ABSTRACT
The development of British Psychology follows a more or less straight course from its first beginnings down to near the end of the XIXth Century. It proceeded on a line parallel to the empiricist philosophical tradition—or, better, it is interwoven with this and to a great extent coincides with it. What seen from the philosophical side is termed empiricism is from the standpoint of psychology associationism. The mechanical-atomistic association-psychology, as expressed in the classical systems of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries, was continued in the XIXth particularly by the two Mills, enriched by Darwin and Spencer with a new strain—the evolutionary—and brought to a conclusion by Bain and Sully, the latest stragglers of the movement. To-day it belongs to history, and it might be paradoxically maintained that it is only still alive in so far as it continues to receive its death-blow at the hands of psychological doctrines that have superseded it. It is obviously merely being kept alive artificially in order to meet the polemical needs of modern psychologists, and it will presumably continue to discharge this function for a while longer.
