(1) The Psychology of War (2) Instinct in Man: A Contribution to the Psychology of Education

Abstract

THE study of instinct as a factor in human nature is a modern, even a contemporary, development. The philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wrote much about the passions and the inclinations and the appetites, by which they meant the irrational impulses which form the baser animal nature, upon which, as they thought, the rational nature is superposed as a spiritual endowment. The modern treatment of the problem, however, is the outcome of the enormous advance of the biological sciences in the latter half of the nineteenth century in the work of Darwin and his successors. Particular attention is being focussed on the study to-day. The great world-war, with the deliberate destruction of accumulated wealtn on a gigantic scale, and the devotion to death and mutilation of a whole generation, is so manifestly irrational that we are driven, perforce, to seek the meaning and cause of war in instinct as opposed to reason, in a primitive nature consisting of impulses and cravings imperfectly controlled by intellect.

(1) The Psychology of War.

By Dr. John T. MacCurdy. Pp. xi + 68. (London: William Heinemann, 1917.) Price 2s. 6d. net.

(2) Instinct in Man: A Contribution to the Psychology of Education.

By Dr. J. Drever. Pp. x + 281. (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1917.) Price 9s. net.