Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth
Century: Cerebral Localization and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier
by
[ Contents | Preface | Introduction |
Chapter: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Bibliography ]
5
HERBERT SPENCER: PHRENOLOGY,
EVOLUTIONARY ASSOCIATIONISM, AND CEREBRAL LOCALIZATION
It is very satisfactory to see how you and Bain, each
in his own way, have succeeded in affiliating the conscious operations of the
mind to the primary unconscious organic actions of the nerves, thus filling up
the most serious lacuna and removing the chief difficulty in the association
psychology.
John Stuart Mill, 1864.
To Spencer is certainly due the immense credit of
having been the first to see in evolution an absolutely universal principle.
Add this sleuth-hound scent for what he was after, and
his untiring pertinacity, to his priority in perceiving the one great truth, and
you fully justify the popular estimate of him as one of the world's geniuses, in
spite of the fact that the 'temperament' of genius, so called, seems to have
been so lacking in him.
William James, 1904.
That the philosophical system of Spencer is an object
of derision is one of the few points on which all philosophers seem now to
agree.
Charles Singer, 1959.
Early Phrenological Work and Social
Statics
Bain represented the culmination of classical
associationism and brought it into relation with sensory-motor physiology.
Herbert Spencer's Principles of Psychology was published in the same year
that Bain's Senses and the Intellect appeared (1855), yet the two works
belong to different generations. Where Bain had enriched the association
psychology with a new interest in motion and provided it with an important
alliance with experimental neurophysiology, Spencer gave it a whole new basis in
evolutionary biology. It was Spencer's psychology of evolutionary associationism
and the conception of cerebral localization which he united with it, that
Hughlings Jackson applied to the nervous system. The views of Jackson and Bain
then provided the psychophysiological theory which David Ferrier developed
experimentally after the localized electrical excitability of the cerebral
cortex was demonstrated in 1870. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that
the work of Jackson and Ferrier can be deduced from the theories of Bain and
Spencer. Jackson's clinical work and Ferrier's experiments were acknowledged
applications of the conceptions of Bain and Spencer. An historical study of the
development of concepts of cerebral localization and its biological context
should therefore pay close attention to the sources of these conceptions as a
necessary prerequisite to an appreciation of their use in the clinic and
laboratory.
Spencer's intellectual development shows the relations
among associationism, phrenology, sensory-motor psychophysiology, cerebral
localization, and the new basis for psychology in the theory of evolution. All
of these approaches came together in his early writings, providing a unique
opportunity to review previous work and to lay the foundations for the work of
Jackson and Ferrier. A close study of this period will also afford an
opportunity to indicate further developments of the conception of psychology as
a biological science which were raised in connection with Gall and were
significantly advanced by Spencer. These developments will be indicated,
although in the present study they will not be pursued in detail beyond Spencer.
The connection between Gall's biological view of
psychology and Spencer's is not merely conceptual. Like Bain, Spencer derived
his initial interest in psychology from phrenology.[1] His biographer reports
that 'His letters show that he approached the study of mental functions through
the avenue of phrenology, his conclusions being reached, as he is more than once
careful to mention, not theoretically only, but by observation'.[2] In his Autobiography, Spencer says,
Between 1820 and 1830, phrenology had been drawing
attention; and there came over to England, about 1830 or after, Gall's disciple,
Spurzheim, who went about the country diffusing knowledge of the system. Derby
was among the towns he visited. Being then perhaps 11, or perhaps 12, I attended
his lectures: having, however, to overcome a considerable repugnance to
contemplating the row of grinning skulls he had in front of him. Of course at
that age faith was stronger than scepticism. Accepting uncritically the
statements made, I became a believer, and for many years remained one.[3]
In 1842, when he was twenty-two, Spencer had his head
'read' by a reputable phrenologist, Mr J. Q. Rumball. Firmness, Self-Esteem, and
Conscientiousness were the largest prominences, and Mr Rumball commented that
'Such a head as this ought to be in the Church'.[4] The full delineation and
commentary are worth studying, as they are,
1 I am indebted to articles by Jefferson (1960, pp.
35-44) and Denton (1921) for the initial impulse to look into the following
matters on Spencer.
2 Spencer, 1908, p. 40.
3 Spencer, 1904, 1, 200.
4 Ibid., 1, 201.
152
on the whole, unexceptionable. However, one friend
ventured the suggestion that 'he might have arrived at the same conclusion
without feeling your head at all'.[l] Spencer was not moved by his friend's
scepticism, 'Papers yield evidence that at that time my faith in phrenology was
unshaken.'[2]
Between 1842 and 1846, his interest in phrenology was
very active indeed. He wrote memoranda on the faculties of Veneration,
Self-Esteem, and Love of Approbation, and made a design for an ideal head.[3] He
wrote to a friend in 1843, 'At present I am engaged in writing an article for The Phrenological Journal upon the new theory of Benevolence and Imitation,
which we have talked over together'.[4] By this time Spencer's scepticism about
phrenology was beginning to manifest itself. The heretical article, advocated a new view of the functions of the organs, and it was rejected by Combe.[5]
However, it was accepted by a new periodical, The Zoist, founded by Dr
John Elliotson for the propagation of mesmerism.[6] 'Phreno-mesmerism[7] was at
that time the name of one class of the manifestations; and, by implication,
Phrenology was recognized as an associated topic. Hence, in part, I suppose, the
reason why Dr Eliotson [sic] accepted this essay of mine.’[8] The
article was published in The Zoist of January, 1844. Two other heterodox
articles advocating relocation of Amativeness from the cerebellum to the
adjacent cerebrum and suggesting that the 'ultimate function' of the organ of
Wonder was 'the revival of all intellectual impressions' or 'Revivisence'
appeared in the July and October numbers.[9]
Spencer says of this period,
Partially dissentient though I was concerning special
phrenological doctrines, I continued an adherent of the general doctrine: not
having, at that time,
1 Spencer, 1904, I, 202.
2 Ibid., 1, 203.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., I, 225.
5 This rebuff was later used by phrenologists to
explain Spencer's subsequent hostility to their views, e.g. Hollander, n.d., I,
459. The members of the British Phrenological Society were still sensitive about
Spencer in the 1960s.
6 Elliotson had been President of the Royal Medical and
Chirurgical Society, Lecturer at St Thomas' Hospital and Professor at the
University of London. He introduced the stethoscope into London. He was a famous
surgeon. However, his espousal of painless operations by mesmerism ended his
academic career. Phrenologists were grateful for the new ally and especially for
the aura of martyrdom which hung around him. The standard translation of Gall
was dedicated to him. He founded the London Phrenological Society and lectured
extensively on phrenology. (Hollander, n.d., 1, 342, 354, 357, etc.) Cf.
Spencer, 1904, I, 227, 246-7; Wallace, 1901, p. 180; Boring, 1950, pp. 119-23.
7 This was the aspect of phrenology that had converted
A. R. Wallace. See above, pp. 44-5
8 Spencer, 1904, I, 227.
9 Ibid., I, 246-7.
153
entered on those lines of psychological inquiry which
led me eventually to conclude that, though the statements of phrenologists might
contain adumbrations of truths, they did not express the truths themselves.[1]
His active interest in phrenology can be traced as far
as 1846, when he set out to improve on phrenological technology.
My interest in phrenology still continued; and thought,
occasionally expended upon it, raised dissatisfaction with the ordinary mode of
collecting data. Examinations of heads carried on merely by simple inspection
and tactual exploration seemed to me extremely unsatisfactory. The outcome of my
dissatisfaction was the devising of a method for obtaining, by graphic
delineations, mechanically made, exact measurements, instead of the inexact ones
obtained through the unaided senses.[2]
A description and drawings of the 'cephalograph' which
he designed are appended to his Autobiography.[3] He intended to
publish its description in The Zoist, but a trial model had been badly
made. He did not pursue the matter then, and when he returned to it, he says, 'I
had become sceptical about current phrenological views, and no longer felt
prompted to employ a better instrument-maker'.[4]
Spencer began reading in preparation for his first
book, Social Statics (1851) in 1846, and between then and 1848, he
abandoned his career as a railway engineer and decided to earn a living as a
writer. Social Statics sought to relate his views on the proper sphere of
government with general moral principles[5]; his attempts to argue a consistent
laissez-faire view of society were based on a biological theory of the structure
of human communities, in which social bodies were made analogous to the somatic
organization of men and other organisms. The argument of the book can be briefly
given in context with its relevance to the development of Spencer's views on
psychology and physiology.
It was written as an attack on Benthamism[6] —
retaining the utilitarian standard of value but rejecting the active role of the
state in attaining the greatest happiness for the greatest number. State
regulation and legislation are seen as interference with Spencer's 'First
Principle': 'Every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he
infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.’[7] Men would
eventually come to do
1 Spencer, 1904, 1, 228.
2 Ibid., I, 297.
3 Ibid., 1, 540-3.
4 Ibid., I, 540.
5 Spencer, 1908, p. 55.
6 Characteristically, Spencer had not read Bentham's
works; see Spencer, 1908, pp. 418, 538.
7 Spencer, 1851, p. 103.
154
naturally what is best, even though a lengthy struggle
would be necessary. His position, which provided the rationale for the
individualist and ultra-conservative ideology of 'Social Darwinism',[1] leads
him to oppose such things as poor laws, state-supported education, sanitary
supervision, protection of the ignorant from medical quacks, tariffs, state
banking, and government postal systems. He opposes anything which he feels would
interfere with the free exercise of all of men's faculties. The duty of the
state is to protect equal freedom but never to interfere with it. He
claims that 'beyond its function of protector against external and internal
enemies, the State has no function: and . . . when it assumes any other function
it becomes an aggressor instead of a protector'.[2]
His argument is based on a distinctly phrenological
view of man. The faculties are heterodox, but they are phrenological faculties
none the less. Consistent with the optimism added to Gall's views by Spurzheim
and Combe, they are extremely modifiable: 'The universal law of life is, that
the exercise or gratification of faculties strengthens them; whilst, on the
contrary, the curbing or inflicting pain upon them, entails a diminution of
their power.'[3] Each faculty grows by exercise and dwindles from disuse.[4]
Happiness results from 'the fulfilment of their functions by the respective
faculties'.[5]
His conception of psychological phenomena departs
radically from that of the Utilitarians. He accepts the pleasure-pain principle
but not the normative psychology with which it had been traditionally linked by
the associationists. James Mill had elaborated Hartley's psychology to serve as
a rational basis for the legislative, economic, and social programme of the
Philosophic Radicals. The psychological view which he developed implied that a
common human nature led to a 'natural identity of interests' of the individuals
in society. Pleasure and pains could be scientifically determined and made part
of a 'felicific calculus'. From these calculations of a scientific psychology, a
legislative programme could be devised which created an 'artificial
identification of interests'[6] by means of the rewards and punishments which
the state dispensed. These two aspects of the Utilitarian programme are
contradictory; and Spencer's Social Statics was a symptom of this major
weakness. Spencer argues that if there is a common meeting ground of the
interests of individuals in society, it will manifest itself without
1 See Hofstadter, 1955, especially Chapter 2.
2 Spencer, 1904, I, 362.
3 Spencer, 1851, p. 80.
4 Ibid., p. 466.
5 Ibid. Cf. pp. 75-89.
6 Halévy, 1952, p. 514. See Part III Chapters 3 and 4,
especially pp. 485-514; Burrow, 1966, chs. 1-4, 6.
155
the artificial sanctions of rewards and punishments by
the state. Moreover, he claims that the belief that such sanctions can be
effective is based on an erroneous conception of human nature. Reasoning
abstractly about the 'greatest happiness' only makes sense when talking about
the ideal man. Attempts at defining such a state are nonsensical where real men
are concerned. 'It is not then to be wondered at, if Paleys and Benthams make
vain attempts at a definition.'[l]
The source of his objection is a phrenological view of
individual differences based on a faculty psychology.
Man..... consists of a congeries of faculties,
qualifying him for surrounding conditions. Each of these faculties, if normally
developed, yields to him, when exercised, a gratification constituting part of
his happiness; whilst, in the act of exercising it, some deed is done subserving
the wants of the man as a whole, and affording to the other faculties the
opportunity of performing in turn their respective functions, and of producing
every one its peculiar pleasure: so that, when healthily balanced, each
subserves all, and all subserve each.[2]
Complete happiness is the result of the exercise of all
the faculties,
in the ratio of their several developments; and an
ideal arrangement of circumstances calculated to secure this constitutes the
standard of 'greatest happiness'; but the minds of no two individuals contain
the same combination of elements. Duplicate men are not to be found. There is in
each a different balance of desires. Therefore the conditions adapted for the
highest enjoyment of one, would not perfectly compass the same end for any
other. And consequently the notion of happiness must vary with the disposition
and character; that is, must vary indefinitely.[3]
State action cannot take account of the myriad subtle
differences among individuals. It can only do harm to the happy, self-sufficient
man or prevent a man who has not achieved this state from doing so.[4] 'To do
anything for him by some artificial agency, is to supersede certain of his
powers-is to leave them unexercised, and therefore to diminish his
happiness.'[5]
Turning from individual psychology to social relations,
Spencer proposes two reasons why men will act for the good of others without
needing the artificial restraints of state action. The first is the existence of
the faculty of the 'Moral Sense'. In his argument for such a faculty,
1 Spencer, 1851, p. 5. Cf. Albee, new ed. 1962.
2 Spencer, 1851, p. 280.
3 Ibid., p. 5. Spencer's opposition to belief in the
constancy of human nature is spelled out, pp. 32-8.
