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Robert M. Young's Mind, Brain and Adaptation revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2021

Christopher Lawrence
Christopher Lawrence*
Affiliation:
Professor Emeritus, Faculty of Life Sciences, University College London, London, WC1E 6BT, UK.
*
*Corresponding author: Christopher Lawrence, Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

Robert Maxwell Young's first book Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (1970), written from 1960 to 1965, still merits reading as a study of the naturalization of mind and its relation to social thought in Victorian Britain. I examine the book from two perspectives that give the volume its unique character: first, Young's interest in psychology, which he considered should be used to inform humane professional practices and be the basis of social reform; second, new approaches to the history of scientific ideas. I trace Young's intellectual interests to the Yale Philosophy Department, the Cambridge Department of Experimental Psychology and a new history and philosophy of science community. Although Young changed his political outlook and historiography radically after 1965, he always remained faithful to ideas about thought and practice described in Mind, Brain.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 54 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 61 - 77
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of British Society for the History of Science.

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References

1 Dewey, John, ‘Psychology and social practice’, Psychological Review (1900) 7, pp. 105–24Google Scholar, 122.

2 Robert Maxwell Young, Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990 (first published 1970), ‘New preface’, p. xi.

3 Among the many studies of the wider context see Hollinger, David, ‘Science as a weapon in Kulturkämpfe in the United States during and after World War II’, Isis (1995) 86, pp. 440–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Agar, Jon, ‘What happened in the sixties?’, BJHS (2008) 41, pp. 567–600CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Interview with Robert Young conducted by Anna K. Mayer, 10 February 1998, British Society for the History of Science Oral History Project, transcript in University of Leeds Library Special Collection (hereafter ‘Interview’). Sometimes timings and references to possible influences are missing, opaque and occasionally self-contradictory.

5 Young, op. cit. (2), pp. 249–50.

6 Young, op. cit. (2), ‘New preface’, p. viii.

7 Roger Smith, ‘Robert Maxwell Young, science historian, born 26 September 1935, died 5 July 2019’, The Independent, 19 August 2019, p. 36.

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9 Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (eds.), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 6 vols., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–58; Lieb, Irwin C. and Hartshorne, Charles, ‘An interview by Irwin C. Lieb: Charles Hartshorne's recollections of editing the Peirce papers’, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society (1970) 6, pp. 149–59Google Scholar.

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11 Young, op. cit. (8), pp. 26–9.

12 Angell, James R., ‘The province of functional psychology’, Psychological Review (1907) 14, pp. 61–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 68. All the functionalist papers cited here are used in Mind, Brain.

13 Roger Smith, Free Will and the Human Sciences in Britain, 1870–1910, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013, p. 31.

14 Angell, op. cit. (12), p. 72.

15 Young, op. cit. (8), p. 27; he omitted ‘arc’ from Dewey's title.

16 Dewey, John, ‘The reflex arc concept in psychology’, Psychological Review (1896) 3, pp. 357–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 365, 358.

17 Young, op. cit. (2), p. viii. Whitehead's designation of the cluster of concepts surrounding ‘life’ as the ‘Achilles heel’ of Cartesianism is an epigraph to the Introduction.

18 On Young and functionalist psychology and Whitehead's non-dualistic ontology see Smith, op. cit. (13), pp. 171–80.

19 Young, op. cit. (8), pp. 26–7. See Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001.

20 Young, op. cit. (8), p. 12; and Young, op. cit. (2), p. 133, where the grandfather quote is taken from Philip P. Wiener, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949, p. 19; Wiener was a major source for Young in tracing this tradition. He impressed this on Roger Smith when he was Young's student in 1966–70. Smith, personal communication.

21 Interview, op. cit. (4).

22 Young presumably learned his neuroanatomy in the Department of Anatomy where Wilbur Smith had an appointment.

23 Kurt Jacobsen, ‘An interview with Bob Young’, Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics (2020) 80, pp. 1–10, 3, at http://freeassociations.org.uk/FA_New/OJS/index.php/fa, accessed 9 December 2020.

