Ethics and some modern world problems / by Willam McDougall.

  • McDougall, William, 1871-1938.
Date:
1924
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Ethics and some modern world problems / by Willam McDougall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    painfully upward from the intellectual and moral levels of our animal ancestry.1 The mass of mankind cannot be made into angels in the course of a few years, nor in the course of a few generations, by any natural process. We must cut our coat according to our cloth; we must seek to develop such an ethical and political system as will effectively harmonize for social ends those energies of human nature that are common to the whole race of man, those ancient instinctive energies that are the very foundation of our being, the springs of all our activities. In short, the ideal of the Christian or philosophic anarchist, of Tolstoi or Kropot¬ kin, the ideal that would do away with all government and all political institutions is, we know, an impossible one. Men need to be governed, need to be members of an organized polity, if they are to realize the best potentialities of their nature. Only by partaking in the life 1 I am aware, of course, that at the present time a school of reactionary psychologists in this country is trying to persuade us that Locke’s old doctrine of the tabula rasa is true. I cannot here set forth the overwhelming weight of evidence against this view. Nor need I refer you to my own published discussions of this topic. It suffices to appeal against this academic freak doctrine to the good sense and universal experience of mankind. The doctrine is a product of the cloistered academic mind, and, in its contemporary form, of minds cloistered in psychological laboratories.