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This book is a fairly recent addition to the field of psychology. The author deals systematically with the problems of human motivation in an attempt to dislodge why people feel and behave as they do; how to control the processes connected with desire, purpose, habit and impulses; and to seek out the basis of these reactions.
The study is begun by a statement of the problem and the method of attack. Motivation is dealt with by conceiving consciousness and matter in a dualistic light, although the author states“the fundamentally real system is that of consciousness or experience, alone. The physical scheme is a conceptual development which arises, so to speak, from viewing the psychical system from the outside.” The author then reviews in three chapters the historical background, presenting in rapid succession the doctrines of animism and religion, then the early Greek views which regarded the principles governing human behavior as being similar to those which governed the universe, to the nineteenth century tendencies of interest in heredity and the development of laboratory psychology and the interest in a physiological attack upon the problem of animal and human behavior. Psychoanalysis is discussed briefly from Janet, Freud, to Kempf and others. The early views regarding animal behavior—the conditioned reflex of Pawlow; Thorndike's hedonistic principle, that of several responses made to the same situation the responses which are followed or accompanied by pleasure are most likely to recur when the situation recurs, and that the responses associated with discomfort will be less likely to recur; and such theories of learning as Watson's who reduces the proposition to the laws of use or exercise, arguing that the successful response occurs twice as frequently because it terminates the series, and is present in every series—are discussed.