Psychology and Thought

It is a commonplace that, during the last two centuries, men have enormously increased their power over nature without increasing the control of that power by thought. In the sphere of international and interracial relations, our chemists and engineers are now contriving, by technical methods whose subtlety would have been inconceivable to our grandfathers, plans for the destruction of London and Paris; but when French and British statesmen meet to prevent those plans from being put into operation, they find it no easier than would the leaders of two Stone Age tribes to form a common purpose, and they generally part with nothing better than a vague hope that war may be avoided by accident and inertia. The nations of Europe seem unable, even after the Locarno Pact, either to amend the Peace of Versailles, or, if it is not amended, to provide against the danger of a new world-struggle which may be succeeded by such a Dark Age as succeeded the break-up of the Roman Empire. And it is not only in dealing with the master-problem of war that we show this inability to control, by taking thought, our new powers. We are, for instance, rapidly learning so to conquer insect-borne disease as to make possible the residence of a largely increased number of white men in the tropics; but throughout the greater part of Africa neither the white invaders nor the European governments to which they are nominally subordinate have thought out any better policy than the reduction of the black population to a condition of statutory servitude, leading some day to pitiless massacres of masters by slaves and of slaves by masters. In the Pacific no one has produced a scheme for the settlement of thinly-populated territory which is based on any wider conception than the separate advantage of competing races and states.

In the sphere of internal policy there is, within the closely guarded frontiers of every state, a turmoil of new ideas; but those ideas have been so far more successful in weakening the traditions on which our existing civilization is based than in showing the way towards anything better. The majority of the inhabitants of Europe now live under constitutions invented by Lenin, Mussolini, Rivera, or by the founders of the German Republic and of the Austrian and Russian succession states; but no one except a few partisans believes that stable forms of relation between the citizen and the state, or between the state and other political and social organizations, have been yet invented. In economic life criticism has far outrun construction; the individualist, collectivist, and syndicalist conceptions of industrial organization have all been discredited, but no new conception has established itself. In jurisprudence every one laughs at Austin’s utilitarianism and Hegel’s idealism, but no one proposes any substitute for them. In literature, painting, and music, æsthetic tradition has been so broken that the young painter or poet cannot settle to his work until he has found his way through a wilderness of half-formulated psychological theories. In personal conduct, young men and women find that new knowledge has shaken traditional sexual and family morality; but that there is as yet no sign that a period of ethical reconstruction is at hand. The United States of America are more fortunate than the states of Europe, in that they are comparatively safe from external attack; but in American politics, economics, literature, religion, and ethics the difficulties arising from the failure of human thought to contrive an adaptation of human society to its new environment are equally obvious.

Thought, therefore, whether as the concentrated mental activity of the professed thinker, or as penetrating and guiding other activities, is now required more urgently than ever before in the history of mankind. Thought, if we are to escape disaster, is needed in many specialized fields; we must construct a more accurate and better-proportioned conception of the past; separate groups of students must explore biology and physics, politics and sociology, and must try to see the relation of their studies to each other, to the ancient problems of philosophy, and to that beauty of words and form and colour by which our thoughts are made more permanent and more significant; thousands of political and social expedients must be invented. But in this book I shall argue that we must also consider how far it is possible for us to improve those processes of thought itself which are used in all the specialized studies, how far, that is to say, we can produce a more effective art of thought.

For the purposes of that inquiry it will be convenient to make a rough division between the more empirical and the more scientific elements in any art—between the methods learnt by each practitioner from his own experience or from imitation of other practitioners, and the wider principles by which those methods can be explained or corrected. Sometimes empiricism lags behind science, and sometimes science lags behind empiricism. Seventy years ago, for instance, Baron Justus von Liebig was the acknowledged leader of the chemical science which then claimed to cover the field of the empirical processes of selecting and cooking food; while the chef of the Reform Club might be taken as being a leader of the empirical “mystery” of food-preparation, handed on by one chef to another, and indicated in the “cookery books” which were so strikingly unlike the text-books of chemistry. We now know that if in 1855 the Reform Club chef had been asked to prepare the best dinner he could, and if Baron Liebig had been asked to order another dinner, to be prepared in the same kitchen and by the same body of cooks, the chef’s dinner would have been much the better, from the point of view of health as well as of enjoyment. Empiricism was then well ahead of science in the art of cooking, and it was only in 1915, that, owing to the unrewarded discomforts endured by scores of small mammals fed alternately on margarine and butter in the little Wesleyan chapel at Cambridge, the chemists demonstrated the importance of the vitamines. Now, perhaps, a professor of bio-chemistry, if he had the necessary modesty and humour, might give a few useful hints to the chef of the Reform Club as to the cooking of fats and vegetables; and might even learn from him, as Darwin learnt from the empirical pigeon-breeders, suggestions leading to new scientific principles. The study of atomic structure by the science of physics has been more successful in catching up the empirical processes of tempering and alloying metals, and a trained metallurgical physicist is now an ordinary and useful member of the staff of any large steel-works. Metallurgy is, indeed, a good instance of a sphere of action in which science and practice are now keeping step, and are producing a rapidly progressive “scientific art.”

