(Group Psychology itself consists properly of two parts, t...)
Group Psychology itself consists properly of two parts, that which is concerned to discover the most general principles of group life, and that which applies these principles to the study of particular kinds and examples of group life. The former is logically prior to the second; though in practice it is hardly possible to keep them wholly apart. The present volume is concerned chiefly with the former branch. Only when the general principles of group life have been applied to the understanding of particular societies, of nations and the manifold system of groups within the nation, will it be possible for Social Psychology to return upon the individual life and give of it an adequate account in all its concrete fullness.
The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology
("Until the later decades of the nineteenth century, psych...)
"Until the later decades of the nineteenth century, psychology continued to concern itself almost exclusively with the mind of man conceived in an abstract fashion, not as the mind of any particular individual, but as the mind of a representative individual considered in abstraction from his social settings as something given to our contemplation fully formed and complete..."
William McDougall was an early 20th century psychologist who wrote a number of highly influential textbooks, and was particularly important in the development of the theory of instinct and of social psychology in the English-speaking world. He was an opponent of behaviourism and stands somewhat outside the mainstream of the development of Anglo-American psychological thought in the first half of the 20th century; but his work was very well known and respected among lay people.
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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
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
(This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
(Excerpt from Physiological Psychology
The scheme of the ...)
Excerpt from Physiological Psychology
The scheme of the nervous system and its functions that the writer has sketched is based upon a careful study of the best authorities; but it is only fair to warn the reader that great differences of opinion upon many fundamental principles still obtain among these authorities. It seemed better to adopt, and apply consistently, a workable scheme of the ele mentary nervous functions than to confuse the reader by frequent references to these differences of Opinion.
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This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
An Introduction To: Social Psychology (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from An Introduction To: Social Psychology
Altho...)
Excerpt from An Introduction To: Social Psychology
Although I have tried to make this book intelligible and useful to those who are not professed students of psychology, it is by no means a mere dishing up of current doctrines for popular consumption and it may add to its usefulness in the hands of professional psychologists if I indicate here the principal points which, to the best of my belief, are original contributions to psychological doctrine.
In Chapter II. I have tried to render fuller and clearer the conceptions of instinct and of instinctive process, from both the psychical and the nervous sides.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
(Upton Sinclair took a gamble publishing this book. A life...)
Upton Sinclair took a gamble publishing this book. A lifelong Socialist who ran for high office several times, a muckraking author who had exposed the abuses of capitalism, was dabbling with what was seen as the occult. The impetus for this was his dear wife, Mary Craig Sinclair, known as 'Craig,' who had been aware all her life that she could sense things that had not yet happened, or which she had no rational access to. In the late 1920s, this came to light when Craig had an odd feeling that their friend Jack London was in mental turmoil, just prior to London's suicide. The Sinclairs started to investigate how deep this particular rabbit hole went... The core of this book is a series of doodles which Upton and others made outside Craig's presence, which she was able to duplicate, apparently telepathically or through clairvoyance. Sinclair claims that Craig had over a 75% success rate over 290 tests, including 25% matches, and 50% partial matches. This success rate is obviously a lot higher than probability, considering that the potential set of drawings is a lot larger than, say, a deck of cards. Sinclair's top reputation as a 'speaker of truth to power' was actually a compelling reason to take this book seriously. The response to Mental Radio was very positive, impressing academics in the field of psychology and other scientists, including Albert Einstein, who wrote the introduction to the German edition. William McDougal, Chair of the Psychology Department at Duke University, who wrote the introduction for this edition, conducted his own experiments with Craig. McDougal and J.B. Rhine later went on to found the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke, which conducted the first academic investigations of ESP. --Text refers the hardcover edition
William McDougall was born on 22 June 1871, in Chadderton, Lancashire, England, and was the second son and third of five children of Isaac Shimwell and Rebekah (Smalley) McDougall. His paternal grandfather, Alexander McDougall, whose parents had moved from Scotland to the north of England, had been the owner and headmaster of a boarding school for boys but through his interest in chemistry became a pupil of John Dalton and founded a successful chemical business. Isaac McDougall continued the business and also built an iron foundry and a paper-pulp factory. His wife, Rebekah, was English, as were both her parents.
