Abraham Tucker as an 18th-century William James: Stream of consciousness,role of examples,and the importance of writing

The life of Tucker

Abraham Tucker led an uneventful life. He did not move in the intellectual circles of the age, but for the most part lived quietly in Surrey on his large country estate. Most of the information about his life comes from a very brief biography which his grandson, Sir Henry Paulet St. John Mildmay, wrote as a preface for a republication of Tucker’s major work, The Light of Nature Pursued (Mildmay, 1831; see also Young, 2004). Tucker’s father, a wealthy merchant, died when Tucker was still a child. Having inherited the family fortune, Tucker never needed to seek a university or clerical position. Unwilling to engage in public controversy and reluctant to push himself forward, he preferred to stay at home, pursuing his intellectual interests and attending to the education of his two daughters.

Tucker published nothing under his own name. He published two minor tracts (1755 and 1773)—the first, an anonymous light-hearted piece, supposedly written by a country gentleman advising his son to avoid politics; and the second, a pseudonymous booklet arguing how to reform spelling to match the spoken word. Apart from these, Tucker’s literary efforts were devoted to Light of Nature, which he started in 1756, two years after the death of his much-missed wife. He published a lengthy, preliminary chapter on free will as a separate booklet in 1763, under the pseudonym Edward Search. This booklet, Freewill, Foreknowledge and Fate (1763a), contained a preface by Tucker’s other pseudonymous persona, Cuthbert Comment, who described himself as Edward’s cousin and a member of “an under branch of the Searches” (Tucker, 1763a, p. xxv). Mr. Comment added several footnotes to the main text. Following a critical review of Freewill in Monthly Review, Mr. Comment came to the spirited defence of his cousin in a separate booklet (Tucker, 1763b). Light of Nature’s first two parts (comprising five books) were published in 1768, under the name of Edward Search, but without editorial contributions from Cuthbert Comment.

Tucker continued working on his great opus, finishing it shortly before his death in 1774. The last years were difficult. He had gone blind, but his older daughter, Judith, helped him complete the work, transcribing his words and reading drafts back to him. She even taught herself ancient Greek to help with the task. Judith oversaw the posthumous publication of the final four books. She discarded her father’s literary conceit of being Search, publishing these volumes under his own name.

Tucker’s death hardly bothered the outside world. The Annual Register, which had not reviewed Tucker’s work in 1768, failed to mention him when it listed the notable deaths of 1774. It recorded the death of the town clerk for the City of London, who died a few days before Tucker; and then it listed the death of a Lincolnshire co-heiress, who died a week later. In between these two listings, it did not record the passing of the author of Light of Nature (Annual Register, 1775, pp. 198–199).

Tucker’s project

Even Tucker’s most dedicated admirers will admit that Light of Nature is not a tightly structured work. It digresses, as Tucker allows his imagination to wander down some quirky by-ways. This is particularly pronounced in the last volumes, which were written when the author could no longer read his own drafts or earlier chapters. Nevertheless, the basic project is clear: Tucker wished to present a case for rational Christianity, opposing both materialist atheism and the bigotry of unreasoning faith. There was nothing unusual in the project itself. Rational Christianity for Tucker meant faith rooted in a rational understanding of nature. God had established “the laws of nature”, and so any Christian philosophy “proceeds by the study of nature”, including human nature (Tucker, 1843, p. 462). ¹ The first part of Light of Nature was subtitled “Human Nature” whilst the second part was “Theology”; the volumes published posthumously bore the subtitle “Lights of Nature and Gospel Blended”.

For his analysis of human nature and particularly for his analysis of human thinking, Tucker drew inspiration from Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690/1960). In the Introduction to Light of Nature, Tucker modestly claimed that “whatever I may be able to do I stand indebted to Mr. Locke”, who had facilitated the increase of knowledge “by pointing out the sources and channels from whence it must be derived”. However greatly Tucker venerated Locke, he nevertheless found himself at liberty “to dissent from him in some few instances”, adding that “this happens very seldom” (Tucker, 1768, Vol. I, ii, pp. xviii–xix). Tucker may have downplayed his differences from Locke, and certainly they do not signify a great ideological or theological divide. However, as will be suggested, they indicate a very different view of the way that the mind works and how its operations should be described.

