Abstract
THE unfortunate habit (which is apt to persist even among those with a scientific training) of discussing verbal questions as if they were questions of fact has been responsible for much waste of time and paper in controversy over the problem of human instincts. How much of this controversy has been verbal may be seen from the fact that many of the opponents of the conception of human instincts have been willing to reintroduce essentially the same conception under some new name such as 'drive', 'urge', etc. Yet behind the mists of verbal controversy, as Prof. T. H. Pear reminds us, there is a real problem of fact-whether or not a man's behaviour is the product of a small number of inherited general dispositions such as sex, pugnacity, acquisitiveness, etc., or whether, on the contrary, the system of his motivation is acquired and the apparently deep-seated dispositions are simply reflections of the motives approved by the 'pattern' of the society in which he was born. Obviously both may be true in part, and the question of fact is then the quantitative one of how much of man's behaviour is to be explained in one way and how much in the other.
Are there Human Instincts?
By Prof. T. H. Pear. (Reprinted from the “Bulletin of the John Rylands Library”, Vol. 27, No. 1, December 1942.) Pp. 32. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1942.) 1s. 6d. net.
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THOULESS, R. Are there Human Instincts?. Nature 151, 489 (1943). https://doi.org/10.1038/151489a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/151489a0