Instincts of the herd in peace and war / by W. Trotter.

  • Wilfred Trotter
Date:
[1916]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Instincts of the herd in peace and war / by W. Trotter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    cerned with those forms of mental activity which man displays in his social relations, the assumption being made that society brings to light a special series of mental aptitudes with which ordinary psy- chology, dealing as it does essentially with the in- dividual, is not mainly concerned. It may be stated at once that it is a principal thesis of this essay that this attitude is a fallacious one, and has been re- sponsible for the comparative sterility of the psychological method in sociology. The two fields— the social and the individual—are regarded here as absolutely continuous ; all human psychology, it is contended, must be the psychology of associated man, since man as a solitary animal is unknown to us, and every individual must present the character- istic reactions of the social animal if such exist. The only difference between the two branches of the science lies in the fact that ordinary psychology makes no claim to be practical in the sense of conferring useful foresight ; whereas sociology does profess to deal with the complex, unsimplified problems of ordinary life, ordinary life being, by a biological necessity, social life. If, therefore, sociology is to be defined as psychology, it would be better to call it practical or applied psychology than social psychology. The first effect of the complete acceptance of this point of view is to render very obvious the difficulty and immensity of the task of sociology ; indeed, the possibility of such a science is some- times denied. For example, at an early meeting of the Sociological Society, Professor Karl Pearson ex- pressed the opinion that the birth of the science of sociology must await the obstetrical genius of some one man of the calibre of Darwin or Pasteur. At a later meeting Mr. H. G. Wells went farther, anti maintained that as a science sociology not only does not but cannot exist.
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