One of Tucker’s contemporaries, David Hartley, also attempted to use Locke’s analysis of the mind as a means of building rational Christianity upon a scientific study of human nature (Allen, 1999). In this regard, Hartley’s Observations on Man (1749/1834) resembles Light of Nature. It also has two parts: the first analyses the human mind and the second provides a theology supposedly based on the first part. Hartley’s approach was much more systematic than Tucker’s. Hartley analysed the human mind in terms of the principle of association, which he derived from Locke. He combined this with a theoretical neuropsychology, based on the passage of vibrations along the nervous system—an idea which he derived from Newton.

Despite certain outward similarities between Hartley’s work and his own, Tucker was critical of Observations. He distrusted Hartley’s theory of vibrations, viewing it as fundamentally materialist. According to Tucker (1768, Vol. I, ii, pp. 66ff.), Hartley was reducing human action to the laws of physiology and was thereby denying free will. The two writers differed in their approaches. Unlike Tucker, Hartley was a systematizer, trying to organize all human psychology around the principles of association and neurological vibration. Historians of psychology, recognizing something familiar in Hartley’s style of neuropsychological theorizing, have often credited him with being one of the first “proper”, scientific psychologists (e.g., Glassman & Buckingham, 2007; Goodwin, 2004; Hergenhahn, 2001; Wade, 2005).

Tucker might have criticized Hartley for being a materialist, but he also stressed that human experience required a body. Without eyes, ears, and nervous connections to the brain, we would not be able to see or hear (Tucker, 1768, Vol. II, ii, pp. 7ff.). Tucker was aware that this assumption contained theological perils. If the body is necessary for experience, this would mean that there could be no conscious life after the death of the body. In the theological part of Light of Nature, Tucker produced a mystical “hypothesis”, proposing that on death the soul departs from the body in a tiny bodily vehicle that is too small to be seen by the naked eye. The soul continues to exist in this vehicular state until it ultimately progresses to the “mundane state”, when it loses its individuality and becomes at one with all previous souls. Tucker describes his vision of having met the vehicular John Locke. The dead philosopher, now inhabiting a tiny body, greets him warmly: “Welcome, Ned Search, into the vehicular state…I have noticed a faint resemblance in your way of thinking with mine” (Tucker, 1768, Vol. II, ii, p. 127). Tucker (or Search) then has an enjoyable chat with Locke about matters philosophical and vehicular. Locke explains how he can still speak, despite lacking a mouth between his vehicular nose and enormous chin. As James would do many years later, Tucker takes mystical themes seriously without abandoning good sense or down-to-earth humour (James, 1902; and see particularly James, 1908, for his defence of entertaining unproven religious hypotheses).

I will not be discussing these aspects of Tucker’s work (but see Martin & Barresi, 2000, for an excellent discussion of Tucker’s ideas about the unity of the person). Nor will the present discussion deal with the theme that brought Tucker a little bit of posthumous fame, which perhaps, in the company of the vehicular Locke, he might have been able to observe with enjoyment. In the early part of the 19th century, William Paley became the most important ethical philosopher in England, advocating a sort of Christian utilitarianism. He found in Tucker the idea that humans do not just pursue their own individual happiness, but that they also pursue, or rather they should pursue, the common happiness of all (see Tucker, 1777, chap. 1). Paley (1791) praised Tucker: “I have found in this writer more original thinking and observation upon the several subjects that he has taken in hand than in any other, not to say, than in all others put together” (pp. xxv–xxvi). Interestingly, Paley explained who Tucker was, as if he did not expect his readers to recognize the author’s name.

Paley (1791) wrote that Tucker’s “talent for illustration is unrivalled” (p. xxvi). Tucker’s social utilitarianism may not be relevant to the present discussion, but his talent for illustration most certainly is. It shaped the character of his psychological analyses, putting him at one with James.