4 Ibid., pp. 281-2.
5 Ibid., pp. 280-1.
156
Spencer reveals the detailed influence of phrenology on
his psychological thinking. Phrenological faculty psychology and craniology are
not mentioned explicitly, and he makes no acknowledgement of the interests which
had dominated his writing activity a few years earlier. However, in attempting
to uphold the Moral Sense doctrine in opposition to Bentham's condemnation of
the principle,[1] Spencer uses a phrenological view of the nature of man, which
he believes unequivocally establishes the existence of a Moral Sense. He also
tries to show that the Utilitarians fall back on the moral sense for the
foundation of their own doctrine.[2] His phrenological argument is that nature
does not leave the fulfilment of important needs to chance or to the care of the
intellect. 'Answering to each of the actions which it is requisite for us to
perform, we find in ourselves some prompter called a desire; and the more
essential the action, the more powerful is the impulse to its performance, and
the more intense the gratification derived therefrom.’[3] This is obviously true
of 'creature needs' such as food, sleep, and the continuance of the race. He
argues that it is also true of our social lives, where analogous impulses exist
leading to love of praise and the sentiment of friendship. His argument for the
moral sense is derived by analogy from these provisions of nature.
May we not then reasonably expect to find a like
instrumentality employed in impelling us to that line of conduct, in the due
observance of which consists what we call morality? All must admit that
we are guided to our bodily welfare by instincts; that from instincts also,
spring those domestic relationships by which other important objects are
compassed-and that similar agencies are in many cases used to secure our
indirect benefit, by regulating social behaviour. Seeing, therefore, that
whenever we can readily trace our actions to their origin, we find them produced
after this manner, it is, to say the least of it, highly probable that the same
mental mechanism is employed in all cases-that as the all-important requirements
of our being are fulfilled at the solicitations of desire, so also are the less
essential ones-that upright conduct in each being necessary to the happiness of
all, there exists in us an impulse towards such conduct; or, in other words,
that we possess a 'Moral Sense', the duty of which is to dictate rectitude in
our transactions with each other; which receives gratification from honest and
fair dealing; and which gives birth to the sentiment of justice.[4]
The existence of an innate instinct or faculty of moral
sense had been claimed by Hutcheson and the Scottish faculty psychologists but
rejected by Gay, Hartley, Paley, James Mill, and Bentham, who argued that all
1 Spencer, 1851, p. 28.
2 Ibid., p. 23.
3 Ibid., p. 19.
4 Ibid., pp. 19-20.
157
moral feelings were the result of experience,
association, and reasoning. The Utilitarian view held that moral judgements
should be derived from calculations based on the utility of actions in leading
to the greatest happiness for the greatest number and that they should be
enforced by the dispensation of rewards and punishments by those in authority.
Gall believed that there was an innate faculty which suited men for living in
society, which he called 'Moral Sense, Sentiment of Justice and Injustice' (and,
variously, 'Goodness', 'Benevolence', and 'Compassion').[1] Gall was cautious in
his argument about this faculty. He had discovered it by his usual method of
correlating a large cranial prominence with extreme benevolence in three
individuals with identical cranial prominences. He inferred that these were
manifestations of an exaggerated degree of activity of the 'organ of
benevolence'.[2] He felt that he had made an insufficient number of observations
to enable him to determine the 'fundamental original destination' of the organ
and so, as he expressed it, 'resorted to reasoning’[3] He concluded 'that
goodness or benevolence is only a gradation of the moral sense',[4] which had as
its primitive destination to 'dispose man to conduct himself in a manner
conformed to the maintenance of social order'.[5] He was not prepared to
acknowledge a separate, fundamental quality of conscience and viewed it as an
'affection of the moral sense or of benevolence'.[6] Spurzheim departed from
Gall's view and argued for separate faculties of 'Goodness' (Gall's
'Benevolence') and of 'Conscientiousness' or 'Justice'.[7] Combe credits
Spurzheim with the discovery of Conscientiousness,[8] but his own account is
much fuller. He identifies the phrenological faculty with the Moral Sense
doctrine of Cudworth, Hutcheson, Reid, Stewart, and Brown. Combe held that
phrenology could settle the issue by providing observations demonstrating 'That
a power or faculty exists, the object of which is to produce the sentiment of
justice or the feeling of duty and obligation, independently of selfishness,
hope of reward, fear of punishment, or any extrinsic motive'.[9] It is the
source of feelings of right and wrong.[10]
There is no obvious direct textual link between the
details of any of these phrenological formulations and Spencer's. Rather, his
argument adopts the form of the phrenological position while the resulting
conception of the moral sense is put in the service of his own social theory.
Spencer makes the phrenologists' identification between natural needs,
1 Gall, 1835, V, 156-200.
2 Ibid., V, 156-7.
3 Ibid., V, 167.
4 Ibid., V, 173.
5 Ibid., V, 167.
6 Ibid., V, 182.
7 Spurzheim, 1815, pp. 337-8, 346-52.
8 Combie, 4th ed., 1836 I, 352.
9 Ibid., I, 355.
10 Combe, 2nd ed., 1825, p. 78.
158
instincts, and faculties, and in illustrating his
argument mentions ten of the faculties which are characteristic of phrenology,
e.g. parental affection,[l] geometric sense (sense of number),[2] and mechanical
sense.[3] He reaches the conclusion that the Utilitarian psychology is
inadequate as an account of men's propensities and that the Utilitarian morality
can only fail in its attempts at calculation of right and wrong in terms of
expediency and by means of reasoning about the greatest good for the greatest
number. Instead, one should study the innate propensities of individuals and the
environmental conditions to which they answer in order to arrive at a true
science of 'Moral Physiology'.[4] The existence of the moral sense insures that
the social behaviour which the Utilitarians would legislate for the public good
will occur naturally if only the state does not interfere with its ill-conceived
artifices.
Spencer's second reason why men will act for the good
of others without the need for state action involves his view of the organismic
relation between society and its members. Public interests and private ones are
essentially in unison, and men have only to realize this. Spencer believes that
they will if left alone to discover it.
When, after observing the reactions entailed by
breaches of equity, the citizen contemplates the relation in which he stands to
the body politic-when he learns that it has a species of life, and conforms to
the same laws of growth, organization, and sensibility that a being does-when he
finds that one vitality circulates through it and him, and that whilst social
health, in a measure depends upon the fulfilment of some function in which he
takes part, his happiness depends upon the normal action of every organ in the
social body-when he duly understands this, he must see that his own welfare and
all men's welfare are inseparable. He must see that whatever
1 Spencer, 1851, p. 21.
2 Ibid., p. 29.
3 Ibid., p. 30.
4 Spencer, 1851, p. 58. The phrenological work which
corresponds most closely to Spencer's position is George Combe's Essay on the
Constitution of Man and Its Relations to External Objects (1827). I have
seen no evidence that Spencer read it, but over seventy thousand copies of the
work were sold by 1838 (Temkin, 1947, p. 309; Cf. pp. 310-12). Combe considers
the relations between faculties and environmental conditions more explicitly
than Gall had. His view lies somewhere between a radical separation of man from
nature and the consistent naturalistic approach to man which came in the wake of
the theory of evolution. Man's relation to natural laws was that he could choose
to act in harmony with them or not. The relevant analogy is his relations with
civil and moral laws, and the argument is conducted in terms of ‘infringement'
and 'obedience'. These bring rewards or punishments, and happiness or evil
befall man in the measure that he obeys or disobeys the laws for which he has
been fitted (Combe, 1827, pp. 6, 7, 39, 46). Combe recast phrenological
principles in the light of natural theology, and his book should be read with
Paley's earlier work and later Bridgewater Treatises of Chalmers and Kidd in
mind. Combe is said to have complained that Chalmers' On the Adaptation of
External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man (1833)
adopted the principles of his Essay without referring to it (Temkin, 1947
p.312). However, it is more likely that they had a common debt to Paley and the
tradition of natural theology.
159
produces a diseased state in one part of the community,
must inevitably inflict injury upon all other parts. He must see that his own
life can become what it should be, only as fast as society becomes what it
should be. In short, he must become impressed with the salutary truth, that no
one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till
all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.[1]
In spelling out the details of this remarkably
optimistic conception, Spencer presents the view of organs and functions which
he later argued was all that he retained from phrenology, and on which he based
his view of cerebral localization.
A FUNCTION to each organ, and each organ to its own
function, is the law of all organization. To do its work well, an apparatus must
possess special fitness for that work; and this will amount to unfitness for any other work. The lungs cannot digest, the heart cannot respire, the
stomach cannot propel blood. Each muscle and each gland must have its own
particular nerve. There is not a fibre in the body but what has a channel to
bring it food, a channel to take its food away, an agency for causing it to
assimilate nutriment, an agency for stimulating it to perform its peculiar duty,
and a mechanism to take away effete matter; not one of which can be dispensed
with. Between creatures of the lowest type, and creatures of the highest, we
similarly find the essential difference to be, that in the one the vital actions
are carried on by a few simple agents, whilst in the other the vital actions are
severally decomposed into their component parts, and each of these parts has an
agent to itself.[2]
Reasoning by analogy from this physiological principle,
Spencer argues an organismic view of economic and social relationships. He does
this by means of a view of life borrowed from Coleridge, and examples taken from
zoology. Life, says Coleridge, consists in the progressive realization of a 'tendency to individuation'.[3] Spencer gives examples in the animal kingdom
to support the thesis that 'By greater individuality of parts-by greater
distinctness in the nature and functions of these, are all creatures possessing
high vitality distinguished from inferior ones'.[4] Tissues are progressively
individuated into separate organs adapted to separate ends.[5] The nervous
system is a notable example, and as it becomes progressively individuated, other
systems (such as the muscular, respiratory, and circulatory systems) are
simultaneously forming separate parts with special functions.[6]
Higher organisms have greater powers and are more
self-sufficient and more individual. In man the individuation is most complete,
and
1 Spencer, 1851, pp. 455-6.
2 Ibid., p. 274.
3 Ibid., p. 436.
4 Ibid., p. 438.
5 Ibid., pp. 438-9.
6 Ibid., p. 439.
160
it is best manifested in the progressive evolution of
his ability to recognize the moral law of equal freedom.[1] Yet this
individuation requires mutual dependence in society.[2]
Just that kind of individuality will be acquired which
finds in the most highly-organized community the fittest sphere for its
manifestation-which finds in each social arrangement a condition answering to
some faculty in itself-which could not, in fact, expand at all, if otherwise
circumstanced. The ultimate man will be one whose private requirements coincide
with public ones. He will be that manner of man, who, in spontaneously
fulfilling his own nature, incidentally performs the functions of a social unit;
and yet is only enabled so to fulfil his own nature, by all others doing the
like.[3]
The identity of personal and social interests leads
Spencer to view society in organismic terms.
We commonly enough compare a nation to a living
organism. We speak of 'the body politic', of the functions of its several parts,
of its growth, and of its diseases, as though it were a creature. But we usually
employ these expressions as metaphors, little suspecting how close is the
analogy, and how far it will bear carrying out. So completely, however, is a
society organized upon the same system as an individual being, that we may
almost say there is something more than analogy between them.[4]
The historical development of society from its lowest
to its highest stages again exemplifies the close analogy to animal
organization. 'In the one extreme there are but few functions, and many similar
agents to each function: in the other, there are many functions, and few similar
agents to each function.'[5] There is an ever-increasing division of labour as a
result of the increasing subdivision of functions and separation of their
agents.[6]
There are two justifications for considering these
passages from Social Statics in such detail. The first is to demonstrate
the influence of phrenological thinking on this seminal work of Spencer's. The
faculty psychology which he uses in conducting his arguments and the belief that
different functions are served by different organs throughout nature came
naturally to a formerly ardent student of phrenological faculties and their
organs. The second justification lies in the relations of the above passages
with his subsequent biological and psychological views. For present purposes the
passages must be lifted from their context and their use in his social theory
ignored.[7] Their importance
1 Spencer, 1851, p. 440.
2 Ibid., p. 441
3 Ibid., p. 442.
4 Ibid., p. 448.
5 Ibid., p. 451.
6 Ibid., p. 453.
7 He remained loyal to the organism-society analogy,
repeated it in the Principles of Biology (1864, I, 160, 163 ff)
and defended it (1908, pp. 570-1). Cf. Albee, 1962, for an analysis of Spencer's
ethical theories in Social Statics and his later writings.
161
to his later thinking is pointed out in two notes to
the revised edition in which he comments on the arguments quoted above:
Until now (1890) that [sic] I am
re-reading Social Statics for the purpose of making this abridgement, the
above paragraph had remained for these 40 years unremembered. It must have been
written in 1849; and it shows that at that date I had entered on the line of
thought which, pursued in after years, led to the general law of evolutional[1]
In the generalizations contained in the two above
paragraphs, and in the recognition of their parallelism, may be seen the first
step towards the general doctrine of Evolution. Dating back as they do to i850,
they show that this first step was taken earlier than I supposed.[2]
Spencer's general theory of evolution and the
biological, evolutionary basis of his psychology grew out of the arguments for
specialization of functions which he elaborated in the context of his
phrenological interests. He later freed his evolutionary psychology from
phrenology, and the belief in cerebral localization (which was all that he
retained from his earlier allegiance), was based on the general theory of
evolution. However, it should be noted that this new basis for a remnant of his
phrenological interests had itself grown out of the theory it replaced. In what
follows an attempt will be made to trace in detail the development of Spencer's
biological view of psychology, its evolutionary basis, and its associationist
form.
