CONTENTS: - The Monist, Vol. 1, 1890-1891 - 77

The Origin of Music. This article is intended as a postscript to Mr. Spencer's essay on "The Origin and Function of Music," included in his Essays, Scientific, Political, and Speculative, of which he is preparing a final edition. It is a reply to Mr. Darwin, who supposes music to have originated from a particular class of vocal noises, the amatory class, instead of, as Mr. Spencer asserts, its being derived from the sounds which the voice emits under excitement, eventually gaining this or that character according to the kind of excitement. After considering various objections by Mr. Edmund Gurney and others, Mr. Spencer concludes: "The origin of music as the developed language of motion seems to be no longer an inference but simply a description of the fact."

Mr. James Sully deals with Differentiation, Assimilation, and Association as the intellectual constituents in the process of Mental Elaboration. Differentiation is considered first as a process of marking off, by means of special adjustments of attention, particular sensations; followed by Discrimination, which involves change of psychical state, the dependence of mental life on which has been formulated as the Law of Relativity. Assimilation, described as a mode of unification or integration, is treated of under the headings, Psychological Nature of Likeness; Automatic Assimilation; Recognition; and Transition to Comparative Assimilation. Association is the "process of psychical combination or integration which binds together presentative elements occurring together or in immediate succession." This supposes Retention or the tendency of a sensation to persist, and Reproduction, or the reappearance "in consciousness" of the impression under a new representative form. The three processes of Differentiation, Assimilation, and Association do not follow each other, but are closely interconnected.

Part II. of Volkmann's Psychology deals with the problem of Time and Space, and with the subjects of Space of Time (Zeitraum), Motion, Number, and Intuition. "Out of sensations intuitions are evolved in consequence of the properties immanent in the sensations." While their localisation progresses in the region of the more strongly toned sensations, projection, or the "assignment of sensations to the external world," goes on simultaneously in the region of toneless sensations. By the addition of "consciousness of dependence in having the sensation," there is the completion of the presentation of the External Thing as thing. Illusions are divided into two classes; namely, 'illusions of internal perception' and 'illusions of sense.' The Ego is purely a psychical result of the soul "becoming conscious of an interaction between one of its presentations and the most ramified of its presentation-masses." Self-consciousness is defined as "internal perception within the Ego." The mind is then dealt with as thinking, feeling, desiring, and willing. Ethical feeling is a kind of æsthetic feeling, distinguished from others by the peculiarity of its objective basis, which is the actual will of the subject. Moral freedom is to have the will determined by reason. Psychological freedom permanently extended over the whole of volition is Character; its opposite is Passion.

Mr. Orange furnishes a different explanation of Berkeley's ethical system from that given by Professor Fraser, in a note to the third dialogue of Alciphron (ii. 107), and points out its agreement with Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge. "Moral laws are laws of nature; but there is no value or force in them as laws, save in so far as they are the orderly expression of God's ideas." Man's ideas are true or good, when the human spirit is at one with the divine. Both in natural and moral philosophy the laws of nature are to be attained by the use of reason.

Prof. Robertson draws attention to the concessions involved in Münsterberg's idea of 'Muscular Sense.' To the term 'muscle-sensation' no exception can be taken, "provided it is meant for no more than mere external designation, as when we speak of 'eye-sensation,' 'skin-sensation,' or the like," and is not called 'sensation of movement.' Münsterberg finds that a whole class of factors have been overlooked, or hardly regarded, by previous inquirers into 'Time-Sense.' These are sensations (or representations) of muscular tension, by synthesis of which with sense-elements (sounds by preference) time-apprehension is explicable. He is struck particularly with the part played in his experiments by the breath-rhythm, and "it seems impossible to doubt that breathing has a prerogative position among the sense-factors concerned in the estimation of short time-intervals." The name 'Time-Sense' has through Münsterberg's investigations "more justification than it ever got from its inventors, for whom it has marked only the apparent immediacy of time-apprehension."

In his criticism of Mr. Spencer's theory of the derivation of space Prof. John Watson lays down as the fundamental position of Transcendentalism, or Idealism, as he prefers to call it, "that the universe is intelligible, and that man in virtue of his intelligence is capable of grasping it in its essential nature. It therefore rejects as unmeaning the doctrine of Mr. Spencer, that we know reality to be unknowable." While recognising that Mr. Spencer and others have done good service in drawing attention to certain outward aspects of the evolution of mind, Professor Watson "concludes that no psychology can be adequate which does not recognise that perception is not the mere occurrence of transient feelings, but the first step in that recognition of the true nature of reality which culminates in the comprehension of the world as a single organic unity of which the source and explanation is intelligence."

Mr. Stout points out, in reply to Dr. Pikler (Mind, No. 59), that the sole aim of his article on "The Genesis of the Cognition of Physical Reality" (Mind, No. 57) was to trace "the genesis of the presentation of physical reality as it appears to the ordinary consciousness: not as it may be modified, and perhaps rectified, by the reflective criticism of this or that philosopher," and that what he urged against Mill was simply that "he has confounded his own philosophical view of physical reality with the view which men ordinarily take when they are not in a philosophical mood."

It is shown by Mr. Sutherland that in the utilitarian ultimate conception there is, in addition to "the greatest happiness, plus an arithmetical truth," the element of absolute justice, the existence of which requires that "all subsidiary rights as means to greatest general happiness should at utmost be classed under relative justice." (London: Williams & Norgate.)

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ETHICS. October, 1890. Vol. I. No. I.