Classics in Psychology

Robert H. Wozniak - Bryn Mawr College

Alexander Bain: The Senses and the Intellect (1855)

The publication of Alexander Bain’s The Senses and the Intellect 1 is widely considered to mark the advent ofmodern psychology. Together with its companion volume, The Emotions and the Will, 2 The Senses and theIntellect served for more than 30 years as the leading English language compendium of the discipline. Untilsuperseded at the end of the 19th century, 3 Bain’s texts were widely read by students and heavily cited bypsychologists. Much that is taken for granted in modern psychology had its point of origin in these two greattreatises.

Bain’s achievement was to combine a thoroughgoing and consistent associationism with an exhaustive taxonomiccatalogue of the facts of everyday human experience and action (from coughing and sneezing to artistic creationand scientific discovery) and a detailed and up to date account of the physiology of sensation and movement.Heavily focused on the nature and workings of a disembodied intellect, psychological analysis before Bain hadbeen curiously out of touch with the realities of both psychological and corporeal life. After Bain, no serious writeron psychology could afford to ignore either the world of everyday experience and action or the physiologicalconcomitants of psychological process.

The central message of The Senses and the Intellect was that the traditional subject matter of psychology couldbe understood with reference to the laws of association and that these laws were reflected in both physiologicaland psychological processes. To set up this argument, Bain divided his book into three large sections. Anintroductory section consisted of a short chapter on the definition of mind and a much longer chapter on thenervous system. A second section focused on movement, sensation, the appetites, and instinct; and a finalsection, taking up nearly half the book, dealt with intellect.

The first section is justly renowned for its inclusion of a chapter on the nervous system. This established a patternthat has been adopted by the vast majority of textbook writers following Bain. It is less well known for its definitionof mind; but there is material of considerable interest here. “Mind, according to my conception of it,” Bain wrote,“possesses three attributes, or capacities. 1. It has Feeling, in which term I include what is commonly calledSensation and Emotion. 2. It can Act according to Feeling. 3 It can Think.”4

Feeling, for Bain, was what has more often been termed “consciousness,” ostensively defined as “the warmth feltin sunshine, the fragrance of flowers, the sweetness of honey, the bleating of cattle, the beauty of a landscape…”5 “Action according to feeling” (or what Bain called “mental action”) consisted of operations such as “eating,drinking, running. flying, sowing, reaping, building, destroying;” 6 and for this category Bain proposed to use theterm “volition.” And thought involved discrimination and active choice, association of means with ends “so as todictate intermediate actions,” 7 and, in higher minds, the storing up, reviving, and combining of impressions.

At first glance, this would appear to be the traditional tripartite division of mind into intellect, feeling, and will thencurrent among continental philosophers and popularized in England by Sir William Hamilton. Paradoxically, Bainseems to have accepted this view himself. 8 But by broadening the category of feeling beyond pleasure/pain andemotion to include sensation (which had traditionally been classified under intellect), by defining volition as actiondirected by feeling (i.e., by consciousness), and by giving intellect as well as feeling a function in thedetermination of action, Bain stood the traditional tripartite theory on its head. Despite his use of the oldterminology, his definition of mind introduced a new classification scheme into psychology: mind asconsciousness, thought, and action.

In the second section of the book, Bain made his most famous contribution to the revolution in thinking thatbecame modern psychology. Here he separated movement from feelings of movement and, on the basis ofnumerous examples of the spontaneity of movement, argued that action was independent of and prior tosensation, available to enter as a unique term into associational complexes with feeling. “Movement,” he argued, “precedes sensation, and is at the outset independent of any stimulus from without…action is a more intimate andinseparable property of our constitution than any of our sensations, and in fact enters as a component part intoevery one of the senses…” 9

Bain even tackled the critical problem of the mechanism by which associations between movement and feelingwere acquired. In psychology’s first clear statement of what later came to be called the Law of Effect, Baindescribed the acquisition of specific associations between spontaneous movement and feeling in terms of thepleasure and pain consequent upon the movement. “There is,” he wrote, “a process of acquirement in theestablishing of those links of feeling and action that volition implies…If, at the moment of some acute pain, thereshould accidentally occur a spontaneous movement, and if that movement sensibly alleviates the pain…themovement…will be sustained through this influence of the painful emotion.” 10 This was a novel addition to thedoctrine of association. For the first time, there was explicit recognition that the outcome of an action couldinfluence associative strength.

