William McDougall, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The springs of all human action are innate. Grant the human being nothing but the capacity to learn and to associate ideas, as the associationists did, or nothing but the conditioned reflex, as the behaviorists do, and you cannot get a single purposive act out of him, because you have given him no reason to act at all — no impulse, no end sought.
Conduct is not pushed from behind by stimuli; it is drawn from in front by goals, and the goals are set by our inherited instincts. An instinct, as I analyze it, has three aspects: it disposes us to notice objects of a certain class, to feel toward them a distinctive primary emotion, and to act toward them in a distinctive way — fear and flight, curiosity and exploration, pugnacity and combat, the parental instinct and its tenderness.
These are the raw motive power; the sentiments and the self-regarding sentiment organize them into character. This is hormic psychology: the science of a mind that strives, that persists toward its end and varies its means, that is an agent and not a machine. No psychology that denies purpose can be a true account of a creature every one of whose acts is purposive.1234
Intelligent action, on the other hand, is generally defined as one which seems to show that the creature has profited by prior experience of similar situations, that it somehow brings to bear its previous experience in the guidance of its present action.An Outline of Psychology, p. 72
The complete depression of the lever and the fullest opening of the valve occur only when a certain com¬ bination of keys is struck; the striking of some of these keys will permit a partial depression of the lever. The keyboard is the array of sensory-organs; the key is any natural object which will strike the appropriate combination of keys.An Outline of Psychology, pp. 109–110
My psychology, on the other hand, has been arrived at by prolonged study of the traditional academic psychologies, combined with the endeavour to develop academic psychology by a free use of. the comparative method, bringing to bear upon the problems of human nature the data and theories of biology, physiology, and anthropology, especially the theory of biological evolution.An Outline of Abnormal Psychology, p. 158
The cue came from the comparison of men with animals. The animals are actuated by their instincts: when nothing appeals to their instincts they remain quiescent; when some instinct is brought into play the animal becomes emotionally excited and puts forth a tremendous display of energy, a display that may continue over an astonishingly long time.An Outline of Abnormal Psychology, p. 63
The founding doctrine of McDougall's social psychology and the one whose fortunes best track his reputation. Enormously influential after 1908, the instinct theory became the target of the "anti-instinct revolt" of the 1920s — Kuo's call to give up instincts, Bernard's demonstration that authors had catalogued thousands of alleged instincts with no agreement — which, joined to the behaviorist ascendancy, expelled the concept from academic psychology within a decade. The hormic insistence on purpose survived indirectly in the purposive and motivational psychologies (Tolman's purposive behaviorism, the study of drives), and the idea of innate, evolved behavioral dispositions returned openly in ethology and evolutionary psychology, which vindicated the general form of McDougall's claim while abandoning his particular catalogue. The dispute over whether behavior rests on innate purposive dispositions or on learning and conditioning is a permanent one.