An introduction to social psychology / by William McDougall.

  • McDougall, William, 1871-1938
Date:
1921
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: An introduction to social psychology / by William McDougall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    false assumption as they do. Sidgwick then, instead of attacking and rejecting as radically false the concep¬ tion of human motives common to both classes of his predecessors, goes on in all seriousness to offer a psychological explanation of the paradox that men do sometimes act unreasonably and otherwise than they ought to act. That is to say, Sidgwick, like those whom he criticises, accepts the doctrine that men normally and in the vast majority of cases act reason¬ ably and as they ought to act, in virtue of some unexplained principle of their constitution, and defines as a problem for solution the fact that they sometimes act otherwise. But the truth is that men are moved by a variety of impulses whose nature has been determined through long ages of the evolutionary process without reference to the life of men in civilised societies; and the psychological problem we have to solve, and with which this book is mainly concerned, is—How can we account for the fact that men so moved ever come to act as they ought, or morally and reasonably? One is driven to suppose that the minds of the moral philosophers who maintain these curious views as to the sources and nature of human conduct are either consti¬ tutionally devoid of the powerful impulses that so often move ordinary men to actions which they know to be morally wrong and against their true interests and destructive of their happiness, or so completely moralised by strict self-discipline that these powerful impulses are completely subordinated and hardly make themselves felt. But if either alternative is true, it is unfortunate that their peculiar constitutions should have led these philosophers to base the social sciences on profoundly fallacious psychological doctrines. Political economy suffered hardly less from the crude