Instinct in man : a contribution to the psychology of education / by James Drever.

  • James Drever
Date:
1917
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Instinct in man : a contribution to the psychology of education / by James Drever. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The relation of biology to psychology seems also in need of being cleared up, but, in this case, the main difficulty arises from the fact, that, as against the psychologist, the biologist tends to think as a physiologist. So far as the results of physiological or psychological investigation bear upon the problems of the biologist, he will of course utilize the results obtained by the other sciences, but his problems and his methods are the problems and methods of neither physiology nor psy- chology, and their results merely supplement his own analysis. That is to say, where biological analysis leaves off in the study of behaviour on the one side, physiological analysis begins, where it leaves off on the other side psychological analysis begins. In what follows we shall not as a rule require to distinguish the physiological account of Instinct from the biological, and may call both biological. Since the biologist, like the physio- logist, studies the behaviour of living organisms from the objective point of view, the biological explanation is continuous with the physiological, in a way in which it cannot be continuous with the psychological. Hence the biologist always tends to talk in physiological terms, rather than psychological, even where he is dealing with phenomena, the physiological explana- tion of which derives its whole meaning from the investigations of the psychologist. This fact seems to make it still more incumbent on the psychologist to assert the rights of the explanation, instead of merely accepting the biological, seeing that, in the present state of biological science, the scales are so heavily weighted against psychology. He will, at any rate, avoid a good deal of confusion by keeping the two accounts separate. We are still left with the relation of psychology to philosophy. The general principle to be applied here is, that psychology is no more concerned with the ultimate nature and meaning of reality than is any other science. All that psychology is con- cerned with, is the description and orderly arrangement, or scientific explanation, of the facts of experience from the inner or subjective side, and the relation of these facts of experience
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