Education
Young McDougall, a precocious youth, had absorbed by the age of fourteen all that his school could give him and was sent for a year to the Real-Gymnasium at Weimar, where he acquired a useful knowledge of German. He graduated in science from Owen's College, Manchester, at the early age of seventeen, with first class honors. After two more years at Manchester he entered St. John's College, Cambridge University, where he continued to do distinguished work. He spent the last two years at Cambridge studying physiology, anatomy, and anthropology, passed the second part of the Tripos with the highest honors, graduated (B. A. ) in 1894, and received the university scholarship at St. Thomas Hospital, London. Though he completed his medical courses (receiving in 1897 the M. B. , B. Chir. , and M. A. degrees from Cambridge), his strong interest in research, together with his appointment as a fellow of St. John's College, in 1898, influenced him against pursuing a medical career.
Career
During his internship, McDougall was invited to join the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits, under the leadership of A. C. Haddon and W. H. R. Rivers, he accepted with eagerness. His task was to determine, as well as the contemporary psychological methods permitted, the sensory capacity of the natives there. While in the Far East he also assisted Dr. Charles Hose in his intensive study of the wild tribes of head-hunters in the territory of the Rajah of Sarawak in Borneo, collaborating with Hose on the two-volume work The Pagan Tribes of Borneo (1912). Though tempted for a time to make field anthropology his life work, McDougall found it insufficiently challenging; and his interest turned to psychology. After returning to Cambridge he attended the lectures of Henry Sidgwick and James Ward, and he spent his honeymoon in 1900 in Gottingen, where he studied under G. E. Miller and learned from him something of the exact methods of experimental psychology. He was greatly influenced by Ward and by William James. Like James, McDougall was temperamentally inclined to lay less stress on the exact, and to him sometimes trivial, methods of experimental psychology as introduced from Germany and more on the wider philosophical and humanistic implications of the science. At the end of 1900 McDougall returned to England as a reader at University College, London. He gave a course of lecture demonstrations in psychology, built a laboratory in the two attic rooms of his house, and for the next four years carried on profitable research in scientific psychology, principally in the psychophysics of vision. He also published papers on brain functions, inhibition, and attention. In his paper "The Physiological Factors of the Attention-Process" (Mind, July 1902) he expounded his famous "drainage" theory of nerve-cell action. In 1904 he became Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy at Oxford. Since the founder of the readership did not think that the mind could be examined experimentally, it was only through the kindness of Prof. Francis Gotch, who provided him with some rooms in his physiological laboratory, that he was able to do any research. His position at Oxford was, however, greatly improved when in 1912 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
In 1920 McDougall received a call to Harvard University as professor of psychology. Notwithstanding his growing popularity in England, the attitude toward psychology at Oxford was still frustrating to him, and his chance of obtaining a professorship at that time was slim. Since he felt that he would have a more dignified position at Harvard and better facilities for research, he accepted the offer and moved to the United States in that same year. He died of cancer at Durham, N. C. , and his body was cremated.
In 1905 McDougall published his Physiological Psychology, and in 1908 An Introduction to Social Psychology, the latter probably his most original and popular contribution. The title, however, is misleading, since it was not "social" psychology, as that term is now understood, that he was dealing with. He described human action in terms of basic, inherited instincts. To each instinct was attached a primary emotion: for example, disgust to repulsion and fear to flight. The value of this contribution was only slowly recognized, but it grew in popularity both in England and America and did much to make his name famous. To American psychologists of that time, however, his theory seemed to be too much like the old "faculty" psychology and to lean too heavily on teleological concepts. McDougall always felt that a mechanistic biology was unsound, and in his Body and Mind, A History and a Defense of Animism (1911) he defended psychophysical parallelism and the emergence of psychical functions. Though the book received only one favorable review, his attack on determinism and his defense of the freedom of choice gained him additional popularity among a large section of the public. In 1912 he wrote a brief volume, Psychology, the Study of Behaviour. His concept of behavior, with its voluntaristic trend, was quite different from the deterministic behaviorism of J. B. Watson, which was then becoming popular in America. From notes which he had been making before the war he wrote in 1920 The Group Mind. He believed that in any highly structured group like a nation there is an organization which is mental, an organization (or what would later have been called a "Gestalt") which resides only partially in the mind of any one individual of the group. The title was unfortunate, and the book was not well received.
