ABSTRACT
“His life is a major tragedy,” Robert Yerkes (chap. 7, Pioneeers II) is reported to have remarked after reading William McDougall's autobiography (cited in Adams, 1939). “In the strictest sense of tragedy, this is profoundly true. The frustrations of little men with little goals are not the materials of tragedy. McDougall's frustration of his goal—to make a science of psychology—was” (Adams, 1939, p. 8). McDougall referred to himself as a “sane” behaviorist, one for whom “the facts ascertainable from introspective observation, and the objectively observable facts of behavior” were equally “indispensable” (Watson & McDougall, 1929, pp. 53–54). He believed that behavior must be understood “in terms of the end or purpose of activity, rather than in terms only of the antecedent events” (McDougall, 1912, p. 38). This position, eventually labeled hormic psychology, contrasted sharply with the stimulus– response (S– R) psychology of John Watson (chap. 12, Pioneers I), whose radical behaviorism left no room for consciousness or mind, for goals or purposes. McDougall (1930) maintained that, as well as seeking understanding of the physiological processes that underlie behavior, psychologists should be concerned with such more difficult problems as “the innate basis of our mental life” (p. 222) and the “relation of mind to body” (p. 223). These issues were irrelevant to most behaviorists and, by the end of the 1920s when McDougall's pessimistic autobiography was written, mechanistic behaviorism, in a variety of forms, was the prevailing view in America. In looking back at his efforts over the previous three decades to convince his colleagues to accept his purposive psychology, McDougall concluded, correctly, that he had failed. Who was this tragic figure?
