Hipótesis específica 2

Charles Darwin

The influence of Brown’s terminology and of his methods and conclu-sions has been potent in the formation and consolidation of the Associ-ational Psychology – represented by J. Mill, J. S. Mill, Alexander Bain, and Herbert Spencer.

Noah Porter, ‘Philosophy in Great Britain and America’,

Emotion is the name here used to comprehend all that is understood by feelings, states of feeling, pleasures, pains, passions, sentiments, affec-tions.

Alexander Bain, The Emotions and the Will,

Physicalist theorists of emotion in Britain–

In the intellectual world of the second half of the nineteenth century evo-lutionary theories were the subjects of endless public and professional disputes. The theory of evolution by natural selection was, however, just one part of a broader set of evolutionary hypotheses, including theories of inheritance of acquired characteristics and sexual selection. These, in turn, were just one part of a coalition of individuals and ideas, which predated the Origin of Species (), and which was broadly perceived in Victorian culture as connected not only with science and evolution, but also with ‘materialism’, ‘atheism’, ‘positivism’ and ‘Comtism’. These terms were used loosely, largely inaccurately and almost always pejora-tively by those who opposed the inroads being made by secular, evolu-tionary and physiological thinkers such as Bain, Spencer, Darwin, Huxley and Henry Maudsley into the preserves of the human mind, morality and religion.^

 See Jacyna (); Cashdollar (); Desmond (,  and ). Desmond’s stud-ies of the political and ideological dimensions of Victorian science and medicine are immensely informative. Their main weakness, perhaps, is their tendency to reproduce uncritically inaccurate contemporary characterisations of thinkers including Huxley as

‘materialists’and ‘atheists’.



 From Passions to Emotions

An entertaining piece of verse entitled Our Modern Philosophers:

Darwin, Bain and Spencer, or The Descent of Man, Mind and Body; A Rhyme with Reasons, Essays, Notes and Quotations, published in un-der the pseudonym ‘Psychosis’nicely illustrates the fact that these three were seen as leading spokesmen of scientific-evolutionary thought, which, in turn, was seen as comprising – as its two most dangerous components – evolutionary biology and physiological psychology. The author started in the preface by summarising the popular view in ‘most of the Christian world’of these modern philosophers:

Three men of genius and free-thought, An intellectual synod,

In conclave sat to bring to naught The works and government of God.

Says Darwin: ‘God did not make man, To demonstration I’ll prove this’;

Says Spencer: ‘Since the world began, God’s government has gone amiss’;

‘By my hypothesis,’says Bain,

‘Man’s immortality’s a myth – his soul’s his brain.’^

Although ‘Psychosis’himself denied that there needed to be any link be-tween psychological theories and religious beliefs, his caricature of the common view bore witness to the perceived antagonism between religion and the thought of Bain, Spencer and Darwin. There was some truth in the perception: these writers’endorsement of physiological and evolu-tionary approaches to the mind was, in some ways, motivated by hostility to Christianity and the churches.

The emotions – including especially those feelings and instincts that were still understood by many as moral, religious and aesthetic ‘affections’

or ‘sentiments’– were, along with reason, hallmarks of what was especially dignified, superior and noble about the human mind. Physiological and evolutionary accounts of emotions were, therefore, particularly powerful weapons in wider science–religion debates. If man’s very emotions could be reduced to mere physiological reflexes, or to inherited animal survival mechanisms, then he truly would have been removed from his unique position as the pinnacle of creation. Physiological and evolutionary psy-chologies were, like evolutionary biology and comparative anatomy, very important contributors to the debate about Man’s Place in Nature (the title of Huxley’s book). In chapter  we saw how design theology arguments could be applied to the mind as well as to the body; the same was true of the methodologies of natural history and evolutionary biology.

‘Psychosis’(), vii.

The physicalist appropriation of Brownian emotions 

The treatments that are considered in this section as the main examples of such accounts of the emotions were produced by three of the central figures of the new psychology: Bain, Spencer and Darwin.^Bain’s widely used textbooks, The Senses and the Intellect () and The Emotions and the Will () (from here on Emotions), and Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions () (from here on Expression) were particularly significant ex-amples of physiological and evolutionary approaches to the emotions, as were the relevant sections of Spencer’s The Principles of Psychology () (from here on Principles), and his essays on Bain and on the physiology of laughter, both originally published in.^

