Journal of the History of Ideas

At its inception, and in the succeeding decades, the journal Mind was a publication of singular significance. Founded in 1876 by Alexander Bain, it was the first of its kind: the pioneering "philosophical journal" in the Anglophone world, to use Bain's own description.¹ Close on the heels of Nature, the hugely successful periodical established seven years earlier to address progress in the natural sciences, Mind would devote itself to another important domain of intellectual work in Britain and worldwide. At the time, science and philosophy were as yet poorly demarcated areas, and the primary ground on which this distinction was negotiated was the study of the human mind and its role in social phenomena.² Especially under its first two editors, George Croom Robertson (serving from the foundation to 1891) and G. F. Stout (from 1892 until 1920), the journal bore witness to a wholesale transformation of scholarly activity regarding these subjects.

The purview of Mind was advertised on its opening page by Croom Robertson.³ This introductory offering bears close scrutiny as an indication of how the journal would develop. Foremost, in his mission statement, Robertson elaborated his position in terms of a series of dichotomies that [End Page 259] Mind would bridge. As both an "organ for . . . original researches" and a "critical record," the journal would be an announcer for and a judge of new work on the phenomena of "subjective consciousness" as well as "objective" physiological operations. On the side of psychology, it would deal with such "natural" mental productions as language as well as the "abnormal mental phases" of insanity. It would treat the mental character of animals in addition to that of humans, employing a relative methodology encompassing "much of . . . Anthropology and all that is meant by Comparative Psychology." In its philosophical aspect, Mind would range from the theoretical ground of "ultimate questions" to applications in educational practice and "Logic, Aesthetics, and Ethics." It would deal with the historical background of philosophy and with "what is being done or left undone in the present day." While an obvious focus was expected on the intellectual community in Britain itself, attention would be granted to work "on the Continent and in America" and the reader was assured that "Mind will not be the organ of any philosophical school."

Mind's masthead, formally unchanged until 1972, denominated it as a "Quarterly Review of Philosophy and Psychology" but Robertson's comments indicate that it would encompass far more than this phrase might immediately suggest. Explicitly at issue was a wide range of controversies then current in Britain. Late Victorian culture was characterized by a self-conscious examination of its own status and prospects. Especially vital concerns included the secularization of knowledge-making institutions⁴; shifts in the role of public social movements⁵; the reshaping of scholarship to accommodate new modes of inquiry, fostering in the process new relationships between literature and science⁶; and the morality of scientific practice⁷—all items of substantive interest for Mind and its founding editor. [End Page 260]

As detailed in a pair of articles written for the journal's centennial in 1976, Mind under its first two editors gradually transformed into an exclusive forum for academic philosophy, shedding its aspirations to chronicle scientific psychology as well as its other broader goals for social reform.⁸ However, for a significant period, it continued to pursue the ambitious program of inquiry indicated on its very first page. In Robertson's introduction, Mind's territory was effectively defined to cover all of what was then known alternately as "moral philosophy" or "moral science." At the moment of the journal's foundation, this was a field undergoing wholesale transformation. An examination of the project of the new periodical provides a window into many important changes underway in intellectual activity at the time. That this project would be centered on problems of "mind" was hardly a surprise. The dominant orientation of British philosophy since the Enlightenment work of Locke and Hume had been directed toward issues of human society by way of an inquiry into individual mental operations. However, with...