British responses to psycho-physiology, 1860--1900.

BETWEEN 1860 AND 1900 psychology emerged as an independent discipline within the context of major European and American universities. During this period of roughly forty years, proponents of an autonomous psychology sought to establish distinct intellectual and institutional identities vis-a-vis the neighboring fields of philosophy and physiology. I In Britain attempts to create a characteristically psychological approach toward phenomena of mind were strongly influenced by a deep and persistent concern over the possible moral implications of the new discipline-in particular, the possible encouragement it might lend to materialist or fatalist theories of human conduct. Contemporary philosophies of scientific method and modes of explanation also shaped the development of the fledgling discipline. Because late Victorian accounts of science were predominantly reductionist and mechanistic, a "scientific" psychology was regarded by many as a threat to the traditional bases of morality. Advocates of a scientific psychology (the description is their own) were accordingly scrupulous in defining the relationships of their discipline to the extant natural sciences on the one hand and to moral philosophy on the other. Far from being a peripheral aspect of late-nineteenth-century British psychology, confined to the writings of extra-professional commentators, this perceived tension between the moral necessity of free will and a law-governed mental science played a central role in the selection of the topics, approaches, and explanations which dominated psychological discussion.The sovereign position which psychological treatises of the period assigned to theories of volition reflects this concern, as does the emphasis placed on the clinical applications of these theories to problems of moral responsibility such as alcoholism, the legal defense of insanity, and child rearing. In particular, the importance of the concept of attention within latenineteenth-century psychology stems from its critical function in theories of volition: to integrate experimental findings on reflex action and other forms of involuntary behavior with the traditional notion of an active, self-determined subject. At an epistemological level, the various schemes of parallelism, monism, and occasionalism set forth by British psychologists to resolve the Cartesian polarity between brute matter and conscious mind represent similar compromise efforts.