24 Young, op. cit. (2), p. x, original emphasis.

25 The intention seems to have been to return to Rochester and become a psychiatrist. It is not clear if he came to England to study experimental psychology and then took the opportunity do history or whether he ‘left medical school in order to work as an historian’. Interview, op. cit. (4); Young, op. cit. (2), p. x. Possibly it was not until 1964 that he considered history of science as a career. He recalled around that time, ‘I was not in my own mind, by profession, a history and philosophy of science person. I was in my own mind, somebody who was trying to figure out the mind/body problem’. Interview, op. cit. (4).

26 Raymond Williams, fellow of Jesus College, who had returned to Cambridge in 1961, was involved. Young came to know him and always recommended Williams's work. How far Williams was important for Young before 1965 I cannot determine. See Ortolano, Guy, The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 93, 148–50Google Scholar.

27 Zangwill, O.L., ‘Obituary notice: Sir Frederic Bartlett (1886–1969)’, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (1970) 22, pp. 77–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bartlett gets approving mention in Young, op. cit. (8), p. 12; Bloor, David, ‘Remember the strong program?’, Science, Technology, & Human Values (1997) 22, pp. 373–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar, describes Bartlett as an intellectual precursor of the strong programme.

28 Gregory, Richard L., ‘Oliver Louis Zangwill 29 October 1913–12 October 1987’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society of London (2001) 47, pp. 515–24Google Scholar, 521, 519, 522, at https//royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsbm.2001.0031, accessed 9 December 2020.

29 Interview, op. cit. (4).

30 Gregory, op. cit. (28), pp. 520, 521, 519, 522.

31 Young, op. cit. (2), ‘New preface’, p. ix.

32 When he did, accounts are conflicting. For Zangwill's ‘gratifying interest in the progress of my work’ and his ‘initial encouragement and continuing support’ see Young, op. cit. (2), p. xi. But see also Interview, op. cit. (4): ‘how did I get from Zangwill to the history and philosophy of science? The answer is, this Department of Experimental Psychology was relentlessly experimental, and if I wanted to do a historical thesis, he wasn't willing to have it in his Department’.

33 Bartlett was ‘out of sympathy with most of the schools and movements of his period, not least psychoanalysis’. Zangwill, op. cit. (27), p. 80. Young said Zangwill's ‘views were certainly an important reason why I kept quiet about the psychoanalytic origins of my enquiries and relegated Freud to footnotes’. Young op. cit. (2), ‘New preface’, p. ix; see Forrester, John and Cameron, Laura Freud in Cambridge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Gregory, op. cit. (28), pp. 520, 519.

35 Young, op. cit. (8), p. 28.

36 Gregory, op. cit. (28), pp. 520, 519. Zangwill's clinical work continues in the Oliver Zangwill Centre for Neuropsychological Rehabilitation, in the Princess of Wales Hospital at Ely. See www.ozc.nhs.uk, accessed 9 December 2020.

37 Roger Hood, then a postgraduate at Downing College, became founding director of the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford. See www.psychoanalysis-and-therapy.com/human_nature/papers/paper73.html, accessed 9 December 2020.

38 Review of Barbara Wootton, assisted by Vera G. Seal and Rosalind Chambers, Social Science and Social Pathology, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1959; and George B. Vold, Theoretical Criminology, New York: Oxford University Press, 1958, Cambridge Opinion, Criminology (1960) 23, pp. 38–40.

39 Young's accounts of the timings of his relations with HPS are unclear. Robert Young, ‘The historiographic and ideological contexts of the nineteenth-century debate on man's place in nature’, in Mikuláš Teich and Robert Young (eds.), Changing Perspectives in the History of Science: Essays in Honour of Joseph Needham, London: Heinemann, 1973, pp. 344–438, 352–3; Interview, op. cit. (4).

