The Westminster Review - v. 136 Author:Unknown Author Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: author appears to admit the extremest theories of materialism, as far as Body and Mind are concerned, in order to introduce a third element, as he puts it, "... more » born of the spirit, spirit." Several chapters are devoted to a review of modern physiology and physiological psychology, principally gathered apparently from two or three handbooks, and familiar to the readers of the International Scientific Series, to which almost all the author's reading appears to be confined. As to his theory, it is impossible to extract it from a book which repels the reader by the barbarism of its style. One instance is the curious substitution of the compound, "takes to do with," where a writer would usually say " has to do with " : " It is not with the evidences of Christianity it takes to do." This is an idiom we confess never to have met with before, and have no wish to meet again. But the work is disfigured throughout with un- grammatical as well as harsh sentences, and is plentifully besprinkled with misprints. Two sentences from the chapter on the " Mysteries of Christianity explained in Scientific Language " will be a sufficient example, but by no means the worst, of the author's style : " Christianity takes to do with the immortal soul created of conscious states, and we have seen that ' primarily' conscious states are derived from the objective world, and carry with them the emotions that accompany them at their origin. I hold it permissible to believe an Ego or soul, so defined, to be built up of luminiferous ether, which, when disembodied as such in functioning, gives expression to the conscious states developed during natural life, and the correlative of consciousness, the phenomena of which conscious states are forms." Towards the end of the book misprints increase rapidly in number, a...« less