Tucker’s style and approach

In his preface, “To the Reader”, of Freewill, Foreknowledge, Tucker discussed his approach, aims, and literary style. He said that he neither sought nor expected applause for his writing: “[T]he Searches were never remarkable for a fondness for fame” (Tucker, 1763a, p. xiv). Although he worked in isolation, he took care with his writing: “I am sure it has cost me infinite pains to save pains to my Reader” (p. xviii). Because his topics were “unentertaining and dry”, he endeavoured “to embellish them with a diversity of style” in order to “relieve the Reader and keep his attention awake” (p. xiii). Sometimes he treated his Reader as a friend, “as if we were sitting together over a bottle” (p. xiv). In the “Preface of the Annotator”, Cuthbert Comment, himself a humorous embellishment, claimed that “few since Plato have attempted to intersperse humour and gaiety among close arguments” (p. xxvii).

Interspersing argument with humour would also be characteristic of James. Hugo Münsterberg (1996) wrote that James’s textbooks have “the intimate warmth of a friend” and “the charm of a perfect artist”; students read them as if reading a novel (p. 109). One historian of psychology has claimed that James’s Principles contains the richest descriptions of human experience in non-fictional writing (Wozniak, 1999). There was an oft-repeated saying about the James brothers: William wrote psychology like a novelist, while his brother Henry wrote novels like a psychologist (the saying can be traced to Rebecca West [1916, p. 11]). Tucker (1763a), however, cautioned his Reader not to read his work as if it were a novel “where one has little else to do than drive on post haste to see how it ends” (p. xxi).

There is a reason why some of James’s readers might have read his books as if they were novels, and why Tucker might have worried lest his readers did likewise. Quite apart from their respective literary skills—and the trouble they took to acquire such skills—both James and Tucker placed great emphasis on describing examples. Like novelists, they gave primacy to the particular, rather than treating particulars as the servants of theory. In his Preface to the Reader, Tucker (1763a) wrote that he sought understanding through “experience and observation of ourselves” (p. vii), examining the workings of the mind “in the common occurrencies of life” (p. viii). He counselled his hypothetical reader “to judge of the abstract in the concrete” and to fix upon “particular instances” (p. xxii). James’s recent biographer has commented that it is “the parade of examples” that brings Varieties of Religious Experience to life (Richardson, 2007, p. 414).

James and Tucker reflected on their own feelings with humanity and homeliness. They did not describe the philosophical ego triumphing over ignorance. In one of the most famous passages of Principles, James discusses how he found it difficult to get out of bed on a cold morning. He writes that, “if I may generalize from my own experience”, we suddenly find ourselves having got up without a decision—“a fortunate lapse of consciousness has occurred” (James, 1890, Vol. 2, p. 524). Similarly, James described his problems in concentrating. He shares his readers’ weaknesses. And so did Tucker. Criticizing Locke’s claim that a good student only leaves his studies to satisfy an appetite, Tucker (1768) says that after a morning’s work on his book, he finds himself in need of recreation:

I then throw aside my papers sometime before dinner; the veriest trifle suits my purpose best: the philosopher can loll out at window like Miss Gawkey, to see the wheelbarrow trundle, or the butcher’s dog carry the tray, and is perfectly contented with his situation. (Vol. 1, i, p. 140)

Then the dinner bell sounds; the philosopher stops his gawking and rushes down to the parlour.

Most of Tucker’s disagreements with Locke came when he examined particular examples. This is clear when Tucker discussed motives in chapter VI of Light of Nature. Locke in his Essay (1690/1960) had produced a rather sketchy account of human motivation, based on the search for pleasure and the avoidance of pain (Vol. 2, xx–xxii, pp.159ff.). Pleasures and pains create uneasiness, and we are motivated to remove that uneasiness and seek satisfaction—hence we engage in motivated actions. Tucker saw great merit in Locke’s account, but he felt it was limited. To be sure, there were moments of uneasiness leading us to satisfy desires, but not all our actions stemmed from uneasiness.

Locke had concentrated on important actions in life, rather than common occurrences. Tucker (1768) saw that we are continually filling our time performing little actions without deliberation or inner uneasiness, such as the moments “in our idle hours or vacant spaces of time [when] we turn our eyes to look at a butterfly, or put down our hands to remove the flap of our waistcoat that had gotten between us and the chair” (Vol. 1, i, p. 101). Tucker parades examples, often from his own experience: “I speak only for myself: when I sit down to dinner I feel no uneasiness in being hungry, rather rejoice in having a good appetite” (pp. 126–127). Frequently, the expectation of pleasure itself can produce further pleasures, not uneasiness. When we are thirsty on a hot day, we may derive pleasure in seeing the wine sparkle as it is poured from a bottle, and in hearing “the little glug glugs” (p. 127).

