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nydus/Instincts of the Herd in Peace and WarPublic
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Table of Contents

SPECULATIONS UPON THE HUMAN MIND IN 1915

to itself, there will always be a risk of a presentable one being extemporized.

Psychology of this primitive type—the naïve psychology of common sense—is always necessarily tainted with what may be called in a special sense an­thro­po­mor­phism; it tells us, that is to say, not what man is but what he thinks and feels himself to be. Judged by its fruits in enabling us to foretell or to influence conduct, it is worthless. It has been studied for thousands of years and infinite ingenuities have been expended on it, and yet at its best it can only tell us how the average man thinks his mind works—a body of information not sensibly superior in reality to the instructions of a constitutional monarch addressed to an unruly parliament. It has distracted thought with innumerable falsifications, but in all its secular cultivation has produced no body of gen­er­al­i­za­tions of value in the practical conduct of life.

C OMMENTS ON AN O BJECTIVE S YSTEM OF H UMAN P SYCHOLOGY

I

Until comparatively recent years the fact that what was called psychology did not even pretend to be of any practical value in

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