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.

    54/490 (page 30)
    and Newton and Faraday, of Herman Lotze, of Leibnitz and Plato and Wordsworth, and of all the great poets, an august company of great men who refused to “lay the intellect to rest upon a pillow of obscure ideas,” whose voices still ring down the ages, insisting that Man is more than mechanism and may yet be master of his fate. The Assumptions of the Reflex Theory Thus warned and encouraged, the student may be prepared to give due weight to the following reflections. All the varieties of psychology which propose to abdicate in favor of a mechan¬ istic physiology, which propose to replace the hypothesis of a mind, a soul, a self, a subject, an experiencer, by that of a brain or a bodily organism working on strictly mechanical or physical principles (that is to say, behaviorism, sensationism, associa- tionism, presentationism), may be conveniently classed together as mechanistic psychologies.1 All of these are based upon cer¬ tain assumptions which, though they have a certain plausibility, have not been justified by the best efforts of those who make use of them so confidently. The chief of these assumptions are: (i) that mechanistic physiology will at some remote date prove adequate to the task that lies before it, namely, the working out of a complete description and explanation of the bodily processes of organisms (including the human organism) in terms of the mechanistic principles of physics and chemistry; (2) that it is, or may become, possible to give an intelligible account of the relation between the facts of experience and the facts of behavior, in terms compatible with such mechanistic physiology. Let us examine briefly these two assumptions. The assump¬ tion which underlies mechanistic physiology is part of a wider twofold assumption which underlies the whole of mechanistic biology; namely, that the mechanistic description of the in¬ organic world is in principle correct, and that organisms have 1 These psychologies are not necessarily mechanistic. Any one of them might be combined with a belief in the reality of purposive action. But they all lend themselves readily to alliance with the mechanistic view of organisms which denies the reality of purposive action; and as a matter of fact they are usually so allied. Behaviorism especially seems to be deduced implicitly from the mechanistic dogma and to lie, somewhat uneasily, in this metaphysical bed.