How, in this respect, do things stand with the expedients by which men are helped in the process of thought? How near are we to the creation of a “scientific art” of thought? Both in our own time and in the past, thought has, of course, been helped by advances in the sciences of logic and mathematics. Roman law, for instance, could not have arisen from the practice of the courts, if Aristotle and others had not first made the science of formal logic; and those methods of contriving and interpreting experiments which have produced our modern control over physical nature have had to wait throughout on progress in the science of mathematics. Even in the sphere of social thought, progress has, in our own time, largely depended upon those quasi-mathematical methods of presenting and comparing the statistical results of the relation between independently varying causes which date from the work of Descartes and Leibnitz. And modern thought in all regions has depended for most of its subject-matter on knowledge accumulated and arranged by scientific methods.

But behind the use by thinkers of rules and materials drawn from the sciences there has always been, since the dawn of civilization, an unformulated “mystery” of thought which has been “explained” by no science, and has been independently discovered, lost, and rediscovered, by successive creative thinkers. Plato learnt from Socrates, Sophocles from Æschylus, Masaccio from Ghiberti, Marlowe, Jonson and Shakespeare, or Hamilton and Madison, learnt from each other, something which was neither logic nor accumulated knowledge; and Faraday, when he became assistant to Sir Humphry Davy, learnt from his master something which thenceforth changed his use of his mind, and which helped to give efficiency to his thought about those observed chemical and physical facts and mathematical methods which he also learnt.

That “something” lies in the field now claimed by the science of psychology; but a very strong case could be made out for the proposition that a young thinker who should today submissively study the current text-books of psychology would be as little likely to improve his work as would have been a young apprentice cook at the Reform Club in 1855, if he had absorbed all Baron Liebig’s Organic Chemistry. A thinker can learn from the present text-books of psychology useful hints as to the results of fatigue, as to detailed methods of memorizing, and as to means of correcting some of the defects of his sense-impressions. But it is difficult for the most patient reader to get much practical help from the existing records of laboratory experiments on the simpler forms of thought; and whoever reads those short chapters on “Reasoning” or “Thought” which in the general psychological treatises cover the whole subject of intellectual activity, often feels as a member of the audience might feel at an organ-recital if the wind-pressure in the organ suddenly dropped. Some, indeed, of the best psychologists warn us that their science can, in that region, offer us no practical help whatever. Professor Pillsbury, for instance, is only a little more explicit than some others when he says, “No rules can be given for making the unfertile brain fertile, nor for the better use of the fertile brain.”

