Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [55]
In Scotland, Thomas Reid (1710–1792), Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), and Thomas Brown (1778–1820), professors at Scottish universities and good Presbyterians all, modified associationism to make it more palatable to believers. They felt that as it was expounded by Locke and Hume, it was mechanistic and degrading to the humanity of man. Moreover, Hume’s skepticism about causality and the reality of the external world was contrary to religious dogma. All three men therefore altered and added to associationism in an effort to repair these defects.
Their chief answer to Locke, Berkeley, and Hume was actually remarkably simple: subjectivism and skepticism were belied by common sense. People in all ages and nations have believed in the external world and in causality because common sense tells them to—the very view Dr. Johnson expressed by kicking the stone. It was hardly good science, but at least it did no harm.
Reid also made the very good point that the simple laws of association seemed grossly inadequate as an explanation of complex mental functions. He therefore revived and enlarged the ancient concept of mental faculties—special innate abilities—and named several dozen of them.50
Later psychologists would struggle to prove, or disprove, the existence of such faculties.
Brown made a smaller but more concrete contribution to associationism: he proposed that there were both primary and secondary laws of “suggestion” (association), and that the latter, under special conditions, altered the operation of the former. Thus, the word “cold” might produce at one time and place the association “dark” but at another time and place the association “hot.” This valuable insight, however, was ignored until the advent of the experimental approach to learning nearly a century later.
James Mill (1773–1836), social theorist, Utilitarian philosopher, and journalist, offered his own version of associationism in Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829). Instead of enlarging the theory, he drastically simplified it. He said that there were only two classes of mental elements—sensations and ideas—and that all association comes about through one factor, contiguity, the simultaneity or nearness in time of two experiences. Complex ideas were nothing but simpler ones conjoined; the idea “everything” was not an abstraction but a mere heap or accumulation of all of one’s simple and complex ideas. Robert Watson says that “this brings association as a doctrine to its nadir in logical, mechanistic, and molecular simplicity.”51 Nonetheless, some leading twentieth-century behaviorists would sound like Mill’s intellectual off-spring.
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), James Mill’s son, primarily a philosopher, discussed psychology in his Logic (1843) and his Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865). He restored to mainstream associationism much of what his father had pruned from it, particularly hypotheses about the formation of complex ideas. Unlike the elder Mill, he envisioned them not as mere assemblages of simple elements but as fusions of those elements, much like chemical compounds that have characteristics unlike those of their component elements. Accordingly, he said, the laws of association cannot tell us how any complex idea comes to be or what it is composed of; we can learn that only from experience and direct experiment. Mill thus helped steer associationism toward experimental psychology.
Alexander Bain (1818–1903), a friend of John Stuart Mill’s, lived well into the era of scientific psychology. Some scholars say he was the last of the philosopher-psychologists, others that he was the first real psychologist in that he devoted most of his life to psychology and brought more physiology into it than any of his predecessors. The physiology was not imaginary, like Hartley’s; it was gleaned from his visits to nineteenth-century anatomists and his reading of their works. The mechanisms