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Part Two of this book turns attention from the general discursive configurations of Victorian psychology to the work of three individuals: Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, and G. H. Lewes. There are several reasons for this alteration in focus. This chapter focuses on Alexander Bain. The first section discusses his relationship with John Mill and the politics of psychological theory. The second section traces Bain's development of physiological associationism. The last section discusses his theory of will.

This chapter begins with the intellectual formation of John Stuart Mill, friend and mentor of Alexander Bain (1818–1903). It presents the case for thinking that, despite his lifelong residence in England, Mill is properly regarded as an inheritor of one important strand in the Scottish philosophical tradition, namely the positivistic naturalism of David Hume. Mill valued Bain’s comments on his System of Logic, and the high regard he placed on Bain’s early psychological work, led him to play a key part in Bain’s appointment to the Chair of Logic in the amalgamated University of Aberdeen (1860), despite strenuous opposition. This chapter explores Bain’s seminal contributions to the foundation of physiologically based psychology, as well as his founding of the subsequently internally acclaimed journal Mind. The chapter interprets Bain as the principal mature exponent of an alternative non-Reidian, non-metaphysical version of the ‘science of mind’.

This chapter discusses how a physiological model of emotion created new avenues into time-worn narratives about aesthetic experience. Focusing on five thinkers who shared an interest in describing aesthetic experience as an embodied affect—Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, Grant Allen, Walter Pater, and Thomas Hardy—the chapter shows how physiological aesthetics challenged the notion that aesthetic judgment was necessarily a slow, reflective process of deliberation. Evolutionary theory and physiology provided tools for rescaling aesthetic response: for Grant Allen and Herbert Spencer, the experience of beauty was a reflex that had evolved slowly in evolutionary time; while for Alexander Bain, it was an immediate neurophysiological response to stimuli of form, color, or sound. This scientific discourse is manifested in later works such as Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native and Walter Pater’s The Renaissance, which experiment with the notion of aesthetic experience as involving discernible physical impressions on the nervous system.

This chapter examines the special sciences found in the texts of a tradition known as “British Emergentism,” which is still evident in the works of current authors, including those of noted neurophysiologist Roger Sperry. British Emergentism’s roots can be found in the middle of the nineteenth century, where it flourished in the century’s first quarter. It can be seen in John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic (1843), where it began, and through works such as Alexander Bain’s Logic (1870), George Henry Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind (1875), Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity (1920), Lloyd Morgan’s Emergent Evolution (1923), and C. D. Broad’s The Mind and Its Place in Nature (1925). The chapter also discusses British Emergentism’s doctrine of “emergent laws,” and the rise and fall of British Emergentism as a doctrine.

This chapter highlights the empiricist school whose chief inspiration was John Stuart Mill, focusing on the once important but now neglected figures of Alexander Bain and George Croom Robertson. After examining Bain’s debt to Mill’s empiricism and his physiologically grounded developments of associationist psychology, the chapter explores his views about time and space, external material reality, causation, force, the mind–body relation, and human free will. A final consideration of Bain’s assertions about thing-in-themselves shows his position to be more subtle than might be thought. The consideration of Croom Robertson focuses on his attempts to define philosophy and to distinguish it from psychology, before briefly conserving his own metaphysical positions.

The Scottish Enlightenment was a stunning intellectual performance that set the intellectual agenda for many people inside and outside Scotland for many decades thereafter. George Davie argues that Sir William Hamilton's pupil and friend James Frederick Ferrier was in substantial measure responsible for the blackout of the Scottish Enlightenment in the 1850s. Ferrier's greatest work is perhaps An Introduction to the Philosophy of Consciousness, which originally appeared as a series of seven papers in Blackwood's Magazine. Consciousness implies an act of negation, for the self must distinguish itself from nature as a self in relation to not-self. The contributions of Alexander Bain and Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison are elaborated. Many of Scottish idealists wrote extensively on the practical implications, whether social or political, of their philosophy.

This chapter explores the role that the senses and the sensory experience play in the composition of poetry. The excerpts it shows note, for instance, note how Victorian scientists and physiologists understood how the sensory experience directly influences poets—and the process of sensory experience proves to be fundamentally important in George Meredith's poetry. Through his poetry, Meredith invites readers to make use of their senses; to see, hear, touch, and smell. This focus on sensory detail even prompted efforts to theorize the relationship between intellectual understanding and the body. In fact, in the extracts compiled in the chapter, scientists insist that comprehending poetry is not just an intellectual activity but also an experiential one. Alexander Bain, for instance, maps and explains the cerebral activity that supports this statement, while Alexander Bryan Johnson shows a concern with the difficulty of relating a sensory experience through language.

This book shows that philanthropy became a favoured trope within literary realism because of its unique utility as a site for the working out of epistemological and aesthetic problems. Henry Mayhew's work represents a new expressive mode uniquely suited to promoting the various aims of philanthropy. Mike Martin sees philanthropy as ‘all forms of voluntary, private giving for public purposes’. Alexander Bain's response represents one of many accounts of philanthropy and its sentimental underpinnings penned by economists, social scientists, public moralists and novelists that amounted to a rich and varied discursive tradition over the course of the century. A comparison of philanthropy and political economy as discrete, if closely interrelated discourses, sheds light on the process of middle-class cultural formation as it pertains to the historically changing form of the novel.

This chapter presents a short history of the modern emergentist tradition. It begins with John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic (1843), and traces through Alexander Bain’s Logic (1870), George Henry Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind (1875), Samuel Alexander’s two-volume Space, Time, and Deity (1920), Lloyd Morgan’s Emergent Evolution (1923), and C. D. Broad’s The Mind and Its Place in Nature (1925). Presented together with these works are some twentieth-century results, both philosophical and scientific, that bear on the conclusions drawn by members of that tradition. James van Cleve’s definition of the notion of an emergent property by appeal to supervenience is also explained in detail, before an attempt by the author to present his own definition of the same.

The author offers a pragmatist definition of belief. To believe something at a given time is to be so disposed that you would use that information to guide those relatively attentive and self-controlled activities you might engage in at that time, whether these activities involve bodily movement or not. This definition is then unpacked and applied to examples. The analysis is relatively straightforward when applied to assertions, but the pragmatists insisted that our beliefs are manifested in a wide variety of non-discursive behaviors, many of which involve the dissociation of attention from control within the execution of a task. Neuroscientist M. Jeannerod’s experiments reveal this complexity. The author argues that these experiments complicate matters, but they do not support “will scepticism.” Contemporary cognitive neuroscience is compatible with a number of different analyses of belief, but it meshes at least as nicely with Bain’s pragmatic conception as any other.