William McDougall: 1871-1938

Author(s): Frank A. Pattie, Jr.

Source: The American Journal of Psychology , Apr., 1939, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Apr., 1939),
pp. 303-307
Published by: University of Illinois Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/1416120

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 NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 303

Z(lilliam tElBougall: 1871-1938

Professor William McDougall died in Durham, North Carolina, on November

28, 1938, in his sixty-seventh year. For some months he had borne with fortitude
the knowledge that a cancer would soon end his life.
Probably no other man had better preparation for the study of human nature
than McDougall. Born in Lancashire, England, on June 22, 1871, the son of a
chemical manufacturer, he was educated in a private school until at the age of four-
teen he was sent for a year to the Realgymnozfiium at Weimar. He entered Owens
College, Manchester, thereafter and studied for four years, in the latter part of this
period working chiefly in biology and geology. In the fall of 1890, having won a
scholarship at St. John's College, Cambridge, he began another four-year period, in
the last two years of which he specialized in physiology, anatomy, and anthropology.
Then followed a medical course at St. Thomas' Hospital, London, and a period spent
with Haddon and Rivers on the Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits and with
Dr. Charles Hose among the headhunters of Borneo. In the Straits he helped
Rivers investigate the sensory capacities of the natives. There followed still another
year of preparation, which he spent a year at Gottingen attending the lectures of
G. E. Muller on psychophysics and memory and working on vision.
In 1900 he was appointed Lecturer in Psychology at University College, London.
During his tenure of this post he conducted experiments on vision at his country
home in Surrey. In 1904, McDougall succeeded G. F. Stout as Wilde Reader in
Mental Philosophy at Oxford. Here his work was carried out with diSculty, since
Oxford has never given much recognition to psychology. The scientists took him
for a philosopher, and the philosophers thought that he was trying to work in an
impossible and empty science. He had a few advanced students (W. Brown, Cyril
Burt, and H. B. English among others), and Professor Gotch allowed some of the
rooms in his physiological laboratory to be used for research. The founder of the
Wilde readership -objected to experimentation and tried to have McDougall ousted,
but in 1912 his position was strengthened by his election to the Royal Society and
to a fellowship in Corpus Christi College. In 1913 he made his first trip to America,
in the company of Dr. Osler of Oxford, to make an address at the opening of the
Phipps Clinic in Baltimore. When the World War broke out, McDougall enlisted
as a private in the French army and drove an ambulance. He later offered his
services to the medical corps of the British army and was made a major. His work
was with military cases of mental disorder and was recognized after the war by his
election as president of the psychiatric section of the Royal Society of Medicine.
He was called to Harvard University in 1920 and stayed there until he accepted
the offer of a professorship at Duke University in 1927.
The scope of McDougall's writings and his intellectual interests is comparable only
to that of Wundt and James. He employed almost all methods of psychological in-
vestigation, and he made contributions to almost all of the principal fields of the
subject Let us consider some of his dominant interests, which by their variety
exhibit the richness of his mind.
Experimental and phyfiiological pfiychologr. Between 1901 and the World War,
McDougall published about twenty papers, the most important of which dealt with
the following topics: Thomas Young's theory of color vision, physiological factors

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304 NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS

of the attention process, sensations excited by a single momentary stimulation of

