Classic Text No. 128: Thomas Brown's comments on Erasmus Darwin's view on madness

In his book Observations on the Zoonomia of Erasmus Darwin MD, Thomas Brown included a critical chapter on the analysis of madness proposed by Darwin in Zoonomia. Although neither Darwin nor Brown are ground-breaking in their views on madness, they illustrate the transitional accounts of madness that were being entertained at the end of the eighteenth century, particularly among writers who had studied at Edinburgh University.

Associationism without associative links: Thomas Brown and the associationist project

There are two roles that association played in 18th-19th century associationism. The first dominates modern understanding of the history of the concept: association is a causal link posited to explain why ideas come in the sequence they do. The second has been ignored: association is merely regularity in the trains of thought, and the target of explanation. The view of association as regularity arose in several forms throughout the tradition, but Thomas Brown (1778-1820) makes the distinction explicit. He argues that there is no associative link, and association is mere sequence. I trace this view of association through the tradition, and consider its implications: Brown's views, in particular, motivate a rethinking of the associationist tradition in psychology. Associationism was a project united by a shared explanandum phenomenon, rather than a theory united by a shared theoretical posit.