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Superficial sciolists in philosophy have need to learn as a first lesson, that the physiologist and pathologist, as such, can have nothing to do with what transcends the sphere of the mere corporeal organism. It is the proper province of the psychologist to investigate the soul and its mind.

Thomas Gorman, Christian Psychology: The Soul and the Body in their Correlation and Contrast,

Emotion is not what has often been presented by physiologists, a mere nervous reaction from a bodily stimulus, like a kick which the frog gives when it is pricked. It begins with a mental act, and throughout is essen-tially an operation of the mind.

James McCosh, The Emotions,

Religion, materialism and the mind

There was no single Christian or theistic response to physiological and evolutionary psychological theories of emotions. Given the importance in the Christian tradition, from Genesis to Augustine and beyond, of the di-vision between man and the lower animals, however, it is perhaps not sur-prising to find that attempts to equate human and animal emotions raised more opposition from some Christian conservatives even than the attempt to correlate emotions with physiological activity. Martyn Paine was quite typical of Christian writers in his rather generous and inaccurate use of the label ‘materialist’ for thinkers writing within positivist, physiological or evolutionary schools of thought. In his Physiology of the Soul, Paine listed Spencer, Huxley, Darwin’s friend the botanist Joseph Hooker, the Irish physicist John Tyndall and the physiologists W. B. Carpenter and Henry Maudsley as ‘materialistic Darwinists’.^ There was of course no necessary connection between belief in evolution and philosophic ma-terialism, as monists such as Spencer and Huxley repeatedly insisted.

Huxley complained in of his treatment at the hands of W. S. Lilly,

 Paine (), .



Christian and theistic responses 

a theological ally of Cardinal Newman. The truth is, Huxley said, that Mr Lilly is possessed by a ‘zeal to paint “Materialism” in large letters on everything he dislikes’.^Paine, ‘Psychosis’ (see chapter) and Lilly were not the only Christian and theistic writers to suffer from this particular form of over-zealousness.

This chapter looks at the affective psychologies produced by those who were opposed to the perceived ‘materialism’ and reductionism of the school of Bain, Spencer and Darwin. Many of these thinkers were mo-tivated, at least in part, by commitment to theistic or Christian beliefs.

As already mentioned several times, the fact that ‘emotions’, unlike ‘pas-sions’ and ‘affections’, was a psychological term unknown to traditional Christianity meant that some Christian writers even in the s still felt more comfortable writing of the will, and the passions and affections of the soul, rather than adopting the category of ‘emotions’. Many of those who did use the new term contested physicalist definitions of it and provided instead cognitive and ‘component’ or ‘compound’ theories.

The writers considered in this section represent a range of approaches taken by anti-physicalists to emotions in the same period that Spencer, Bain and Darwin were formulating their physiological-evolutionary the-ories. These writers, some of whom would have considered themselves writers of ‘psychology’ and others of whom would have thought of them-selves more as metaphysicians or even as theologians, were all contribu-tors to psychological understandings. Their theories have generally been neglected, however, by historians of psychology. Perhaps this neglect has been the result of restrictive twentieth-century assumptions about what counts as psychology (for instance that it is a secular, scientific, non-metaphysical or professional academic discourse). The neglect of writers such as J. D. Morell, Thomas Upham, William Lyall, George Ramsay, Martyn Paine and James McCosh resulted in a communal amnesia in the worlds of scientific and philosophical psychology with regard to nineteenth-century cognitive and compound views of emotions.

The authors of the works examined in this chapter shared, as well as their opposition to reductionist psychologies of emotion, some form of religious commitment. They fall into three categories – the more or less traditionally Christian, the natural theological and those whose works revealed only a metaphysical or philosophic theism. The Christian con-servatives considered below – William Whewell, William Sewell, John Henry Newman, John Grote and Thomas Gorman – were all based in Oxford or Cambridge. They were advocates of a theological dualism in which the soul was superior to the body and created in the image of God.

 Huxley (), ; see also Desmond (), –.

 From Passions to Emotions

They generally used the categories of the Christian tradition and showed no interest in physiology or evolution.

