The physicalist appropriation of Brownian emotions: Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin

Abstract

The influence of Brown's terminology and of his methods and conclusions has been potent in the formation and consolidation of the Associational Psychology – represented by J. Mill, J. S. Mill, Alexander Bain, and Herbert Spencer. Noah Porter, ‘Philosophy in Great Britain and America’, 410 Emotion is the name here used to comprehend all that is understood by feelings, states of feeling, pleasures, pains, passions, sentiments, affections. Alexander Bain, The Emotions and the Will , 3 Physicalist theorists of emotion in Britain 1855–1875 In the intellectual world of the second half of the nineteenth century evolutionary theories were the subjects of endless public and professional disputes. The theory of evolution by natural selection was, however, just one part of a broader set of evolutionary hypotheses, including theories of inheritance of acquired characteristics and sexual selection. These, in turn, were just one part of a coalition of individuals and ideas, which predated the Origin of Species (1859), and which was broadly perceived in Victorian culture as connected not only with science and evolution, but also with ‘materialism’, ‘atheism’, ‘positivism’ and ‘Comtism’. These terms were used loosely, largely inaccurately and almost always pejoratively by those who opposed the inroads being made by secular, evolutionary and physiological thinkers such as Bain, Spencer, Darwin, Huxley and Henry Maudsley into the preserves of the human mind, morality and religion.

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