40 Among the massive literature on this see Arnold Thackray and Robert K. Merton, ‘On discipline building: the paradoxes of George Sarton’, Isis (1972) 63, pp. 472–95; Geoffrey Cantor, ‘Charles Singer and the founding of the British Society for the History of Science’, BJHS (1997) 30, pp. 5–23; A.K. Mayer, ‘When things don't talk: knowledge and belief in the inter-war humanism of Charles Singer (1876–1960)’, BJHS (2005) 38, pp. 325–47.

41 Young, op. cit. (39), p. 355.

42 In an essay on Young's intellectual heroes, Roger Smith explained, Burtt considered ‘whatever the success of physical science, the [Scientific] Revolution was a disaster for philosophy and civilized culture. The new way of thought, he argued, made it impossible for there to be systematic knowledge, or true science, of the mental world’. Roger Smith, ‘The quest for humane relations: the trajectory of an intellectual life’, Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics (2020) 80, pp. 11–26, 12, at http://freeassociations.org.uk/FA_New/OJS/index.php/fa, accessed 9 December 2020.

43 ‘Originally, The Metaphysical Foundations was Burtt's Ph.D. dissertation, written at Columbia University, which was the seat of American pragmatism and naturalism in the 1920s’. Diane Davis Villemaire, ‘Introduction’, in Villemaire (ed.), E.A. Burtt, Historian and Philosopher: A Study of the Author of The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, Dordrecht: Springer, 2002, pp. 1–6, 1; ‘Although unacknowledged by Burtt, it is Dewey's reconstructed philosophy … which stands behind The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science’. Villemaire, ‘Columbia University in the 1920: the young radical philosophers’, in Villemaire, E.A. Burtt, op. cit., pp. 7–14, 7.

44 Charles C. Gillispie, ‘Alexandre Koyré’, in Gillispie (editor in chief), Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 16 vols., New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970–80, vol. 7, pp. 482–90, 482.

45 Cited in H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 86; see p. 101 for Koyré's ambivalence with regard to Burtt's importance.

46 Alexandre Koyré, ‘The significance of the Newtonian synthesis’, Journal of General Education (1950) 4, pp. 256–68, 268.

47 Cited in and translated by Cohen, op. cit. (45), p. 85.

48 Cited in Nick Jardine, ‘Koyré's Kepler/Kepler's Koyré’, History of Science (2000) 28, pp. 364–76, 364.

49 Yehuda Elkana, ‘Alexandre Koyré: between the history of ideas and sociology of disembodied knowledge’, History and Technology (1987) 4, pp. 115–48, 118.

50 Jardine, op. cit. (48), p. 371.

51 Notably Marie Boas Hall. See Frank A.J.L. James, ‘Alfred Rupert Hall 1920–2009 and Marie Boas Hall 1919–2009’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy (2012) 11, pp. 353–408. Alistair Crombie was another.

52 A. Rupert Hall, ‘Merton revisited or science and society in the seventeenth century’, History of Science (1963) 2, pp. 2–16, 11. See also his ‘Alexandre Koyré and the scientific revolution’, History and Technology (1987) 4, pp. 485–96.

53 Robert Olby, ‘A retrospect on the history of the life sciences’, in J.D. North and J.J. Roche (eds.), The Light of Nature: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985, pp. 95–109.

54 Young, op. cit. (39), pp. 352–3.

55 Alistair C. Crombie, ‘Alexandre Koyré and Great Britain: Galileo and Mersenne’, History and Technology (1987) 4, pp. 81–92.

56 Marshall Clagett (ed.), Critical Problems in the History of Science: Proceedings of the Institute for the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin, September 1–11, 1957, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959.

57 A.C. Crombie (ed.), Scientific Change: Historical Studies in the Intellectual, Social and Technical Conditions for Scientific Discovery and Technical Invention, from Antiquity to the Present, New York: Heinemann, 1963.

