ABSTRACT
Although common sense spoke clearly to the people, its philosophical advocates had reservations. ese began with omas Reid’s commentator, Dugald Stewart, who worried that common sense would draw on ignorance in such a way as to prevent free enquiry and uphold popular error. His remedy for this laid down principles that had the additional advantage of causing the philosophy to develop into a science of psychology. Stewart stressed Reid’s appeal to the constitution of human nature. Deepening this emphasis his intellectual heirs focused on the laws and principles of the mental constitution. is led to Reid’s philosophy being modifi ed into a psychology by Hamilton in his supplementary dissertations and lectures, by McCosh in Th e Intuitions of the Mind, and by Spencer and Bain in the works they published during the s. All of these publications framed the constitution of the mind as the workings of the brain. Even Mansel, the common-sense philosopher who was most divorced from science, gave a powerful lecture entitled Psychology, Th e Test of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, which reduced virtues to psychological facts, discovered through investigations by the moral faculty. Nineteen years later, one member of Mansel’s audience still clearly remembered this lecture as “an assertion of the reality and necessity of psychology as a study and as a science”.
In the nineteenth century mental science was usually called association psychology. It had entered Reid’s An Inquiry into the Human Mind as the answer to scepticism: fact was to reply where reason failed. e underlying premise was that human beings constantly infer there is a power or faculty of thinking and a mind that exercised that power. Yet it was impossible to demonstrate how these inferences could be made by logic or reason. Connections between things, such as that between a sound and a passing vehicle, were established immediately, without reasoning. As Reid explained: “It is the eff ect of a principle of our nature common to us with the brutes”. ese were fi rst principles for which no further reason could be given other than that, by the constitution of our nature, we were compelled to assent to them. An example of a fi rst principle was “that similar eff ects proceed from the same or similar causes”.
Before Reid could wholeheartedly adopt association psychology as a defence against scepticism, it fi rst had to be cleansed of godless elements. He had extensively criticized David Hartley’s version of associationism because its doctrine of vibrations had a tendency to make any operation of the mind passive, a “mere mechanism, dependent on the laws of matter and motion”. Reid saw this as a tarnish, and to remove it he introduced moral senses as active faculties. is marked the beginning of a split among the association psychologists: between the mechanists, such as Hartley, Condillac, James Mill and J. S. Mill and the intuitive or common-sense philosophers, such as Reid, Hamilton, McCosh and Spencer. e only major exception to this division among mid-Victorian psychologists was Bain, who wavered uncomfortably between the two groups although usually siding with the former.
