Cited by T. Quick, 'Disciplining Physiological Psychology: Cinematographs as Epistemic Devices, 1897-1922', Science in Context 30 (4), pp. 423-474.
Description:

'The first part thus examines Bergson’s cinematographic characterization of mechanism, along with the ‘vital’ evolution to which he opposed it. It considers the relevance of this opposition to Sherrington’s physiological science, thereby examining the interaction between mechanical, vital, and physical modes of explanation in physiological psychology at this time (Young [1970] 1990; Smith 1973; Daston 1978; Jacyna 1981).'

 

'Creative Evolution identified British physiological psychology as it’s principle object of philosophic concern. In this work Bergson identified such writers as Herbert Spencer and Alexander Bain with what he characterised as a particularly problematic intellectual trend. Spencer and his contemporaries had articulated what they understood as a simultaneously mechanical and philosophic psychology, in which nerves were characterised as the material corollaries of mental states (Young, [1970] 1990, esp. 172-180. See also Daston 1978; Smith 2013, 45-49).'

 

'McDougall conveyed his findings in terms that went directly against the mechanistic tendencies of late nineteenth century British physiological physiology (Young, 1990).'

 

Relevant passage from Young:

 

'Spencer's Evolutionary Associationism as an Advance on Gall and on Traditional Sensationalism

The foregoing story of Spencer's development provides the necessary foundation for understanding both the implications of his psychology for the associationist tradition, and its bearing on some of the issues raised by Gall. Spencer's concept of mental evolution was at once an integration of his view of adaptation with that of development from homogeneity to heterogeneity, and an expression of his adherence to the association psychology. It has been noted that the reading of Lyell had turned Spencer toward a Lamarckian view of evolution. In 'The Development Hypothesis' the only mention of a mechanism is the statement that animals and plants, when placed in new conditions, undergo changes fitting them for their new environment. In successive generations these changes continue 'until, ultimately, the new conditions become the natural ones'. [note: 'Spencer, 1901, I, 3.'] In reviewing his application of this view to psychological phenomena, Spencer says,

The familiar doctrine of association here undergoes a great extension; for it is held that not only in the individual do ideas become connected when in experience the things producing them have repeatedly occurred together, but that such results of repeated occurrences accumulate in successions of individuals: the effects of associations are supposed to be transmitted as modifications of the nervous system. [note: 'Spencer, 1904, I, 470.']

In the light of Spencer's development this extension presents itself as the natural next step. Its simplicity is deceptive. In fact, the application of evolution to psychology has consequences which are yet to be fully exploited, but the present analysis must be confined to its effects on psychological issues in the mid-nineteenth century. Spencer provided an evolutionary theory which mediated between the conflicting claims of Gall's psychology and the Lockean tradition of sensation-association.

The choice for Locke in explaining the origin of knowledge was between innate ideas and sensationalism. He opted equivocally for the latter, and Condillac unequivocally made the choice for a tabula rasa view of mind. The attempt to build a psychology on this epistemological thesis had been faced with serious limitations which centred around a vehement objection to any endowment that suggested that mental phenomena were innate. Evolutionary associationism was incompatible with a simple tabula rasa view of mind.

To rest with the unqualified assertion that, antecedent to experience, the mind is a blank, is to ignore the all-essential questions-whence comes the power of organizing experiences? whence arise the different degrees of that power possessed by different races of organisms, and different individuals of the same race? If, at birth, there exists nothing but a passive receptivity of impressions, why should not a horse be as educable as a man? Or, should it be said that language makes the difference, then why should not the cat and dog, out of the same household experiences, arrive at equal degrees and kinds of intelligence? Understood in its current form, the experience-hypothesis implies that the presence of a definitely organized nervous system is a circumstance of no moment-a fact not needing to be taken into account! Yet it is the all-important fact-the fact . . . without which an assimilation of experiences is utterly inexplicable. [note: 'Spencer, 1855, pp. 580-1.']

These are the same objections that Gall made to sensationalism: it could not explain individual and species differences, and it ignored the fundamental importance of the biological endowment of varying brain structures. In fact, Lewes credited Gall with settling the issue with which Spencer is concerned.

Gall may be said to have definitively settled the dispute between the partisans of innate ideas and the partisans of Sensationalism, by establishing the connate tendencies, both affective and intellectual, which belong to the organic structure of man . . . all the fundamental tendencies are connate, and can no more be created by precept and education than they can be abolished by denunciation and punishment. [note: 'Lewes, 1857, p. 633. The edition of Lewes' book which Spencer read did not include the chapter on Gall. It was added in the second edition, which is quoted here. Cf. Young, 1966. p. 39 (fn. 77).']