Darwin’s treatment of the emotions has received much greater atten-tion from historians of science and of psychology than have the treatments of Spencer and Bain, although it was these latter two whose influence was greatest on thought about the mind during thes to s in Britain and America. Bain and Spencer, along with Bain’s friend and mentor John Stuart Mill (who introduced Bain to Comte’s Cours de Philosophie Positive in), formed a philosophical triumvirate associated in Britain and America with empiricism, naturalism, science and Positivism.^ In

the English Catholic, St George Mivart, wrote to Darwin that for a time he had felt himself a ‘thoroughgoing disciple of the school of Mill, Bain and H. Spencer’.^Writing to Charles Revouvier in, William James commented that ‘With us it is the philosophy of Mill, Bain and Spencer which just now carries everything before it.’^ And four years later it was James’judgment that ‘The two philosophers of indubitably the widest influence in England and America since Mill’s death are Messrs. Bain and Spencer, who have little in common except the tendency to explain things by physical reasons as much as possible and this abundance of illustrative fact.’^Finally, in, Spencer had disappeared from James’

recollection, which was now that ‘Twenty-five years ago all of us whose education had any outlook and vitality were pupils of the Mills and Bain.’^ In the English-speaking world in the second half of the nineteenth cen-tury, Bain’s and Spencer’s works were the authoritative texts of a new

 Brett (), , –, picks out Bain’s physiological psychology along with the evo-lutionism of Spencer and that of Darwin as three of the four most important agencies shaping British psychology in the nineteenth century. The fourth is James Ward’s article on ‘Psychology’in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

 Spencer (b and c).

 From here on references to ‘Mill’are to John Stuart Mill. His father will always be referred to as ‘James Mill’. On Bain’s association with Mill, which started in, see Bain (),

, –, , , ; Young (), n.; Cashdollar (), –, –.

 Quoted in Desmond (), . ^Quoted in Fisch (), .

James (), . See also Lange (), , –.

 Quoted in Fisch (), .

 From Passions to Emotions

scientific psychology.^ Bain, who met Comte in Paris in and had been an admirer and critic for a decade previously, was considered by the American positivist John Fiske to be one of the ‘English positivists’;

and Porter, in, picked out Comte, Mill, Bain and Spencer as the main representatives of dangerous sceptical and materialistic tendencies in philosophy and psychology.^

The physicalist appropriation of Brownian emotions The influence of Scottish moral and mental science on the exact sciences, especially physics, in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been well documented.^In this and subsequent chapters my focus is on the influence of Scottish mental science specifically on scientific psy-chology. Brown’s influence on this generation of psychological thinkers was noted at the time. In Noah Porter, the President of Yale, wrote:

‘[T]he influence of Brown’s terminology and of his methods and con-clusions has been potent in the formation and consolidation of the As-sociational Psychology – represented by J. Mill, J. S. Mill, Alexander Bain, and Herbert Spencer.’^ It is significant that Porter emphasised that it was Brown’s terminology, in particular, that was adopted by the Mills, Bain and Spencer.^As we have seen, one of the most notable of Brown’s terminological innovations was the newly systematic use of the term ‘emotions’as a major psychological category alongside sensations and thoughts. The eminent physician, Sir Henry Holland, who had been studying in Edinburgh around the time that Brown first came to public attention through his involvement in the Leslie affair, later also judged that Brown’s Lectures had contained ‘much that has been appropriated, doubtless unconsciously, by later writers on Mental Philosophy’.^

Henry Holland was not the only writer acquainted with Brown’s work later to be involved in the development of a new physiological psychology in England. Several of the new scientific psychologists of this period ei-ther were Scots themselves, or had studied in Scotland. Charles Darwin studied medicine for two years in Edinburgh (–) before giving up the idea of becoming a physician and starting to study for the Anglican ministry in Cambridge. It was during his time in Edinburgh that he would

 Fisch (), .

 Bain (), –. On Fiske, see Fisch (), ; Porter (b), –.

 Olson (). ^Porter (), .

 Mill adopted the Brownian classification of mental states as sensations, thoughts and emotions, with the slight difference that he, unlike Brown, considered ‘volitions’to be a category separate from ‘emotions’. Mill (), , .

Holland (), ; on Holland’s own contributions to medical-psychological discourse, see Rylance (), –.