There are no disquisitions on the psychological effects of glug glugs in Locke’s Essay. But, as will be seen, the expectation of future pleasure (or pain) reflected something fundamental about human experience that Tucker stressed. Tucker (1768) claimed he differed from Locke only in detail: “Though I do not pretend to a clearer, perhaps I may to a more microscopic eye: I consider action more minutely” (Vol. 1, i, p.119). In several places, Tucker used the metaphor of a microscope to describe his mode of analysis. “We Searches”, he wrote, “although not many of us are clever at handling the telescope, are observed to be in general very fond of the microscope” (Tucker, 1843, p. 455). In essence, Tucker was defending the sort of method that a James or a Goffman would use: looking in detail at what people do and feel, rather than constructing a grand scheme and then searching for examples to fit the theory. Characteristically, Tucker laughed at his chosen metaphorical method. The microscope is not always useful: “[I]f you walk in the street with a pair of microscopes tied to your eyes, you will perpetually be running against people” (Tucker, 1843, p. 459).

Tucker’s method was not really a “method” in the modern sense, but he was engaging in what Ernest Hilgard (1987) would call “psychologizing”. To “psychologize” was, in Hilgard’s view, “to reflect on ordinary observations” and then to offer such a plausible interpretation that “detailed proof would seem irrelevant—or at least too tedious to be worth the effort” (p. 50). Tucker (1768) advised his readers not to consider him to be “unveiling a secret unknown to them”; instead he was just making “an observation they cannot fail of making themselves upon such notice” (Vol. 1, vi, p. 76). In his introduction, Tucker made the same point. No reader should expect new discoveries: “I pretend only to remind him of things that may have slipped his memory or point out to him objects that may have escaped his notice” (p. xvi). But as Hilgard realized, it is no mean skill to show people something about themselves that they regularly overlook.

According to Hilgard, James was the “the preeminent psychologizer”; and this was why James produced such “a full-bodied, warm-hearted psychology” (Hilgard, 1987, p. 50; see also Hunt, 1994). James, with the latest experimental and physiological research to aid him, could remind his readers of their small, easily forgotten foibles. We can smile with self-recognition at his observations. James, of course, was opposing the cold psychology of German introspectionism with a looser form of self-analysis (Myers, 1997). Some psychologists, notably Baldwin and Hall, criticized James’s Principles, when it was first published, for being too unsystematic and too personal (Henley, 2007; Richardson, 2007, pp. 301ff.). James valued understanding the particular over the formulation of grand theory. Similarly, when put alongside Locke’s theory-driven descriptions of action (or those of Hartley), Tucker’s accounts convey a full-bodied, unsystematic, warm-hearted sense of humanity.

Stream of thought

The parallels between Tucker and James would be interesting, but not necessarily crucial, if they were based solely on their stylistic similarities as writers. Additionally, however, there are substantive similarities in the way the two understood the nature of consciousness. James’s most famous “discovery”—that consciousness is a stream—has its parallels in Tucker’s work.

Tucker’s analysis of the mind differed from that of Locke (and also from later associationists) in one very important respect. Tucker did not use his metaphorical microscope to isolate particular states of mind which supposedly exist at a given instant. He saw actions and thoughts occurring over time and, thus, the mind had to be analysed in relation to sequential patterns of living. This is apparent in Tucker’s descriptions of pleasure and uneasiness. The common occurrences that he described are actions taking place across time: we are hot and thirsty, sit down and wait for the drink to be poured, and so on. He is envisaging a sequence of events rather than an isolated, psychological moment.

