James Sully

1842-1923 · British · Associationist and Child Psychology

The study of illusion has a peculiar value: it shows us the working of the mind by the light of its errors.

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

Converse with James Sully on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in James Sully's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.