In nineteenth-century Britain, the story of thinking about other people was inseparable from the story of the struggle between the different intellectual disciplines that took thinking about other people as their proper business. The tension between psychology and philosophy – overlapping, but increasingly discrete, disciplines – forms a crucial context for this chapter and the next. This chapter explores how the Scottish philosopher James Frederick Ferrier (1808–1864) forged out of this tension an engaging understanding of thinking as a form of action.

The history of psychology in nineteenth-century Britain generally goes like this. Before the nineteenth century, the study of the human mind did not draw clear distinctions between philosophical and psychological speculation, nor did some aspects of human life – the emotions, or perception, for example – belong clearly to one or the other. The dominant intellectual traditions in England and Scotland – empiricism, associationism, and “Common Sense” realism – made the identity of psychology and philosophy particularly durable, well into the nineteenth century. Because, since Locke, anglophone philosophical speculation had largely concerned the origins of ideas in experience, and the laws by which the mind exercised its powers, philosophy was always in essence psychological in orientation: it focused on how the mind is shaped by its environment, and was at least in theory hospitable to empirical testing.