habit, on the self, on emotion, on will, and on instincts…Any one of these could be recommended to the general reader, the interest of the material itself being its own reward.”
In spite of its chaotic nature as a science, m spite of its numerous and mutually antagonistic schools, psychology has much of value to us as practical leaders and organizers of large bodies of men. There is vast room for improvement in the quality of individual leadership, in the reduction of offense against military and civil law, and in the maintenance of a high morale and esprit de corps throughout the Navy. Will someone of patience and ability work through the mass of facts and theories, selecting the good and rejecting the bad, and organize it into a system for the attainment of those ends? It can be done, and should be. But, unfortunately, it would be a heavy task and might bring its author little reward, for as Dr. Pillsbury says in the closing sentences of his book:
The enumeration and description of the present- day schools show that there is no lack of variety of opinion. If in the world of scientific theory, as in the evolution of living species, the appearance of a great number of “sports” is the necessary antecedent of advance through survival of the fit, psychology is in no danger of stagnation. Fortunately it is not in the province of the historian to prophesy which is likely to survive.
FOREIGN DIPLOMACY IN CHINA, 1894-1900. By Philip Joseph. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. 1928. $4.50.
Reviewed by Brockholst Livingston
It is certainly advisable for naval officers to be fully informed of the background of diplomacy in China. The desires of foreign nations may at any moment kindle into flame the smouldering remains of interactional strife. Who knows but that when this appears in print, the war which some have seen coming will have flared into reality?
This volume by Dr. Joseph is an admirable work, even if it may be in parts slightly biased, and supplies a handy resume of the Chinese question of the period. A feature of it is the prominence given the navies of the world in shaping the methods of carrying out the policies formulated by the foreign offices. In discussing the German acquisition of Kiaochow, the author quotes from a writer of that nation who says: “Up till now it has been necessary to refrain from utilizing such opportunities [as the condition of the_ missionaries] because the Navy, whose decision must be final for the conduct of foreign politics, has not yet arrived at a definite decision on the question [of a site for a naval base].” Dr. Joseph himself has this to say in regard to certain “telegraphic instructions of the gravest character” received by the British minister to China, which if necessary he “should not hesitate to deliver,” that “the presence of the British fleet in Chinese waters was a sufficient intimation to the Tsungli Yamen of what the character of these instructions might be.” He states further that within sixteen days, “they [the Chinese] formally agreed to the British demand…” Such is the strength of sea power.
While the book contains much information of intrinsic value, it is regretted the author felt compelled to enter the realm of fancy in discoursing on such points as the compensation the United States received from Great Britain in return for benevolent neutrality in the South African War and the unimpaired maintenance of Britain’s position and policy in China.
Two nations seem to stand out prominently in the affairs of China. “In her eagerness to fulfill her continental territorial aspirations, Japan had created a new international problem of great dimensions—The Problem of China.” And, in the estimation of this writer, the actions of the Russian government “were merely quickening the speed with which they proposed to bring China under their domination.” Recent history stands as proof of Dr. Joseph’s conclusions.
The closing words of the book may, perhaps, be more easily questioned than others. The author writes:
…without the constant efforts of British statesmen on behalf of the “open-door” policy it is hardly likely that America’s proposal would have met with success. In all probability she would not have been admitted to the markets of China. The diplomatic battle which had won the assurances of the powers for the “open-door” had been fought by the British Foreign Office and not by the American State Department. The success was, in fact, a victory for the British policy.