the eye, variation of visual intensity with duration of stimulus, the relation between
corresponding points of the two retinas, and learning and retention with respect
to Bergson's distinction between habit memory and pure memory. His work shows
a strong interest in inferring from sensory and perceptual phenomena the nature
of processes in the brain. In 1903 he published his drainage theory of inhibition,
which received favorable attention from Sherrington. Although this theory, like the
idea that learning involves a decrease of synaptic resistance, belongs to that class
of neurological theories for which there is considerable plausibility but little or no
direct physiological evidence, its author, with characteristic tenacity, never sur-
rendered it. As late as 1929 he claimed that all of Pavlov's phenomena of inhibition
were in harmony with the drainage theory. In 1905 the small but extremely influ-
ential Physiological Psychology appeared, in which psychology was defined as "the
positive science of the conduct of living creatures."
Hormic psychology and the theory of instincts. For a decade McDougall's An In-
troduction to Social Psychology (1908) was undoubtedly more successful and in-
fluential than any other psychological work. Although written for the general public,
it was widely used for many years as a textbook. Largely a synthesis of the views
of other writers, it was nevertheless a brilliant work of systematization. In this book
McDougall sought to lay a firm foundation for the social sciences to replace the
ad hoc psychologies previously concocted by many writers in this field. This firm
foundation he believed to be the theory of instincts and their derivatives, the senti-
ments. In his Outline of Psychology (1923) he carried this theory farther and named
it, after a suggestion of Percy Nunn, the hormic theory. This theory states that
purposive striving is the most fundamental category of psychology, and that the
springs of purposive activity are the instincts. The instincts are inborn dispositions,
which cannot be defined by reference either to definite stimuli or to bodily move-
ments, but only by the kinds of change in the situation which their activity brings
about or, when introspection is possible, by the specific accompanying emotional
quality. The ascription of a specific emotion to each of the human instincts is one
of the most original but at the same time one of the most questionable points in
McDougall's system. One of the arguments for the existence of human instincts
upon which McDougall most strongly insisted was that from evolutionary continuity;
this argument is especially prominent in the Outline, where the instincts of both men
and animals are discussed in the same sections. His tendency to bring human and
animal behavior so close together was somewhat checked in 1933 by his introduc-
tion of the term "propensities" in place of "human instincts," a verbal change which
called attention to the difference between the relatively fixed behavior to animals and
the very variable manifestations of human instinctive activity. These pronounced
hereditarian views of McDougall may be illustrated by his idea that in gregarious
animals and human beings certain instincts may be aroused, independently of any
learning, by the sight or sound of the same instinctive activity on the part of another
individual.
One of the central doctrines of McDougall's hormic psychology is that all be-
havior is purposive and bears six objective marks which distinguish it from me-
chanically produced movements. Reflexes are not to be confused with "behavior,"
for they do not show these marks of purposiveness; they are, like habits, devoid of
any driving force and may serve, as mere "motor mechanisms," any instinct.

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 NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 305

Purposive striving in McDougall's system is said to be accompanied b

experience, which cannot be reduced to sensations of muscular contra
ception and memory are held to be governed to a large extent by con
stinctive striving in men and animals involves some degree of foresigh
however rudimentary. In The Energies of Men (1933) McDougall gave
factors great prominence, especially in his discussion of animal learni
based partly upon animal experiments which he had made in collabora
his son.
McDougall's theory of sentiments he took, with some modifications
work of G. F. Shand. He held that the sentiments are the functional un
life; each sentiment is an organization of all the instinctive and cogn
tions relating to a particular object. He called the theory of the sentiments "a
systematic sketch of the structure of character and a theory of its development from
native tendencies under the moulding process of social traditions."
Socsl psychology. McDougall's strictly social psychology began with The Group
Mind (1920); his work of 1908 had been largely the groundwork in individual
psychology which was to be applied to social phenomena in his later writings. His
book of 1920 discussed the concept of the group mind (not to be confused with
the rejected concept of group consciousness), the behavior of crowds and organized
groups, and the national mind and character. The Group Mind was intended to form
one part of a magnum opus, but McDougall never completed the project, since this
part was so unfavorably received. Undoubtedly the book was handicapped by its
title, which lent itself to misunderstanding. The verdict of critics was that this
work was no more scientific than many others, not written by men of science, on the
same subjects.
McDougall developed the theory of innate mental differences between races in
a series of Lowell lectures, published under the title Is America Safe for Democracy?
( 1921 ) . This book belongs to the period in which the results of mental tests,
especially the army tests given to different-racial and national groups, were un-
critically accepted as revealers of "innate" intelligence. McDougall used these data
as evidence of the innate inferiority of the negro race and for the hereditary origin
of intellectual differences found among children from different social strata. He
also attempted to show that there were certain important temperamental differences
among the three races of Europe which were reflected in various social and cultural
phenomena. Later in his autobiography (1930) he said that he did not know that the
American people were sensitive about the racial question and that this book is
largely responsible for a hostile attitude toward him on the part of the American
press.
The mind-body problem. In Body andS Mind: A History and a Defence of
Animism ( 1911 ) and its sequel, Modern Materialism and Emergent Evolution
(1929), McDougall defended the theories of psychophysical interaction and vitalism.
Mechanical principles he held to be inadequate to explain purposive activity, organic
evolution, morphogenesis, heredity, vital self-regulation, and memory. Furthermore,
he thought that the correlation between brain processes and mental processes can-
not be carried very far, in fact that there are no complete brain correlates for memory,
the unity of consciousness, meanings, or intelligent purposive activity. In the later
book he vigorously criticized the efforts of H. C. Warren and R. B. Perry to
teduce purposive activity to mechanical activity or to obliterate the distinction

