Bain, ALEXANDER

Bain, ALEXANDER, writer on mental philosophy, was born at Aberdeen in 1818. Educated at the university of his native city, he lectured there as deputy-professor for a few years, afterwards taught Natural Philosophy at the Andersonian University, Glasgow, filled the office of assistant-secretary to the Metropolitan Sanitary Committee and the Board of Health, examined in mental philosophy for the university of London and the Indian Civil Service, and was appointed in 1860 to the chair of Logic in Aberdeen. He resigned in 1881, and the same year was elected Rector of his university. In 1859 he was made LL. D. by the Edinburgh University. Bain's chief works are The Senses and the Intellect (1855), and The Emotions and the Will (1859), completing a systematic exposition of the phenomena of the human mind. Other books are Mental and Moral Science, a Compendium of Psychology and Ethics (1868); Logic, Deductive and Inductive (1870); The Relation of Mind and Body (1873); Education as a Science (1879). He wrote also a biography of James Mill (1881), as well as a criticism of John Stuart Mill (1882), besides several handbooks of English grammar; he assisted in editing Grote's Aristotle, and edited Grote's Minor Works. In philosophy, Bain is a conspicuous representative of the empirical or experimental school, in opposition to the a priori, or transcendental. His psychology is based on physiology, after the manner of Hartley's; but instead of considering the human organism as capable only of receiving impressions and of acting in response thereto, he finds in it a power of originating active impulses (Spontaneity), and thus obviates many of the defects alleged by a priori philosophers to inhere in the system of sensationalism, as hitherto exhibited. His two chief works were pronounced by J. S. Mill to be the most careful, the most complete, and the most genuinely analytical exposition of the human mind which a posteriori psychology had produced. See ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS.