Spencer

Herbert Spencer (1820—1903) was trained as an engineer; early in his career he became a permanent invalid, so he decided to devote his time to writing treatises about all of the sciences, including sociology, political science, and psychology. In 1855 his two-volume Principles of Psychology appeared. The work included the new idea of evolutionary associationism: associations that are often repeated in the lifetime of an individual or in a race will be transmitted to the offspring as an evolutionary instinct. This is how instincts like the web spinning of the spider or the nest building of birds arise; instincts are inherited concatenations of reflexes.

His work anticipated, and his later thinking was influenced by, his cousin Darwin s Origin of Species (1859).

The breadth of Spencers thought (which went far beyond a pure, limited asso-ciationism) is exemplified by his espousal, in his Principles of Psychology, of a doubleaspect monism much like Spinoza’s; he also developed a hedonistic account of motivation. The work included, further, discussions of feelings and of the elements of mind; in a section on education he maintained that the aim of schooling is to facilitate adjustment to one’s environment: “Life is a continual adjustment of internal to external circumstances.” An emphasis on adjustment became particularly characteristic of the functionalist psychology' in the United States of the first half of the 20th century; the view is still prevalent in the current Zeitgeist, and many psychologists remain interested in the mechanisms that organisms use in coping with the problems and challenges of everyday life.

Evolutionary thinking affected the associationist traditions in the direct form inherent in Spencer’s evolutionary associationist doctrine of instinct and also became the fundamental hedonistic concept in Thorndikes law of effect and Hull’s principle of reinforcement. Darwin’s emphasis on the survival of the species that “works,” that fits its surroundings, has a parallel in the principle of later learning theory that those responses in an organism’s repertoire will survive that “work” in the sense of satisfying needs, but those that do not or that lead to annoyance or pain will drop out, as Thorndike and Hull held.

Darwin

Charles Darwin (1809—1882; Figure 3.1) is important in the history of psychology primarily because of his vast and detailed Origin of Species (1859), in which he supported with massive data his major principles of evolution: chance mutation and the survival of the fit, that is, of organisms that are well suited to their ecological circumstances. Alfred Russell Wallace proposed a similar theory in a brief paper at about the same time but did not present the huge wealth of data in support of it that Darwin had amassed. Darwin also wrote a more psychological book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, in which he argued that evolution occurs not only in morphology but also in behavior, including the expression of emotion; examples of evolutionary vestiges include the baring of teeth in dogs before they fight, which still has some utility, as against the clenching of the teeth in an angry human, where the adjustive function of preparing to bite is, at least in modern civilized society, much less clear.

Bain

A professor of philosophy at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, Alexander Bain (1818—1903) can be credited with a number of “firsts” in the history of psychology. He wrote the first systematic textbook of psychology in English. The book was also the first on psychology to begin with a chapter on neurolog}'. As a whole, the work is more systematic than that written by Spencer at about the same time. Bain’s treatise was published in two parts: in 1855 Part One, I’he Senses and the Intellect; in 1859 Part Two, The Emotions and the Will, the will being identified by Bain with the spontaneous activity of the nervous system. The work was one of the first to include a chapter on habit. His chapter on association included two laws—contiguity and similarity—and also a statement of what was later, in Thorndike’s hands, to become the law of effect: behavior occurs according to trial and error, with chance movements, from among which the successful ones are selected for retention.

In 1872 Bain published Mind and Body, the first text devoted to this topic; he espoused a psychophysical parallelist position, because he believed that inter-actionism is incompatible with the idea of conservation of energy. In 1876 he founded the first psychological journal, Mind, which was to be a major outlet for influential philosophical and psychological works, including a paper by Darwin on education and childhood training.