In the last section of the book, Bain focused on intellect and on the nature of intelligence as an associativemechanism for governing the acquisition of adaptive action. After exhaustive discussion of the Laws of Contiguityand Similarity, both couched in terms of association between Action, Feeling, and Thought, and an analysis ofCompound Associations (multiple links established through contiguity, similarity, or both), Bain turned to thenature and role of “constructive” association. Here, in articulating the concept of “trial and error,” he made stillanother of his famous contributions.

For Bain, constructive association involved the creation of “new combinations…out of elements already in thepossession of the mind.” 11 The effects of constructive association were to be seen not only in great works ofmathematical, artistic, and literary creativity, but in the everyday generativity of language. How, he asked, do wemake use of old verbal forms to construct new meanings? His answer was that this occurs through a process ofproduction and selection, trial and error: “When there is not a sufficiency of [verbal] forms within reach of thepresent recol-lection,” he wrote, “the process of intellectual recovery must be plied to bring up others, until thedesired combination is attained. A voluntary effort is quite equal to the task of cutting down and making up,choosing and rejecting…; the feeling that possesses the mind of the end to be served, is the criterion to judgeby, and when this is satisfied the volition ceases…In all difficult operations, for purposes or ends, the rule of trialand error is the grand and final resort.” 12

Bain’s text brought about a revolution in psychology. By providing a thorough and systematic collation andtaxonomy of psychological data, he helped move the field along the road from metaphysical speculation toobservational science. By demon-strating the heuristic relevance of anatomical and physiological data toexplanation in psychology, he contributed to the devel-opment of a physiological orientation that was to mark theemergence of scientific psychology. 13 And by introducing movement into psychology as a category of analysis inits own right and emphasizing the role of consciousness in the direction of movement, Bain paved the way for thelater functionalist psychology of adaptive mind and behavior.

1 Bain’s dates are 1818–1903; for biographical information on Bain, see Bain, A. (1904). Autobiography. London:Longmans, Green. The work under discussion here was first published as Bain, A. (1855). The Senses and theIntellect. London: John W. Parker and Son.

2 Bain, A. (1859). The Emotions and the Will. London: John W. Parker and Son.

3 The most important texts appearing during this period were: Ladd, G.T. (1887). Elements of PhysiologicalPsychology. A Treatise of the Activities and Nature of the Mind from the Physical and Experimental Point of View.New York: Scribner’s; Höffding, H. (1891). Outlines of Psychology. London Macmillan; Sully, J. (1892). TheHuman Mind. A Text-Book of Psychology. London: Longmans, Green; Stout, G.F. (1899). A Manual ofPsychology. London: University Correspondence College Press; and, of course, James, W. (1890). The Principlesof Psychology. New York: Henry Holt.

4 Bain (1855), op. cit., p. 1.

5 Ibid., p. 2.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid., p.5

8 Ibid., p. 7.

9 Ibid., p. 67.

10 Ibid., p. 293–4.

11 Ibid., p. 572.

12 Ibid., p. 575.

13 For a discussion of the likelihood of Wilhelm Wundt’s profiting from a reading of Bain, see Diamond, S. (1974).The Greatness of Alexander Bain. Unpublished invited address, Sixth Annual Meeting of Cheiron, University ofNew Hampshire.

Extracted from Classics in Psychology, 1855–1914: Historical Essays ISBN 1 85506 703 X © Robert H. Wozniak, 1999

Classics in Psychology, 1855–1914 Historical Essays - Contents Classics in Psychology, 1855-1914