[From MK (2015.08.13.0705 CET)]
William McDougall. "The Hormic Psychology" Supplementary Chapter 7 in
An Introduction to Social Psychology. London: Metheun & Co. (1950):
444-494.
https://archive.org/stream/introductiontoso020342mbp#page/n15/mode/2up
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IN the volume Psychologies. of 1925 I took the field as an exponent of
purposive psychology. Anticipating a little the course of history, I
shall here assume that the purposive nature of human action is no
longer in dispute, and in this article shall endeavour to define and
to justify that special form of purposive psychology which is now
pretty widely known as hormic psychology. But first a few words in
justification of this assumption.
Fifteen years ago American psychologists displayed almost without
exception a complete blindness to the most peculiar, characteristic,
and important feature of human and animal activity, namely, its
goal-seeking. All bodily actions and all phases of experience were
mechanical reactions to stimuli, and all learning was the modification
of such reactions by the addition of one reaction to another according
to the mechanical principles of association. The laws of learning were
the laws of frequency, of recency, and of effect ; and, though the law
of effect as formulated by Thorndike may have suggested to some few
minds that the mechanical principles involved were not so clear as
might be wished, the laws of frequency and recency could give rise to
no such misgivings. The law of effect, with its uncomfortable
suggestion of an effect that somehow causes its cause, was pretty
generally regarded as something to be got rid of by the substitution
of some less ambiguous and more clearly mechanical formula.
Now, happily, all this is changed ; the animal psychologists have
begun to realise that any description of animal behaviour which
ignores its goal-seeking nature is
( 445) futile, any " explanation " which leaves it out of account,
fictitious, and any experimentation which ignores motivation, grossly
misleading ; they are busy with the study of " drives,"" sets," and "
incentives." It is true that their recognition of goal-seeking is in
general partial and grudging ; they do not explicitly recognise that a
" set " is a set toward an end, that " a drive " is an active striving
toward a goal, that an " incentive " is some-thing that provokes such
active striving. The terms " striving " and " conation " are still
foreign to their vocabularies.
Much the same state of affairs prevails in current American writings
on human psychology. Its problems are no longer discussed, experiments
are no longer made with total and bland disregard for the purposive
nature of human activity. The terms " set,"" drive," and " incentive,
"having been found indispensable in animal psychology, are allowed to
appear in discussions of human problems, in spite of their
anthropomorphic implications ; " prepotent reflexes,"" motives,""
drives,"" preponderant propensities,"" impulses toward ends,""
fundamental urges," and even " purposes " now figure in the texts. In
the final chapter on personality of a thoroughly mechanical text (1),
in which the word " purpose " has been conspicuous by its absence, a
role of first importance is assigned to " dominant purposes.
"Motivation, after being almost ignored, has become a problem of
central interest. Yet, as was said above, we are in a transition
period ; and all this recognition of the purposive nature of human
activity is partial and grudging. The author (Dr. H. A. Carr), who
tells us on one page that " Man attempts to transform his environment
to suit his own purposes, "nowhere tells us what he means by the word
" purposes " and is careful to tell us on a later page that "We must
avoid the naive assumption that the ulterior consequences of an act
either motivate that act or serve as its objective." Almost without
exception the authors who make any recognition of the goal-seeking or
purposive nature of human and animal activities fall into one of the
three following classes :
(a) they imply that, if only we (446) knew a little more about the
nervous system, we should be able to explain such activities
mechanically ; or
(b) they explicitly make this assertion ;
(c) more rarely, they proceed to attempt some such explanation.
Partial, half-hearted, reluctant as is still the recognition of
purposive activity, it may, I think, fairly be said that only the
crude behaviourists now ignore it completely ; that, with that
exception, American psychology has become purposive, in the sense that
it no longer ignores or denies the goal-seeking nature of human and
animal action, but accepts it as a problem to be faced.
It would, then, be otiose in this year of grace to defend or advocate
purposive psychology in the vague sense of all psychology that
recognises purposiveness, takes account of foresight and of urges,
impulses, cravings, desires, as motives of action.
My task is the more difficult one of justifying the far more radically
purposive psychology denoted by the adjective " hormic," a psychology
which claims to be autonomous ; which refuses to be bound to and
limited by the principles current in the physical sciences ; which
asserts that active striving towards a goal is a fundamental category
of psychology, and is a process of a type that cannot be
mechanistically explained or resolved into mechanistic sequences ;
which leaves it to the future development of the sciences to decide
whether the physical sciences shall continue to be mechanistic or
shall find it necessary to adopt hormic interpretations of physical
events, and whether we are to have ultimately one science of nature,
or two, the mechanistic and the teleological.
For hormic psychology is not afraid to use teleological description
and explanation. Rather, it insists that those of our activities which
we can at all adequately describe are unmistakably and undeniably
teleological, are activities which we undertake in the pursuit of some
goal, for the sake of some result which we foresee and desire to
achieve. And it holds that such activities are the true type of all
mental activities and of all truly vital activities, and that, when we
seek to interpret more obscure instances of human activity and when we
observe on the part of animals (447) actions that clearly are
goal-seeking, we are well justified in regarding them as of the same
order as our own explicitly teleological or purposive actions.
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M