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In writing this book Professor Eldridge has made a unique contribution to the sociological movement in that he has utilized the naturalistic method of investigating these complicated situations, and has thus sought the facts in each case regardless of their import as supportive of current or personal theories. In developing his thesis he has taken pains to emphasize and elaborate the factors operative in all social situations including hereditary human traits and capacities, such as hunger, fear, anger, the sex and parental instincts, gregarious impulses, play tendencies, etc.; the physical environment, cultural and traditional acquisitions comprising general habits, intellectual processes and hedonic factors. This broadly basic attitude naturally outlines a field obviously too extensive for detailed treatment, but the author has courageously described, evaluated and attempted to correlate the processes involved in the development of a democratic society.
McDougall's concepts concerning the “instincts” which are now controversial, are followed rather consistently; however, the author has anticipated difficulties here as may be shown by a quotation from the preface, “One concession has been made to some prospective opponents. The bulk of the text was prefaced before controversies on the general problem had become acute, as they recently have, and therefore before a certain school of social psychologists developed such marked antipathy to the hypothesis that human beings are formed with tendencies toward more or less specific responses to environmental stimuli—-especially when these tendencies are called instincts. I have thought it well to spare the feelings of these psychologists in regard to this matter so far as possible and this I have done by substituting for the term instinct which figured rather conspicuously in the original draft of the text, more pacifying terms (as I hope) such as impulse, disposition, tendency and instinctive, the adjectival equivalent of t