Although Spencer echoed Gall's objections and his emphasis on biological endowment and adaptation, he could accept neither the view of nature nor the faculty psychology on which Gall's arguments were based. Gall saw organic life in terms of the static chain of being. The cerebral endowments of species were part of an eternally fixed order of nature, and he believed that the organs were added in a stepwise fashion. The endowments of individuals were also given at birth, and the role left for experience was very meagre indeed. In his extreme reaction to the sensationalists in the name of biological endowment, Gall had moved dangerously close to a belief in innate ideas. In pursuing their epistemological interests the sensationalists had clearly committed biological absurdities. Similarly, Gall had pursued his biological and social interests faithfully and incidentally had talked philosophical nonsense. Much of the reaction to his psychology was the result of the supposed relation of faculties to innate ideas. In his zeal to show the continuity of human behaviour with that of animals he had collapsed the distinction between instincts and the most complex manifestations of human intelligence. Thus, the laws of various pure and applied sciences were supposed to be innately given as instincts in animals with striking talents and in human geniuses. [note: 'Gall, 1835, V, 48, 51, 65-6, 82-3.'] The charge against Gall that he adhered to belief in innate ideas was therefore not without foundation.

Others had noted the relations between biologically endowed instincts and innate ideas. For example, Johannes Mueller says, 'The expression of Cuvier with reference to instinct is very correct. He says, that animals in their acts of instinct are impelled by an innate idea,- as it were, by a dream'. [note: 'Mueller, 1842, p. 947.'] In sharing this view Mueller argued, 'That innate ideas may exist, cannot in the slightest degree be denied: it is, indeed, a fact. All the ideas of animals, which are induced by instinct, are innate and immediate; something presented to the mind, a desire to attain which is at the same time given. The new-born lamb and foal have such innate ideas, which lead them to follow their mother and suck the teats'. [note: 'Ibid., p. 1347.'] However, he was not prepared to extend this equation to man. To the question, 'Is it not in some measure the same with the intellectual ideas of man?’ [note: 'Ibid.'] he replied with an emphatic denial and reverted to the arguments of the sensationalists. The general intellectual ideas of man result solely from 'the mutual reaction of allied perceptions amongst themselves'. [note: 'Ibid., p. 1348. Cf. pp. 948-9.'] He believed in fixed endowment where animals were concerned, and in sensationalism in human intelligence.

In addressing himself to this extremely confused set of explanations and assumptions, Spencer had first to answer the argument of special creation in the name of evolution, and then to mediate the conflicting claims of the sensationalists and those who employed the concept of instinct. His first attack was on the special creation hypothesis on which Gall had based his objections to the sensationalists. Gall had argued the innate endowment of a pre-established harmony between a faculty and its proper objects in the environment. Speaking of this adjustment of psychical cohesions to relations among objects in the environment, Spencer says,

Concerning their adjustment, there appear to be but two possible hypotheses, of which all other hypotheses can be but variations. It may on the one hand be asserted, that the strength of the tendency which each particular state of consciousness has to follow any other, is fixed beforehand by a Creator-that there is a pre-established harmony between the inner and outer relations. On the other hand it may be asserted, that the strength of the tendency which each particular state of consciousness has to follow any other, depends upon the frequency with which the two have been connected in experience-that the harmony between the inner and outer relations, arises from the fact, that the outer relations produce the inner relations. [note: 'Spencer, 1855, p. 523.']

Spencer believed that there was no real evidence to support the special creation hypothesis. Speaking, though not directly, to Gall's view, he says,

That the inner cohesions of psychical states are pre-adjusted to the outer persistencies of the relations symbolized, is a supposition which, if taken in its full meaning, involves absurdities so many and great that none dare carry it beyond a limited range of cases. [note: 'Ibid., pp. 527-8.']

On the other hand, the supposition that the inner cohesions are adjusted to the outer persistencies by an accumulated experience of those outer persistencies, is in harmony with all our positive knowledge of mental phenomena. [note: 'Ibid., p. 528.']

The evidence commonly cited to illustrate the doctrine of the association of ideas made the evidence for the 'experience hypothesis' overwhelming. [note: 'Ibid., pp. 525-6.']

However, he also took account of the fact that the major barriers to the rejection of special creation were the phenomena of reflex action, instinct, and the 'forms of thought' in man. ‘But should these phenomena be otherwise explicable, the hypothesis must be regarded as altogether gratuitous.’ [note: 'Spencer, 1855, pp. 523-4.'] Since Spencer's answer is the same for all three of these sets of phenomena-evolution and association-the present discussion will centre on the one which was historically most troublesome.