During his first year at Harvard he incautiously chose national eugenics as the subject of a series of Lowell Lectures. The army's wartime mental tests seemed to show differences in innate intelligence between races, and on the basis of these results he proclaimed the superiority of the Nordic race and the hereditary origin of differences in the mental endowment of children from different social classes. He published these lectures in 1921 under the title Is America Safe for Democracy? To this book, and to the fact that he was pulling against the current of Watsonian behaviorism, McDougall attributed the later hostility of the American press and American psychologists to his various publications. As far back as his student days McDougall had rebelled against the dominant theory of August Weissmann, which denied the inheritance of acquired characteristics. He therefore began a long series of experiments on successive generations of white rats in order to prove or disprove once and for all the contrary Lamarckian hypothesis.
At the time of his death he had been working for seventeen years on this research. Although he believed his results favored the Lamarckian theory, he did not think them conclusive. His son Kenneth continued the tests with negative results. McDougall's two most important books while at Harvard were his Outline of Psychology (1923) and his Outline of Abnormal Psychology (1926). The keynote of the former was the goal-seeking activity, which in highly developed organisms becomes the "mind. " He called his viewpoint a hormic psychology, with the urge to live as the basic drive. In the latter book he included what he thought was best in the theories of Freud, Jung, and Morton Prince. McDougall had become interested in psychoanalysis shortly before World War I, and he was subsequently analyzed by Jung. Although he believed that Freud had "done more for the advancement of psychology than any other student since Aristotle, " in his Psycho-Analysis and Social Psychology (1936) he pointed out inconsistencies in Freudian psychology.
Meanwhile McDougall had become gradually disillusioned in regard to Harvard. Most of the graduate students there had already become indoctrinated in the dogma of determinism; the opportunity for research was not nearly as great as he had expected; and the general atmosphere was not as friendly as his sensitive nature craved. In addition, financial matters worried him. Consequently, when in 1927 he was offered a professorship at Duke University with a greatly increased salary, promises of support for his research, and evidence of a more friendly view of his work, he accepted. Two years later he published his Modern Materialism and Emergent Evolution (1929), the aim of which was to make clear the fundamental concept of his psychological thinking that purposive action is "a form of causal efficiency distinct in nature from all mechanistic causation. " In The Energies of Men (1932) he maintained that foresight and insight are prominent in the instinctive striving of both men and animals. As a youth McDougall had been much concerned with the problems of religion. At first he took Christianity very seriously, but he soon became skeptical and finally assumed a nonmilitant agnosticism which he retained throughout his life. For some thirty years, however, he "dabbled" in psychical research. Although he did not have much hope of positive results, he thought that scientists should not hold aloof from such investigations, and while at Duke he actively supported J. B. Rhine's work on extrasensory perception.
Quotations:
'. .. .I am one of those who cannot find reason to believe in the existence of panaceas, elixirs of life, and philosopher's stones, one of those who believe rather that the price of liberty and human dignity is unceasing vigilance and perpetual struggle with the infirmities of our own nature. . .. .surely, if we would form some useful notion of what human beings may and should become under intensive cultivation, and, still more, if we would know how to conduct the process of cultivation so as to make some progress toward that ideal, we must start with some notion of the raw material provided by Nature for us to work upon! . .. .If I have a religion, its first precept is that we shall seek truth faithfully; and I would say this with Emerson: "God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please. You can never have both. "'
Personality
McDougall was a tall, heavy man of distinguished appearance. He often showed an unexpected shyness, warmth, kindness, and generosity, unexpected because he appeared to the world, especially in his publications, as combative and aggressive. The one most outstanding characteristic of his intellectual life was that he almost invariably took the unpopular side of controversies.
William McDougall was one of the most original and productive of twentieth-century psychologists, but he was so far ahead of his time that his influence, though great with nonacademic psychologists, philosophers, and theologians, suffered from the criticism of his more narrow-minded colleagues, especially in America. His support of indeterminism and free will, instincts, inheritance of traits, the role of purpose in action, and his theories of race were so unpopular that his valuable contributions to scientific psychology were almost forgotten. Today, in the mid-twentieth century, his general theory of instincts is accepted, together with his idea of innate capacities. His "group mind" fits into a Gestalt frame; his so-called "hormic" psychology, or the idea that action is in great part determined by purposive factors, is in line with the purposive psychology of Edward C. Tolman and his adherents; and his belief in the dynamic nature of mental processes is in accord with the doctrine of the modern psychiatrist. It was his tragedy that he did not live to receive the honor due him but died a sad and disappointed, though to the last a remarkably courageous, man.
Connections
In 1900, McDougall married Anne Aurelia Hickmore of Brighton, England. They had five children: Lesley, Duncan Shimwell, Kenneth Dougal, Angus Dougal, and Janet Aline.