William McDougall

The Theory of Laughter

PROF. SULLY has given us in his latest work a model monograph on laughter.1 With much charm and penetration, and in the light of a wide knowledge of the very extensive literature of the subject, he discusses the nature, causes and effects of laughter, its uses, its origin, its development and its future in the race and in the individual. He criticises the more important of the many theories of the ludicrous propounded by .philosophers in all ages; he shows that each one of them fails to account for a considerable proportion of the many varieties of the ludicrous, and he concludes “that the impressions of the laughable cannot be reduced to one or two principles.” While thus recognising the impossibility of bringing all kinds of laughter-causing things under one-formula, Prof. Sully points to two causes of laughter which are closely allied and frequently cooperate, namely a sudden oncoming of gladness and a sudden release from constraint, and these, he regards as the two principles most generally applicable to the explanation of the nature of the ludicrous. There is implied here and throughout the book me assumption that “the laugh … is in general an expression of a pleasurable state of feeling,” an assumption which finds also explicit expression in several passages, e.g. “that outburst of gladness which we call laughter” and “laughter being primarily the expression of the fuller measure of the happy or gladsome state.” It is assumed, in fact, that that which makes us laugh does so in general in virtue of its pleasing us, or, more shortly, that in general we laugh because we are pleased.

The Present Chaos in Psychology and the Way Out

There is at the present time a bewildering variety of schools of psychology in open rivalry and conflict with one another. The Press and the general public, in America, at least, seem to be aware of only two of these, namely the psychoanalytic and the behaviouristic schools; and the newspaper writers and the average highbrow are content to mix snippets and catchwords from these two utterly different schools, ignoring all the rest, unless they add to their shop-window display some uncertain reference to the work of the mental testers.

The Philosophy of J. S. Haldane

In a little book of 155 pages the late John Scot Haldane gave the world his final message. Much as his friends and admirers must regret his recent death, we may rejoice that in these few pages he has succeeded in presenting in clear and unmistakable fashion the philosophy which, throughout his long life of highly successful detailed research in physiology combined with equally effective and untiring application of his findings to practical problems, he slowly developed into the outlines of a comprehensive and rounded system.

Mechanism, Purpose and the New Freedom

The problem of the relation between mechanism and purpose is of profound theoretical interest. It is the most fundamental of the great perennially disputed problems. And, unlike some other of the great unsolved problems, it is also of far-reaching and profound practical importance. The kind of answer we give to the question affects in a multitude of ways the conduct of our lives, the form and working of all our institutions, our science, our law, our politics, our economics, our morals, our religion.

The will of the nation.

Twenty of the biggest chemical companies in the United States have launched a campaign to discredit two historians who have studied the industrys efforts to conceal links between their products and cancer. In an unprecedented move, attorneys for Dow, Monsanto, Goodrich, Goodyear, Union Carbide and others have subpoenaed and deposed five academics who recommended that the University of California Press publish the book Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution, by Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner. The companies have also recruited their own historian to argue that Markowitz and Rosner have engaged in unethical conduct. Markowitz is a professor of history at the CUNY Grad Center; Rosner is a professor of history and public health at Columbia University and director of the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbias School of Public Health.

An Introduction to Social Psychology.

The first comprehensive textbook of social psychology written from a psychological rather than sociological point of view. McDougall pioneered the analysis of social phenomena from the point of view of instinct theory.