When discussing the anticipation of pleasure, Tucker wrote that the present moment does not really exist as such, for we are always looking forward. Although philosophers might talk of the present, “this present time is in reality the next succeeding instant” (Tucker, 1768, Vol. 1, i, p. 108). This can be seen in the way we perceive things. Our perceptions “flow in upon us without intermission and we generally have a foresight of them before they come” (p. 109). Moreover, we can affect what we are about to see. In this regard, the future is mixed with the present. James made the same point, adding the past to the mixture of present and future. In Principles he wrote that the present only exists in an abstract sense, and that we do not have a consciousness of it (James, 1890, Vol. I, pp. 608f.). Any perception of an object is complex, and “part of the complexity is the echo of the objects just past, and, in a less degree, perhaps, the foretaste of those just to arrive” (p. 606).

For James, these notions of perception, involving past and present, follow from his famous conception of consciousness as a stream. James (1890) wrote that consciousness is unbroken and feels unbroken, although it can be interrupted when we sleep; otherwise “consciousness remains sensibly continuous and one” (Vol. I, p. 238). James could equally have repeated Tucker’s description that perceptions flow without intermission. James stressed that consciousness was not chopped up into bits: “A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described”. He declared that henceforth we should refer to “the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life” (p. 239). He described this as “the primal fact” of the science of psychology (James, 1899, p. 15).

Tucker used the same metaphor. He argued that the mind is both active and passive. We cannot completely control our thoughts, even if we are deliberating upon an issue intently, rather than staring out of the window. The thinker is like a hound sniffing a trail: we might decide to follow the trail but we have not laid it down, so that we do not know where it might lead. The mind only begins a train of thinking, “but the thoughts introduce one another successively” (Tucker, 1768, Vol. 1, i, p. 11). Tucker says we can compare the thinker to a “man who has a river running through his grounds” (p. 12). The river might break into several channels; if the land owner tries to dam up one of the channels, the river still flows through others. The flow of the river is unstoppable, and so it is with our thoughts, which “are perpetually working so long as we are awake” (p. 13). We may divert our thoughts, but we “can never totally prevent them from moving” (p. 13).

For James, the river of consciousness meant that thoughts and feelings never repeat themselves in exactly the same way. Tucker emphasized another point, from which James would not dissent. However much we try to control our thoughts—and both James and Tucker agreed we should try—we can seldom, if ever, succeed in retaining full control. Our conscious life happens to us as much as, if not more than, we direct it to happen. The rational, dominant ego (or “will”) is a myth. We are not the masters (or mistresses) of our own minds: as Tucker (1768) wrote, “We cannot constantly keep a watchful eye on our thoughts”, but notions will start up “in the fancy” (Vol. 1, i, p. 370). According to Tucker, the mind “cannot lie a moment inactive” for “she works incessantly…and if her weightier motives suspend their action ever so little, some lighter will slip in to keep her in play” (p. 91). Some ideas are like lightning: they “flash, strike and vanish; they pass so swiftly we cannot get a look at them nor remember their existence” (p. 92).

Tucker was again departing from Locke, for he was denying that thinking or mental activity can be equated with consciousness. In one of the few passages from the Light of Nature to be quoted by a 19th-century psychologist, Tucker wrote that the mind can continue working even when we are asleep. On waking, we can find that our ideas “have ranged themselves anew”, and this shows that “our organs do not stand idle the moment that we cease to employ them” (Tucker, 1768, Vol. 1, i, p. 249). William Carpenter, the celebrated physiologist, quoted this passage to support his notion of “unconscious cerebration” or brain activity giving rise to thinking without conscious experience (Carpenter, 1879, p. 531). By the time James was writing, it was becoming acknowledged not only that unconscious thinking existed, but that its study was central to the new discipline of psychology. One American textbook, published five years after Principles, claimed that the largest class of mental activities to be studied by psychologists were unconscious ones (Krohn, 1895, p. 18). James, of course, had given great attention to our habits, fidgets, and the “fringes of experience” of which we are largely unaware.

The importance of habits

There is further parallel between the ideas of Tucker and James: the importance of habits. One authority has claimed that the most widely quoted chapter of Principles is the chapter on habits (Hothersall, 1984). James argued that much of our behaviour and experience is habitual. We develop habits of language, habits of mind, bodily habits, and so on. Some of our habits are “known” by the body, not the conscious mind: “Few men can tell off-hand which sock, shoe or trouser-leg they put on first”. To remember, they must mentally rehearse the act and “even that is often insufficient—the act must be performed” (James, 1890, Vol. 1, p. 113). There are also habits of mind. It is through the development of perceptual habits that we come to understand the world. In a famous phrase, James described the world of the infant, who, assailed by all senses at once, perceives it all as just “one great blooming buzzing confusion” (p. 488). Gradually, the infant learns to make sense of this confusion, selecting certain elements and ignoring others. This selectivity becomes habitual, as the mind, without conscious awareness, learns to focus on some elements and weed out others.