58 Henry Guerlac, ‘Some historical assumptions of the history of science’, in Crombie, op. cit. (57), pp. 797–812, 809.

59 Alexander Koyré, ‘Commentaries’, in Crombie, op. cit. (57), pp. 847–57, 853, 856.

60 R.C. Oldfield, ‘Scientific approaches to psychology: changing views of behaviour mechanisms’, in Crombie, op. cit. (57), pp. 577–89; See O.L. Zangwill, ‘R.C. Oldfield's contribution to neuropsychology’, Neuropsychologia (1973) 1, pp. 373–6.

61 Gregory, op. cit. (28), p. 519.

62 Oldfield, R.C. and Zangwill, O.L., ‘Head's concept of the schema and its application in contemporary British psychology’, British Journal of Psychology (1942) 32, pp. 267–86Google Scholar. This was the first of several papers on the subject.

63 Zangwill, op. cit. (27), p. 78.

64 Young, op. cit. (2), p. viii. Young paid no attention to attempts within German philosophy to create the human sciences on a new epistemological basis.

65 Young, op. cit. (2), pp. vii, 4. The term ‘function’ entered psychology from phrenology via Lewes. K.M. Dallenbach, ‘The history and derivation of the word “function” as a systematic term in psychology’, American Journal of Psychology (1915) 26, pp. 473–84.

66 Young, op. cit. (2), p. xi.

67 On Head see Jacyna, L.S., Medicine and Modernism: A Biography of Sir Henry Head, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008Google Scholar.

68 Owsei Temkin, ‘Gall and the phrenological movement’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1947) 21, pp. 275–321; Temkin, ‘Remarks on the neurology of Gall and Spurtzheim’, in E. Ashworth Underwood (ed.), Science, Medicine and History: Essays in the Evolution of Scientific Thought and Medical Practice Written in Honour of Charles Singer, 2 vols., London: Oxford University Press, 1953, vol. 2, pp. 282–9.

69 Greene, John C., The Death of Adam: Evolution and Its Impact on Western Thought, Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1959Google Scholar, is recognized as an important contribution to historiographical debates over Darwinism.

70 Young's formal and informal students studied these functional concepts. The reflex was the focus in Roger Smith, ‘The background of physiological psychology in natural philosophy’, History of Science (1973) 11, pp. 75–123; and the sensorium commune in Figlio, Karl, ‘Theories of perception and the physiology of mind in the late eighteenth century’, History of Science (1975) 12, pp. 177–212CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71 Plato, The Republic, Book VII. The quote is from Benjamin Jowett's translation (1st edn 1894), but ‘assumptions’ is in H.D.P. Lee, Plato: The Republic, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955, p. 302. None of Young's epigraphs have bibliographical details other than an author and a date, which has created considerable problems.

72 Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985; Steven Shapin, ‘Phrenological knowledge and the social structure of early nineteenth-century Edinburgh’, Annals of Science (1975) 32, pp. 219–43. Indeed, at this time Young considered phrenology a ‘pseudo-science’: Young, op. cit. (2), p. 243.

73 Young op. cit. (2), pp. 23, 18, 38.

74 Temkin in Underwood, op. cit. (68), p. 285.

75 Young, op. cit. (2), p. 16,

76 Young, op. cit. (2), pp. 88, 81, 80, 87.

77 Young, op. cit. (2), pp. 69, 72, 54. Alexandre Koyré, ‘Introduction’, in René Descartes, Descartes’ Philosophical Writings: A Selection (ed. and tr. Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Thomas Geach), London: Nelson, 1954, p. xiii. This was a text for students. It seems a reasonable supposition that it was used at Yale.

78 Young, op. cit. (2), p. 101. Young assigns this to E.H. Gombrich, 1962. Seemingly it is from Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, New York: Pantheon Books, 1960, p. 75. Misleadingly it has been prefixed with the sentence ‘Like art, science is born of itself, not of nature’. This seems to have been added by Young, as does the phrase ‘no less than the scientist’.