The development of Spencer's views subsequent to the
writing of Social Statics involves three closely intertwined themes. The
first is the abandonment of the faculty of psychology of phrenology in favour of
associationism. The second is a change in the foundations of his organfunction
view.
He added this to other analogies borrowed from
embryology and development to elaborate his general theory of evolution. The
novel features of his psychology arise from the union of the concepts of
association and evolution and lead to a conception of psychology as a biological
science of adaptation. Third, when he returns to the consideration of
phrenology, almost as an afterthought in his Principles of Psychology, he retains only two aspects of the theory which formerly held his
intellectual loyalty. Certain of the phrenological faculties are present in
shadow form as the names for complex emotions, but these are no longer
fundamental faculties. They are the synthetic products
1 Spencer, 1892, p. 120, commenting on the passage
quoted in part from Spencer, 1851, p. 274. See above, p. 159.
2 Spencer, 1892, p. 266, commenting on the passage
quoted in part from Spencer, 1851, pp. 451-3. See above, p. 160.
162
of associated individual and racial experiences. The
theory of cerebral localization is retained as a corollary of the general theory
of evolution from homogeneity to heterogeneity and of the resulting
physiological division of labour.
Spencer's Interest in Psychology: From
Faculties to the Association of Ideas
Before the publication of Social Statics, Spencer's writings were primarily concerned with engineering topics, education,
and government. Shortly after the appearance of his book, he met George Henry
Lewes (Spring, 1850). They walked home together discussing the 'development
question' (evolution), and Spencer defended the mechanism of inheritance of
functional adaptations against the view of the Vestiges of the Natural
History of Creation.[1]
Their friendship and their many long walks together had
important results, including the renewal of Lewes' interest in science and his
liaison with George Eliot, to whom Spencer introduced Lewes.[2]
'One result of my friendship with Lewes was that I read
some of his books.' A novel did not impress Spencer either way. 'A more
important result, however, was that I read his Biographical History of
Philosophy, then existing in its original four-volume form. . . . Up to that
time questions in philosophy had not attracted my attention.' He had ignored a
copy of Locke's Essay on his father's shelf and rejected Kant's Critique of Pure Reason after reading a few pages in 1844.[3]
It is also true that though, so far as I can remember,
I had read no books on either philosophy or psychology, I had gathered in
conversations or by references, some conceptions of the general questions at
issue. And it is no less true that I had myself, to some extent, speculated upon
psychological problems-chiefly in connexion with phrenology. . . . Still, I had
not, up to 1851, made the phenomena of mind a subject of deliberate study.[4]
I doubt not that the reading of Lewes's book, while it
made me acquainted with the general course of philosophical thought, and with
the doctrines which throughout the ages have been the subjects of dispute, gave
me an increased interest in psychology, and an interest, not before manifest, in
philosophy at large; at the same time that it served, probably, to give more
coherence to my own thoughts, previously but loose. No more definite effect,
however, at that time resulted, because there had not occurred to me any thought
serving as a principle of organization.[5]
1 Spencer, 1908, p. 541.
2 Gross, n.d., p. 259.
3 Spencer, 1904, I, 378-9.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., I, 379.
163
Just as the reading of Lyell's refutation of Lamarck
turned Spencer towards belief in inheritance of acquired
characteristics,[l] the reading of Lewes' positivist polemics seems to have
turned him towards metaphysics. He wrote to his father in September 1851, that
he was absorbed in the subject.[2] Between the autumn of 1851 and the beginning
of 1852, Spencer decided to write a book on psychology.[3] He wrote to his
father in March, 'I shall shortly begin to read up in preparation for my
"Introduction to Psychology".' This was envisaged as the preliminary to a larger
work and was to contain its general principles.[4] Within two weeks, he wrote 'I
am just beginning to read Mill's Logic. This is my first step towards preparing
for my "Introduction to Psychology" which I mean to begin vigorously by and
by.'[5] Spencer does not specify the other sources of his psychological
development. However, the reading of Mill's Logic[6] and his subsequent
writings give ample evidence of the direction his thinking took.
A direct result of his reading of Mill was the
formulation of what he considered to be a unifying concept for his psychology.
In reflecting on Mill's objections to Whewell, he was led to the formulation of
'The Universal Postulate'.[7] This was Spencer's ultimate criterion of belief:
the thesis that 'in the last resort we must accept as true a proposition of
which the negation is inconceivable'.[8] First begun in October, 1852, and
published as an essay a year later, this conception was expanded into Part I of
his Principles of Psychology.[9] Although the connection between this
part of his work and the rest is very tenuous indeed, it seems to have had the
psychological effect of spurring him on.
Thus it appears that the general interest in mental
phenomena..... which I..... inferred was increased by reading Lewes's Biographical History of Philosophy in the autumn of 1851, quickly
under that stimulus, began to have results. It was there remarked, that some
original conception in relation to the subject was needed to give me the
requisite spur; and this requirement was, it seems, fulfilled much sooner than I
supposed.[10]
1 See below, pp. 167, 172, 186-90.
2 Spencer, 1908, p. 67.
3 Spencer, 1904, I, 391.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid
6 The book was a gift from George Eliot. Spencer, 1908,
p. 418.
7 Ibid., p. 544; Spencer, 1904, 1, 416.
8 Spencer, I904, 1, 472.
9 The article engendered a prolonged controversy with
Mill which is not relevant here. However, from the viewpoint of strictly
psychological issues Mill was quite right to apologize for this part of
Spencer's Principles as 'the very essence of the a priori philosophy' while giving the remainder of the work a qualified recommendation.
(Mill, 1867, p. 99.) Mill's opinions changed somewhat toward a more favourable
view of Spencer's psychology, though not toward the first part. (Spencer, 1908,
pp. 114-5. Cf. Packe, 1954, pp. 431-4; Mill, 1872, p. 557.)
10 Spencer, 1904, 1, 392.
164
Mill's conception of psychology[l] was firmly opposed
to the possibility of deriving a science of character from direct observation of
complex behaviour.[2] Nor could it be deduced from physiology. The true 'Laws of
Mind' were to be found by introspective observation and experiments on actual
'mental successions' and were based on the principle of association.[3] 'The
subject, then, of Psychology is the uniformities of succession, the laws,
whether ultimate or derivative, according to which one mental state succeeds
another-is caused by, or at least is caused to follow, another.’[4]
In the edition of Mill's Logic which Spencer
read, the major authorities cited are James Mill and (to a lesser extent)
Hartley, though Bain is given precedence in later editions, and Spencer himself
is mentioned.[5] The science of character which Mill proposed was to be called
Ethology.
The laws of the formation of character are, in short,
derivative laws, resulting from the general laws of mind, and are to be obtained
by deducing them from those general laws by supposing any given set of
circumstances, and then considering what, according to the laws of mind, will be
the influence of those circumstances on the formation of character.[6]
In other words, Ethology, the deductive science, is a
system of corollaries from Psychology, the experimental science.[7]
Mill's approach was opposed to phrenology by
implication, and he was also explicitly opposed to it in his writings and
activities. He closes his discussion of the relations between psychology and
physiology by saying,
The latest discoveries in cerebral physiology appear to
have proved that any such connection which may exist [between mental
peculiarities and any varieties cognisable by our senses in the structure of the
cerebral and nervous apparatus] is of a radically different character from that
contended for by Gall and his followers, and that whatever may hereafter be
found to be the true theory of the subject, phrenology at least is untenable.[8]
When William Carpenter published an extensive review of
a phrenological work which was scrupulously fair but highly critical of
phrenology, Mill wrote to him
I should have been truly vexed not to have heard
immediately of such a valuable contribution to science as your paper. I have
read it once with great care, but I must read it a second time before I can have
completely incorporated it with my system of thought. I have long thought that
you
1 Mill, 1872, pp. 552-71.
2 Ibid., pp. 552-4.
3 Ibid., pp. 555-6.
4 Ibid., p. 557.
5 Ibid., pp. 557,558.
6 Ibid., p. 567.
7 Ibid., p. 569.
8 Ibid., pp. 561-2.
165
were the person who would set to rights the pretensions
of present and the possibilities of future phrenology; but I did not venture to
hope that I should see, so soon, anything approaching in completeness and
conclusiveness to this.[1]
Finally, it has been mentioned that Mill is supposed to
have convinced Bain to write his critical examination of phrenology as a
possible science of character.[2]
The most important concomitant of Spencer's reading of
Lewes and Mill is the change that occurred in his psychological views. Whether
or not Spencer's change in allegiance can be directly attributed to the reading
of Mill's work must remain, for the present, an open question.[3] What is clear
is that Spencer's renewed interest in psychology took a form radically different
from his earlier phrenological work. He turned from the faculty formulation of
phrenology to a belief in associationism. This change can be chronicled with the
aid of a remarkable document.
There was another essay written in Spencer's
phrenological period. The same letter that mentions the article later rejected
by Combe refers to an essay on 'The Force of Expression', which was duly
rejected by Tait's Magazine. 'It was not without merit; for, ten years
after, it was, with improvements, published in the Westminster Review, under the title of "The Philosophy of Style".’[4] Spencer revised and developed
the original essay during the early autumn of 1852.[5] The result provides an
excellent picture of his views in transition.
The aim of the essay was 'to explain the general cause
of force in expression'.[6] Its relevance to the development of his
psychological views results from the fact that he attempts an explanation in
terms of the effect of various stylistic constructions on the mind of the
reader. For present purposes the details of his arguments about style are
incidental, but the language in which he writes is quite revealing. The essay
has a single point, with positive and negative aspects. His positive view is
that economy and vividness of verbal expression and arrangement promote ease of
understanding; the converse is that there is a danger of fatiguing the reader
which must be avoided by suitable variation and balance of verbal constructions.
These aspects are illustrated by numerous examples. Were this all, the essay
would be most uninteresting to the historian of science.
1 Carpenter, 1888, p. 55. Cf. below, pp. 212-14.
2 Haldane, 1912, 1, 79-80. I have seen no support for
this claim in primary sources.
3 Spencer's MSS in the British Museum should be
carefully examined with this question in mind. A brief inspection has not
provided any help on Spencer's debt to Mill. Spencer was not generous in
acknowledging his intellectual debts.
4 Spencer, 1904, 1, 225.
5 Ibid., I, 405.
6 Ibid.
166
However, there is a point at which the language of his
argument changes abruptly to the faculty psychology of phrenology. It may even
be possible to specify the last sentence that underwent revision, since the
following one contains the first mention of faculties, and the whole of the
remainder of the essay is expressed in terms of faculties and groups of
faculties, their exercise and exhaustion.[1] The negative expression of
Spencer's thesis is 'that the sensitiveness of the faculties must be
husbanded'.[2] The emotions he refers to are those of reverence, approbation,
beauty. The different effects of words is 'dependent on the different states of
our faculties'.[3]
The language in which he makes the positive point is
that of the association psychology. Force of expression is achieved by means of
the greatest economy of mental 'energy', 'effort', 'power', or 'attention'. The
mental law governing the effects of forms of expression is that of association.
The mental contents to which he refers are images, ideas, and their respective
elements. The mental functions involved are attention, imagination, memory, and
concentration. Until near the end of the positive statement of his thesis the
language is uniformly associationist.[4]
All Spencer's subsequent writings employ the language
and assumptions of associationist psychology.
There is one further point to be made about this
remarkable snapshot of a mind in transition. It is not the case that the last
portion of 'The Philosophy of Style' was left untouched, for the closing
paragraph reveals another manifestation of the development of Spencer's
psychology: the first extension of his concept of evolution to superorganic
phenomena.[5] In order to appreciate the significance of the union of
association psychology and his theory of evolution it will be necessary to look
further into the development of his view of evolution. For the
1 The point of transition occurs at Spencer, 1901, II,
360. The last sentence in associationist language refers to 'mental energy' and
'strain on the attention'. The next sentence contains the first mention of
'perceptive faculties'.
2 Ibid., II, 364.
3 Ibid. The subsequent development of Spencer's views
is reflected in the fact that, in commenting on this essay in his Autobiography, he uses neither the language of association psychology nor
that of phrenological faculties. His review of the thesis of the article is
given in terms of nervous energy and the sensibility of nervous structures.
(Spencer, 1904, I, 405-6.)
4 The MS of this essay which Spencer deposited in the
British Museum neither supports nor detracts from my reading. In particular, it
shows no break at the point where the language changes to that of faculty
psychology (MS., p. 113), and faculty language does not appear to have been
deleted or replaced in the earlier portions of the MS. Since the last sentence
contains reference to a view which he did not hold until 1851, one may conclude
that it was probably a recopy of the revised version.
5 Spencer, 1901, II, 366-7.
167
present one should note the union of the old
phrenological psychology with the new faith in associationism and an embryonic
form of his concept of evolution in the revision of this essay from his
phrenological period.
