A difference of words is, in this case, more than a mere verbal differ-ence.Though it be not the expression of a difference of doctrine, it very speedily becomes so ...The first great subdivision, then, which I would form, of the internal class, is into our intellectual states of mind, and our emotions.
Thomas Brown, Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind,–
Philosophy of the mind in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
By around the category of ‘emotions’ had subsumed ‘passions’,
‘affections’ and ‘sentiments’ in the vocabularies of the majority of English-language psychological theorists.It had become the most pop-ular standard theoretical term for phenomena such as hope, fear, love, anger, jealousy and a wide variety of others.This chapter examines texts reflecting that transition.Having been concerned, so far, predominantly with the works of theologians, preachers and religious thinkers, I now want to examine a more secular philosophical tradition.In this chap-ter my focus will be on works of ‘mental science’ produced during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially by certain Scottish empiricist philosophers and their followers.Before moving on to that part of the story, a few introductory words about the differences be-tween various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century schools of philosophy of mind will help to set the scene and to introduce some perhaps unfa-miliar terminology.
A Priorism, sensationalism and associationism
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, views about the nature of the mind (or soul) were categorised by, amongst other things, their
A useful introduction to nineteenth-century philosophical-psychological discourse is Rylance (), ch. .
The Scottish creation of ‘the emotions’
position on an axis of which A Priorism and sensationalism were the two extremes.The A Priorist considered mental faculties to be prior to experience – they were innate powers of the mind (or soul).The sensa-tionalist believed the reverse – that mental faculties were the products of experience.A Priorists tended to be associated with Kant’s views on mental categories’ active role in shaping experience and with Reidian faculty psychology, while sensationalists were seen as the descendants of John Locke, who had taught in his Essay Concerning Human Understand-ing () that there were no innate ideas but that the mind was, at birth, a tabula rasa which was shaped by experience.John Stuart Mill in
named the two schools the a priori and a posteriori schools; the former he associated with Plato and Reid, the latter with Aristotle, Locke, Hume and Hartley.
The term ‘sensationalism’, coined by the philosopher J.D.Morell in his Speculative Philosophy of Europe () to refer to the mental philos-ophy of the Mills, Auguste Comte and G.H.Lewes, became a widely used term for those who believed all mental powers (including the inter-nal sense) to be the products of experience alone.‘Sensationalist’, rather like ‘materialist’, was a term more often used by its opponents than its purported proponents (Morell himself was opposed to the sensationalist approach).The most famous exposition of pure sensationalism had been that of Etienne de Condillac in his Trait´e des Sensations ().In the Trait´e, Condillac described a statue gradually coming to life, one sense at a time, and how all the powers of the soul would be produced by those sensations alone.In nineteenth-century debates on the nature of mind the word ‘sensationalist’ was used where a twentieth- or twenty-first-century writer might use the word ‘reductionist’.In the place of the reduction-ist claim made in our own time that we are ‘nothing but a bundle of neurones’, the claim was allegedly made by sensationalists that we are ‘nothing but a bundle of sensations’; this in turn was a more re-ductive form of the earlier Hobbesian assertion that we are ‘nothing but a bundle of passions and affections’ (see chapter).
Locke himself, despite being claimed as the intellectual ancestor of thinkers at the reductionist end of the spectrum, had not been an extreme sensationalist.He had, rather, believed the powers of the mind to be de-rived from two sources – first, sensations, but also the internal reflection of the mind upon its own activity, which he called the ‘internal sense’ or simply ‘reflection’.Belief in these two sources of ideas was characteristic
[Mill] (), –.
Morell (), , x, –.See also Warren (), especially ch. , which deals with French thinkers such as Condillac and Bonnet whom Morell would certainly have clas-sified as ‘sensationalists’; Cashdollar (), –.
From Passions to Emotions
of the Lockean philosophy developed by the ‘associationists’. Associa-tionism was connected most frequently with the name of David Hartley, whose Observations on Man () was widely considered the source of the doctrine.The associationists held that all mental states, faculties or powers – from beliefs and desires to moral feelings and complex passions or emotions – were wholly acquired rather than innate.For example, the repeated association of contact with flames with physical pain could pro-duce the fear of fire.Nineteenth-century associationists included Thomas Brown, the Mills, Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer and G.H.Lewes.