The physicalist appropriation of Brownian emotions 

have first become familiar with the work of the Scottish anatomist Charles Bell. Bell, in turn, had been a contemporary of Brown’s while both were studying for the M.D. in Edinburgh at the turn of the century, and, like Brown, had studied with Dugald Stewart, and been on friendly terms with Francis Jeffrey and the other founders of the Edinburgh Review.^Darwin also studied works by several other Scottish writers including Henry Lord Brougham, John Abercrombie and Sir James Mackintosh, while thinking about expression and habit in the lates (see below).^Alexander Bain was himself a Scot who had studied the philosophical writings of Brown and Chalmers; his mentor John Stuart Mill also came from a Scottish family. So there were many routes through which Scottish philosophy came to exercise an influence over mid-nineteenth-century physiological psychology in Britain and America.

While much new evidence and many new methodologies were im-ported into affective psychology during the middle decades of the nineteenth century (for example, by the introduction of evolutionary hy-potheses, extensive observations of animal and infant behaviour, and the use of physiology), the categories of the new psychology were largely un-changed. Categories such as ‘intellect’, ‘will’and the ‘senses’that the new psychologists adopted were all ancient categories, and ones ‘which have been established in popular thought and language’, as Spencer put it.^

One of the only exceptions to this was the case of ‘emotions’. Although the term ‘emotions’was no doubt in popular use among many by the

s and s, it is the most striking instance of a major psychological category that was used differentially by scientific and non-scientific psy-chologists. The adoption of the category of ‘emotions’by Bain, Spencer and Darwin was indicative of the fact that they were influenced more by their reading of Scottish mental scientists such as Brown, Chalmers and Mackintosh than by English theologians and moralists such as Butler, Paley and Whewell, who spoke the language of passions, affections and sentiments (see chapter). Physicalist scientific psychologists were not the only ones to use the word ‘emotions’, but they did so sooner and integrated the category into their psychology more readily than did more traditional, especially Christian, thinkers.

Pichot (), –, –; Hartley (), . On Brown’s links with the Edinburgh Review, see n. of chapter  in this volume.

Campbell () argues that Darwin was strongly influenced by the Scottish Common Sense tradition in his rhetoric of scientific methodology. Manier () also discusses the influence on the young Darwin of Scottish philosophers including Stewart, Brown, Abercrombie and Mackintosh. Olson (), –, examines the Scottish roots of Sir John Herschel’s philosophy of science; Herschel was one of the philosophers of science who most influenced Darwin’s own thinking. Darwin was also deeply influenced by the Scottish geologist Charles Lyell.

Spencer (c), .

 From Passions to Emotions

There are two points to be distinguished here. First, the term

‘emotions’ was anomalous. Unlike the terms ‘sense’, ‘intellect’, ‘will’,

‘imagination’, or ‘memory’, it was not an ancient category used by clas-sical, medieval, Enlightenment and scientific psychologists alike. The term ‘emotions’, in comparison with its older psychological cousins – categories such as ‘sense’, ‘intellect’, ‘will’, ‘affections’ and ‘passions’ – was the merest infant, having been coined in the previous fifty years.

Unlike these other categories, it had no resonance or significance within either traditional Christian psychology or neoclassical philosoph-ical psychology. The language of the physphilosoph-icalist emotion theorists was full of ‘brains’, ‘nerves’, ‘nerve currents’, ‘muscles’, ‘glands’, ‘viscera’,

‘organic processes’. These emotions theorists were also amongst the first generation of thinkers to produce textbooks and theories that de-scribed themselves as works of ‘psychology’rather than ‘mental science’,

‘philosophy of the mind’, or ‘metaphysics’.^Many Christian thinkers, especially in more conservative environments such as Oxford and Cam-bridge (and some American colleges), continued to use the terms

‘will’, ‘passions’, ‘affections’and ‘sentiments’much more than the term

‘emotions’.

The second point, however, is that the term ‘emotions’was, in a differ-ent respect, just like other terms in this period. Like ‘will’and ‘intellect’, for example – and like the term ‘psychology’itself – the term ‘emotions’

had different meanings depending on whether it was being used as part of a Christian, theistic, philosophical, or scientific psychology. McCosh, for example, used the term ‘emotions’to refer to acts of the mind (see chapter); Bain, Spencer and James used it to refer to acts of the nerves and viscera. There were similar discrepancies in the use of the term ‘will’.

There was discontinuity of meaning of psychological terms across world-views.

