On another occasion I may give my own views, and content myself now with saying that I have followed with the greatest interest and with much (if not unlimited) satisfaction the treatment of the subject at the hands of the genial, large-minded Danish professor.
The work of M. FOUILLÉE which I announced in my last communication (to your other magazine), bears the title of _L'Evolutionnisme des Idées-Forces_. It is a voluminous work; and it contains a great many things—perhaps too many. We have from M. Fouillée, the promise of a constructive work—_La Psychologie des Idées-Forces_, in two volumes; but his present book is chiefly devoted to the labor of demolition. As contemporaneous psychology has its weak sides, and as M. Fouillée is a skilful critic, you may imagine that his attacks upon Wundt, Herbert Spencer, Taine, Ribot, W. James, and numbers of others, both living and dead, are conducted with spirit. The successful fulfilment of the task he has set himself would necessitate the ruin of the hypothesis, avowed or concealed, that has supported psychological research as well as furnished occasional excellent conclusions; for it is the aim of M. Fouillée to overthrow what he has ingeniously termed the theory of "idea-reflexes," and the place once cleared, to substitute for it the theory of "idea-forces."
The chief feature of the book is therefore M. Fouillée's criticisms of the theories "that make consciousness the intermittent illumination of a mechanism"; of the theories "that reduce the sentiments and the emotions to simple reverberations of organic movements and even of expressive movements"; of those finally "that make of desire and the feeling of effort, simple passive muscular sensations, the reflexions of movements already executed." Solid objections are not wanting in these pages. M. Fouillée does not refrain from playing when he has a good hand.
So far so good. But—we ask—would psychology have ever made any advances if it lacked the hypothesis that M. Fouillée condemns? And, as a matter of fact, are the majority of psychologists really thus irretrievably bent upon establishing a mechanical explanation of life, a theory of "man as automaton"? The truth of the matter is that the opposed point of view has rendered no results, and that in taking consciousness for our central position we too easily go astray in fanciful speculations. On the other hand, by the endeavor to grasp the bonds of mind through the medium of the body, it _has_ been found possible to throw some light upon unobserved facts. It would not do to let this be too quickly forgotten; and if some have seen fit to pass beyond and to attempt to reduce the Universe to a mechanism, imprudent saltations of this character into open materialistic metaphysics concern them alone.