Psychology, the study of behaviour / by William McDougall.

  • McDougall, William, 1871-1938.
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Psychology, the study of behaviour / by William McDougall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and, becoming habitually directed to that object, may generate a sentiment strangely like maternal love. Now, in order to bring home to our minds the full importance of such cognitive-conative linkage, let us carry the history of the devoted mother a step further. After some years of devotion, during which the sentiment has grown all-powerful and has generated a great system of knowledge, habits, and interests, the mother loses her child. She is prostrated with sorrow, and when the first paroxysm of grief is past, she remains inert; the mainspring of all her energy is stopped at its source; the will to live, which for years has poured itself freely through this one system, finds no adequate channel through which to animate her organ- ism; and slowly she dies, her end probably hastened by the invasion of phthisis or of some other disease, which she no longer has the energy to resist. Or, if she continues to live, her best chance of restoration to a life of activity and health lies in the finding of some new object for her maternal impulse, to which the whole system of her master-sentiment may, with some readjustment, direct its activities, thus opening once more the ohoked channels by which alone the vital energy can adequately suffuse her whole being. She may