An outline of psychology / [William McDougall].

  • McDougall, William, 1871-1938.
Date:
[1923]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: An outline of psychology / [William McDougall]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ii by every science; and they have to justify themselves by their successful working. Without them, not only science but all intelligent discourse is impossible, whether about human na¬ ture or any other topic. The discussion of experience, of its conditions and its expressions, necessarily makes use of such classificatory hypotheses. But the question remains—Should we restrict the use of hypothesis as much as possible ? Or is it advantageous deliberately to devise and use hypotheses that go beyond the bare minimum necessary for description, hypotheses of a more gratuitous nature, designed to explain the facts we describe ? Here opinions differ very widely. Some authors pro¬ fess a horror of hypotheses, and pretend to proscribe them from all science. This is mere ignorance and pedantry. We have seen that the hypotheses invoked in the use of general terms are inevitable; and the more far-reaching, more deliberately designed hypotheses, which are commonly distinguished as explanatory, are not really of a different nature; for description and explana¬ tion are not really distinct processes; explanation is only descrip¬ tion in terms more general and more abstract than those of simple description. In making and using such hypotheses, it is all-important to be aware of what we are doing and to be ready to modify or abandon them at need. If we maintain this attitude, hypotheses are great aids to discovery, and, in so far as they are well designed, they greatly simplify description and facilitate explanation. Some Historical Hypotheses When psychology began to separate itself as a science from the popular and literary traditions, it did not start with a clean sheet in respect of hypotheses. Not only was it obliged to use and to revise, as best it could, the classificatory hypotheses of common speech; but also it found in these traditions certain hypotheses of the more far-reaching or explanatory kind, which, though vague and ill-designed for scientific purposes, were so firmly established that it was difficult to escape their influence. The very name of the science embodies such a hypothesis; for it implies that the science is concerned to study the soul or psyche, which for long ages had been regarded as a vital prin-