ABSTRACT
One of the most certain conclusions emerging from the recent historiography of the origins of a scientific psychology, is that the story is complex and multifaceted. Historians have recognised the original springs of modern psychology in post-Cartesian studies of the physiology of the brain and nervous system, and subsequent work in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century neurophysiology; in attempts to understand the mind in the wake of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and in other aspects of the history of epistemology, including the associationist theory of ideas, and Scottish ‘Common Sense’ realism; in theories of political economy and associated attempts to develop a proto-anthropology and a proto-sociology; in ideas on the nature of language; theories of animal (including human) evolution; theories of development associated with new educational thinking; studies of memory; studies of dreaming; and of insanity; in physiognomy and other studies of ‘character’; in craniology or phrenology and subsequent – or rival – theories of brain localisation; in mesmerism; and even in the possessive individualism which is seen as a concomitant of capitalism. All of these factors, and perhaps a few more, not listed here, need to be taken into account, if we are to understand the emergence of this new science.1
