H. P. Grice, "Philosophical Psychology: from Ward and Stout to the Armchair"

Ward, James (1843–1925), English philosopher and psychologist. Influenced by Lotze, Herbart, and Brentano, Ward sharply criticized Bain’s associationism and its allied nineteenth-century reductive naturalism. His psychology rejected the associationists’ sensationism, which regarded mind as passive, capable only of sensory receptivity and composed solely of cognitive presentations. Ward emphasized the mind’s inherent activity, asserting, like Kant, the prior existence of an inferred but necessarily existing ego or subject capable of feeling and, most importantly, of conation, shaping both experience and behavior by the willful exercise of attention. Ward’s psychology stresses attention and will. In his metaphysics, Ward resisted the naturalists’ mechanistic materialism, proposing instead a teleological spiritualistic monism. While his criticisms of associationism and naturalism were telling, Ward was a transitional figure whose positive influence is limited, if we except H. P. Grice who follows him to a T. Although sympathetic to scientific psychology – he founded scientific psychology in Britain by establishing a psychology laboratory  – he, with his student Stout, represented the beginning of armchair psychology at Oxford, which Grice adored. Through Stout he influenced the hormic psychology of McDougall, and Grice who calls himself a Stoutian (“until Prichard converted me”). Ward’s major work is “Psychology” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed., 1886), reworked as Psychological Principles (1918). See also ASSOCIATIONISM, JAMES, KANT.