The difference between ‘sensationalism’ and ‘associationism’ – aside from the often derogatory overtones of the former – was that the former was more crudely reductionist, and explained complex phenomena as mere aggregates of basic bodily sensations, whereas the latter explained them as properties of complex learned associations, and gave a greater role, as Locke had, to the mind’s power of reflection.
Common sense
‘Common sense’ was a label applied to representatives of a predominantly Scottish school of philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The principal figure and founder of the school was Thomas Reid, whose views on reason and the passions were discussed in chapter, alongside those of Hutcheson and Butler.Indeed it was partly from their ideas on the inner moral sense that Reid developed his own theory of common sense.Reid’s Enquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense () set out to respond to the sceptical arguments of Hume about the existence of the human soul and of Berkeley about the existence of the material world.One distinctive element of the common sense approach was the claim that all rational beliefs were based on certain self-evident truths, which could be seen to be true without the help of philosophical inquiry or religious teaching.It was this appeal to the reliability of human intuition or ‘common sense’ that earned the school of thought its name.
These intuitions included logical and moral axioms as well as belief in the uniformity of nature and in the existence of an external world.
See Warren (), –; Russell (), –.
Rylance (), –, provides a particularly helpful description of nineteenth-century associationist psychology.For another useful summary, see Warren (), ch. .Warren considers Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume to be forerunners of associationism; the associationists proper are considered by him to be Hartley, Brown, James Mill, Bain, Spencer and Lewes.See also McCosh ( and ); Klein (), –, ch. ;
Rapaport (); Berrios (), –; Fancher (), –.
See [Mill] (), –. Haakonssen ().
The Scottish creation of ‘the emotions’
The influence of the common sense school, when applied to mental philosophy, principally derived from its ability to provide a third way, beyond the dichotomies of materialism versus idealism, A Priorism ver-sus empiricism.To borrow a phrase from Charles Cashdollar, the com-mon sense school could be characterised as ‘judicious conservatives’ who struck a balance between tradition and theology on the one hand and new scientific and philosophical ideas on the other.William Hamilton and James McCosh were influential nineteenth-century advocates of com-mon sense teachings in Britain and America.
Locke, Newton and mental science
Some Scottish writers on aesthetics, especially Lord Kames, in his Elements of Criticism () and Archibald Alison, in his Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (), were early users of the category of
‘emotions’ as a general psychological term referring to vivid feelings, per-ceptions and sensations.It was the associationist mental scientists, how-ever, who provided the most influential early uses of the term ‘emotions’.
Hume’s early use of the term in his Treatise of Human Nature (–) was significant.The chemist, philosopher and theologian Joseph Priestley was another early user of the term within the associationist tradition of mental science, in his essays on Hartley’s theory of the mind ().
For both Hume and Priestley, however, ‘emotions’ fulfilled an undefined role, while ‘passions’ and, to a lesser extent, ‘affections’, remained the established categories that they favoured.Thomas Brown’s treatment of the emotions in his Edinburgh Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind () was a watershed; he was the first mental philosopher to give the term a coherent, systematic and central role instead of ‘passions and affections’, or ‘active powers’.‘Emotions’ was a term baptised by Brown – a follower of Hume’s in many respects – within a mechanistic
‘science of the mind’.
One of the dominant modes of psychological thought in the decades either side of was natural theology.The same design-theology
Most common sense philosophers were, however, representatives of the a priori rather than the associationist psychological school – i.e. they more readily appealed to innate intuitions and ideas than to experience as the ground of complex psychological abilities.
For an illustration of the way that the common sense and associationist approaches to mind contrasted, see Priestley (a).
On Reid’s life and works and the common sense school see n. to chapter .
Kames (); Alison (); for more on Kames’ views on emotions, passions and sentiments, see Rauch (), –; Craig (); Danziger (), ; Pinch (),
–, –.On Alison, see Francis Jeffrey’s review of the second edition of the Essays, [Jeffrey] (); see also Kallich ().
Priestley (), xxvii–xxviii.