The concept of instinct had been the traditional enemy of both evolution and associationism. It had been cited as conclusive evidence of special creation and design. [note: 'Baldwin, 1913, II, 87-8.'] Gall held this view. Indeed, animal instinct was chosen as the topic of one of the eight Bridgewater Treatises in which natural theologians defended design by showing God's handiwork throughout creation. [note: 'Kirby, 1835. Cf. Gillispie, 1959, pp. 209-16, 244-5.'] Conversely, Darwin's Origin, published four years after Spencer's Principles, contained a chapter devoted to an attempt to explain how instincts could evolve by natural selection. He considered this issue one of the most formidable objections to his theory.[note: 'Darwin, reprinted, 1950, Chapter VII, especially pp. 207-8.'] The antagonism between the association psychology and explanations in terms of instincts goes back to the inception of the school. The founding of the psychology of association occurred in the Rev. John Gay's assertion of the possibility of deducing the moral sense and all our passions from the pleasure-pain principle and association. [note: 'Gay, 2nd ed., 1732. Cf. Halévy, 1952, pp. 7-9; Albee, 1962, pp. 78-90'] Gay's dissertation was written in explicit opposition to Hutcheson's claim that moral sentiments and disinterested affections are innately given to the mind as instincts. [note: 'Gay, 1732, p. xxxi.'] Gay's answer to Hutcheson was:

Our approbation of Morality, and all Affections whatsoever, are finally resolvable into Reason pointing out private Happiness, and are conversant only about things apprehended to be means tending to this end; and that whenever this end is not perceived, they are to be accounted for from the Association of Ideas, and may properly enough be called Habits. [note: 'Ibid., p. xxxii.']

Although Hutcheson's view may not in itself have been 'a-kin to the Doctrine of Innate Ideas, yet I think it relishes too much of that of Occult Qualities'. [note: 'Ibid.'] Gay goes on to argue that 'as some Men have imagin'd Innate Ideas, because forgetting how they came by them; so others have set up almost as many distinct Instincts as there are acquired Principles of acting'. [note: 'Ibid., p. liii.'] The psychological aspect of Hartley's associationism is an elaboration of this opposition to explanation in terms of instinct. [note: 'Hartley, 1749; Halévy, 1952, pp. 7-9; Macintosh, 1860, p. 380; Willey, 1962, pp. 134-7.']

Five years later (1754) Condillac argued from his extreme sensationalism to the position that instincts were acquired habits which an individual derived from sensations and had ceased to reflect about. This explanation left no way of accounting for the identity of instincts within species and their marked differences between species. It is not surprising therefore to find that the judgement made on eighteenth century associationism was that, 'All attempts to explain instinct by this principle have hitherto been unavailing'. [note: 'Macintosh, 1860, p. 379.'] The aim had been to explain them away.

After attention was explicitly turned to the comparative study of instincts within evolutionary psychology, Romanes judged the major nineteenth-century associationists prior to Spencer as follows: 'Mill, from ignoring the broad facts of heredity in the region of psychology, may be said to deserve no hearing on the subject of instinct; and the same, though in a lesser degree, is to be remarked of Bain.’ [note: 'Romanes, 1883, p. 256.'] It is with Spencer that Romanes begins the serious debate on instinct and opposes Spencer's view in favour of Darwin's. [note: 'Ibid., pp. 256-62.'] J. S. Mill had granted the existence of instincts and admitted that the association psychology could not explain them.

No mode has been suggested, even by way of hypothesis, in which these [human and animal instincts] can receive any satisfactory, or even plausible, explanation from psychological causes alone; and there is great reason to think that they have as positive, and even as direct and immediate, a connexion with physical conditions of the brain and nerves as any of our mere sensations have. [note: 'Mill, 1872, p. 561.']

Nevertheless, both he and Bain persisted in the belief that moral feelings or the moral sense were acquired by each individual during his lifetime. Darwin was hesitant about quarrelling with Mill but claimed that 'it can hardly be disputed that the social feelings are instinctive or innate in the lower animals; and why should they not be so in man? . . . The ignoring of all transmitted mental qualities will, as it seems to me, be hereafter judged as a most serious blemish in the works of Mr Mill'. [note: 'Darwin, 2nd ed., 1874, p. 98.'] Of Bain's view, he said, 'On the general theory of evolution this is at least extremely improbable'. [note: 'Ibid.'] Spencer wrote to Mill that the evolutionary theory could account for an innate moral sense.

I believe that the experiences of utility organized and consolidated through all past generations of the human race, have been producing corresponding nervous modifications, which, by continued transmission and accumulation,have become in us certain faculties of moral intuition-certain emotions responding to right and wrong conduct, which have no apparent basis in the individual experience of utility. [note: 'Quoted in Bain, 1875, p. 722. Bain has provided a very useful history of pre-evolutionary views on the moral faculty (1875, pp. 448-751).']

The innate moral sense that Spencer had argued in Social Statics was thus retained, but its basis was changed from endowment in the form of a phrenological faculty to endowment in the form of accumulated species experience.

