The Senses and the Intellect‪.‬

Elibron Classics. Digitized Replica of 1868 edition by Longmans, Green, and Co., London.

Alexander Bain (1818-1903), one of the famous British Utilitarians, was early proponent of scientific psychology. An advocate of the British school of empiricism, Bain proposed that all knowledge and mental processes had to be based not only on spontaneous thought and ideas, but on actual physical sensations. Bain strove to identify the link between the mind and the body, focusing on the physiological correlations between mental and behavioural phenomena. In his seminal work The Senses And The Intellect (1855) and its companion volume, Emotions And The Will (1859), Bain proposed that traditional psychology could be expressed with reference to the laws of association, and that both physiological and psychological processes were linked. These two works remained the standard British text for students of the subject until the end of the nineteenth century. Notable in The Senses was the inclusion of a chapter on the nervous system, which set the standard for the majority of textbooks to come.