The Development of Spencer's General Theory of
Evolution
Spencer claimed that a belief in evolution had been
latent in him since boyhood. He held that the view was implicit in the habit
which his father had encouraged of seeking natural causes of phenomena. This
entailed a disbelief in miracles, and therefore a relinquishment of the creed of
special creation. This process was occurring during his early manhood. It was
rather far-fetched for Spencer to claim retrospectively that the inevitable
corollary of belief in the universality of natural causation was a belief in
evolution, since this corollary had escaped so many scientists and philosophers
for centuries.[1]
The first explicit convictions on evolution came from
reading Lyell's Principles of Geology when he was twenty. The argument against Lamarck in Lyell's work led Spencer to a partial acceptance of both
the transmutation of species and the mechanism of inheritance of acquired
characters.[2] His belief in evolution never wavered, though the particular way
he expressed and applied it underwent considerable development.
It has already been noted that Spencer later saw the
remarks on progressive specialization of function in animals and in societies,
which appeared in Social Statics, as 'the earliest foreshadowing of the
general doctrine of Evolution'.[3] The examples used in that work were largely
drawn from T. Rymer Jones' A General Outline of the Animal Kingdom. What
he took from Jones was the idea of progression from simple creatures, where the
duties of all structures are performed by one tissue, to more complex organisms
where separate organs are adapted to separate end.[4] Spencer had drawn from
this the analogy of increasing subdivision of functions in the development of
society.[5] However, in both cases the concept of development used in this work
'involving as it did the idea of function along with the idea of
structure,...... was limited to organic phenomena'.[6]
Spencer encountered two phrases in the next two years
which consolidated his concept of evolution and freed it from this limitation.
1 Spencer, 1904, II, 6-7.
2 Spencer, 1904, I, 176-7. Spencer, 1904,
II, 6-7.
3 Spencer, 1908, p. 541.
4 Spencer, 1851, pp. 436-40. Cf. pp.
274-.5.
5 Ibid., pp. 451-3.
6 Spencer, 1904, II, 9.
168
The first of these came from 'a little book just
published by Milne-Edwards' which Spencer and Lewes took with them on one of
their excursions in 1851:' 'the physiological division of labour'. This succinct
expression had the effect of sharpening the views of development he put forth in Social Statics.[2]
The second phrase was discovered in W. M. Carpenter's Principles of Physiology (1851), which Spencer was reviewing: von
Baer's formula that 'the development of every organism is a change from
homogeneity to heterogencity'.[3] Though von Baer limited the concept to the
development of individual organisms, it was felt by Spencer to provide a general
formulation which could be applied to evolution beyond the organic world. The
first extension of the general concept of evolution crept into the end of the
essay on 'The Philosophy of Style'. He says that a perfect composition will
'answer to the description of all highlyorganized products both of man and
nature. It will be, not a series of like parts simply placed in juxtaposition,
but one whole made up of unlike parts that are mutually dependent'. On the
adjoining page it is suggested that progress in style 'must produce increasing
heterogeneity in our modes of expression'.[4]
1 Spencer, 1908, p. 542. Henri Milne-Edwards (1800-85)
was a noted French zoologist and a pupil of Cuvier. He worked mainly on
invertebrate comparative anatomy. See Nordenskiöld, 1928, p. 425. Spencer does
not mention the title of the work he read, but it was probably Outlines of
Anatomy and Physiology (1850) or possibly Introduction à la zoologie générale (1851). The work and the principle of the division of labour are
considered, along with Milne-Edwards' career, in Russell, 1916, pp. 195-200.
Milne-Edwards believed in a sort of descent theory but rejected any explanation
in terms of natural causes (Ibid., pp. 244-5).
2 Spencer, 1904, II, 166; Cf. Spencer, 1864, I, 160 and
Spencer, 1908, pp. 570-1.
3 Spencer, 1904, II, 8-9. Karl Ernst von Baer
(1792-1876), a German zoologist, was the most distinguished and influential of
the early nineteenth-century embryologists. His work was the culmination of
previous embryology and 'the point of departure of all that was to follow'. It
was he who converted embryology from philosophic speculation to a laboratory
science. His embryological law of development of special heterogeneous
structures from general homogeneous ones played an important, if confusing, part
in the history of evolutionary theory, and Carpenter's exposition of his work
was at the centre of the issue. Both Darwin and Spencer twisted von Baer's work
for their own evolutionary purposes. In fact, he was opposed to organic
evolution 'root and branch' and devoted his last years to an attempt at
destroying Darwin's work by removing the embryological supports which Darwin
considered crucial. Darwin's use of von Baer's work to support recapitulation
was diametrically opposed to the latter's conclusions. This story is
exhaustively told in two excellent essays in Glass, et al., 1959;
Oppenheimer, Jane. An Embryological Enigma in the Origin of Species (pp.
292-322), from which the above evaluation is taken, and Lovejoy, Arthur O.,
'Recent Criticism of the Darwinian Theory of Recapitulation: Its Grounds and Its
Initiator (pp. 438-58). Lovejoy notes the similarity of von Baer's formulation
in embryology to Spencer's doctrine of the evolution of the universe, but he is
unaware of the direct link. He remarks, however, that Spencer's use of the
formula was 'essentially different from and opposed to the ideas of his German
predecessor'. (Ibid., p. 447.) Cf. Nordenskiöld, 1928, pp. 363-6, etc.: Russell,
1916, Chapter IX, etc.
4 Spencer, 1901, II, 366-7. Spencer, 1904, I, 406;
Spencer, 1904, II, 9.
169
He had explicitly declared for organic evolution
several months before (March, 1852) in an essay on 'The Development
Hypothesis',[1] where it was argued that evolution of species is a much less
implausible hypothesis than special creation, and the persistence of the latter
view was attributed to ignorance and prejudice. He does not claim that actual
changes of species can be demonstrated or the modifying influences identified,
but argues that analogies to such processes are all around us, for example,
continuous series can be drawn between distinct geometrical shapes and the
development of a man from a single cell.[2]
After writing 'The Development Hypothesis', 'the
evolutionary interpretation of things in general became habitual'.[3] It was
applied in various forms in essays written in 1853-4, and these applications led
naturally to his treatment of psychology where it became the central concept of
his Principles.
The Writing of the Principles of Psychology in Terms of Evolutionary Adaptation and Correspondence
The simplest description of the Principles of
Psychology is that it united the association psychology with the theory of
evolution. However, it was not evolution itself but the view which Spencer took
of the development of mind which 'originated the book and gave its most
distinctive character'.[4] His expositor put the point more clearly than
Spencer: 'Two fundamental ideas rule the psychology of Mr Herbert Spencer: that
of the continuity of psychological phenomena; that of the intimate relation
between the being and its medium. These two points virtually contain his
doctrine.’[5] No psychologists except Gall and his followers had so emphatically
made the connection of mind with life, and the adaptation of the mental
functions to the environment, central to their views. Certainly no one in the
associationist tradition had gone so far in substituting a biological approach
for the traditional epistemological one. In fact, there is evidence that
Spencer's phrenological interests played an important part in his conception of
psychology as a biological science of adaptation.
Adaptation was a major issue in Social Statics, and Spencer's conception of it was derived directly from phrenology. In
attacking the general formulation of the Utilitarians, he criticized its failure
to take account
1 Spencer, 1901, 1, 1-7.
2 This essay and the Principles of Psychology were recognized by Darwin as legitimate anticipations of his own view. (Darwin,
6th ed., 1928 p. 13.) He refers to 'your excellent essay on Development' in a
letter to Spencer. (Spencer, 1908, p. 98.) Cf. below pp. 188-92.
3 Spencer, 1908, p. 544.
4 Ibid., p. 546.
5 Ribot, 1873, p. 158.
170
of individual and racial differences. 'Adaptation of
constitution to conditions' was the cause of all physical and mental differences
among men.[1] The goal of his social theory was the attainment of 'congruity
between the faculties and their spheres of action'.[2] This leads to fulfilment,
gratification, and genuine happiness.[3] As long as the state does not interfere
and try to create an artificial identity of interests based on an erroneous
belief in a uniform human nature, 'this nonadaptation of an organism to its
conditions is ever being rectified; and modification of one or both, continues
until the adaptation is complete'.[4]
These views were at two removes from Gall. The popular
phrenologists who had influenced Spencer, especially Spurzheim and Combe, had
abandoned Gall's belief in fixed mental endowment and held that the faculties
could be considerably altered by exercise. Spencer's meliorism went still
further to a belief in the inevitability of progress:
Organs, faculties, powers, capacities, or whatever else
we call them, grow by use and diminish from disuse, [and] it is inferred that
they will continue to do so. And if this inference is unquestionable, then is
the one above deduced from it-that humanity must in the end become completely
adapted to its conditions-unquestionable also. Progress, therefore, is not an
accident, but a necessity.[5]
This remarkable belief was the conclusion to his
argument that all maladaptation and imperfection would disappear if only the
excesses or defects of faculties could be allowed to correct themselves by
natural intercourse with the appropriate conditions of existence.[6]
Spencer alluded to these views in reviewing the
development of his psychology.
An early-impressed belief in the increase of faculty by
exercise in the individual, and the subsequently accepted idea of adaptation as
a universal principle of bodily life, now took, when contemplating the phenomena
of mind, an appropriately modified form.[7]
This modification was formulated in 1853, as he was
accumulating memoranda and preparing to begin the book.[8] He had arrived at a
definition of life as 'the co-ordination of actions'. In applying this to
psychology it
1 Spencer, 1851, p. 61.
2 Ibid., p. 59.
3 Ibid., pp. 466-7.
4 Ibid., pp. 59-60.
5 Ibid., p. 65; cf. Young, 1969, pp. 134-7, 141.
6 Ibid., p. 64. Cf. pp. 457, 460-1.
7 Spencer, 1904, II, 11
8 Spencer, 1908, p. 74.
171
required to be supplemented by recognition of the
relations borne by such co-ordinated actions to connected actions in the
environment. There at once followed the idea that the growth of a correspondence
between inner and outer actions had to be traced up from the beginning; so as to
show the way in which Mind gradually evolves out of Life. This was, I think, the
thought which originated the book and gave its most distinctive character; but
evidently, the tendency to regard all things as evolved, which had been growing
more pronounced, gave another special interest to the undertaking.[1]
Thus, when Spencer began writing the Principles in August ' 1854, it was Part III, the 'General Synthesis, that he wrote
first.[2] 'Progressive adaptation became increasing adjustment of inner
subjective relations to outer objective relations-increasing correspondence
between the two.’[3] The adaptive view is unified with evolution from
homogeneity to heterogeneity.
Previous association psychologists had been concerned
with the connections among mental phenomena. Natural scientists had concentrated
on the connections between external phenomena. The epistemological bias of the
Lockean tradition connected these two domains in terms of a knowing mind and its
objects. The aim of Spencer's psychology was neither the connections among
internal phenomena nor among external phenomena nor within knowledge itself.
Hence, then, as in all cases we may consider the
external phenomena as simply in relation, and the internal phenomena also as
simply in relation; the broadest and most complete definition of life will be-The
continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.[4]
.........not only does the definition, as thus
expressed, comprehend all those activities, bodily and mental, which constitute
our ordinary idea of life; but it also comprehends, both those processes of
growth by which the organism is brought into general fitness for those
activities, and those after-processes of adaptation by which it is specially
fitted to its special activities.[5]
Mental phenomena are defined within this context as
'incidents of the correspondence between the organism and its environment'.[6]
The correspondence between life and its circumstances
is treated in successive chapters as 'direct and homogeneous', as 'direct but
heterogeneous', as extending in space and time, as increasing in speciality,
generality, and complexity, as coordinated and as integrated.
1 Spencer, 1908, pp. 545-6.
2 Ibid., p. 546. Cf. Spencer, 1904, 1, 460-1.
3 Spencer, 1904, II, 11.
4 Spencer, 1855, p. 374
5 Ibid., p. 375
6 Ibid., p. 584.
172
The degree of life varies with the degree of
correspondence. Bodily and mental life are but species of life in general. Mind
'emerges out of bodily life and becomes distinguished from it, in proportion as
these several traits of the correspondence become more marked'.[1]
In adhering to the principle of continuity (perhaps
more completely and consistently than any previous writer except Leibniz),
Spencer was bound to apply his evolutionary view to the various categories of
physiological and psychological manifestations. He held that no truly valid
demarcations could exist among simple irritations, reflexes, their compounding
into instincts, the beginning of conscious life, and the highest manifestations
of intelligence-memory, reason, sentiment, and will. Memory, for example, is
dawning instinct, and instinct is organized memory.[2]
Spencer's Evolutionary Associationism as an Advance
on Gall and on Traditional Sensationalism
The foregoing story of Spencer's development provides
the necessary foundation for understanding both the implications of his
psychology for the associationist tradition, and its bearing on some of the
issues raised by Gall. Spencer's concept of mental evolution was at once an
integration of his view of adaptation with that of development from homogeneity
to heterogeneity, and an expression of his adherence to the association
psychology. It has been noted that the reading of Lyell had turned Spencer
toward a Lamarckian view of evolution. In 'The Development Hypothesis' the only
mention of a mechanism is the statement that animals and plants, when placed in
new conditions, undergo changes fitting them for their new environment. In
successive generations these changes continue 'until, ultimately, the new
conditions become the natural ones'.[3] In reviewing his application of this
view to psychological phenomena, Spencer says,
The familiar doctrine of association here undergoes a
great extension; for it is held that not only in the individual do ideas become
connected when in experience the things producing them have repeatedly occurred
together, but that such results of repeated occurrences accumulate in
successions of individuals: the effects of associations are supposed to be
transmitted as modifications of the nervous system.[4]
1 Spencer, 1904, I, 470.
2 Ribot, 1873, pp. 149, 189. For a very clear
exposition of Spencer see Ibid., pp. 124-93.
