Secondary sources evidently claim that Thomas Reid had proposed up to 43 faculties or powers of the mind; anyone know whether they might be listed someplace? So far our search through Reid's own work hasn't turned up anything like a list. Whit

-- Harry Whitaker (hwhitake@nmu.edu), April 16, 2003

Answers

According to D. B. Klein in A History of Scientific Psychology: Its Origins and Philosophical Background (Basic Books, 1970), there are comparative lists in H. D. Spoerl, "Faculties versus traits: Gall's solution," Character and Personality, 1936, 4, 216-231. Klein indicates that Spoerl gives Reid's list from 1870, Stewart's list of 1827, and Gall's list of 1810 in three columns. Spoerl's list is reproduced in Allport's Personality (Henry Holt, 1937) on page 84. Klein also discusses the difficulty of compiling a list from the original works--his discussion of faculties and phrenology is quite extensive.

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), April 16, 2003.

WIlliam Hamilton published an edition of Reid's complete works between 1846 and 1863. You might check your library for it, and see if it has an index.

-- Christopher Gfeen (cgreen@chass.utoronto.ca), April 16, 2003.

Perhaps this is the very secondary source you read, but I notice that David J. Murray, in his _A History of Western Psychology_ (2nd ed., Prentice-Hall, 1988, p. 124), says that Reid, "was skeptical of earlier divisions of the faculties: The only one he explicitly approved of was that between the understandaing and the will. He dealt with the former in the essay on _intellectual_ powers, the latter in the essays on _active_ powers of the mind. It is possible to extract from the skein of his later books as many as forty-three mental faculties, however (Brooks, 1976)."

The reference at the end of this passage is to:
Brooks, G. P. (1976). The faculty psychology of Thomas Reid. _Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences_, _12_, 65-77.

I have no idea how reliable Brooks' article is, but it sounds from Murray as though this number is a later reconstruction, not a list laid out explicitly by Reid. You might look to Brooks' sources to trace the idea backwards.

-- Christopher Green (cgreen@chass.utoronto.ca), April 16, 2003.