The Senses and the Intellect (First Edition)

BAIN, Alexander. The Senses and the Intellect. London: John W. Parker and Son, 1855.

Large Octavo. Half calf and textured cloth. Spine gilt with titling on darker brown panels. Edges spotted red. Marbled endpapers. xxxi, 614 pp. First edition. Jessop, p. 85; NCBEL III, 1514; Rand I, 111.

When Alexander Bain published The Senses and the Intellect in 1855 — the same year as Herbert Spencer's Principles of Psychology and two years before Flaubert's Madame Bovary — he was attempting something that had not quite been attempted before: a systematic account of the human mind grounded not in metaphysical speculation but in physiology.

Bain was a Scotsman of working-class origin who had risen through the British empiricist tradition and his closest intellectual friendship was with John Stuart Mill, who recommended Parker as his publisher and read the manuscript with care. What Bain produced was a rigorous and comprehensive examination of the senses and the intellect as they were understood in the light of contemporary neurological science: tracing the connections between mental states and nervous activity, arguing for the reality of a muscular sense as a distinct mode of perception, and building an associationist psychology that was at once philosophically serious and experimentally grounded. A foundational work of the history of science, presented in a sound and handsome early binding.

Very good. Binding generally very good. Leather supple and in good order. Some mild rubbing at corners and spine ends, small chip to spine. Contents very good with mild and scattered foxing throughout, stronger to preliminaries. Angus & Robertson seller stamp to lower front pastedown.

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Catalogue Number: HH000400