3 Spencer, 1901, I, 3.
4 Spencer, 1904, I, 470.
173
In the light of Spencer's development this extension
presents itself as the natural next step. Its simplicity is deceptive. In fact,
the application of evolution to psychology has consequences which are yet to be
fully exploited, but the present analysis must be confined to its effects on
psychological issues in the mid-nineteenth century. Spencer provided an
evolutionary theory which mediated between the conflicting claims of Gall's
psychology and the Lockean tradition of sensation-association.
The choice for Locke in explaining the origin of
knowledge was between innate ideas and sensationalism. He opted equivocally for
the latter, and Condillac unequivocally made the choice for a tabula rasa view of mind. The attempt to build a psychology on this epistemological thesis
had been faced with serious limitations which centred around a vehement
objection to any endowment that suggested that mental phenomena were innate.
Evolutionary associationism was incompatible with a simple tabula rasa view of mind.
To rest with the unqualified assertion that, antecedent
to experience, the mind is a blank, is to ignore the all-essential
questions-whence comes the power of organizing experiences? whence arise the
different degrees of that power possessed by different races of organisms, and
different individuals of the same race? If, at birth, there exists nothing but a
passive receptivity of impressions, why should not a horse be as educable as a
man? Or, should it be said that language makes the difference, then why should
not the cat and dog, out of the same household experiences, arrive at equal
degrees and kinds of intelligence? Understood in its current form, the
experience-hypothesis implies that the presence of a definitely organized
nervous system is a circumstance of no moment-a fact not needing to be taken
into account! Yet it is the all-important fact-the fact . . . without which an
assimilation of experiences is utterly inexplicable.[1]
These are the same objections that Gall made to
sensationalism: it could not explain individual and species differences, and it
ignored the fundamental importance of the biological endowment of varying brain
structures. In fact, Lewes credited Gall with settling the issue with which
Spencer is concerned.
Gall may be said to have definitively settled the
dispute between the partisans of innate ideas and the partisans of
Sensationalism, by establishing the connate tendencies, both affective and
intellectual, which belong to the organic structure of man . . . all the
fundamental tendencies are connate, and can no more be created by precept and
education than they can be abolished by denunciation and punishment.[2]
1 Spencer, 1855, pp. 580-1.
2 Lewes, 1857, p. 633. The edition of Lewes' book which
Spencer read did not include the chapter on Gall. It was added in the second
edition, which is quoted here. Cf. Young, 1966. p. 39 (fn. 77).
174
Although Spencer echoed Gall's objections and his
emphasis on biological endowment and adaptation, he could accept neither the
view of nature nor the faculty psychology on which Gall's arguments were based.
Gall saw organic life in terms of the static chain of being. The cerebral
endowments of species were part of an eternally fixed order of nature, and he
believed that the organs were added in a stepwise fashion. The endowments of
individuals were also given at birth, and the role left for experience was very
meagre indeed. In his extreme reaction to the sensationalists in the name of
biological endowment, Gall had moved dangerously close to a belief in innate
ideas. In pursuing their epistemological interests the sensationalists had
clearly committed biological absurdities. Similarly, Gall had pursued his
biological and social interests faithfully and incidentally had talked
philosophical nonsense. Much of the reaction to his psychology was the result of
the supposed relation of faculties to innate ideas. In his zeal to show the
continuity of human behaviour with that of animals he had collapsed the
distinction between instincts and the most complex manifestations of human
intelligence. Thus, the laws of various pure and applied sciences were supposed
to be innately given as instincts in animals with striking talents and in human
geniuses.[1] The charge against Gall that he adhered to belief in innate ideas
was therefore not without foundation.
Others had noted the relations between biologically
endowed instincts and innate ideas. For example, Johannes Mueller says, 'The
expression of Cuvier with reference to instinct is very correct. He says, that
animals in their acts of instinct are impelled by an innate idea,- as it were,
by a dream'.[2] In sharing this view Mueller argued, 'That innate ideas may
exist, cannot in the slightest degree be denied: it is, indeed, a fact. All the
ideas of animals, which are induced by instinct, are innate and immediate;
something presented to the mind, a desire to attain which is at the same time
given. The new-born lamb and foal have such innate ideas, which lead them to
follow their mother and suck the teats'.[3] However, he was not prepared to
extend this equation to man. To the question, 'Is it not in some measure the
same with the intellectual ideas of man?’[4] he replied with an emphatic denial
and reverted to the arguments of the sensationalists. The general intellectual
ideas of man result solely from 'the mutual reaction of allied perceptions
amongst themselves'.[5] He believed in fixed endowment where
1 Gall, 1835, V, 48, 51, 65-6, 82-3.
2 Mueller, 1842, p. 947.
3 Ibid., p. 1347.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., p. 1348. Cf. pp. 948-9.
175
animals were concerned, and in sensationalism in human
intelligence.
In addressing himself to this extremely confused set of
explanations and assumptions, Spencer had first to answer the argument of
special creation in the name of evolution, and then to mediate the conflicting
claims of the sensationalists and those who employed the concept of instinct.
His first attack was on the special creation hypothesis on which Gall had based
his objections to the sensationalists. Gall had argued the innate endowment of a
pre-established harmony between a faculty and its proper objects in the
environment. Speaking of this adjustment of psychical cohesions to relations
among objects in the environment, Spencer says,
Concerning their adjustment, there appear to be but two
possible hypotheses, of which all other hypotheses can be but variations. It may
on the one hand be asserted, that the strength of the tendency which each
particular state of consciousness has to follow any other, is fixed beforehand
by a Creator-that there is a pre-established harmony between the inner and outer
relations. On the other hand it may be asserted, that the strength of the
tendency which each particular state of consciousness has to follow any other,
depends upon the frequency with which the two have been connected in
experience-that the harmony between the inner and outer relations, arises from
the fact, that the outer relations produce the inner relations.[1]
Spencer believed that there was no real evidence to
support the special creation hypothesis. Speaking, though not directly, to
Gall's view, he says,
That the inner cohesions of psychical states are
pre-adjusted to the outer persistencies of the relations symbolized, is a
supposition which, if taken in its full meaning, involves absurdities so many
and great that none dare carry it beyond a limited range of cases.[2]
On the other hand, the supposition that the inner
cohesions are adjusted to the outer persistencies by an accumulated experience
of those outer persistencies, is in harmony with all our positive knowledge of
mental phenomena.[3]
The evidence commonly cited to illustrate the doctrine
of the association of ideas made the evidence for the 'experience hypothesis'
overwhelming.[4]
However, he also took account of the fact that the
major barriers to the rejection of special creation were the phenomena of reflex
action,
1 Spencer, 1855, p. 523.
2 Ibid., pp. 527-8.
3 Ibid., p. 528.
4 Ibid., pp. 525-6.
176
instinct, and the 'forms of thought' in man. ‘But
should these phenomena be otherwise explicable, the hypothesis must be regarded
as altogether gratuitous.’[1] Since Spencer's answer is the same for all three
of these sets of phenomena-evolution and association-the present discussion will
centre on the one which was historically most troublesome.
The concept of instinct had been the traditional enemy
of both evolution and associationism. It had been cited as conclusive evidence
of special creation and design.[2] Gall held this view. Indeed, animal instinct
was chosen as the topic of one of the eight Bridgewater Treatises in
which natural theologians defended design by showing God's handiwork throughout
creation.[3] Conversely, Darwin's Origin, published four years after
Spencer's Principles, contained a chapter devoted to an attempt to
explain how instincts could evolve by natural selection. He considered this
issue one of the most formidable objections to his theory.[4] The antagonism
between the association psychology and explanations in terms of instincts goes
back to the inception of the school. The founding of the psychology of
association occurred in the Rev. John Gay's assertion of the possibility of
deducing the moral sense and all our passions from the pleasure-pain principle
and association.[5] Gay's dissertation was written in explicit opposition to
Hutcheson's claim that moral sentiments and disinterested affections are
innately given to the mind as instincts.[6] Gay's answer to Hutcheson was:
Our approbation of Morality, and all Affections
whatsoever, are finally resolvable into Reason pointing out private
Happiness, and are conversant only about things apprehended to be means
tending to this end; and that whenever this end is not perceived, they are to be
accounted for from the Association of Ideas, and may properly
enough be call'd Habits.[7]
Although Hutcheson's view may not in itself have been
'a-kin to the Doctrine of Innate Ideas, yet I think it relishes too much
of that of Occult Qualities'. [8] Gay goes on to argue that 'as some Men
have imagin'd Innate Ideas, because forgetting how they came by them; so
others have set up almost as many distinct Instincts as there are acquired Principles of acting'.[9] The psychological aspect of Hartley's
associationism is an elaboration of this opposition to explanation in terms of
instinct.[10]
1 Spencer, 1855, pp. 523-4.
2 Baldwin, 1913, II, 87-8.
3 Kirby, 1835. Cf. Gillispie, 1959, pp. 209-16, 244-5.
4 Darwin, reprinted, 1950, Chapter VII, especially
pp. 207-8.
5 Gay, 2nd ed., 1732. Cf. Halévy, 1952, pp. 7-9;
Albee, 1962, pp. 78-90
6 Gay, 1732, p. xxxi.
7 Ibid., p. xxxii.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., p. liii.
10 Hartley, 1749; Halévy, 1952, pp. 7-9; Macintosh,
1860, p. 380; Willey, 1962, pp. 134-7.
177
Five years later (1754) Condillac argued from his
extreme sensationalism to the position that instincts were acquired habits which
an individual derived from sensations and had ceased to reflect about. This
explanation left no way of accounting for the identity of instincts within
species and their marked differences between species. It is not surprising
therefore to find that the judgement made on eighteenth century associationism
was that, 'All attempts to explain instinct by this principle have hitherto been
unavailing'.[l] The aim had been to explain them away.
After attention was explicitly turned to the
comparative study of instincts within evolutionary psychology, Romanes judged
the major nineteenth-century associationists prior to Spencer as follows: 'Mill,
from ignoring the broad facts of heredity in the region of psychology, may be
said to deserve no hearing on the subject of instinct; and the same, though in a
lesser degree, is to be remarked of Bain.’[2] It is with Spencer that Romanes
begins the serious debate on instinct and opposes Spencer's view in favour of
Darwin's.[3] J. S. Mill had granted the existence of instincts and admitted that
the association psychology could not explain them.
No mode has been suggested, even by way of hypothesis,
in which these [human and animal instincts] can receive any satisfactory, or
even plausible, explanation from psychological causes alone; and there is great
reason to think that they have as positive, and even as direct and immediate, a
connexion with physical conditions of the brain and nerves as any of our mere
sensations have.[4]
Nevertheless, both he and Bain persisted in the belief
that moral feelings or the moral sense were acquired by each individual during
his lifetime. Darwin was hesitant about quarrelling with Mill but claimed that
'it can hardly be disputed that the social feelings are instinctive or innate in
the lower animals; and why should they not be so in man? . . . The ignoring of
all transmitted mental qualities will, as it seems to me, be hereafter judged as
a most serious blemish in the works of Mr Mill'.[5] Of Bain's view, he said, 'On
the general theory of evolution this is at least extremely improbable'.[6]
Spencer wrote to Mill that the evolutionary theory could account for an innate
moral sense.
I believe that the experiences of utility organized and
consolidated through all past generations of the human race, have been producing
corresponding nervous modifications, which, by continued transmission and
accumulation,
1 Macintosh, 1860, p. 379.
2 Romanes, 1883, p. 256.
3 Ibid., pp. 256-62.
4 Mill, 1872, p. 561.
5 Darwin, 2nd ed., 1874, p. 98.
6 Ibid.
178
have become in us certain faculties of moral
intuition-certain emotions responding to right and wrong conduct, which have no
apparent basis in the individual experience of utility.[1]
The innate moral sense that Spencer had argued in Social Statics was thus retained, but its basis was changed from endowment
in the form of a phrenological faculty to endowment in the form of accumulated
species experience.
Where instinctual phenomena had effectively opposed the
separate positions of evolution and associationism, Spencer believed that they
could be explained by the unified view of evolutionary associationism. 'The
doctrine that the connections among our ideas are determined by experience,
must, in consistency, be extended not only to all the connections established by
the accumulated experiences of every individual but to all those established by
the accumulated experiences of every race.’[2] Given this general principle, all
the phenomena of life and mind can be explained in terms of the experience
hypothesis.[3] The application of this view to reflex and instinct disposes of
their opposition to associationism and the basis of this objection in the belief
in preestablished harmony.
Though it is manifest that reflex and instinctive
sequences are not determined by the experiences of the individual organism manifesting them; yet there still remains the hypothesis that they are
determined by the experiences of the race of organisms forming its
ancestry, which by infinite repetition in countless successive generations have
established these sequences as organic relations: and all the facts that are
accessible to us, go to support this hypothesis. Hereditary transmission,
displayed alike in all the plants we cultivate, in all the animals we breed, and
in the human race, applies not only to physical but to psychical
peculiarities.[4]
By replacing the tabula rasa of the individual
with that of the race, Spencer was able to retain the basic position of
sensationalism while recognizing the inherited biological endowments in the
nervous system, and avoiding the risk of the rationalist belief in innate ideas.