Where instinctual phenomena had effectively opposed the separate positions of evolution and associationism, Spencer believed that they could be explained by the unified view of evolutionary associationism. 'The doctrine that the connections among our ideas are determined by experience, must, in consistency, be extended not only to all the connections established by the accumulated experiences of every individual but to all those established by the accumulated experiences of every race.’ [note: 'Spencer, 1855, p. 529.'] Given this general principle, all the phenomena of life and mind can be explained in terms of the experience hypothesis. [note: 'Ibid.'] The application of this view to reflex and instinct disposes of their opposition to associationism and the basis of this objection in the belief in preestablished harmony.

Though it is manifest that reflex and instinctive sequences are not determined by the experiences of the individual organism manifesting them; yet there still remains the hypothesis that they are determined by the experiences of the race of organisms forming its ancestry, which by infinite repetition in countless successive generations have established these sequences as organic relations: and all the facts that are accessible to us, go to support this hypothesis. Hereditary transmission, displayed alike in all the plants we cultivate, in all the animals we breed, and in the human race, applies not only to physical but to psychical peculiarities. [note: 'Ibid., p. 526.']

By replacing the tabula rasa of the individual with that of the race, Spencer was able to retain the basic position of sensationalism while recognizing the inherited biological endowments in the nervous system, and avoiding the risk of the rationalist belief in innate ideas. The term 'innate' thereby lost its Cartesian terrors for the empiricist. Baldwin puts the position succinctly by saying that he replaced 'Condillac's individual human statue by a racial animal colossus, so to speak'. [note: 'Baldwin, 1913, II, 84.'] And, most important for the present purposes, he gave the statue an evolving nervous system and thus avoided the other rationalist fallacy of referring mental endowments solely to an immaterial mind.

The reduction of all distinction between instinct and the highest intellectual operation of the human mind which Gall felt was required by his biological, anti-sensationalist view could be abandoned when it became appreciated that the higher operations could evolve out of simple reflexes and instincts, and that the primitive could co-exist with the more advanced. Finally, the analytic principle and the genetic method which had been the central thesis of the Lockean tradition (and its main contributions to philosophy, psychology, and science) were retained and extended to a much wider domain. Gall had found it necessary to fall short of a rigorous application of the principle of continuity in order to give some reality to the faculties which he felt to be the important variables in behaviour. Spencer made it possible to retain a consistent application of continuity in the evolution of relatively stable functions, while still granting their reality and efficacy for the individual. Psychology was freed from the static adaptations of Gall's innate faculties and the more general application of the pre-established harmony of the special creation view. All of this was achieved by the comparatively simple expedients of (1) placing the principle of continuity on a temporal basis for the race; (2) extending the principles of the psychology of sensation and association to include the dynamic interactions between an organism and its environment; (3) stabilizing the results of these interactions in the nervous systems of various species.

Having provided himself with a uniform explanatory principle, Spencer applied it to the evolution of mind from the contraction of a sensitive polyp on irritation, and through the development of specialized tissues-nerves for irritation and muscles for movement. The simple reflex is the transitional point of nervous differentiation from the merely physical. [note: 'Spencer, 1855, pp. 533-8.'] Instincts are complex reflexes whereby a combination of impressions produces a combination of contractions. [note: 'Ibid., p. 542.'] This increasing complexity involves such phenomena as the recognition of prey or a predator, and the activities necessary for capture or flight. [note: 'Ibid., pp. 539-53.'] Still more complex correspondences lose their indivisibility, become dissociated, and occur independently. The impression is freed from both the immediate presence of the stimulus and the requirement for immediate response. [note: 'Ibid., pp. 555-63.'] This is the dawn of conscious memory. Reason is but one more step in the developing complexity of relations of inner to outer-a further part of the insensible evolution. Both memory and reasoned action tend to lapse into automatism. [note: 'Spencer, 1855, pp. 568-9.'] As a last step, the 'forms of thought', the last bastion of the rationalist position, are absorbed into the sensationalist explanation. Space, time, causation, and so on, became explicable.

Finally, on rising up to human faculties, regarded as organized results of this intercourse between the organism and the environment, there was reached the conclusion that the so-called forms of thought are the outcome of the process of perpetually adjusting inner relations to outer relations; fixed relations in the environment producing fixed relations in the mind. And so came a reconciliation of the a priori view with the experiential view. [note: 'Spencer, 1908, p. 547.']

In addressing himself to the issue which had exercised epistemologists at least since Plato, and which is one of the thorniest questions of modern philosophy, Spencer implicitly asserts that such questions must henceforth be seen as psychological and therefore as biological. The answer which Spencer gave to the old question of the origin of ideas came not from metaphysics but from heredity. At this point the development of psychology from a branch of speculative metaphysics to a biological science is, in principle, complete. However, it will become abundantly clear that what was conceived in principle in 1855 has yet to be thoroughly applied in practice.' (172-180)