From Passions to Emotions
paradigm could be applied to the inner world of the mind as had already been extensively applied to the world of external nature and the human body.Mind and body could both produce evidence of the intelligence and benevolence of the Creator.As Thomas Chalmers would put it, ‘a mental constitution might as effectually bespeak the hand of an intelligent Maker, as does a physical or material constitution’.Henry Brougham, in his Discourse of Natural Theology (), described the human mind as
‘by far the most singular work of divine wisdom and power’.Brougham claimed that natural theologians had, in their enthusiasm for finding ev-idence of contrivance in the material universe, neglected this source of evidence of divine design.There was some truth in this, but Brougham appears to have overlooked the influential contributions of Butler and Chalmers, to name just two particularly important figures, to the natural theology of the mind.Brougham’s assertions, that ‘The structure of the mind, in every way in which we can regard it, affords evidence of the most skilful contrivance’, and that ‘The feelings and the passions with which we are moved are devised for purposes apparent enough, and to effect which their adaptation is undeniable’ were both extremely similar to the statements about the mind in general and the passions and affec-tions in particular made by Butler in his sermons a century earlier (see chapter).
Boyd Hilton’s work has illustrated how eighteenth-century moralists’
discussions about the moral sense, private vices, public virtues and the motivation of individuals in society developed, during the nineteenth cen-tury, into more specialised debates about political economy. This was partly through the way that Butler’s thought was revived, developed and applied by Chalmers and others.Butler’s influence was arguably greater in the nineteenth century even than it had been in the eighteenth.This chapter, in a similar way, shows how Hutcheson’s, Butler’s and Reid’s speculations about human passions, affections and sentiments were de-veloped, especially via Brown and Chalmers, into a more specialised psy-chological discourse about the ‘emotions’.
Another figure whose influence was still felt in this period was John Locke, the father of the associationist school of psychology.As well as using the analogy between outward and inner sensations in describing the passions, Locke had adopted another of the analogies characteristic of the halfway house between Christian and secular psychologies – the trope of inward ‘observation’, derived from the modelling of mental philosophy on
Chalmers (), .Hilton () writes of Chalmers: ‘Natural theology was trans-ferred from the physical to the mental and applied to the relations between men’ ().
Brougham (), . Brougham (), . Brougham (), , .
Hilton (). Hilton (), –.
The Scottish creation of ‘the emotions’
experimental natural philosophy. The empirical approach to the mind replaced the admonition of the Delphic oracle and of St Augustine to
‘know thyself ’ with the rather more prosaic call of the mental scientists to ‘observe thyself ’.And instead of finding, as Augustine had, vestiges or images of the Triune God in the human mind, the mental scientists, as the moralists had before them, found evidences or proofs of a Deity.
Just as natural theology could equally be based on the physical or the mental, so the scientific methods of observation, experiment and induc-tion could equally be applied to either realm.There has been consider-able debate about the extent and nature of the influence of ‘science’ on figures who are deemed to be actors in the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’.
P. B.Wood has investigated this question with particular reference to the teaching of moral philosophy at Marischal and King’s colleges in Aberdeen in the eighteenth century.He picks out Reid’s mentor George Turnbull as having been a particularly important figure.Turnbull’s com-mitment to ‘apply myself to the study of the human mind in the same way as to that of the human body’ was one shared by many of the Scottish mental and moral philosophers responsible for the introduction of the term ‘emotions’.At the turn of the nineteenth century, the recent chem-ical revolution was a particularly influential source of methodologchem-ical comparisons for these authors.
Even some conservative Christian philosophers in this period engaged in a sort of thinking about mental reality that was almost entirely secular.
The central Christian concepts of original sin, the fall and grace through Christ were absent from the pages of their texts.Even those who in other contexts would have insisted (and indeed did insist) on the centrality of these doctrines accepted the application of an entirely unchristian set of terms and methods when it came to psychology.One writer who fitted this particular bill and is discussed below was Thomas Chalmers, the evangelical preacher who led the ‘Disruption’ of , which saw the creation of the Free Church in Scotland by ministers disillusioned with the established church.
For the proponents of mental science, the texts of Bacon, Locke and Newton replaced those of St Paul, St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas
Locke (), –.
See e.g. Chalmers (), and throughout.Also see chapter in this volume on Butler’s use of design theology in his psychology.
On the application of the methods of ‘science’ and natural philosophy to the study of the mind see n. to the Introduction of this volume.
Turnbull quoted in Wood (), .On the debate between Francis Jeffrey and Dugald Stewart on the difference between observation and experiment and which was practised by the inductive mental scientist, see Payne (), –; McCosh (), –; Chitnis (), –; Flynn ().