And, unfortunately, that section of current psychology which deals with thought may be not only useless but much worse than useless to the would-be thinker. Psychology has been deeply and necessarily influenced by recent growths in our knowledge of nerve-physiology, and physiologists and psychologists alike have tended to base on that knowledge a series of summary generalizations, often expressed in clumsy mechanical metaphors, on just that point—the relation of thought to other physiological and psychological processes— where a practitioner of the art of thought requires most exact and guarded statement. Men, for thousands of years, have vaguely connected the psychological events of which they were conscious in themselves with different parts of their bodies. To the Greek poets and philosophers pity seemed related to the abdomen, courage to the beating heart, and intense thought to the diaphragm which controls our breathing. The modern physiologists, by dissection under the microscope of the nerves of men and other animals, combined with observation of the behaviour of various parts of the organism under experimental conditions, have concentrated attention on the nervous system. In the primitive behaviour-cycle which begins with the impact of some external stimulus upon a sense-organ, and ends with a movement of the limb-muscles, the physiologists have been able to follow the passage of the stimulation along the “afferent” nerves from the sense-organ to points where they come into relation with the “efferent” nerves, down which the counter-stimulations pass to the muscles. They tell us that when the original stimulation reaches the spinal cord, it may cause immediate and automatic muscular “reflexes” (such as scratching an irritated place on the skin, or adjusting the limbs to prevent falling) even in an animal the whole of whose brain has been removed. But the stimulation may also reach those more recently evolved nervous outgrowths of the spinal cord which are roughly distinguished as the “lower” and the “upper” brain. When it reaches the carpet of interlacing nerves which forms the “cortex” or “grey matter” of the mammalian upper brain, it sets a sort of telephone-exchange into operation, and nervous events take place which appear in consciousness as memories and associations and suggestions. The original sense-stimulus is recognized as part of a “situation,” [1] and a new message, representing a solution of that situation, may travel back through the lower brain to the nerves attached to the muscles. This cortical message may then give rise to an “intelligent” muscular movement, added to, or modifying, or inhibiting the “reflex” movements which originate in the spinal cord, and the more “instinctive” movements which are related to the lower brain, and are normally accompanied by conscious “emotions.”

A scientist born in the second half of the nineteenth century could hardly prevent himself, when describing this series of events, from using terms taken from the behaviour of power-driven machinery. He was almost certain to ask himself what was the “power” in the process, and what was the “machine.” There seemed to be “power” acting within the spinal cord and its related “sympathetic” nerve centres, and revealing itself in the reflex movements; but that power had no apparent connection with the intelligent element in behaviour. On the other hand, the process of “association of ideas” in the upper brain did not seem to reveal much independent “power” of its own. There remained the intermediate stage of the lower brain with its instincts and their appropriate emotions. These instincts had obvious driving power, and it was undeniable that instinctive impulses often initiated the process of “association” in the upper brain as a means of attaining their satisfaction. He was apt, therefore, to conclude that “instinct,” or “emotion,” or “instinctive emotion” was the “power” required; and that “intelligence” or “reason” was the “machine.” Professor J. T. MacCurdy, for instance, says that “the static, intellectual functions of the mind are like the mechanisms of the automobile; the emotional or instinctive functions are like its thermodynamics,” and Professor MacDougall, in his Outline of Psychology (1923, p. 440 n.), says that “it is the paradox of Intelligence that it directs forces or energies without being itself a force or energy.” Even the great physiologist, Sir Charles Sherrington, in his Presidential Address to the British Association in 1923, spoke of the human mind as “actuated by instinct but instrumented by reason.” David Hume, writing in 1739, when Hartley had already started physiological psychology, but before the rise of machine-industry, expressed the same conclusion in terms of the ancient industrial system based on slavery. “Reason,” he said, “has no original influence,” it “is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” ”

This “mechanist” conception of the relation between instinct and thought is based on ascertained facts, is extremely clear, and is sufficient both for the professor of physiology who is superintending an experiment, and for the professor of psychology who is standing before his black-board, or sitting at his desk and marking examination answers. It is only when it is used as an actual guide to thinking that it breaks down. The generalizations of Baron Liebig as to the chemistry of nutrition also served excellently well for the introductory black-board explanations given by the cookery instructresses when I was a member of the London School Board; and, since neither the instructresses nor their pupils troubled about them when it was a question of cooking anything, no difficulties arose. In the same way, it is probable that the majority even of the most “mechanist” psychologists, when they are thinking whether a new theory is sound or not, do not often relate their methods of speculation to their belief that their instincts are, and their intelligence is not, “a force or energy.” But there is one group of thinkers who have in our own time taken the “mechanist” conception of the relation of instinct to reason as a guide for their own intellectual methods. These are the Marxian Communists in Russia and elsewhere; I have, for instance, before me an admirably written Outline of Psychology published in 1921 (perhaps with the aid of the Third International) by the Plebs League, who were British representatives of what the book calls “the Fighting Culture of the Proletariat.” Its purpose is stated to be “to introduce the student to the science of human behaviour, and to the study of the mechanism on which behaviour depends” (p. 1), and it contains many quotations from MacDougall’s works. On almost every page the word “mechanism” occurs once or more, and the writers constantly insist that thought is a machine, inert in itself, but driven by the force of instinct. Readers are told that they “must realize clearly” that “our political convictions, our moral and ethical codes . . . the class-consciousness of the workers and that of the capitalists; all these are ultimately founded on non-rational complexes, which urge us on to the actions we perform” (p. 4). ‘Our wants and conations, the strivings of our instincts, emotions, and habits . . . furnish the standard by which the reason judges. . . . Reasoning is an accompaniment, but not a cause of action” (p. 82); and the whole argument leads to the conclusion that “in all crises” the “dictatorship of a small minority” (p. 98) who have realized these facts is essential. The men who now rule Russia combine this “mechanist” conception of the relation between instinct and reason with a rigid metaphysical dogma of predeterminism, and are able by that combination to convince themselves that such a “bourgeois” intellectual process as unbiased reflection before one acts in obedience to one’s simplest animal instincts, is at the same time biologically impossible, and also biologically possible but politically and economically inadmissible. And they seem determined to stamp out among their fellow-citizens, with the thoroughness of the Spanish Inquisition, all those methods of inventive thought which originally enabled Marx to think and write Das Kapital.

