SOURCE: A review of Man and His Works, in The Modern Language Review, Vol. 40, No. 3, July, 1945, pp. 149-50.

In the following review, Potter finds the lectures collected in Man and His Works “eminently readable: shrewd, witty and vivacious.”

The William James Lectures, delivered recently at Harvard by Edward Lee Thorndike, have now been published in an attractive volume bearing the comprehensive title Man and His Works. These lectures are eminently readable: shrewd, witty and vivacious. Their themes range from the inherited causative agents or ‘genes’ of the mind to the laws of man's ‘modifiability’, human relations in general, and the psychology of government, punishment and welfare. Two lectures out of ten are devoted to the psychology of language. Seeing that they occupy a central position in this book (Chapters IV and V) and that they are from the pen of a world-famous experimentalist, we approach them with expectation...