Conscious thinking can also be guided by habits. Although James (1890) described thinking as a stream, thoughts pass before us “in a train or a chain” (Vol.1, p. 240). In this respect, thought is jointed, as we pass from one train of thought to another (Bailey [1999] discusses whether this conflicts with James’s notion of the continuity of thinking). Because our brains continually build up connections between nerves, our minds build up habitual trains of thought. As we start thinking of one thing, so we move habitually to another. These conceptual habits ensure that we do not have to start from scratch each time we think. The individual could have no meaningful life without habits, whether conceptual, perceptual, or behavioural. Habits also provide the routines that are vital for social life. In another striking phrase, James (1890) described habit as “the enormous fly-wheel of society” (Vol. 1, p. 121).

All these ideas—with the exception of the physiological speculations about the nervous system building up well-used connections—can be found in Tucker, who likewise stressed the importance of habits. Like James, Tucker envisaged the world of the infant as overloaded by confusing sensations. Nature presents her objects, he wrote, “in a chaos, or confused multitude, wherein there is nothing distinct, nothing connected”; instead, sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings “rush in all the five avenues of sensation, and accost the mind in one act of perception” (Tucker, 1768, Vol. 1, i, p. 223). The mind learns to select, to pay attention to some things not others—there is a “culling of particular objects from the whole number exhibited to view” (p. 225). And we begin to associate some objects with feelings, memories, and so on.

Tucker paid great attention to the nature and operation of trains of thinking. He saw it as part of our nature to form and use trains: “Though the mind by her notice begins the formation of a train, there is something in our internal mechanism that strengthens and completes the concatenation” (1768, Vol. 1, i, p. 248). Once we have formed trains of thought then, “whatever suggests the first link, the rest will follow readily of their own accord” (p. 249). So, too, we might have behavioural habits; and Tucker discussed such small gestures as rearranging a waistcoat or picking at one’s fingers. Having chains of thought and habits were vital for life. Our first attempts at so many actions are awkward and slow, “while we are forced to dig up everything by dint of application”; but when we have formed “proper trains, that will spring up of their own accord”, then we find “we can go on expeditiously, readily and perfectly” (p. 254).

In Tucker’s view, the importance of habit eclipses that of conscious judgement for the conduct of everyday life, both on an individual and a social level. He suggested: “The tenor of our lives, and success of our endeavours, depends more upon habit than judgement” (Tucker, 1768, Vol. 1, ii, pp. 93–94). He claimed that “our habits both of thinking and acting” depend on the same cause, namely “the spontaneous or mechanical rising of ideas in thought” (Tucker, 1777, iv, p. 175). Habit does not triumph by force, “but steals upon you imperceptibly, or teases or tires you into a compliance” (Tucker, 1768, Vol. 1, ii, p. 93). Because habits include our perceptions of objects, management of limbs, trains of thought, and “common forms and modes of behavior[,] . . . there is no living in the world without falling into habits” (Tucker, 1777, iv, p. 183).

Tucker may not have used the metaphor of the fly-wheel, but his meaning was similar to James’s. He had an additional argument that distinguished formal rules from habits. Rules, habits, and customs share an affinity “for they all tend to produce a uniformity of custom” (Tucker, 1777, iv, p. 246). We need rules for social life, but they are often irksome and restrictive. People react against them. However, habitual customs are far more efficacious than consciously followed rules. When rules become familiar, they cease to be consciously followed or resisted. Instead, they become “habits or ways of acting fallen currently into without care or reflection” (p. 246). Of course, some customs and habits can have ill consequences, such as the habits of prejudice or “habits of misapprehension and misjudging common among all degrees of men” (p. 188). James (1890) pointed out that habit, the great social fly-wheel, was society’s “most precious conservative agent” (Vol. 1, p. 121). Tucker appreciated that such conservatism had its dangers, as well as benefits. Habits, just like microscopes, can sometimes restrict our vision of the world.

