‎HARTLEY (D.)‎
‎De l'homme, de ses facultés physiques et intellectuelles, de ses devoirs et de ses espérances. Ouvrage traduit de l'anglais avec des notes explicatives de R.A. SICARD -- 2 VOLUMES (COMPLETE SET) -- BEL EXEMPLAIRE‎

‎P;, Ducauroy, 1802, 2 volumes in 8 reliés en demi-basane rouge, dos ornés de filets dorés (reliures de l'époque), (quelques rousseurs), T.1 : 10pp., 402pp., T.2 : (2), 430pp.‎

Reference : 2584

‎---- EDITION ORIGINALE de cette traduction de l'ouvrage de HARTLEY par l'Abbé SICARD, successeur de l'ABBE DE L'EPEE à la tête de l'institut des sourds-muets ---- BEL EXEMPLAIRE ---- "THE FOUNTAINHEAD OF SOMME THE MOST IMPORTANT IDEAS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL, BIOLOGICAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL THOUTHT". (DSB) ---- "HARTELY wrote one important work, Observations on man, his frame, his duty and his expectation... The first volume of Observations is a tour de force which considers every significant topic in neurophysiology and human and comparative psychology, explained in terms of the development of complex ideas and habits from simple sensations and their repeated juxtapositions in experience. Mental associations were paralleled by vibrations of particles in the nervous system that persisted in the form of smaller 'vibratuncles' which provided the physical basis for memory... The significance of Hartley's work did not lie in any new empirical findings but in a set of assumptions and a framework for approaching the phenomena of life and mind. In the century following the publication of Observations, the work came to be seen as the fountainhead of some of the most important ideas in biological, psychological and social thought. Viewed in a narrow perspective, it was the first published work in english to use the term "psychology" in its modern sense. Hartley's principles provides the conceptual framework for the associationist tradition in modern psychology, including learning theory and psychoanalysis. His speculations about the physiology of the nervous system laid the foundations for the dominant sensory-motor interpretation of neuro-physiology and the experimental localization of functions in the cerebral cortex. It is misleading, however, to separate the psycholo-physiological from the more general aspects of Hartley's influence. His book is the central document in the history of attempts to apply the categories of science to the study of man and society... Considered conceptually, Hartley's was the first systematic elaboration of the explanatory principle that came to play an analogous role in the biological and human sciences to the concept of gravity or attraction in the physicochemical sciences. His unification of sensation, motion, association, and vibrations in a coherent mechanistic theory of experience and behavior provided the grounds for the secularization of the concepts of adaptation and utility... Erasmus Darwin used Hartley's mechanisms as the basis for his theory of evolution and for his system of medical classification in Zoonomia... Müller drew on Hartley's motor theory of learning, which was by then gaining support from findings in experimental neurophysiology. A. Bain integrated Hartley's sensory-motor physiology with the mainstream of the english tradition of associationist psychology. Théories of evolution also drew on Hartleian mechanisms. Thus, Spencer's evolutionary theory extended associationist learning theory from the experience of the individual to that of the race. J. Hughlings Jackson applied these conceptions to the physiology and pathology of the brain, while David Ferrier applied them to the experimental localization of cerebral functions...". (DSB VI p. 139) ---- Zilboorg pp. 192, 282, 397 - Norman N° 1003 english ed. - Hunter & Macalpine pp. 379/382 - MacHenry**2584/F2‎