Helping San Diego, California and beyond since 1997.
Do you need
volunteer, community service, work, military or court hours?
|
|
Helping San Diego, California and beyond since 1997.
|
|
Click here and add this page to your favorites!
|
Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: HAN-HEG |
|
|
HARTLEY, DAVID (17051757) , English philosopher, and founder of the Associationist school of psychologists, was born on the 3oth of August 1705. He was educated at Bradford grammar school and Jesus College, Cambridge , of which society he became a fellow in 1727. Originally intended for the Church, he was deterred from taking orders by certain scruples as to signing the Thirty-nine Articles, and took up the study of medicine
Newark , Bury St Edmunds, London, and lastly at Bath, where he died on the 28th of August 1757. His Observations on Man was published in 1749, three years after Condillac's Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines, in which theories essentially similar to his were expounded. It is in two partsthe first dealing with the frame
body
drawn
work
chief
The outlines of Hartley's theory are as follows. With Locke he asserted that, prior to sensation, the human mind is a blank. By a growth from simple sensations those states of consciousness which appear most remote from sensation come into being. And the one 1 Anonymously in the 1731 ed., with acknowledgment in 1758 ed.law of growth of which Hartley took account was the law of contiguity, synchronous and successive. By this law he sought to explain, not only the phenomena of memory, which others had similarly explained before him, but also the phenomena of emotion, of reasoning, and of voluntary and involuntary action (see AssocIATION OF IDEAS). By his physical theory Hartley gave the first strong impulse to the modern study of the intimate connexion of physiological and psychical facts which has proved so fruitful, though his physical theory in itself is inadequate, and has not been largely adopted. He held that sensation is the result of a vibration of the minute particles of the medullary substance of the nerves, to account for which he postulated, with Newton, a subtle elastic ether, rare in the interstices of solid bodies and in their close neighbourhood, and denser as it recedes from them. Pleasure is the result of moderate vibrations, pain of vibrations so violent as to break the continuity of the nerves. These vibrations leave behind them in the brain a tendency to fainter vibrations or " vibratiuncles " of a similar kind, which correspond to " ideas of sensation." Thus memory is accounted for. The course of reminiscence and of the thoughts generally, when not immediately dependent upon external sensation, is accounted for on the ground that there are always vibrations in the brain on account of its heat and the pulsation of its arteries. What these vibrations shall be is determined by the nature of each man's past experience, and by the influence of the circumstances of the moment, which causes now one now another tendency to prevail over the rest. Sensations which are often associated together become each associated with the ideas corresponding to the others; and the ideas corresponding to the associated sensations become associated together, sometimes so intimately that they form what appears to be a new simple idea, not without careful analysis resolvable into its component parts. Starting, like the modern Associationists, from a detailed account of the phenomena of the senses, Hartley tries to show how, by the above laws
See life of Hartley by his son in the 18o1 edition of the Observations, which also contains notes and additions translated from the German of H. A. Pistorius; Sir Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (3rd ed., 1902), and article in the Dictionary of National Biography; G. S. Bower, Hartley and James Mill (1881); B. Schonlank, Hartley and Priestley
End of Article: HARTLEY, DAVID (17051757) If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
<a href="http://jcsm.org/StudyCenter/Encyclopedia/HAN_HEG/HARTLEY_DAVID_17051757_.html"> HARTLEY, DAVID (17051757) </a> |
|
|
(Previous) HARTLEPOOL |
(Next) HARTLEY, JONATHAN SCOTT (1845 ) |
|
Sponsored Advertisements