The term 'innate' thereby lost its Cartesian terrors for the empiricist. Baldwin
puts the position succinctly by saying that he replaced 'Condillac's individual
human statue by a racial animal colossus, so to speak'.,[5] And, most important
for the present purposes, he gave the statue an
1 Quoted in Bain, 1875, p. 722. Bain has provided a
very useful history of pre-evolutionary views on the moral faculty (1875, pp.
448-751).
2 Spencer, 1855, p. 529.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., p. 526.
5 Baldwin, 1913, II, 84.
179
evolving nervous system and thus avoided the other
rationalist fallacy of referring mental endowments solely to an immaterial mind.
The reduction of all distinction between instinct and
the highest intellectual operation of the human mind which Gall felt was
required by his biological, anti-sensationalist view could be abandoned when it
became appreciated that the higher operations could evolve out of simple
reflexes and instincts, and that the primitive could co-exist with the more
advanced. Finally, the analytic principle and the genetic method which had been
the central thesis of the Lockean tradition (and its main contributions to
philosophy, psychology, and science) were retained and extended to a much wider
domain. Gall had found it necessary to fall short of a rigorous application of
the principle of continuity in order to give some reality to the faculties which
he felt to be the important variables in behaviour. Spencer made it possible to
retain a consistent application of continuity in the evolution of relatively
stable functions, while still granting their reality and efficacy for the
individual. Psychology was freed from the static adaptations of Gall's innate
faculties and the more general application of the pre-established harmony of the
special creation view. All of this was achieved by the comparatively simple
expedients of (1) placing the principle of continuity on a temporal basis for
the race; (2) extending the principles of the psychology of sensation and
association to include the dynamic interactions between an organism and its
environment; (3) stabilizing the results of these interactions in the nervous
systems of various species.
Having provided himself with a uniform explanatory
principle, Spencer applied it to the evolution of mind from the contraction of a
sensitive polyp on irritation, and through the development of specialized
tissues-nerves for irritation and muscles for movement. The simple reflex is the
transitional point of nervous differentiation from the merely physical.[1]
Instincts are complex reflexes whereby a combination of impressions produces a
combination of contractions.[2] This increasing complexity involves such
phenomena as the recognition of prey or a predator, and the activities necessary
for capture or flight.[3] Still more complex correspondences lose their
indivisibility, become dissociated, and occur independently. The impression is
freed from both the immediate presence of the stimulus and the requirement for
immediate response.[4] This is the dawn of conscious memory. Reason is but one
1 Spencer, 1855, pp. 533-8.
2 Ibid., p. 542.
3 Ibid., pp. 539-53.
4 Ibid., pp. 555-63.
180
more step in the developing complexity of relations of
inner to outer-a further part of the insensible evolution. Both memory and
reasoned action tend to lapse into automatism.[1] As a last step, the 'forms of
thought', the last bastion of the rationalist position, are absorbed into the
sensationalist explanation. Space, time, causation, and so on, became
explicable.
Finally, on rising up to human faculties, regarded as
organized results of this intercourse between the organism and the environment,
there was reached the conclusion that the so-called forms of thought are the
outcome of the process of perpetually adjusting inner relations to outer
relations; fixed relations in the environment producing fixed relations in the
mind. And so came a reconciliation of the a priori view with the
experiential view.[2]
In addressing himself to the issue which had exercised
epistemologists at least since Plato, and which is one of the thorniest
questions of modern philosophy, Spencer implicitly asserts that such questions
must henceforth be seen as psychological and therefore as biological. The answer
which Spencer gave to the old question of the origin of ideas came not from
metaphysics but from heredity. At this point the development of psychology from
a branch of speculative metaphysics to a biological science is, in principle,
complete. However, it will become abundantly clear that what was conceived in
principle in 1855 has yet to be thoroughly applied in practice.
Implications of Evolutionary Associationism for
Traditional Issues
Associationists had always been opposed to faculty
psychology, but before their view had been joined to evolution they could offer
no convincing alternative. For example, Bain merely asserted that the principle
of association of ideas was adequate to supersede and explain all the phenomena
formerly attributed to the faculties of the Lockean tradition.[3] In dealing
with the phrenological faculties in On the Study of Character, he
argued that these were not fundamental, that they could be reduced to one of the
classes of his own theory, and that these, in turn, could be explained by the
laws of association and the pleasure-pain principle. But he had no convincing
explanation for the enduring features of mental experience and behaviour.
Spencer could provide an explanation of the development of the various modes of
manifestation of intelligence and grant their relative stability in the species
without making them distinct mental agents. His evolutionary associationism
freed him from the usual procedure of starting at birth with a
1 Spencer, 1855, pp. 568-9.
2 Spencer, 1908, p. 547.
3 Bain, 1868, p. 693.
181
tabula rasa and explaining the development of
the complex phenomena of instinct, emotion, and intellectual functions on the
basis of individual experience alone.
Spencer grants that there are valid differences among
the various 'modes of intelligence known as Instinct, Memory, Reason, Feeling,
Will, and the rest'.[l] However, in their true nature they are only phases of
correspondence, and their genesis is by insensible degrees. He considers the
faculties and emotions neither fundamental nor distinct nor part of a fixed
endowment. 'Intelligence has neither distinct grades, nor is constituted of
faculties that are truly independent; but that its highest phenomena are the
effects of a complication that has arisen by insensible steps out of the
simplest elements.' There are no valid demarcations. Classifications of
faculties
can be but superficially true. Instinct, Reason,
Perception, Conception, Memory, Imagination, Feeling, Will, etc., etc., can be
nothing more than either conventional groupings of the correspondences; or
subordinate divisions among the various operations which are instrumental in
effecting the correspondences. However widely contrasted they may seem, these
various forms of intelligence cannot be anything else than either particular
modes in which the adjustment of inner to outer relations is achieved; or
particular parts of the process of adjustments.[2]
The phrenological faculties retained none of their
independent status as mental agents in Spencer's psychology. After his
conversion to associationism they were retained only as the names of the
emotions.[3] The emotions are not included in the analytic chapters of the Principles of Psychology. Indeed, the whole analytic half of the work
is singularly uninteresting for present purposes. The 'General Analysis'
consists of an expanded version of his defence of realism and his criterion of
belief-the Universal Postulate. The 'Special Analysis' is old-style
epistemological psychology-analysis of the forms of reasoning, perceptions of
external objects, space, time, motion, and so on, and various mental relations.
The aim of this part of his work is the traditional analysis of complex mental
phenomena into their elements, explaining their cohesions by means of the laws
of association.[4] The interest which the work holds for the modern reader is
confined to those parts in which the old-style associationism is recast in an
evolutionary framework.
1 Spencer, 1855, pp. 486-7.
2 Ibid., p. 486.
3 Ibid., pp. 601-2; Spencer, 1901, 1, 251.
4 This part is summarized in Spencer, 1904, I, 471.
182
The treatment which Spencer gives to the emotions in
the Principles of Psychology is but one more application of his
evolutionary associationism to the synthesis of complex mental phenomena.
The progress from the initial forms of feeling to those
complicated forms of it seen in human beings, equally harmonizes with the
general principles of evolution that have been laid down. Arising, as it does,
when the automatic actions, from increasing complexity and decreasing frequency,
become hesitating; and consisting, as it then does, of nothing more than the
group of sensations received and the nascent motor changes aroused by them;
feeling, step by step developes [sic] into larger and more varied
aggregations of psychical states-sometimes purely impressional, sometimes
nascently impressional or ideal; sometimes purely motor, sometimes nascently
motor; but very frequently including in one combination, immediate impressions
and the ideas of other impressions, with immediate actions and the ideas of
other actions. And this formation of larger and more varied aggregations of
psychical states, necessarily results from the accumulating cohesions of
psychical states that are connected in experience. Just as we saw that the
advance from the simplest to the most complex forms of cognition, was explicable
on the principle that the outer relations produce the inner relations; so, we
shall see that this same principle supplies an explanation of the advance from
the simplest to the most complex feelings.[1]
Prior to Spencer-or, more generally, prior to the
theory of evolution -the associationists had been no more successful in
explaining emotions than they had been with instincts. This was admitted by J.
S. Mill in his review of 'Bain's Psychology': 'It is certain that the attempts
of the Association psychologists to resolve the emotions by association, have
been on the whole the least successful part of their efforts.’[2] This judgement
was repeated by their expositor, Ribot.[3] Bain's psychology -the culmination of
pure associationism-did not contain a general analysis of the emotions. Although
successive editions of Bain's work included results of the new evolutionary
studies of Spencer and Darwin, these are 'added on', and the new thinking did
not vitally affect his essentially pre-evolutionary view.[4] Evolutionary
associationism could acknowledge the stability of the emotions in a species,
which had been the strength and danger of Gall's faculty psychology, while
retaining their experiential origins-the strength and weakness of
associationism.
That the experience-hypothesis, as ordinarily
understood, is inadequate to account for emotional phenomena, will be
sufficiently manifest. If possible, it is even more at fault in respect to the
emotions than in respect to the cognitions. The doctrine maintained by some
philosophers, that all the
1 Spencer, 1855, pp. .597-8.
2 Mill. 1867, p. 132.
3 Ribot, 1873, p. 327.
4 Cf. Warren, 1921, pp. 115, 118-20.
183
desires, all the sentiments, are generated by the
experiences of the individual, is so glaringly at variance with hosts of facts,
that I cannot but wonder how any one should ever have entertained it. Not to
dwell on the multiform passions displayed by the infant, before yet there has
been such an amount of experience as could by any possibility suffice for the
elaboration of them; I will simply point to the most powerful of all
passions-the amatory passion-as one which, when it first occurs, is absolutely
antecedent to all relative experience whatever.[l]
Attempts at explanation of complex emotions as
developments wholly within the life of an individual are absurd. The alternative
to explanation of the origin of emotions within the life of the individual is
the view that their evolution takes place through countless generations.
By the accumulation of small increments, arising from
the constant experiences of successive generations, the tendency of all the
component psychical states to make each other nascent, will become gradually
stronger. And when ultimately it becomes organic, it will constitute what we
call a sentiment, or propensity, or feeling, having this set of circumstances
for its object.[2]
Spencer had little more than this to say about emotions
in the Principles of Psychology. Fortunately, he wrote a critical review
of Bain's The Emotions and the Will, in which he provides a very incisive
comment on the limitations of pre-evolutionary associationism, and spells out
the implications of the new context for future investigations. The remarkable
thing about the review is how clearly he saw the meaning of evolution for
associationism at a time (1860) when evolution was just attaining the centre of
intellectual discourse. The first systematic observations in evolutionary
psychology were still over twenty years away. One should recall, though, that by
1860 he had been writing on evolutionary psychology for almost ten years.
Spencer clearly understood one of Bain's two principal
contributions, as well as his major limitation.
The facts brought to light by anatomists and
physiologists during the last fifty years, are at length being used towards the
interpretation of this highest class of biological phenomena; and already there
is promise of a great advance. The work of Mr. Alexander Bain..... may be
regarded as especially characteristic of the transition.[3]
On the other hand, Spencer betrays no hint that he
grasped either Bain's theory of activity or its significance. Given his reading
habits
1 Spencer, 1855, p. 606.
2 Ibid.
3 Spencer, 1901, I, 242.
184
it is even doubtful if he read the relevant parts of
Bain's book.[1] His criticism of Bain's concept of volition has as its text a
single sentence from the first paragraph of the book.[2] Consequently, Spencer
is silent on the aspect of Bain's work which later evolutionary and functional
psychologists would use to complement the tendency toward passivity in Spencer's
concept of adaptation.
Spencer also recognizes Bain's place in the development
of psychology from a speculative and deductive branch of metaphysics to that of
a biological science.
Until recently, mental science has been pursued much as
physical science was pursued by the ancients; not by drawing conclusions from
observations and experiments, but by drawing them from arbitrary a priori assumptions. This course, long since abandoned in the one case with immense
advantage, is gradually being abandoned in the other; and the treatment of
Psychology as a division of natural history, shows that the abandonment will
soon be complete.[3]
Bain's work aimed to provide a 'natural history of the
mind'.[4] As such 'we believe it to be the best yet produced'.[5] 'Of its kind
it is the most scientific in conception, the most catholic in spirit, and the
most complete in execution.'[6] However, the natural history method as used by
Bain is not enough, and his work is therefore essentially transitional.[7]
Bain's classification of the emotions was derived from
the expressions and feelings displayed in the adult.
Thus, then, Mr. Bain's grouping is throughout
determined by the most manifest attributes-those objectively displayed in the
natural languages of the emotions, and in the social phenomena that result from
them, and those subjectively displayed in the aspects the emotions assume in an
analytical consciousness. And the question is-Can they be correctly grouped
after this method? We think not.[8]
We think that Mr. Bain, in confining himself to an
account of the emotions as they exist in the adult civilized man, has neglected
those classes of facts out of which the science of the matter must chiefly be
built.[9]
The complete natural-history-method involves ultimate
analysis, aided by development; and Mr. Bain, in not basing his classification
of the emotions on characters reached through these aids, has fallen short of
the conception with which he set out.[10]
In brief, he has written a Descriptive Psychology,
which does not appeal to Comparative Psychology and Analytical Psychology for
its leading ideas.
