Bain

Bain Alexander (1818–1903), British philosopher and reformer, biographer of James Mill (1882) and J. S. Mill (1882) and founder of the first psychological journal, Mind (1876). In the development of psychology, Bain represents in England (alongside Continental thinkers such as Taine and Lotze) the final step toward the founding of psychology as a science. His significance stems from his wish to ‘unite psychology and physiology,’ fulfilled in The Senses and the Intellect (1855) and The Emotions and the Will (1859), abridged in one volume, Mental and Moral Science (1868). Neither Bain’s psychology nor his physiology were particularly original. His psychology came from English empiricism and associationism, his physiology from Johannes Muller’s (1801–58) Elements of Physiology (1842). Muller was an early advocate of the reflex, or sensorimotor, conception of the nervous system, holding that neurons conduct sensory information to the brain or motor commands from the brain, the brain connecting sensation with appropriate motor response. Like Hartley before him, Bain grounded the laws of mental association in the laws of neural connection. In opposition to faculty psychology, Bain rejected the existence of mental powers located in different parts of the brain (On the Study of Character, 1861). By combining associationism with modern physiology, he virtually completed the movement of philosophical psychology toward science. In philosophy, his most important concept was his analysis of belief as ‘a preparation to act.’ By thus entwining conception and action, he laid the foundation for pragmatism, and for the focus on adaptive behavior central to modern psychology. See also ASSOCIATIONIS. T.H.L.

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