Abstract
If the mansion of the human psyche was sketched by Hobbes, Locke and Hume, the detailed, architectural blueprint was drawn during the mature phase of associationist thought, first by a famous physician following in Locke’s footsteps.
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- 1.
As Mischel notes, Hartley falls into the tradition of “speculative Newtonian science common in that century” (Mischel 1966, p. 126, emphasis added), not experimental Newtonianism. The serious attempt to bring British associationism into the laboratory, as we shall see, was first made more than a century later.
- 2.
Hartley seems to have been unsure as to whether the neurophysiological side was “necessary to the total theory” or whether it was merely a “complementary and parallel explanation” (Oberg 1976, p. 442).
- 3.
It has been argued that two earlier works, published anonymously in 1741 and 1747 and advancing the associationist theory of psychology in preliminary form, should also be attributed to Hartley (Ferg 1981). We will set this aside and here focus on the Observations.
- 4.
This metaphor has also been applied to Locke’s philosophy of mind (Smith 1987, p. 125).
- 5.
It must be remembered that, while Hartley was pulled in two opposite directions by his commitments to Newtonian science and associationist psychology on the one hand, and clerical training as a Christian philosopher on the other hand (Oberg 1976, p. 442), he “was close to a materialist explanation of man, and his critics thought he had reached it” (Oberg 1976, p. 444).
- 6.
In full, A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation (Mill 2006).
- 7.
Also in An Examination of the Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton (Mill 1865).
- 8.
Strictly speaking, this amounts to an attenuated form of decompositional reductionism since the mid-level fusion events stop any decompositional reduction back to the original elements. Recognizing this caveat, however, we will continue to speak of John Stuart Mill’s position, like that of his father, as a form of associationism fundamentally committed to both elementism and to decompositional reductionism. Again, the aim of the younger Mill was to answer criticism of associationism—not to abandon or to substantially alter the basic theory.
- 9.
Mill’s own parallel example of the compound water as an intermediary simple makes this clear (Mill 2010).
- 10.
For Hartley and Mill, explaining mental data, “does not differ essentially from explaining the properties of a mineral,” as one commentator put it (Mischel 1966, p. 144).
- 11.
Boyle was the great British advocate of the atomic view in natural philosophy. His influence on the Royal Society and the intellectual community in general was vast (Rogers 1996).
- 12.
Newton and Locke became friends, as the story goes, in late 1689 or 1690 (plausibly) meeting first at the salon of the Earl of Pembroke (Rogers 1978, p. 231).
- 13.
Not forgetting, of course, that philosophers are a quarrelsome bunch. For example, in Leviathan and the Air-Pump Shapin and Schaffer (1989) offer a detailed account of Hobbes’s conflict with Robert Boyle and the Royal Society.
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Beenfeldt, C. (2013). Mature British Associationism. In: The Philosophical Background and Scientific Legacy of E. B. Titchener's Psychology. SpringerBriefs in Philosophy. Springer, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00242-2_2
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