1 Spencer, 1908, pp. 417-19.
2 Spencer, 1901, I, 258-9.
3 Ibid., I, 243.
4 Ibid., I, 242.
5 Ibid., I, 264.
6 Ibid., I, 243.
7 Ibid., I, 244.
8 Ibid., I, 247.
9 Ibid., I, 257.
10 Ibid., 1, 249.
185
And in doing this, he has omitted much that should be
included in a natural history of the mind; while to that part of the subject
with which he has dealt, he has given a necessarily imperfect organization.[1]
Spencer argues that comparative and developmental
psychology can supply the studies which Bain's work lacked. Four types of
investigation must precede and guide the traditional associationist analysis:
1. 'Study the evolution of the emotions up through the
various grades of the animal kingdom . . . and how they are severally related to
the conditions of life.'
2. Compare the emotions in lower and higher human
races.
3. 'In the third place, we may observe the order in
which the emotions unfold during the progress from infancy to maturity.'
4. Comparing the results 'displayed in the ascending
grades of the animal kingdom, in the advance of the civilized races, and in
individual history', we should seek harmony and general truths.[2]
It is only after the above studies have been
made that one can attempt the analysis of complex adult human emotions into
their elements. Such analysis must be guided by comparative and developmental
information.[3]
Spencer's approach to the analysis of the emotions
provides a very significant advance on the previous work of the associationist
tradition. By insisting that comparative and developmental studies must precede
and guide the application of the genetic method to the emotions as experienced
subjectively, he challenged a fundamental assumption of those psychologists who
believed that philosophical and introspective analyses were adequate methods.
The assumption was that the actual development of emotions, indeed of all
psychological phenomena, conforms to the categories and sequences according to
which we can interpret them introspectively. Spencer insisted that biological
studies must precede introspective analysis and thus raised the issue of whether
the analytic classification conforms to a natural classification, whether
psychologists' accounts of the synthesis of complex psychological phenomena are
accurate reflections of their actual synthesis in evolution and in individual
experience. The study of psychological phenomena is thereby transferred from
plausible verbal analysis of the complex to the simple (like James Mill's), or
verbal syntheses of everyday psychological life from simple elements (like
Condillac's). Speculative and verbal analyses are replaced by biological
observations and (later)
1 Spencer, 1901, 1, 257.
2 Ibid., 1, 250-1.
3 Ibid., 1, 251-2.
186
experiment. Once again, Spencer's arguments echo Gall's
objections to the sensationalists while his answers depart from Gall's innately
given static faculties and supply an alternative within the associationist
tradition by uniting it with evolution.
It must be recognized, that in spite of his biological
viewpoint, Spencer did not transcend the classificatory scheme of the
association psychology. He offered a more plausible explanation of the genesis
of psychological functions than his predecessors, but he retained their
classification of those functions. He showed that explanation in terms of
faculties was fallacious, and this was an advance on Gall. However, he failed to
derive, or even advocate, the set of biological functions which Gall had sought,
for which the evolutionary theory provided a sound basis. Evolutionary
associationism thus failed to provide an integrated, biological psychology, and
its objective descendant, behaviourism, has done no better. Instinct, Reason,
Perception, Conception, Memory, Imagination, and so on, remain the topics or
chapter headings in contemporary psychological works. One approach -modern
ethology-offers hope of finally transcending the categories of medieval
psychology and providing a nomenclature that fulfils the promise of evolutionary
psychology by means of naturalistic observation followed by controlled
experiments.
The Mechanism of Evolution
Spencer's criticism of accounts by traditional
associationists closes with his explanation of how new emotions are evolved.
This discussion raises an issue which has been deliberately ignored throughout
the present study: Spencer's belief in the inheritance of acquired
characteristics. His theory will first be given and then considered in its
historical context.
The mechanism which he adopted was avowedly
'Lamarckian'. Acquired habits are passed from generation to generation until
they become fixed in the nervous system. 'Every one of the countless connections
among the fibres of the cerebral masses, answers to some permanent connection of
phenomena in the experiences of the race.'[l] What the individual feels as
homogeneous emotions undecomposable into specific experiences, are in fact 'the
organized results of certain daily-repeated combinations of mental states' and
consist of 'aggregated and consolidated groups of those simpler feelings which
habitually occur together in experiences
1 Spencer, 1855, p. 581.
2 Spencer, 1901, I, 254; Cf. 256.
187
Spencer spells out this view in some detail, and since
his exposition considers the question which most troubles the modern reader, it
will be given in full.
When, in the circumstances of any race, some one kind
of action or set of actions, sensation or set of sensations, is usually
followed, or accompanied, by various other sets of actions or sensations, and so
entails a large mass of pleasurable or painful states of consciousness; these,
by frequent repetition, become so connected together that the initial action or
sensation brings the ideas of all the rest crowding into consciousness:
producing, in some degree, the pleasures or pains that have before been felt in
reality. And when this relation, besides being frequently repeated in the
individual, occurs in successive generations, all the many nervous actions
involved tend to grow organically connected. They become incipiently reflex;
and, on the occurrence of the appropriate stimulus, the whole nervous apparatus
which in past generations was brought into activity by this stimulus, becomes nascently excited. Even while yet there have been no individual experiences, a
vague feeling of pleasure or pain is produced; constituting what we may call the
body of the emotion. And when the experiences of past generations come to be
repeated in the individual, the emotion gains both strength and definiteness;
and is accompanied by the appropriate specific ideas.[1]
In the next paragraph he considers and rejects the
mechanism of natural selection. The example he considers is that of birds, on a
formerly undiscovered island, whose behaviour evolves from an initial lack of
fear of man to innate dread.
Now unless this change be ascribed to the killing-off
of the less fearful, and the preservation and multiplication of the more
fearful, which, considering the comparatively small number killed by man, is an
inadequate cause; it must be ascribed to accumulated experiences; and each
experience must be held to have a share in producing it. We must conclude that
in each bird which escapes with injuries inflicted by man, or is alarmed by the
outcries of other members of the flock (gregarious creatures of any intelligence
being necessarily more or less sympathetic), there is established an association
of ideas between the human aspect and the pains, direct and indirect, suffered
from human agency.[2]
He goes on to infer that the emotion is a memory of
these pains. In the course of generations, the nervous system is modified by
these experiences, and thus young birds fly away at the sight of man as a result
of a partial excitement of the nerves previously excited in their ancestors and
the consequent painful consciousness. 'The vague painful consciousness thus
arising, constitutes emotion proper.’[3]
1 Spencer, 1901, I, 254-5.
2 Ibid., 1, 255.
3 Ibid., I, 256.
188
Later, Spencer slightly modified his belief that
natural selection was an 'inadequate cause'. He added the following note to the
1870 edition of the Principles of Psychology:
Had Mr. Darwin's Origin of Species been
published before I wrote this paragraph, I should, no doubt, have so qualified
my words as to recognize selection,' or artificial, as a factor. At the time the
first edition was written the only factor I recognized was the inheritance of
functionally-produced changes; but Mr. Darwin's work made it clear to me that
there is another factor of importance in mental evolution as in bodily
evolution. While holding that throughout all higher stages of mental development
the supreme factor has been the effect of habit, I believe that in producing the
lowest instincts natural selection has been the chief, if not the sole,
factor.[l]
Spencer defended this position in the face of growing
objections in the last quarter of the century, and reiterated it as late as
1899.[2]
Flugel points out that Spencer's belief in the
inheritance of acquired characteristics 'contributed not a little to the general
decline of interest in his work'.[3] It should be remembered, however, that this
judgement did not begin to become operative until well after the period under
consideration here (until after Weismann distinguished somatic changes from the
stability of the transmitted 'germ-plasm' in 1885), and that Darwin himself laid
increasing emphasis on use-inheritance in his writings after 1859. In fact it
was Spencer who pointed this out in a careful analysis of Darwin's later
writings. 'The Factors of Organic Evolution' (1886).[4] Darwin had no reason to
quarrel with Spencer's view and altered the brief but crucial passage on man in
the Origin to include a highly complimentary reference to Spencer. The
first edition says, 'In the distant future I see open fields for far more
important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that
1 Spencer, 1908, p. 565.
2 Ibid., p. 547. See also various articles by Spencer
on the formula of evolution, mental evolution, inheritance of acquired
characteristics, Weismannism, heredity, and so on, written between 1871 and 1898
and listed in his bibliography. (Spencer, 1908, pp. 581-6.) Most of these are
reprinted in the second edition of Principles of Biology (1898-9), Various Fragments (1900), and Facts and Comments (1902). For
an excellent discussion of the contemporary debate, see Romanes (1892, pp.
253-7; 1916, pp. 64-8, and passim). Spencer makes a greater concession to
natural selection in his Autobiography: 'The Origin of Species made it clear to me that I was wrong; and that the larger part of the facts
cannot be due to any such cause' [as 'the inheritance of functionally-produced
modifications']. (Spencer, I 904, II, 50.)
3 Flugel, 1951, p. 119.
4 Spencer, 1901, I, 389-466. Cf. Romanes, 1916, pp.
2-12. Spencer reiterates his Lamarckian psychological views in the Preface to a
pamphlet version of this essay (1887, pp. iii-iv) which is omitted from the Essays. (See Young, 1967). It was on the basis of their belief in the
inheritance of acquired characteristics (even though by means of nervous
arrangements) that both Darwin and Spencer were accused of reverting to belief
in 'innate ideas'. (Höffding, 1909, p. 451 ; Meynert, enlisting support from
Weismann, 1885, pp. viii, 274).
189
of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and
capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his
history.'[l] Darwin had not read Spencer's Principles of Psychology when
he wrote this. In later editions of the Origin (6th edition, 1872),
Darwin altered these sentences to read, 'Psychology will be securely based on
the foundation already well laid by Mr. Herbert Spencer'.[2] Darwin's private
opinion of Spencer underwent very wide fluctuations, from extreme admiration of
him as perhaps England's greatest philosopher, and feelings of inferiority, to
personal dislike and even contempt for his speculative bent.[3]
One further judgement should be given to help obviate
the current reaction to Spencer's views on the mechanism of evolution. Speaking
of the period 1851-58, T. H. Huxley said,
The only person known to me whose knowledge and
capacity compelled respect, and who was, at the same time, a thoroughgoing
evolutionist, was Mr. Herbert Spencer, whose acquaintance I made, I think, in
1852, and then entered into the bonds of a friendship which, I am happy to
think, has known no interruption. Many and prolonged were the battles we fought
on this topic. But even my friend's rare dialectic skill and copiousness of apt
illustration could not drive me from my agnostic position.[4]
The point of this discussion of Lamarckianism is that
what is now seen as a totally erroneous view of the mechanism of evolution was
one of those immensely fruitful errors in the history of science which the
historian would be mistaken to criticize. Like phrenology, it must be judged in
the light of its heuristic value. There is little point in considering in detail
the work generated by the general theory of evolution throughout biology: the
whole basis of the science was transformed. This occurred despite the gropings,
hesitations, and partial recantations of its early exponents. The same may be
said for evolutionary psychology. The concept of psychology as a biological
science based on the evolutionary theory was completely reorienting the science
in the half-century following the first statements of Spencer and Darwin. When
the mechanism of evolution became more clearly understood, it could find its
rightful place within the general approach. Use-inheritance gave way to random
mutation and natural selection. But the evolutionary basis of concepts which had
defeated the associationists such as
1 Darwin, 1950, pp. 413-I4.
2 Darwin, 1928, pp. 461-2.
3 See various remarks in Darwin, edited Francis Darwin,
3rd ed., 1887; Darwin, edited Francis Darwin, 1903; Darwin, edited Barlow, 1958;
especially Darwin 1958, pp. 108-9.
4 Darwin, 1887, II, 188.
190
reflex, instinct, and emotion had been established in
the meantime, even though the precise mode of their transmission is still not at
all clearly understood. Although Spencer was wrong about the mechanism of
evolution, modern views support his main theme: the adaptations of living things
to their surroundings are evoked by problems posed by their environments.[1]
That they are evoked by natural selection of random genetic mutations was not
the main issue in converting psychology to a biological science of adaptation.
Therefore, Spencer's erroneous mechanism for evolution
has been deliberately and properly ignored in discussing his work, because it is
irrelevant to the historical development of the concepts with which the present
discussion is concerned.
The Influence of Spencer
Two changes have been emphasized as extremely important
in the nineteenth-century development of psychology away from its position as a
branch of epistemology. The first is its conception as a biological science; the
second is its close relations with neurophysiology. It was argued above that
Gall played an important role in establishing both approaches at the beginning
of the nineteenth century. Spencer and Gall shared these two major premises
about psychology, and there is much evidence to suggest that Spencer arrived at
them during the period of his early phrenological allegiance. Spencer also
shared with Gall the stylistic and personal traits of pomposity, conceit, and
long-windedness, as well as the fate of being reviled and ridiculed by the
subsequent generations which were most indebted to him. Finally, they both
influenced others more through important general principles and approaches than
by specific empirical findings. In Gall's case the findings were erroneous and
in Spencer's nonexistent. Both advocated studies which they did not successfully
conduct themselves.