Throughout this book, I have tried to make connections between the-ories of will and thethe-ories of passions, affections and emotions. The way that the physicalist emotions theorists discussed in this chapter thought about will was in the non-realist tradition of Hobbes, Hume and Brown, all of whom had held that there was no substantial or immaterial ‘will’

that existed independently of the particular passions, appetites, desires

 Samuel Taylor Coleridge had been one of the first to suggest the introduction of the term ‘psychology’, which he had taken from Blumenbach’s lectures on psychology at G ¨ottingen. In his Biographia Literaria (), he wrote: ‘We beg pardon for the use of this insolens verbum; but it is one of which our language stands in great need. We have no single term to express the philosophy of the Human Mind; and what is worse, the principles of that philosophy are often called “metaphysical”, a word of very different meaning’; quoted in Hearnshaw (), .

The physicalist appropriation of Brownian emotions 

and emotions. A ‘volition’was conceived, in the new physiological psy-chology, not even primarily as a mental act, but as the nervous activity that preceded action – in other words, as a neurological version of Hobbes’

‘final appetite’. As Boyd Hilton puts it: ‘The will came to be regarded, no longer in terms of faculty psychology, but as a series of transient volitions, each one representing expenditure of acquired energy.’^ It has already been noted above that a scientific approach to the mind, especially insofar as it sought to discover laws, was unlikely to provide a substantial role for a free will. This was further demonstrated by Bain’s and Spencer’s views of volition; they were responsible for reinvigorating the tradition of non-realist psychology using the resources of neurophysiology and positivism.

The physiological and evolutionary emotion theorists discussed in this chapter were also among the first to pioneer the belief that the science of the mind should, centrally, also be a science of matter – specifically a sort of physiology focussing on the nervous system (Bain) or a sort of natural history drawing principally on evolutionary hypotheses (Darwin) or both (Spencer), or, perhaps, a science of human behaviour (intimated by all three in various ways). So the transition was made in this period from the by-now very well-established tradition of applying methods connected with the physical sciences to the mind qua mind (observation, induction, analysis and classification of mental states), to the new practice of using the methods and results of the physical sciences per se (especially evolu-tionary biology and neurophysiology) as the basis of an understanding of the mind.

From the late eighteenth century onwards, medical men with in-terests in the relations of mind and body, such as William Falconer, Sayer Walker, Alexander Crichton, Thomas Cogan, Thomas Burgess and William Cooke, wrote on the passions and emotions in connection with the physiology of health and disease. (Thomas Brown too, of course, had trained and practised as a physician before turning to the philoso-phy of the mind.) The medical literature contributed to the currency of a physiological approach to affective psychology, which was to be philo-sophically and scientifically developed, systematised and popularised by Bain, Spencer and Darwin.^ Cooke’s natural theological and medical study of the emotions is considered further in chapter.

Hilton (), .

Falconer (); Cogan (,  and ); Burgess (); Cooke ( and ).

For Cogan’s definitions of the terms ‘passions’, ‘affections’ and ‘emotions’, and an anal-ysis thereof, see Cogan (), –; Payne (), –. For two very interesting accounts of medical treatises on the passions in the later eighteenth and early nine-teenth centuries, see Grange () and Luyendijk-Elshout (). See also Hunter and Macalpine (), –, –, and throughout.

 From Passions to Emotions

Dual-aspect monism and man–animal continuism A final important theme in this chapter is the newly accelerated develop-ment of an autonomous scientific worldview. The works of Bain, Spencer and Darwin shared a rejection of the design-theology account of the ex-pressions of emotions that had been popularised by one of the Bridge-water authors, Sir Charles Bell. Bain and Spencer in particular, along with Thomas Huxley, were responsible for constructing an alternative metaphysics on which to build scientific psychology – namely agnostic monism. It was an atheological system derived from the influence of Scottish (Hume, Brown and Mill) and continental (Spinoza and Comte) teachings on the limitations of human knowledge. This alternative athe-ological and monist metaphysics of the unknown and unknowable nature of ultimate reality was given the title of ‘agnosticism’by Huxley in.^

In short, the personal God who could be known through revelation and experience, albeit imperfectly, was replaced by a more radically unknown and unknowable ‘something’that underlay the veil of mental and physical phenomena. Spencer called it ‘The Unknowable’. This was the world-view which was in the process of crystallising, and within which Bain, Spencer and others developed their concepts of emotions in thes to

In short, the personal God who could be known through revelation and experience, albeit imperfectly, was replaced by a more radically unknown and unknowable ‘something’that underlay the veil of mental and physical phenomena. Spencer called it ‘The Unknowable’. This was the world-view which was in the process of crystallising, and within which Bain, Spencer and others developed their concepts of emotions in thes to