The ‘natural theologians’ or ‘preacher psychologists’, generally fall into Cashdollar’s category of ‘judicious conservatives’.^ Looking at it from the other side, in view of the extent to which they were prepared to in-clude physiological and (less often) evolutionary considerations in their accounts of passions and emotions, they could equally be called ‘cautious liberals’. This group included, not only natural theologians in the classi-cal Bridgewater mould, such as Charles Bell, Henry Brougham, Thomas Burgess and Henry Holland, who interpreted human mental faculties as signs and products of the wisdom and benevolence of the Creator, but also writers who went beyond this basic design-theology model in their dual commitments to Christianity and to the study of nature, especially of the human body.^Examples of the latter included Paine and McCosh.

The last of these was a particularly interesting figure, since his book, The Emotions () was one of the most substantial, as well as one of the last, books of psychology written in a way that was both significantly informed by Christian belief and also written as a contribution to the new academic psychology.^

The third category of texts in this chapter are examples of ‘metaphys-ical theism’. Such texts displayed a commitment to belief in some form of Deity and, especially to the existence of spirit or mind and its prior-ity over matter. They were only thinly theistic rather than Christian or natural theological, however, since they were more often informed by German Idealist philosophy or a very broad sort of ‘spiritualism’ than by theology of any sort. This group included Morell, Lyall and the American philosopher-theologians Laurens Hickok and Noah Porter.^

Mind–body dualism

All the treatments of passions, affections and emotions considered here were predicated on mind–body dualism. Their authors believed, in oppo-sition to the physiological-evolutionary psychologists, that there could be such a thing as a mental act with no bodily correlate. For example, Charles Bell, in dealing with weeping and laughter, had described these expres-sions not only as arising from sentiments not shared by the brutes, but

 Cashdollar (), ch. .

Bell (, ); Brougham (); Holland ().

 For a discussion of the account given by G. T. Ladd – another of the last generation of soul-psychologists – of emotions and sentiments, see chapter.

On Hickok and Porter, see Roback (), –, –; Spilka (). On the broader issues surrounding the relationship of philosophic idealism to religious belief, see Willis (); Sell ().

Christian and theistic responses 

also as arising from ‘mental conditions, independent of physical causes’.^ The mind or soul was conceived as a substance inhabiting or using a body. Paine taught that the soul was a self-acting substance, ‘subserved’

by the brain and the nervous system.^ The body was often described as the ‘tenement’ or ‘instrument’ of the soul.^Lyall expressed this central commitment in a typical way: ‘The most essential part of our nature is unquestionably the living soul within us – the spiritual substance of which we are possessed, or which is clothed in a material body, united to a mate-rial organization.’^Hickok taught that ‘The psychology we attain must recognize through all its facts, the existence of a rational spirit, which dwells in a tabernacle of flesh and blood.’^As a result of this mind–body dualism it was clear for the Christian and theistic psychologists – while it was increasingly unclear in the works of monist scientific psychologists – that the ‘emotion in the mind’ and the ‘exertion of the bodily frame’ were different things, the former causing the latter.^ As McCosh put it, in opposing the monist school associated with Spencer:

There is no propriety in calling the nervous affection a correlate of the emotion, or representing the two, after the fashion of the school, as the sides of one thing.

They are two things, each with its own properties, but acting and reacting on each other, and both should have a place in a full account of the phenomenon.^

It was important for McCosh, in order to avoid determinism, that the mind be an independent ‘self-acting’ substance with a free will: he achieved this, in the same way as Thomas Reid had before him, by insist-ing that matter itself was inert and could only be moved by an act of will (human or divine).^

In classical Christian psychology it had been the soul and not the body that was active. Even though ‘passions’, as the word suggests, were seen as passive phenomena, that was not, as has often been assumed from Descartes onwards, because the soul was the passive recipient of these feelings but because the body was passively moved by the actions of the animal soul (and also sometimes because the higher rational soul was acted on by the animal soul). Treatments of passions, affections and emotions that were authentic representatives of this Christian tradition insisted on the activity of the soul or mind rather than of the body. Lyall, although his methodology was that of a theistic metaphysician and not

Bell (), . ^Paine (), . ^E.g. Cooke (), xi.