The present position, indeed, of the conception of instinct as force and intelligence as machine compels any one who desires, as I do, to get help for the practical art of thought from the science of psychology, to form a judgment of his own, on the best evidence he can find, as to physiologico-psychological questions which he would normally prefer to leave to the specialized expert. If, therefore, I were told, as a teacher of political science, by a young communist student whose mind had not yet been completely closed by dogma, that this mechanist conception is (whether we like or dislike its political effects) forced on us by the full authority of modern psychology and physiology, I should begin by pointing out that during the last three or four years some of the best psychologists and physiologists seem to have rejected both “mechanist” language on this point and the grossly oversimplified conception of intelligent behaviour to which its use is apt to lead. At the Oxford International Psychological Congress, for instance, of 1923, Dr. C. S. Myers as President protested against the prevailing tendency “to suppose that all percepts, ideas and volitions, all forms of cognition and conation, derive their motor effects from the energy which they obtain from related affects. According to some, indeed, this energy is ultimately to be derived from a single affect—the sexual emotion. But the past neglect of instinctive and emotional feelings should not,” he warned the Congress, “cause us to overlook the activity involved in perceiving or thinking, or to regard percepts or thoughts (e.g., ends) as merely inert ‘mental matter’ whose ‘movement’ (nay, whose very ‘existence’ in consciousness) is dependent solely on the force of propulsion or repression derived from feeling. Cognitive and affective experiences are not thus to be isolated in their beginnings.”

I should then ask my young communist to forget that he ever saw a machine, and to conceive of the human organism as a combination of living elements, all of which tend to co-operate in securing the good of the organism (or of the species of which the organism is a temporary representative), but each of which retains some measure of initiative—so that the co-operation is never mechanically perfect. I should quote Dr. Henry Head’s statement at the same Congress that “the aim of the evolutionary development of the central nervous system is to integrate its diverse and contradictory reactions, so as to produce a coherent result adapted to the welfare of the organism as a whole,” ” and should emphasize his assumption that human integration is not complete, and that “diverse and contradictory reactions” do occur. This conception might be easier to employ if all young people had learnt a little physiology at school. It could then be pointed out to them that the phagocytes (or “white corpuscles”) which wander about in our blood, co-operate with the rest of the organism by surrounding and digesting intruding bacteria; but that in doing so the phagocytes act as living and behaving things, and not as the purely mechanical instruments of a force external to themselves. Each phagocyte, indeed, hunts and digests nearly as independently as if it were an isolated inhabitant of a warm tropical sea. A man’s hair cooperates with the rest of his organism by protecting his brain from blows and from sudden changes of temperature; but it may go on growing, though the man has ceased to live. His epithelial cells may begin at any moment to proliferate independently, and so cause death by cancer. Red blood-corpuscles, or patches of skin, transferred from one man to another may both continue their own activities and also co-operate in the wider functions of the new organism of which they are now parts.

