Handbuch der vergleichenden Psychologie

Abstract

THE present is often said to be a psychological age, and certainly the recent rapid multiplication of psychological books and lectures would seem to justify the above statement. One happy result of the stimulus which popularity has given to the production of psychological literature has been to make that literature extensive and varied. Nevertheless a survey of that literature shows that the psychologist's library is by no means adequate to his needs. There are at least two regrettable deficiencies, deficiencies which are more obvious in English than in German psychological literature. There is, on one hand, no large-size and generally accredited work on theoretical or pure psychology, a work sympathetically mediatory between the several divergent schools of contemporary psychological thought/a work which provides a basis of theory for the co-ordination of the as yet somewhat scattered results reached in the various fields of psychological research. There are in existence many first drafts of and essaystowards such a work, but none is detailed and comprehensive enough, apart from the fact that none of them can claim anything like general agreement; and this deficiency, however unavoidable, however much a symptom of scientific health, is obviously very disconcerting to students.

Handbuch der vergleichenden Psychologie.

Herausgegeben von Gustav Kafka. Band 1: Die Entwick-lungsstufen des Seelenlebens. Pp. viii + 526. Band 2: Die Funktionen des normalen Seelenlebens. Pp. viii + 513. Band 3: Die Funktionen des abnormen Seelenlebens. Pp. viii + 515. (München: Ernest Reinhardt, 1922.)