Forgetting Tucker

Why has Tucker been forgotten? It is insufficient just to say, as Paley did, that the reason lies in the rambling nature of Tucker’s great book. Some thinkers have made and sustained reputations on the basis of long, unreadable works. We can all think of examples. Actually, William Hazlitt published a compact version of Light of Nature in 1807, on the recommendation of the poet Coleridge. This abbreviated volume fared no better than its much longer original. It was certainly less successful than James’s compact version of Principles which was published as Psychology: Briefer course (1892). James was writing for an identifiable market of undergraduates who wanted accessible textbooks to help them through their courses. Neither Tucker nor Hazlitt had such a ready readership.

Perhaps Tucker was producing ideas that did not match the intellectual mood of his times. In effect, rather than by intention, Tucker was showing the psychological limitations of Locke’s project of attempting to base all knowledge on scientific reasoning. Through his examples, he was showing why we are not in control of our minds. For much of the time, the conscious mind, or ego, was unaware of what it was doing. This was not the result of cognitive failure but was part of human nature. By the mid- to late 19th century, developments in neuro-physiological research were suggesting that much brain activity does not reach conscious awareness. To use Carpenter’s term, “unconscious cerebration” was becoming an acceptable idea. Moreover, writers such as Alexander Bain and Herbert Spencer were, in their analyses of the mind, paying attention to the little, non-intellectual, and even non-conscious things that we do. The way was being prepared for accepting that “the unconscious” may be an important determining factor in human psychology.

Tucker was writing at a time when many intellectuals were reluctant to dethrone the rational ego, even if they were happy to unite rationalism with theology. Much more historical investigation would be required in order to relate Tucker’s lack of success to wider movements of intellectual change. Yet, at first sight, he looks like a thinker who proposed ideas that would appear significant 100 years later, at least when they were presented with the rhetoric of scientific discovery, which even James employed.

Of course, forgotten figures can have intellectually important effects. It is common for historically minded psychologists who champion the cause of a neglected figure to claim that the individual in question really did have a major impact. It has been claimed that the 18th-century figures of the third earl of Shaftesbury and Thomas Reid, despite being outwardly neglected, have had an underground effect on the history of psychology; their ideas on commonsense have resurfaced unacknowledged in contemporary critical psychology (Billig, 2008). The supporters of Karl Bühler, in arguing the case for reassessing his contribution, have stressed his influence on such major figures as Popper, Vygotsky, and Wittgenstein (Brock, 1994; Wettersten, 1988). But Tucker is a far more obscure figure. There is no evidence that he directly, or indirectly, influenced figures such as Popper, Vygotsky, or Wittgenstein. Certainly, Paley is not in that class today—and one would have to work hard to argue that, through Paley, Tucker significantly affected the future direction of psychology.

There is, nevertheless, a possible almost-linkage between Tucker and James through the English philosopher Shadworth Hodgson. James first met Hodgson in 1880 and subsequently they corresponded regularly. James quoted Hodgson’s work extensively in Principles. Hodgson’s philosophy was based on an analysis of mind and its operations. His approach was much more theoretical than James’s and he certainly lacked the gift of illustration. In one letter to Hodgson, James complained that a piece of his friend’s writing “hangs in the air of speculation and touches not the earth of life” (30 December 1885, H. James, 1926, p. 244).

James appreciated Hodgson’s ideas about consciousness. In Principles, James included a lengthy quotation from Hodgson’s The Philosophy of Reflection (1878) to support his own notion that the perception involves past and future, giving consciousness its continuity “without which it could not be called a stream” (James, 1890, Vol. 1, p. 607). In the quotation, Hodgson suggested that there is no present in consciousness and that experience is continuous. Hodgson did not describe consciousness as a stream in The Philosophy of Reflection, nor in The Theory of Practice (1870), which James also quoted in Principles. Hodgson did so in his first book, when he defined the purpose of metaphysics as tracing “the stream of consciousness and of existence to its source or sources” (Hodgson, 1865, p. 74). By the time he came to write The Metaphysic of Experience (1898) several years after James’s Principles, Hodgson was using the metaphor regularly.

