Stout, G. F.

George Frederick Stout (1860-1944), English psychologist, was born on Tyneside. He went to Cambridge as a classical scholar of St. John‘s College and had a brilliant career there, gaining firsts in both parts of the classical tripos in 1881 and 1882 and in Part 2 of the moral science tripos in 1883. He was made a fellow of his college in 1884.

In 1886 Stout went to the University of Aberdeen as lecturer in comparative psychology. (At that time, comparative psychology did not designate the study of animal behavior; it meant treating psychology in a Darwinian rather than a philosophical context. The term thus corresponds rather closely to “functional psychology,” which was prevalent in the United States at about the same time [see Angell 1907; Herrnstein & Boring 1965, pp. 499-507].) In 1898 he became Wilde reader in mental philosophy at Oxford, and finally he moved north again to become professor of philosophy at St. Andrews University, where he remained from 1903 until his retirement in 1936.

Stout was essentially what is now disparagingly called an armchair psychologist, but this did not detract from his influence on British psychology, which continued into the years following World War i; the fifth edition of his Manual of Psychology (1899) appeared as late as 1938.

His first and most original book was Analytic Psychology, which appeared in 1896, to be followed by the Manual in 1899 and the Groundwork of Psychology in 1903. Thereafter his interests became more philosophical; he was, after all, a professor of philosophy by this time.

During the latter half of the nineteenth century the distinctively British account of mental processes, with its empiricism and associationism, as represented by James Mill and Alexander Bain, was influenced and greatly enriched by contemporary developments in Germany and in particular by the sophisticated epistemology of Kant. The transition from this older position was marked by the publication of James Ward‘s article “Psychology” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1886. This raised arguments against associationism that so far have not been satisfactorily answered.

Stout was a pupil of Ward, with whom he differed on many points of detail but on few of substance. He advanced some distance beyond his teacher, however, and in the fields of perception and cognition he put forward views that are often credited to later writers. For example, the Manual contains an early formulation of the gestalt position that, to be sure, lacks experimental evidence but does not differ in any essential from the theories elaborated in Germany during the decade after 1912. Also, in a chapter entitled “Conation and Cognitive Synthesis” in the second volume of Analytic Psychology, he developed the theme, later proved and illustrated experimentally by Piaget, that action is a basic component of cognitive structure.

Stout was in no sense a behaviorist, but he held that mind and body are always implicated with one another in two basic ways. First of all, minds are embodied; they are never to be found on their own. Second, the concept of awareness, or consciousness, implies the concepts of objectivity and externality. Yet, only introspective analysis is the proper task of the psychologist, and any discussion of the brain or sense organs involves a departure from the strictly psychological point of view. Thus, a great deal of what we now think of as experimental psychology would have been regarded by Stout as irrelevant to his field. Much of his work, therefore, is of merely historical interest, but even today his type of acute theoretical analysis might usefully precede experimental work on many of the more complex cognitive and perceptual processes.

James Drever

[For the historical context of Stout‘s work, see the biography ofWard, James; for discussion of the subsequent development of his ideas, seeDevelopmental psychology, article ona theory of development.]

WORKS BY STOUT

(1896) 1918 Analytic Psychology. 2 vols. London: Allen & Unwin.

(1899) 1938 Manual of Psychology. 5th ed. London: University Tutorial Press.

1903 Groundwork of Psychology. New York: Hinds & Noble.

1930 Studies in Philosophy and Psychology. New York: Macmillan.

1931 Mind and Matter. Cambridge Univ. Press. → Based on the Gifford lectures delivered between 1919 and 1921.

1952 God and Nature. Cambridge Univ. Press. → Published posthumously. Based on the Gifford lectures delivered between 1919 and 1921.

WORKS ABOUT STOUT

Angell, James R. 1907 The Province of Functional Psychology. Psychological Review 14:61-91.

Herrnstein, Richard J.; and Boring, E. G. (editors) 1965 A Sourcebook in the History of Psychology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

Passmore, J. A. 1944 G. F. Stout: 1860-1944. Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy 22:1-14. → Now called Australasian Journal of Philosophy. Contains a bibliography of Stout‘s works on pages 11-14.