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LÉVY-BRUHL, L., Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures. Felix Alcan, Paris, 1918. 3rd ed. 461p. Rebound. Spine gilt titled. Pages yellowed. Signature on title page. ‘This important book will doubtless find many readers; nut so much because of its importance, as because it falls within that interesting borderland which lies between the loosely delimited provinces of sociology, anthropology, psychology and the history of religions. It is written from the point of view of the French sociological school represented by M. Durkheim and hist collaborators of ‘L’Année Sociologique’, and its object is to seek precisely what are the directive principles of the mentality of primitive peoples and how these principles make their presence felt in institutions and practices. The author thinks he has been able to determine in what respects the mental mechanism of primitive men differs from ours, and to establish the most general laws of its operations. He thinks that ethnologists and anthropologists have hitherto neglected the social nature of the facts to be explained. This social nature is expressed by the term ‘representation collectives’. (…) Collective representations are common to members of a social group, they are transmitted from generation to generation, they have their own peculiar laws and do not obey the laws of a psychology founded upon an analysis of the individual subject. They impose themselves upon individuals and awaken sentiments of respect, hope, fear, adoration, etc., towards objects which are regarded as possessing occult powers capable of acting upon members of the social group (…). The mentality of primitive men is ‘mystical’, because the reality in which they move is itself mystical. Because they attribute mystical powers to everything, they do not perceive anything as we do. The mystical properties of objects and beings make an integral part of the primitive man’s representations. (…) When the collective representations of primitive men imply the presence of these properties, nothing will dissuade them from it, since it is perhaps the nature of these properties not to manifest themselves to perception. Hence the primitive mentality is impervious to experience (…). It is also pre logical. (…) It does not obey the laws of our logic; but the collective representations of the lower societies are connected by what we may call (…, the ‘law of participation.’ (…) beings and objectives can ben (…) at the same time themselves and other than themselves. (…) The essential theses that M. Lévy-Bruhl attempts to establish are: First, that the institutions, the practices, the beliefs of primitive men imply a pre logical and mystical mentality which is oriented otherwise than ours; and second, that the collective representations and the relations of these representations which constitute this mentality are ruled by the law of participation, and as such are indifferent to the logical law of contradiction. (…) While the author is quite right in emphasizing the psychological roots and also the collective character of social phenomena, I think he overestimates his own originality and exaggerates the difference between the mentality of the lower societies and our own. (…) For him, the significance of the study of collective representations and their relations among primitive men, lies in the conviction that this study will be able to throw light upon the genesis of our categories and our logical principles, and thus lead to a new and positive theory of knowledge founded upon the comparative method. (…) There is no doubt that he accentuates the difference between the mental functions of the lower and the higher societies. (…) I do not feel that his careful and comprehensive study of mental functions of the lower races impairs, or tends to impair, the validity of the belief in the essential identity of the human mind. Rather, it tends to confirm this belief (…); his conclusion is that logical and pre logical elements coexist in the apparent unity of the thinking subject (…).(GEORGE S. PATTON in The Philosophical Review, 1912, pp.455-60). From the library of Professor Carl Deroux. € 34.50 (Antiquarian)