More work would be needed to trace the influence of Hodgson on James and vice versa. What is of interest here is another possibility. There is no evidence that James read Tucker, but he certainly read Hodgson’s The Theory of Practice and, particularly, the sections on emotion (see James, 1890, Vol. 1, p. 130). In The Theory of Practice (1870), Hodgson critically discusses Tucker’s approach to the emotions at length (pp.108ff.). Hodgson was arguing that emotions could not be causes of other emotions or of physiological states. Although clearly familiar with Tucker’s work, Hodgson does not cite him when discussing the continuity of consciousness or the absence of a pure experience of the present. One might speculate whether on these issues Hodgson may have been influenced by reading Tucker.

Although one cannot tie down whether Tucker influenced Hodgson—and whether, through Hodgson, he indirectly influenced James—one thing can be said with certainty. Hodgson could have cited Tucker when he agreed with him, and not just when he disagreed. Had he done so, James might then have become aware of his predecessor. We might speculate further. The seriously dry Hodgson would not have enjoyed the glug-glug, Miss Gawkey side of Tucker. James, on the other hand, would have appreciated the humour. Such conjectures must remain, as Tucker (1768) described his vision of Locke, “hypotheses…concerning things unknown” (Vol. 2, ii, p. 5). ²

Remembering Tucker

What benefits can we gain from reconsidering Tucker and noting his similarities with James? The question is most appropriate for those who are critical of current ways of doing psychology and who might look to the past in the hope of finding alternative ways of understanding psychological issues. In this regard, Tucker and James have much to teach us. In their respective ways, they point to the importance of little examples over big theory. Both prized the role of examples, and this lies at the root of their originality. They did not posit, and grandly name, hypothetical mental states as the so-called “causes of actions”. Instead, they sought to imagine how we actually do things, how we actually think and feel. By psychologizing in this way, they were able to notice the complexity of our actions and thoughts, occurring over time. It is no coincidence that these two thinkers who took psychological examples seriously both envisaged consciousness as a stream.

Nor is it a coincidence that they wrote humanely about our limitations and foibles. Neither expected us to have perfect, super-rational egos. In this, Tucker and James are themselves examples for those who wish today to create different, warm-hearted forms of psychology. Moreover, their work demonstrates that psychology is not just theory and methodology, as if the discipline stands solely upon these two big pillars. The enduring popularity of William James illustrates the poverty of the theory–methodology outlook. James was not an especially notable theorist—Principles is not famous because it presented a unique theoretical stance. Nor was he a great methodologist. Regarding the new experimental method emerging from Germany, he wrote that it “taxes the patience to the utmost and could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored” (James, 1890, Vol. 1, p. 192). Quite simply, James’s fame rests upon his quality as a psychological writer.

Like any academic discipline, psychology must be written. Its rhetoric is as much, if not more, a part of its character as are its theories and methodologies (Bazerman, 1987, 1988; Billig, 1994, 1996). The examples of James and Tucker show why. James disdained the rhetoric of the research report, which psychologists developed during his lifetime. Instead, he dazzled, charmed, and entertained his readers. His “psychologizing” was not a method as such. It could not exist outside of his writing, like the equipment of a psychological laboratory. His way of writing ensured that his psychologizing was warm-hearted. So it was with Tucker. There is so much that brings the reader closer to the writer. In the focus on the little things of life, the waistcoat flap and trouser-leg, and in the all too human failures of thinking, we can recognize ourselves.

If today we want a humane psychology, then it is not principally to theory or methodology that we should be turning. It is precisely because James and Tucker did not write like “proper” psychologists that their writings are still able to bring such insight and wisdom. Significantly, by turning their attention to the details of small actions, they were able to produce, across a gap of over 100 years, a strikingly similar psychological understanding. This present tribute to both Tucker and James is not wholly innocent. It is more than a celebration of psychology’s past, both remembered and forgotten. It seeks to raise hopes for a different psychology in the future. It is psychology’s present that is being overlooked here. That is perhaps apt. After all, both Tucker and James disputed the psychological reality of the present.