From Passions to Emotions
as the most often cited authorities on the realities of human mental life and the proper way to study it.Newton’s comment at the end of his Opticks (), that the methods of natural philosophy could be success-fully applied also to ‘moral philosophy’ became a ‘proof text’ on a par, in terms of frequency of allusion amongst mental scientists, with many a favourite biblical text of classical and revivalist theologians of earlier gen-erations.A whole new scientific tradition with its own ‘Scriptures’ (such as Bacon’s Novum Organum, Locke’s Essay and Newton’s Opticks) was emerging during this period.Wood refers, for example, to the ‘almost Biblical status of Bacon’s writings in eighteenth-century Scotland’.
Another recent commentator argues that through the influence of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scottish philosophers, Bacon and Newton came to be regarded as ‘virtual Protestant saints’.
An early user of the term ‘emotions’: David Hume David Hume’s liberal use of the term ‘emotions’ in his Treatise of Human Nature (–) was the earliest sustained use of the term in the English language in a way that is similar to present-day usage. For most of the eighteenth century, moral and mental philosophy of a similar genre in both Scotland and England continued to use ‘passions’ (along with
‘desires’ and ‘appetites’), ‘affections’ and, sometimes, ‘moral sentiments’, as the basic categories of affective psychology.Hume also used these categories but in conjunction with a relatively frequent (if ambiguous) use of the term ‘emotions’.
Book of Hume’s Treatise was entitled ‘Of the Passions’.He divided all the perceptions of the mind into impressions and ideas.The impressions were further divided by Hume into primary and secondary impressions.
Primary impressions were internal or external bodily sensations – of the bodily constitution and its animal spirits or of sight, sound, touch and so on.He continued: ‘Secondary, or reflective impressions are such as proceed from some of these original ones, either immediately or by the interposition of its idea.Of the first kind are all the impressions of the senses, and all bodily pains and pleasures: Of the second are the passions and other emotions resembling them.’Unlike Descartes, then, Hume did not think that passions were the direct result of the movement of animal spirits (feelings with bodily causes).Rather he believed that they were secondary impressions of feelings, produced by the combination of a sensation with an idea.So Hume removed passions ‘and other emotions resembling them’ one degree further from primary bodily movements
Wood (), –. Campbell (), .
Hume (). Hume (), .
The Scottish creation of ‘the emotions’
than Descartes had done, while adopting the same basic ‘perception’
model favoured by both Locke and Descartes.
Annette Baier, in her study of Hume’s Treatise, suggests that Hume used ‘emotions’ to mean raw, non-cognitive feelings, sensations, or agita-tions of the spirits.She contrasts this with Hume’s understanding of the passions and sentiments as secondary, cognitive impressions with inten-tional objects.This is an interesting suggestion, and one that would fit well with my overall argument here that the new category of ‘emotions’, when it did finally emerge as an established category, was a particularly non-cognitive one, unlike the categories of passions, affections and sen-timents as they were used in the eighteenth century and before.How-ever, unfortunately, I am not sure that Hume’s uses of ‘emotions’ can all be interpreted, as Baier suggests, as meaning ‘sensations’ or ‘bodily disturbances’.There are many cases of apparent equivocation (both in the Treatise and in Hume’s Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals) between ‘passions’ and ‘emotions’, although ‘passions’ was the central and most frequently used category.In most instances Hume seemed to intend ‘emotions’ to be read as a rather vague and general term to mean
Annette Baier, in her study of Hume’s Treatise, suggests that Hume used ‘emotions’ to mean raw, non-cognitive feelings, sensations, or agita-tions of the spirits.She contrasts this with Hume’s understanding of the passions and sentiments as secondary, cognitive impressions with inten-tional objects.This is an interesting suggestion, and one that would fit well with my overall argument here that the new category of ‘emotions’, when it did finally emerge as an established category, was a particularly non-cognitive one, unlike the categories of passions, affections and sen-timents as they were used in the eighteenth century and before.How-ever, unfortunately, I am not sure that Hume’s uses of ‘emotions’ can all be interpreted, as Baier suggests, as meaning ‘sensations’ or ‘bodily disturbances’.There are many cases of apparent equivocation (both in the Treatise and in Hume’s Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals) between ‘passions’ and ‘emotions’, although ‘passions’ was the central and most frequently used category.In most instances Hume seemed to intend ‘emotions’ to be read as a rather vague and general term to mean