The misbehaviorists : Pseudo-science and the modern temper by Harvey Wickham
"The misbehaviorists" by Harvey Wickham is a work of cultural criticism written in the early 20th century. It challenges the vogue of behaviorism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and mechanistic materialism, arguing that these movements trade on the prestige of science while reducing mind, freedom, and morality to mere mechanism. With a polemical yet analytic style, it targets influential figures and ideas to defend consciousness, purpose, and religious tradition against reductive theories. The opening of
this work contrasts the sensed death of the poetic-religious past with the assertive authority of modern science, asking whether science truly describes reality and whether its public interpreters are reliable. It then scrutinizes behaviorism: presenting John B. Watson’s rejection of consciousness, outlining receptors–neurons–effectors, reflex arcs, and conditioned reflexes (including the “Little Albert” experiment), and insisting that such accounts leave out mind, choice, and meaning. Wickham examines the synapse as the supposed mechanistic selector, criticizes appeals to habit and chance, and contests efforts to reduce emotions and language to mere motions or “sub-vocal speech,” highlighting ethical implications in proposals for laboratory-style child-rearing and the discouragement of parental affection. The section closes by turning to William McDougall’s instinct theory, showing how its “hormic” impulses also risk determinism even as it gestures toward a vitalist account of will. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
Read or download for free
For an overview of the different reading options, see our Reading Guide
| Reading Options | Url | Size | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Read now! | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77481.html.images | 591 kB | |||
| EPUB3 (E-readers incl. Send-to-Kindle) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77481.epub3.images | 1.8 MB | |||
| EPUB (older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77481.epub.images | 1.8 MB | |||
| EPUB (no images, older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77481.epub.noimages | 402 kB | |||
| Kindle | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77481.kf8.images | 2.0 MB | |||
| older Kindles | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77481.kindle.images | 2.0 MB | |||
| Plain Text UTF-8 | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77481.txt.utf-8 | 505 kB | |||
| Download HTML (zip) | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/77481/pg77481-h.zip | 1.6 MB | |||
| There may be more files related to this item. | |||||
Similar Books
About this eBook
| Author | Wickham, Harvey, 1872-1930 |
|---|---|
| LoC No. | 28009964 |
| Title | The misbehaviorists : Pseudo-science and the modern temper |
| Original Publication | New York: The Dial Press, 1928. |
| Credits | Sean/IB@DP, Terry Jeffress, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) |
| Language | English |
| LoC Class | BF: Philosophy, Psychology, Religion: Psychology, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis |
| Subject | Psychology |
| Subject | Science -- Philosophy |
| Subject | Behaviorism (Psychology) |
| Category | Text |
| EBook-No. | 77481 |
| Release Date | Dec 17, 2025 |
| Copyright Status | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 1239 downloads in the last 30 days. |
| Project Gutenberg eBooks are always free! | |