And the same combination of co-operating elements, each of which subserves the good of the whole, while itself retaining some measure of initiative, is found in the functions of the nervous system. When Woodworth says of the psychological factors in man that “any mechanism except, perhaps, some of the most rudimentary that give the simple reflexes [I should myself reject this exception], once it is aroused, is capable of furnishing its own drive and also of lending drive to other connected mechanisms,” he is using language drawn from the “mechanist” conception to express the very different conception (for which I am here arguing) of the co-operating parts of an organism as each possessing its own drive. The Greek word for “drive” is “hormé,” and therefore Professor T. P. Nunn (in his Education, its Data and First Principles, 1920, p. 21) called this the “hormic conception” or “hormism.” Hormism does not deny that all the parts of an organism tend toward integrated action. But it substitutes the conception of a living and imperfect tendency towards integration for the conception of a mechanical and perfect integration. The behaviour of a steam engine is completely integrated; because the parts of the engine have no force of their own, and only obey the force of the steam from the boiler. The behaviour of the human organism tends towards integration, for otherwise the organism could not, as an organism, exist; but its integration is not complete, because its parts possess in varying degrees a force of their own."

If the curriculum of our municipal schools also included some instruction in the past history of the evolution of living organisms, the difference between the “hormic” and the “mechanist” conceptions of intelligent action could be made clearer by using, as Dr. Head does in the passage quoted above, evolutionary language. The human body is built up of cells, and every human being comes into existence by the repeated splitting of a single-celled fertilized ovum, thereby repeating in outline the evolutionary history of his species. The world contains both single-celled and many-celled animals; and we can, by arranging them in order of complexity and success in cell-co-ordination, trace an unbroken series from the loosely co-operating single-celled protozoa to the highly unified many-celled human organism.

In such a series the simplest form of co-operation between cells might be represented by a group of single-celled marine protozoa, retaining their individuality except that they are embedded in a common jelly-mass which is propelled through the water by the simultaneous action of their whip-like ‘flagella.’ Next in succession might come such “colonies” as those of the coral-protozoa, where the tissues of the members of the “colony” are continuously connected with each other, but where each “individual” (if one may still use the word) is similar in structure to the rest, and follows with independent but roughly co-ordinated variations, a similar behaviour-pattern. Later in the series would come the innumerable species of true metazoa (from the flat-worms to man), in which the structure of the cells of skin and viscera and nerves and bone is so specialized as to fit each of them for the performance of different functions in the life of the organism; and in which the behaviour of each part of the organism, though still retaining traces of its ancient independence, is subordinated with an enormously greater degree of success to the behaviour of the organism as a whole.’

The history, however, of the Russian attempt to found a complete scientific art of thought upon the “mechanist” conception should be a warning to us not, in the present state of physiological knowledge, to make an equally confident use of the “hormic” conception. The Russians and their followers reject on a priori grounds some of the plainest facts of history, and deny the existence of some of the most important elements in their own mental experience. Those who prefer the “hormic” conception should for the present be content if it helps them to see more clearly certain observable facts of human intellectual behaviour which the use of mechanist language tends to obscure. One of these facts is that, although what I have called (p. 30) the primitive cycle of psychological events in rational behaviour is carried through with greater vigour and ease than any less primitive course—although when sensation leads at once to impulse, impulse to thought, and thought back again to impulse and muscular action, we are often more intensely alive than when associative thought begins without sensation, or without an impulse from the lower nerve-centres, or when thought ends without action or the impulse to act—yet that cycle is not the only possible, nor always, for the purposes of the thinker, the most effective cycle. The cortex of the upper brain may, for instance, of its own initiative, to satisfy its own need of activity, and to carry out its own function in the organism as a whole, start the process of thought without waiting for the primitive stimulus of a sensation. When Lord Shaftesbury, in his diary for 1854, wrote one day, “Very busy; little time for thought; none for reading. Oftentimes do I look at a book and long for it as a donkey for a carrot; and I, like him, am disappointed; * he was describing an impulse to think which was started by the visual sensation of a book, and which owed part of its vigour to that fact. But if Lord Shaftesbury had been compelled to live in a house where he never saw a book, his brain would still, without any appropriate preliminary sensation, have asserted its need to think.