Spencer's position in the last half of the nineteenth
century was that he shared with Darwin the establishment of psychology on a
biological, evolutionary foundation and with Bain the close alliance of
associationism with sensory-motor psychophysiology.
Darwin pioneered studies in comparative and genetic
psychology in the chapter on 'Instinct' in the Origin (I859), Chapters
III and IV of the Descent of Man (1871), The Expression of the
Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), 'A Biographical Sketch of an
Infant' (1877), various
1 See Wallace and Srb, 1961, pp. 104-5, and passim.
191
shorter papers,[l] and the extensive materials on
instinct which he made available to Romanes and which appeared in Mental
Evolution in Animals (1883). Although an adequate account of Darwin's
psychological work remains to be written, there have been a number of studies
dealing with aspects of his overwhelming importance in the development of
psychology as a branch of evolutionary biology in the three separable areas of
comparative psychology, functional psychology, and the study of the nervous
system.[2]
While Darwin was primarily responsible for the general
climate of evolutionary thinking and provided many detailed observations, he was
somewhat naïve in his approach to psychology, and could not provide the language
with which to express the implications of his own work. It is in this area
between the general climate and the specific findings that Spencer is the major
figure. Spencer was applying evolutionary principles to psychological phenomena
for years before Darwin published the Origin. The attention of Darwin's
circle was turned to man's body rather than his mind for twelve more years until
the Descent of Man appeared.[3] It was Spencer who provided the first,
and the most thorough, conception of adaptive, evolutionary psychology. His work
was more seminal than directly contributory. He argued for a consistent
application of empiricism but was characteristic of the parent tradition of
associationism in not actually employing the empirical method. He advocated
comparative and developmental studies but conducted none. He conceived
psychology as the study of the adaptation of organisms to their environments,
but failed to free himself completely from the epistemological bias of
associationism, being concerned with the origin of ideas, the forms of thought,
and a correspondence theory of truth.
One measure of Spencer's significance, therefore, is
through his influence on major figures in three aspects of the new biological
psychology: George J. Romanes in animal and comparative psychology, William
James in functional psychology, and John Hughlings Jackson in sensory-motor
psychophysiology.
G. J. Romanes wrote the first modern animal psychology
based on
1 See Darwin, 1887, III, 368-9.
2 On comparative psychology, see Warden, 1927; Hilgard,
1960; Boring, 1950; Brett, 1953; Murphy, 1949; Young, 1967a. On functional
psychology, see Baldwin, 1905, 1913; Angell, 1907, 1909; Young, 1966, pp. 26-28.
On nervous system, see Magoun, 1960, 1961. The research of Howard Gruber of
Rutgers University promises to shed considerable light on Darwin's psychological
work.
3 Huxley, 1863; Lyell, 1863. Cf. Greene, new ed.' 1961,
ch. 10.
192
the evolutionary theory and employing the empirical
method.[1] He set out to trace the main outlines for mental evolution, as Darwin
had done for bodily evolution. In his first volume, Animal Intelligence (1882) his purpose is to lay the foundations in comparative psychology for an
understanding of mental evolution. He starts from Darwin and Spencer. 'With the
exception of Mr Darwin's admirable chapters on the mental powers and moral
sense, and Mr Spencer's great work on the Principles of Psychology, there has
hitherto been no earnest attempt at tracing the principles which have been
probably concerned in the genesis of Mind.’[2] The second volume of Romanes'
work is concerned with mental evolution proper and finally takes the position
that was still equivocal in Bain and Spencer.
I am in no wise concerned with 'the transition from the
object known to the knowing subject', and therefore I am in no wise concerned
with any of the philosophical theories which have been propounded upon this
matter. . . . I cannot too strongly impress upon the memory of those who from
previous reading are able to appreciate the importance of the distinction, that
I thus intend everywhere to remain within the borders of psychology, and nowhere
to trespass upon the grounds of philosophy.[3]
Darwin provided the main inspiration and many of the
data for these volumes and made his extensive notes on instinct available to
Romanes. The second major source in Mental Evolution in Animals (1883) is
Spencer, who provides the starting point of the discussion on instinct as well
as the psychological framework of evolutionary associationism which Romanes
adopts.
Comparative psychology developed from these beginnings
to a more rigorous formulation by C. Lloyd Morgan, who drew heavily on Romanes'
work and was his literary executor. Morgan improved on Romanes' rather
uncritical anecdotal method and anthropomorphism.[4] The next developments in
animal psychology involve support for Morgan's methods by Jacques Loeb, who put
forward the existence of ‘associative memory' as the point in the scale of
beings where animal life becomes conscious.[5] The introduction of the
puzzle-box method into comparative psychology by E. L. Thorndike in 1898 was the
point at which objective experimental methods were introduced into psychology,
and prepared the way for its absorption into behaviourism.[6]
Behaviourism and modern learning theory may seem remote
from
1 Boring, 1950, pp. 473-4.
2 Romanes, 1882, p. vi.
3 Romanes, 1883, p. 11.
4 Morgan, 1890-91.
5 Loeb, 1901.
6 On these developments see Warden, 1927; Boring, 1950,
pp. 472-6, 497-8; Carr, 1927; Young, 1967a, pp. 125-6.
193
evolutionary associationism to the modern reader. It
may be useful to recall that the units of the conditioned reflex are new terms
for the basic concepts of sensory-motor psychophysiology. The extreme complexity
of current discussions and the sophisticated methods and techniques of work in
modern learning theory must not be allowed to obscure its conceptual basis. John
Dewey noted as early as i896, that the use of the reflex concept in psychology
was an admission that the sensory-motor view was basic to nerve structure and
function, as well as to experience and behaviour.[1] It is clear that, although
most studies of conditioning and learning depend on the evolutionary theory for
their relevance to human psychology, the evolutionary aspect of the discipline
has been largely ignored. However, the continued influence of associationism on
this tradition has recently been reviewed with results which bear on one's
appreciation of Bain and Spencer.
In a chapter entitled 'Modern Concepts of Association',
Murphy begins by echoing Guthrie's belief that association is the only theory of
learning that has ever been proposed.[2] He reviews the work of the
behaviourists and learning theorists and shows that the central point of their
work has been the principle of association placed in the objective context of
the reflex paradigm. Stimulus-response psychology and the various schools of
conditioning and learning theory have added a great deal to the old domain: the
experimental method, various control procedures, quantification, and a
behaviourist emphasis on the periphery of the organism. That is, they have made
the study of association an objective science whose data are in the external
world of objects and behaviour. New concepts such as 'operant' have been
elaborated from Thorndike's restatement of Bain's early law of effect. However,
the central conception has remained associationist. This unites Pavlov, Watson,
Skinner, and a host of lesser figures. Reflecting on the century since Bain
brought associationism into relation with physiology and Spencer with evolution,
Murphy concludes,
If one had to summarize the main trend as it now exists
in the middle of the century, it would almost certainly have to be to the effect
that despite huge and continuous protests of strong and active personalities,
the conceptions of Spencer and Bain a hundred years ago remain dominant.
. . . An enormous amount of sophistication has gone
into experimental and quantitative refinement of the theory of association; but
the framework set up by the associationists remains.[3]
1 Dewey, 1896, p. 357.
2 The theory of innate ideas seems to have dropped from
the memory of at least one eminent scientific psychologist by 1937. See above,
p. 120.
3 Murphy, 1949, p. 283.
194
Spencer's role as a major source of James' founding of
functional psychology cannot be demonstrated in detail here. Once again,
however, Darwin provided the general issue and influence, while Spencer supplied
its psychological embodiment, and Bain the specific theory of activity which was
developed in the writings of early pragmatists and was expressed in William
James' Principles of Psychology (1890). Among the sources for this work,
Spencer played the double role of being its major one for the adaptive,
evolutionary view and-through Hughlings Jackson and Ferrier-for the specific
sensory-motor psychophysiology of its early chapters. James grew increasingly
critical of Spencer's vagueness on matters of general evolution, but he had
nothing but praise for the fact that Spencer stressed its universality.[1] 'To
Spencer is certainly due the immense credit of having been the first to see in
evolution an absolutely universal principle.'[2] James' biographer reports that
'the writings of Spencer furnished the most important part of his early
philosophical pablum'.[3] He read the First Principles between 1860 and
1862, and its initial influence was very stimulating.[4] James used Spencer's Principles of Psychology as the text for his first course in physiological
psychology at Harvard (1876-77), and his first original publication was a
commentary on Spencer.[5] His course on the philosophy of evolution used
Spencer's First Principles as a text beginning in 1880 and as late as
1897.[6] It should be stressed that James was very critical of Spencer's
detailed formulations. However, Spencer's aims and the topics he discussed were
just those which most interested James. As his own thought developed he retained
these interests while rejecting many of Spencer's answers and reacting strongly
against his intellectual muddiness and pretensions toward explaining
everything.[7]
The influence of Spencer's Principles of Psychology on James' work of the same title written thirty-five years later is clear
from the following remarks in James' introductory chapter.
On the whole, few recent formulas have done more real
service of a rough sort in psychology than the Spencerian one that the essence
of mental life and of bodily life are one, namely, 'the adjustment of inner to
outer relations'. Such a formula is vagueness incarnate; but because it takes
into account the fact that minds inhabit environments which act on them and on
which they in turn react; because, in short, it takes mind in the midst of all
its concrete relations, it is immensely more fertile than the old-fashioned
1 Perry, 1935, I, pp. 474-5.
2 James, 1924, p. 124.
3 Perry, 1935, I, 474.
4 Ibid., I, 474.
5 Ibid., I, 478.
6 Ibid., 1, 482.
7 Perry, 1935, I, 484; James, 1924, pp. 128-39.
195
‘rational psychology', which treated the soul as a
detached existent, sufficient unto itself, and assumed to consider only its
nature and properties.[1]
James' final evaluation of Spencer was harsh, but he
continued to admire his psychological work:
My impression is that, of the systematic treatises, the
'Psychology' will rank as the most original. Spencer broke new ground here in
insisting that, since mind in its environment have evolved together, they must
be studied together. He gave to the study of mind in isolation a definitive
quietus, and that certainly is a great thing to have achieved. To be sure he
overdid the matter, as usual, and left no room for any mental structure at all,
except that which passively resulted from the storage of impressions received
from the outer world in the order of their frequency by fathers and transmitted
to their sons. The belief that whatever is acquired by sires is inherited by
sons, and the ignoring of purely inner variations, are weak points; but to have
brought in the environment as vital was a master stroke.[2]
Functional psychology was born of a union of this
formulation and a more active view of adaptation, which James drew from Bain.
The work of Bain and Spencer eliminated the credibility
of a simple labula rasa psychology. Bain's careful study of the role of
muscular motion in learning undermined the persistent belief in passive
sensationalism, while Spencer's evolutionary view revealed the absurdity of a
psychology which confines itself to individual experience. Almost exactly a
century after Condillac's statue provided the basis of a plausible explanation
of learning,[3] psychologists could point to this 'thought experiment' as the
opposite of a fruitful hypothesis. Bain and Spencer showed convincingly that
organisms feel, know, and act as they do, by virtue of what they have inherited
as a result of the vicissitudes of their species, and by virtue of what they
have already done.
Bain and Spencer dominate the union of associationism
with biology. Bain brought about its integration with sensory-motor physiology.
Spencer reinforced this and based the new sensory-motor psychophysiology on an
evolutionary foundation. Magoun has convincingly argued that to their
contemporaries and early successors, Spencer's ideas of the evolution of the
brain and its functions were fully as
1 James, 1890, I, 6. Cf. Perry, 1935, I, 476-8, 489-90.
For a fuller consideration of the sources of James' Principles, see
Perry, 1935, II, Chapters LII-LVI, especially LV.
2 James, 1924, pp. 139-40.
3 Condillac had tried to prove the sensationalist
thesis by adding the senses, one by one, to a marble statue, and argued that the
result accounted for all psychological phenomena. See Condillac, 1930; above, p.
15.
196
significant and influential as Darwin’s, if not more
so, in the development of concepts of evolution of the brain and behaviour.[1]
This aspect of Spencer’s work will be pursued through its influence on Hughlings
Jackson, and its union with other evidence for cerebral localization in the
writings of Ferrier to provide an experimental sensory-motor psychophysiology
based on the assumption of cerebral localizations.[2]
1 Magoun, 1960, p. 204; 1961, p. 16; see also Wiener,
1949.
2 There are three further aspect of Spencer’s influence
which should be mentioned (1) Spencer’s social theory and its influence on
Social Darwinism has been explored by Hofstadter.(2) His role in the foundation
of modern sociology along with Auguste Comte, who also began his work as a
student of Phrenology and remained loyal to Gall, deserves a full study. See
Greene (1959); Burrow (1966), ch. 6. In addition to his seminal influence in
functional psychology, Spencer’s influence on Durkheim and others was of
fundamental importance in the development of functionalism in sociology and
social anthropology. (3) His theory of psychophysical parallelism, through
Jackson’s ‘Law of Concomitance’, provided the form of Freud’s psychoanalytic
theory and provided the position which Freud held in the mind-body problem from
his first work (on Aphasia, 1891) to his last (Outline of
Psychoanalysis, 1940). This aspect of relations among Spencer, Jackson, and
Freud should be pursued as part of a more general study of the central role
psychophysical parallelism has played in the history of neurology, psychiatry,
and psychoanalysis.