Created by Elizabeth R. Valentine
2012
Description:

'McDougall, then, considered his investigations as contributing to a different, but similarly vitalist tradition of research as that in which Bergson had invested: like Bergson, he characterized the defining attribute of life as an activity (flow) rather than a structure such as the cell; like Bergson, he accorded a non-rational concept (‘instinct’ rather than Bergson’s ‘intuition’) a fundamental role in the psyche (McDougall 1908); and like Bergson, he was fascinated by what he characterized as the as-yet unknown potentialities of vital existence. It is notable in this later regard that both served as presidents of the Society for Psychical Research (Valentine 2012, 70-71, 81).'

 

'In acquiring Münsterberg's psychological laboratory, Sully had helped bring a set of research questions to Britain that had hitherto generally only appeared in the country in terms of broader enquiries concerning the relation of matter to spirit (for example in the study of Mesmerism, or, as frequently, optics)  (Hayward 2007, 40-56; Schickore 2006, 396-401). The tools that Münsterberg's laboratory contained invited investigation of sensory and more generally psychological problems within a very different setting than these latter sciences. For example, Richet, Binet, Bergson, James, and such colleagues of Sherrington’s as McDougall, Cyril Burt and the physicist Oliver Lodge found common ground in their belief that spiritualist phenomena constituted an epistemologically significant site of analysis (Valentine 2012).'