Thought, again, may start, not only without the primitive stimulus of a sensation, but also without the intermediate stimulus of an “instinctive” impulse from the lower brain. Though a train of mental association may be vigorously driven from link to link by envy of a rival, or pity for a sufferer, it may also start without the aid of an instinctive impulse, and may gain vigour as it proceeds. And just as the upper brain may start its activity without the stimulus of a sensation or an “instinctive” impulse, so it may conclude its activity without having produced that muscular movement which concludes the “primitive” cycle of psychological events. A train of thought may die away without any recognizable external result of any kind. When Archimedes invented his test of specific gravity, he ran into the street and shouted; but in the preceding twelve months he must have done a good deal of thinking that left his muscles passive. Dr. J. B. Watson, it is true, and his followers say that any thought of a chess-player which does not cause his hand to move towards the pieces does cause his internal or external speech-organs to move—or rather actually consists of such movements, though they may be both invisible and inaudible. But Dr. Watson’s only proof that his belief is true is apparently the circular argument that if it were not true the extreme behaviourist dogma would be unsound.”

And the various factors whose co-operation makes up the primitive cycle of intelligent action can not only “short circuit” that cycle by sometimes providing their own drive, but can to some extent overlap each other’s functions, and like the actors in a stock company, play each other’s parts. K.S. Lashley has proved that a rat normally acquires the visual habit of finding its way about a maze by using the occipital part of its cortex; but that, when the occipital part is removed, it can relearn the habit (in about the same number of minutes) by using another part of its cortex.t In the same way, human beings can, apparently, use different proportions of the cortical and non-cortical elements in their central nervous system, while performing what seem to be identical operations. I was, myself, a rather precocious and extremely unmusical small boy. At the age of five I learnt to play The Blue Bells of Scotland on the piano, by a process which I can remember well, and believe to have been entirely “cortical.” Some of my sisters, by making more use of the more ancient parts ? of their nervous systems, learnt to play with infinitely less cortical activity, and with very different effects upon their hearers.

I am often reminded by these facts of the British Constitution, which it has been part of my professional duty to study. That Constitution has been evolved owing to the need of unifying the social actions of the forty-three million inhabitants of Great Britain. It, like the human nervous system, consists of newer structures superposed upon older, in such a way as to produce both the defect of overlapping, and the compensating advantage of elasticity. The oldest part of our Constitution provides that we shall be governed by our king, whom God has caused to be born from his father, and who has been anointed in Westminster Abbey by our chief priest. The king still chooses his ministers, as he did when he was the only source of authority. Before the king, on the advice of his ministers, directs his sheriff to hang or imprison a man, he makes use of an almost equally old system, trial by jury. Twelve peers of the prisoner, chosen by the supernatural indication of the lot, are sworn to tell the truth about him by oaths which bring them into danger of supernatural penalties. On these older parts has been superposed a newer system, which provides that we shall be governed by a Parliament, elected by the men and women on the register, and acting through ministers responsible to it. On Parliament itself has been superposed a still more recent system, in which the main work of government is done by civil servants and military officers chosen by competitive examination, and by professional judges and magistrates chosen by the ministers but exercising independent authority.

Many constitutional text-books have been written in which all these facts are represented as a neatly dovetailed mechanical arrangement, in which each decision is taken by an undisputed appropriate authority, and no question is left undecided. But a British politician who determined to act on that conception would certainly be a political failure. He could only succeed by remembering that the relation between the parts of our Constitution is never simple, and is constantly changing. A certain degree of responsibility of the ministers to the monarch persists, and influences the working of their responsibility to Parliament. In time of war the control of Parliament over the civil executive and the army may be almost completely suspended, and the Commander-in-Chief may refuse to tell his plans to the Secretary for War. No one knows whether the next English bishop will really be chosen by the prime minister, or by the king, or by the Archbishop of Canterbury, or by a subtle balance between authorities each of which is in its origin and on its own principles supreme. And if one authority, from ill-health or incompetence or some external crisis, ceases to function, another silently takes its place.

In Britain, therefore, the art of government is not that mechanical process of driving an inert machine by the force of a single sovereign will, of which rulers like Lenin and Mussolini constantly dream, but the delicate task of co-ordinating the actions of partially independent living organisms. And all the psychological and physiological arts by which unity of action is to some degree secured within the individual human organism are of this type. Mr. Harry Vardon, for instance, in his book How to play Golf (1912), says (p. 62) that after a year of constant experimentation he discovered a grip which “seems to create just the right fusion between the hands, and involuntarily induces each to do its proper work.” Mr. Vardon’s language would not perhaps satisfy exact psychological analysis, but he has the root of the matter in him. By his use of the words “fusion” and “involuntarily” he means that he has at last acquired an art which enables him, when he grips his brassy, to unify the behaviour of certain partially independent elements in his organism; and the thinker who is about to grip his problem has to acquire a similar art.

