Physiological psychology / by W. McDougall.

  • McDougall, William, 1871-1938.
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Physiological psychology / by W. McDougall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    views as to the ultimate nature of the world may be, seek to accord due recognition to both the physiological and the psychical factors of our mental life. We are sometimes told that the introduction of physio- logical considerations in psychological reasonings is futile, because our knowledge of the nervous system and of the processes that occur in it is so imperfect. It is a sufficient answer to point out that many recent advances in psychology are directly due to physiological observations; for example, our knowledge of the complex processes involved in the use of language has been very greatly increased by the study of lesions of the different parts of the brain concerned in these processes and of the effects of such lesions, and many other examples might be cited. But we may reply in more general terms that the phenomena of sleep, fatigue, and disease, the mental effects of drugs and of injuries to the brain, the slow development and decline of mental power with the develop- ment and decay of the nervous system in youth and in old age respectively, cannot be in any sense understood or explained save by reference to the nervous system, and they prove conclusively that our mental life is intimately bound up with, and to a great extent conditioned by, the processes of the nervous system, and therefore cannot be understood without the aid of knowledge of those processes. It is just these features of our mental life of which a thorough understanding is most urgently needed, because it is with these that the educator and the physician are concerned, and it may be confidently predicted that psychology will cease to be regarded as a purely academic study, and will be recognized as providing the only sound theoretical basis for the art of the teacher and the practice of the alienist in proportion as it becomes a truly physiological psychology. The physiological psychologist must avoid the error, an error into which too many physiologists have fallen, of neglecting or despising the refinements and subtleties of the introspective psychologists. He must admit the primacy of introspective psychology, must recognize that all the objective