Lyall (), . See also Lyall (), , where he states that the only true philosophy is one that allows a real existence to both mental and material substances.

 Hickok (), .

Bell (), . See also Holland (),  and , where the ‘passions and emotions’

in the mind have an effect on bodily organs.

McCosh (), . ^Hoeveler (), –.

 From Passions to Emotions

of a Christian theologian, was also committed to the active view of the mind, which he described as being ‘possessed of a spontaneous activity and inherent power, by which our simple ideas are framed, products of the mind solely, and not indebted to sensation farther than as the prompter of a stimulant of mind’.^Lyall’s view was that the emotions, as well as the movements of the intellect, were the products of the activity of the

‘spiritual substance within’.^

Design-theology texts that made less use of Christian theological psy-chology than did McCosh’s or Paine’s – for instance, some of the works produced by Chalmers, Bell and the physicians William Cooke and Henry Holland – were less committed to the denial of spontaneous bod-ily activity. These authors, writing in the tradition of Butler, Paley and other design-theologians, were happy to ascribe agency not only to di-vinely created mental mechanisms such as appetites, passions, sentiments and instincts but also to divinely created bodily mechanisms. Secondary causes were often spoken of as if primary. Bell, for one, was happy to refer to the ‘agency of the body’ in certain passions, and to refer to ‘the actions of and expressions of the body’ that ‘betray the emotions of the heart’.^

Man–animal separatism

The conventional Christian teaching that man was qualitatively distinct from the animals was defended in three ways in the context of opposition to physicalist theories of emotions in this period. First, even in the case of those emotions that might be common to man and animals (those still understood by some as passions), the difference was that man, unlike lower animals, could and should control his passions by the powers of reason and will. As Paine put it, instinct is common to man and animals, but man alone has the power of reason.^ FrederickRauch (a German Protestant Hegelian who moved to America and taught mental philoso-phy in Pennsylvania in thes) in his Psychology () made it clear how the traditional teaching on man–animal separatism applied to the emotions.^He defined emotions as disturbances of the otherwise peace-ful motion of the mind, which in turn he defined (again in a conventional Christian way) as the union of reason and will. He then continued: ‘From

Lyall (), . ^Lyall (), –.

 Bell (), –, . ^Paine (), –.

 On Rauch, see Eric Carlson’s ‘Introduction’ to Rauch (); Roback(), –.

Rauch’s Psychology was one of the first books published in English with the word

‘psychology’ in its title.

Christian and theistic responses 

this definition it follows at once that the animal, having no mind [i.e. no reason or will], cannot have emotions.’^

Secondly, it was taught (as Butler and other eighteenth-century moral-ists had taught) that human beings, unlike animals, had a conscience and a moral duty to God and to their fellow men. The moral dimension was also at workin the methodology of Christian and theistic emotions the-orists – they were not committed, as the physicalists were, to a morally disengaged and objectifying scientific epistemology that treated human beings as organic mechanisms rather than as personal agents. Newman in particular stressed the moral and personal dimension of the affections;

he argued that ‘Conscience has an intimate bearing on our affections and emotions, leading us to reverence and awe, hope and fear’, and that such feelings were stirred by other people rather than by non-human objects –

‘we are not affectionate towards a stone, nor do we feel shame before a horse or a dog’.^

Thirdly, human beings were seen as qualitatively different sorts of crea-ture from the rest of the ‘brute creation’, and were therefore held to be able to feel and express a range of affections, sentiments or emotions not participated in by lower animals. For example, Bell held that because human beings differed from lower beings by having the power of imagi-nation, they could experience a peculiar sort of fear:

I should apply the name of terror to that kind of fear in which there is a strong working of the imagination, and which is therefore peculiar to man. The eye is bewildered; the inner extremity of the eyebrows is elevated, and strongly knit by the action of the corrugator; thus producing an expression of distracting thought, anxiety, and alarm, and one which does not belong to animals.^

Belief in the independent existence of the soul went hand in hand with belief in man–animal separatism, as the workof Bell, amongst others, demonstrates. The belief was that man differed from the lower animals primarily by virtue of his soul, with its powers of reason, conscience and imagination. As Newman put it, ‘Man is the highest of the animals, and more indeed than an animal, as having a mind.’^ If it was at the level of physiology that the distinction was less clear-cut (although naturalists such as Richard Owen worked hard to maintain its reality), then it was at the level of the soul and its mind that the distinction was defended to the hilt by Christians and theists. Consequently it was also at the level of mind that the incentive was greatest for the physiological or evolutionary psychologist to efface the division (see chapter).

