Thinking and doing / by Harry Roberts.

  • Harry Roberts
Date:
1933
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Thinking and doing / by Harry Roberts. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tions, and store them in their rooms, just as might a prudent cave-dweller who was never sure of to- morrow’s dinner. The instinct is, as it were, fol- lowed for its own sake, the inclination being aided by the pleasurable feelings which themselves form part of the urge. A good many simple-minded people, for instance, still hunt and kill animals, and get an enormous amount of satisfaction and enjoy- ment out of it; not because they want food, and not because they get any pleasure out of killing animals, but because hunting constituted one link in an in- stinctive chain which helped primitive man to ap- pease his hunger. All animals seem, so far as they can be observed by us, to be built on a common plan, and to react to the external world fundamentally much in the same manner; even though, in detail, their be- haviour is so various. We have small ground for supposing that the ultimate forces which impel our own activity differ in essence, however much they may differ in quality or strength, from those which move our lowlier relatives. It is the great discovery of the so-called New Psychology that our own true motives of action are rarely what we flatter ourselves they are. We have been so used to take for granted that whilst other creatures act mainly from instinct almost as iron filings fly to the magnet, we are ‘rational creatures’ guided solely by conscious reasoning and calculated fore- sight. We are now coming to see that we also depend on inborn energy and impulses for our driving force, and that our reasoning is but a de- velopment of that conscious hesitation and delay
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