79 Young, op. cit. (2), p. 101. Another puzzle. Cited as Crombie, 1963, it presumably refers to Crombie, op. cit. (57). Not discovered, and I am unsure that it sounds like Crombie.

80 Young had high regard for the L.S. Hearnshaw's explication of Bain. See L.S. Hearnshaw, A Short History of British Psychology (1840–1940), London: Methuen, 1964. Roger Smith, personal communication. See also Roger Smith, The Sense of Movement: An Intellectual History, London: Process Press, 2019.

81 Young, op. cit. (2), p. 120, italics in original.

82 National Library of Scotland, MS. 3650, ff. 165–6, cited in Young op. cit. (2), p. 103.

83 Young op. cit. (2), pp. 127, 131, 127.

84 ‘My conclusion about the science of character advocated by Mill and attempted by Bain closely parallels the judgements of Ward and Allport’. Young, op. cit. (2), p. 132 n. 5. James Ward was professor of mental philosophy and logic at Cambridge from 1897. It was from Ward that Bartlett was said to have ‘acquired his biological outlook and his feeling for the essential continuity and indivisibility of mental life’. Zangwill, op. cit. (27), p. 77.

85 The epigraph is from Crombie, op. cit. (57), p. 7.

86 In 1948 Singer opposed Rupert Hall's appointment to a post as a historian of science at Cambridge on the grounds that he was not a scientist. James, op. cit. (51), p. 362.

87 See Young, op. cit. (39), pp. 363–88, esp. 366–7. On Young's Darwinian scholarship and especially on de Beer see James A. Secord, ‘Revolutions in the head: Darwin, Malthus and Robert M. Young’, BJHS, forthcoming.

88 In 1959 John C. Greene had published a major paper on Spencer's sociology. John C. Greene, ‘Biology and social theory in the nineteenth century: Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer’ in Clagett, op. cit. (56), pp. 419–46, 434. This paper is only mentioned in the final footnote to Chapter 5 of Mind, Brain stating that Spencer's role in creating modern sociology ‘deserves a full study’. Young, op. cit. (2), p. 196 n. 2.

89 Young, op. cit. (2), pp. 161, 162, 185, 173, 183.

90 Young, op. cit. (2), pp. 185, 179, 185.

91 Young, op. cit. (2), p. 199 n. 2.

92 Young, op. cit. (2), pp. 232, 224, 232, 224, 231, italics in original.

93 See ‘the developments which culminated in Ferrier's work’ and ‘Ferrier's work represents the final extension of the Bell–Magendie paradigm’, Young, op. cit. (2), pp. 240, 241.

94 Young, op. cit. (2), 235, 243, 246–7, 234, 245, 246.

95 Dewey, op. cit. (1), p. 119. The role of psychology in education was central to the associationist tradition and functionalism.

96 Young, op. cit. (2), pp. 249–52.

97 Young, op. cit. (2), pp. 249.

98 Young, op. cit. (39), pp. 348, 349; see Secord, op. cit. (87).

99 Elkana, op. cit. (49), p. 114.

100 Alexander, Jeffrey C., Positivism, Presuppositions, and Current Controversies, London: Routledge, 1982, p. 22Google Scholar.

101 Clifford Truesdell, Essays in the History of Mechanics, Berlin: Springer 1968, p. 146, cited in Shapin, Steven and Schaffer, Simon, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985, p. xxiGoogle Scholar. Thanks to Simon Schaffer for this reference.

102 Interwar Marxist approaches to science now look like versions of positivist historiography. See Gary Werskey on J.D. Bernal's ‘scientistic ideology’, which ‘identifies science as the engine of technological and social transformation’, in ‘The Marxist critique of capitalist science: a history in three movements?’, Science as Culture (2007) 16, pp. 397–461, 411. Also Mayer, A.K., ‘Fatal mutilations: educationism and the British background to the 1931 International Congress for the History of Science and Technology’, History of Science (2002) 11, pp. 446–72Google Scholar.

103 Smith, op. cit. (42).

104 Young, op. cit. (2), p. 253.