Notes

1W. B. Pillsbury, The Fundamentals of Psychology (1923), p. 429.

1 See K. Koffka, The Growth of the Mind (1924), and Koehler, The Mentality of Apes (1925), for evidence indicating that intelligent mammalian action is stimulated not by a sensation as such but by a sensation as indicating a “situation” calling for action.

1 Problems in Dynamic Psychology, 1923, p. x. 2 Collected Works, Vol. II, pp. 194-5.

1 Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Psychology (p. 188). 2 Ibid., p. 180.

1R. S. Woodworth, Dynamic Psychology (1918), p. 67.

1 Though MacDougall is the most influential authority for what I here call the “mechanist” view of the relation between instinct and reason, he himself, in his Outline of Psychology (1923), pp. 72 and 218, and in an article in Psyche (July, 1924, p. 27), adopts, while arguing against Loeb, Watson, and others, what he calls Nunn’s “hormic theory of action.” The explanation of this fact is that there are three distinct problems in the discussion of which the term “mechanism” or “mechanistic conception” is used in three different senses. The first is the purely metaphysical problem of determinism or contingence, in which the determinist opinion is often called “mechanist.” This problem concerns the whole universe, and therefore no decision in favour either of determinism or of contingence affects the relation between themselves of any parts of the universe more than any other parts. The second is the problem of “vitalism” or “mechanism” in the behaviour of living organ-

isms. That problem was well stated by Prof. J. S. Haldane in his presidential address to the Physiological Section of the British Association (1908). He there asked whether the characteristic internal and external movements of a living cell are due entirely (as Loeb, for instance, contends) to chemical and physical forces, or (as Haldane himself contends) to a general purposiveness in the behaviour of living organisms which is not comparable with, and does not interact with the chemical and physical forces. In the discussion of this second problem Loeb’s contention is often called “mechanist.” The third problem is the much more limited question which I discuss above. In the case of man and the other higher mammals, have the functions of the upper brain any initiative or “drive” of their own (as Myers and Nunn contend), or are they entirely dependent (as MacDougall, MacCurdy, and others contend) on the “drive” of “instincts” arising in the lower brain? I have called MacDougall’s answer to this third problem “mechanist.” The clearest statement of that answer appeared originally in his well-known Social Psychology (1908), p. 44, and is repeated in his Outline of Psychology (1923), p. 218: “The instincts are the prime movers of all human activity; by the conative or impulsive force of some instinct, every train of thought, however cold and passionless it may seem, is borne along towards its end . . . all the complex intellectual apparatus of the most highly developed mind is but the instrument by which these impulses seek their satisfaction. . . . Take away these instinctive dispositions with their powerful impulses, and the organism would become incapable of activity of any kind; it would be inert and motionless, like a wonderful clockwork whose mainspring had been removed, or a steam engine whose fires had been drawn.” Professor MacDougall is not, I believe, a Marxist; but as long as he continues to reproduce this passage, he will be quoted by Marxists all over the world in support of their plea for the necessary subordination of reason to passion.

1See E. P. Mumford on “The Conception of Individuality in Biology” (Science Progress, July, 1925).

* Hammond, J. L. and B., Lord Shaftesbury (1923), p. 128.

1 See MacDougall, Outline of Psychology (1923), p. 289. “In animals and primitively in man every cycle of mental activity expresses itself in the bodily behaviour which is the natural outcome of all conation.” 2 “We do not admit [reasoning] as a genuine type of human behavior except as a special form of language habit.” Watson, Behavior (1914), P- 319-

* Psychobiology, 2, p. 55 (1920), and Journal of Comparative Psychology, 1, p. 453 (1921), and American Journal of Physiology, 59, p. 44 (1922). Owing, I am told, to a peculiarly indefensible application of the post-war “axe,” none of these journals are in the British Museum Library. I have to thank Dr. E. D. Adrian of Cambridge for the references, ? Presidential address of Sir Charles Sherrington to the British Association, 1922: “the chief, perhaps the sole seat [of mentality] is a comparatively modern nervous structure superposed on the non-mental and more ancient other parts” [of the nervous system].