| Summary: | "Under a convergent variety of interests the concept of mental adjustment has assumed a larger significance and new aspects. Dr. Wells undertakes to interpret and organize the material from which insight has resulted. The fundamental biological conception of adapted conduct, as that conforming to and advancing the welfare of the individual and the race, remains. The increasing understanding of the psychical factor changes the view of the mechanisms by which such adaptation is reached in human lives. It is a complicated matter to make individuals happy, the more complicated the individual and the more complicated the circumstances that control, the greater the complexity of adjustment. The science of happiness is the most intricate of human pursuits. It is to this study that Dr. Wells makes a significant contribution. The volume moves toward a definite position in regard to the control and expression of vital trends. Such a position has a direct bearing upon ethics and education and all the regulative systems that distinguish between good and bad, between the more and less desirable. For adjustment implies value, indeed sets the standard of value. Dr. Wells attempts an analysis of the source of such standards, and an appraisal of their worth and fitness for the life that we of today must attain. With the task thus set, his procedure naturally is concerned with orderly unfoldment and presentation of detail. Beginning with the biological relations, he promptly introduces the mental factor, and presents the mind and its products as an instrument of adjustment. The use and waste of the mental trends is his theme. Right thinking is the indispensable requisite of right action. The mind's privilege is at once its power and its danger. The substitution of thoughts for realities takes us back to primitive man and the unschooled habits of his mind, to magic and superstition; it takes us collaterally to the breakdown of mind in the forms of insanity, in which the distinction of fact and fancy fades. The mechanisms of the process are absorbing. The scope of symbolism is important and receives a chapter to itself. Humor, rhetoric, magic, dreams, delusion, reflect the force at work--a common habit with vastly different outcomes. The work should find its place as an aid to the general reader, as a guide to the psychological student, whatever his practical interests or his professional purpose may be"--Introduction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved).
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