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306 NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS

between the two. The value of Body and Mind as a comprehensive summary of the
psychophysical problem and of its sequel as a critique of emergent evolution will
remain undiminished for many years to come.
Abnormal psychology In the field of abnormal psychology McDougall wished to
be a mediator between academic and medical psychology. He considered himself a
member of a group led by Morton Prince and W. H. R. Rivers. Both of these
men had been influenced by McDougall's writings; in fact, McDougall claimed to
have converted Prince to hormic psychology. McDougall based his Outline of Ab-
normal Psychology (1926) partly on his military experience. The book is important
for its systematic discussion of mental disorders, which made much use of the
concepts of instinct, repression, conflict, and dissociation; for its treatment of
hypnosis; and for its criticism of Freudian and Jungian psychology. In the last two
chapters, McDougall yielded to his speculative tendencies and presented his "monadic
theory" of personality.
His criticism of psychoanalysis in this book and Psychoanalysis and Social Psy-
chologr (1935) is probably the most thoroughgoing and competent that has been
made up to the present time by either a medical or an academic psychologist. Mc-
Dougall preferred not to attack the application of psychoanalysis to individual
cases; he chose rather to point out its internal inconsistencies and to criticize its
application to other fields, especially social psychology. He was queerly ambivalent
toward Freud. After having written in 1920 that he found French writers on ab-
normal psychology, especially Janet, more valuable to him than those of the German
and Austrian school, he said in 1926, "I believe that Professor Freud has done
more for the advancement of psychology than any other student since Aristotle."
Although he never receded from this opinion, it would be hard to End very much
in Freudian psychology of which he approved except its hormic quality.
The Lamarckian experiment. McDougall's belief in the inheritance of acquired
characters, which he had expressed in many of his works, led him to begin in
1920 what he has himself called "a fool's experiment" on the transmission of the
effects of training in rats. The experiment has now gone on for at least 13 years
and 37 generations. The descendants of the trained animals, which learned to escape
from a tank of water, made decidedly fewer errors in the latter generations than a
control group. Although there has been criticism, principally from Crew of Edin-
burgh, McDougall believed that all objections could be answered and that he had
proved the Lamarckian principle.
Nor was McDougall's versatility limited by even these six fields. As early as
1896 he published a theory of muscular contraction. He contributed several papers
to anthropological journals and collaborated with Dr. Hose in 1912 on The Pvgan
Tribes of Borneo. He wrote extensively on topics relating to ethics and world
politics. Eugenics and psychic research he called his hobbies; in fact, psychic research
became a major interest of his last years, when he actively supported Rhine's work
on extra-sensory perception, accepting the results at their face value.
To the last McDougall was a vigorous and indeed an unexcelled polemist. His
polemic abilities were a natural outgrowth of his championing a cluster of un-
popular causes; he was necessarily belligerent in the face of opposition on so
many fronts. Many years ago he decided to write his controversial articles with

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 NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 307

utter frankness, and he lived up to this policy. His enthusiasm sometimes pro-
duced clever phrases which antagonized some readers (he called behaviorism "a
most misshapen and beggarly dwarf" and said that parallelism "survives merely as a
historical curiosity still hugged by a few intellectual tortoises"), but his informal
oral discussions were marked by mildness and even diffidence. Among his last
polemic essays were a devastating criticism of Pareto and a series of articles on
Gestalt psychology.
McDougall lived and thought in the tradition of British psychology after the
decline of associationism. He has said that he was a disciple of no one but Stout
and James. His indebtedness to Stout is perhaps not as well known in America as it
should be. His system of psychology in its main features is an extension of Stout's
psychology, free from certain doctrines which he considered errors, with greater
emphasis on hormic forces, and in a less austere literary style. From James, Mc-
Dougall got a belief in the pragmatic criterion of truth and a great deal of personal
. . .

nsplrahon.

A feeling of isolation, due to the almost unanimous rejection by American psy-

chologists of his hormic theory and especially of his views on human instincts,
burdened his last years. He deplored the chaotic state of psychology and became
skeptical of its present and future progress and of the value of his own life-work,
saying in 1935, in spite of his manifest achievements, "Even now, after some forty-
five years of sustained effort, I am not sure that I have made any progress, have
learnt anything of human nature.''l
The Rice Institute FRANK A. PATTIE, JR.

'l The autobiography of McDougall, in A History of Psychology in Autobiography

1, 1930, 191-223, edited by Carl Murchison, which has been consulted in the prepara-
tion of this sketch, is candid and fascinating. It is accompanied by a photograph of
McDougall in army uniform. A more recent picture appears in Human Affairs
edited by R. B. Cattell and others, 1937. Neither is a very good portrait of Mc-
Dougall, who was an exceptionally handsome man.

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