The group mind : a sketch of the principles of collective psychology, with some attempt to apply them to the interpretation of national life and character / by William McDougall.

  • McDougall, William, 1871-1938.
Date:
1927
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The group mind : a sketch of the principles of collective psychology, with some attempt to apply them to the interpretation of national life and character / by William McDougall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    key which shall unlock all doors and solve all problems. Thus some, adopting the notion of a variety of human races, each endowed with a certain peculiar and unalterable combination of qualities, seek to explain all history by the aid of biological laws, especially the Darwinian principles, as a struggle for survival between individuals and between races. Others, like Karl Marx and Guizot, see in economic conditions and the struggles between the social classes within each nation, the all important factors. Others again, like Montesquieu and to some extent Buckle and more recently Matteuzzi, have seen in the influences of physical environment the key to the understanding of differences of national character and history; while others profess to have found it in differences of religious system, or of the forms of government and systems of laws. Others again, like le Bon1, in a few dominant ideas which, they say, being possessed by any nation (or possessing a nation) determine its character and civilisation. All these are exaggerations of partial truths; and in opposition to all of them it must be laid down that the understanding of the mind of a nation is an indispensable foundation for the interpretation of its history. Just as there are two kinds of psychology of individuals, so there are two kinds of psychology of peoples. There is the individual psychology which is primarily descriptive, which is the biography of persons, and whose aim is to impart an accurate conception of the general tendencies of a person and of the course of his develop¬ ment. And there is the psychology whose aim is to explain in general terms the conduct of individual men in general by the aid of con¬ ceptions and laws of general validity. The former, of course, was developed much earlier than the latter, which is in the main of quite modern growth. As this explanatory psychology develops, its principles begin to find application in the sphere of biographical or individual psychology, raising it also to the explanatory plane. Just so there are two parallel kinds of psychology of peoples. There is the descriptive psychology of the tendencies of particular peoples, the biography of nations and peoples, which is what com¬ monly is meant by ‘ history ’; and there is the psychology which seeks to explain in general terms how these tendencies arise, which seeks the general laws of which these diverse national tendencies are the outcome. This last is the modern science which is beginning to take shape and to undertake the task so inadequately dealt with by the so-called 1 Psychological Laws of the Evolution of Peoples