Rauch (), . ^Newman (), , .

Bell (), . ^Newman (), .

 From Passions to Emotions

Varieties of anti-physicalist theories of emotion in Britain and America–

The Christian conservatives

Traditionalists such as the Oxford theologian, Thomas Gorman, would have liked to exclude physiological considerations from the study of the soul altogether. He responded to the reductionism of physiological psy-chology by defending staunchly the autonomy and superiority of the spir-itual part of the human being. Gorman, writing in, characterised Henry Maudsley and other physiologists of mind as ‘atheistic naturalists’

who mistakenly treated mind as the activities of brute matter: ‘Superfi-cial sciolists in philosophy have need to learn as a first lesson, that the physiologist and pathologist, as such, can have nothing to do with what transcends the sphere of the mere corporeal organism. It is the proper province of the psychologist to investigate the soul and its mind.’^ The absolute transcendence of the spiritual and supernatural was asserted as a reason for the incompetence of naturalists in the realm of psychology.^

It is tempting to see an analogy here between the asserted supremacy of the supernatural and spiritual over the body, on the one hand, and the de-sired institutional dominance of Christian theology over natural science in the academic fields of psychology and ethics, on the other. Gorman and others ultimately failed to maintain this dominance.^

Two English texts – one produced by the Reverend William Whewell in Cambridge in, the other by the Reverend William Sewell in Oxford in – serve as early examples of the fact that while Scottish mental sci-entists and their followers were increasingly using the category ‘emotions’, conservative English thinkers were still speaking more traditional and more Christian language. Whewell, like Chalmers and Bell a Bridgewater author, is well known as a polymath Anglican with an interest in the his-tory and philosophy of the inductive sciences. In  he composed a Preface to the Scottish moral philosopher Sir James Mackintosh’s Disser-tation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy.^It was in his Dissertation that

 Gorman (), .

 For the reverse view, expressed by HavelockEllis and others, that only physiological and experimental psychologists were competent in psychology, see chapter.

On the ideological overtones of debates about mind and matter between theological dualists and naturalistic monists, see Jacyna (); Hilton (), –.

 Mackintosh (). The dissertation was initially part of the introductory volume to the

th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. For an interesting biography of Mackintosh see McCosh (), ch. . McCosh scathingly concluded that Mackintosh had largely wasted his philosophical talents and had ‘attained the highest eminence only as a talker in the best social circles of London’ ().

Christian and theistic responses 

Mackintosh made the suggestions for a new affective terminology that Thomas Chalmers discussed in his Bridgewater Treatise (see chapter).

The suggestions were made, as follows, in the context of a critique of Hartley:

In the whole of his philosophical works, we find no trace of any desire produced by association, of any disinterested principle, or indeed any distinction between the percipient and what, perhaps, we may now venture to call the emotive or pathematic part of human nature until some more convenient name shall be hit on by some luckier or more skilful adventurer, in such new terms as seem to be absolutely necessary.^

This suggested innovation was not, as Whewell noted in his Preface, widely accepted. In a footnote Whewell added the following commentary on Mackintosh’s use of ‘emotion’: ‘“The part of our nature” of which the author here speaks, has often been described by the compound phrase

“the desires and affections”. The proposal to call these “the Emotions”

has not been generally accepted; but the adjective “emotional” is not unfrequently used.’^ So according to Whewell, at least, Brown’s

has not been generally accepted; but the adjective “emotional” is not unfrequently used.’^ So according to Whewell, at least, Brown’s