James Sully

1842-1923 · British · Associationist and Child Psychology

Common sense, knowing nothing of fine distinctions, is wont to draw a sharp line between the region of illusion and that of sane intelligence.

James Sully was among the last and most graceful of the British associationist psychologists — the empiricist school of Locke, Hume, the Mills, Bain, and Spencer — and, in the same years, a pioneer of the systematic study of children and a genial theorist of laughter, illusion, and beauty. A man of letters as much as a scientist, friend of George Eliot and G. H. Lewes, he wrote a psychology that kept the literary warmth and human breadth of the older tradition even as the new experimental laboratories were displacing it.

Topics James Sully addresses

• associationism
• the laws of association
• the psychology of illusion
• error as a window on the normal mind
• illusions of perception, memory, and belief
• child study
• the observation of childhood
• the psychology of laughter
• the play-attitude and agreeable incongruity
• the theory of the comic
• the critique of pessimism
• the hedonic calculus
• British empiricist psychology
• sensation and intuition
• the building-up of mind from sensation
• the human mind as a textbook system
• the teacher's psychology
• imagination and imagery in the child
• the child's drawing and language
• aesthetics and the sense of beauty
• the reconstructive nature of memory
• dreams and the imagery of sleep
• attention and interest
• the moral sense in children

Questions to put to James Sully

Associationism and the Building of Mind

• How do you build up the whole mind from elementary sensations?
• What are the laws of association and how do they organize experience?
• Don't we need to assume some innate ideas or mental structures to explain thought?
• How does association explain complex thinking like reasoning or imagination?
• What role does the nervous system play in your associationist account?

The Psychology of Illusion

• Why do you say illusions reveal the normal workings of the mind?
• How are the processes that produce error the same as those that produce truth?
• What kinds of illusions have you studied and what do they show?
• How does memory reconstruct and distort what we recall?
• Can we trust introspection if it's subject to systematic illusions?

Child Study and Mental Growth

• Why is watching children the key to understanding how the mind develops?
• What have you learned from observing children's drawings and play?
• How should teachers use your findings about the natural order of mental growth?
• What are the most revealing errors children make as their minds develop?
• How did you gather observations from parents and teachers for your studies?

Laughter and the Comic

• What is the play-attitude and why is it essential to laughter?
• How does incongruity produce the sense of the ludicrous?
• Why do children first laugh in tickling and games of mock-fear?
• What social functions does laughter serve beyond mere amusement?
• How is humor different from other forms of the comic?

Pessimism and the Hedonic Calculus

• What's wrong with Schopenhauer's claim that pain outweighs pleasure in life?
• How do the pessimists miscalculate the balance of satisfaction and suffering?
• What are the quiet positive pleasures that pessimists overlook?
• Is your critique of pessimism based on introspective errors you've catalogued elsewhere?
• Do you think life is worth living on balance?

Converse with James Sully on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in James Sully's own writing, cited to the page.