Thomas Brown

Brown's philosophy occupies an intermediate place between the earlier Scottish school and the later analytical or associational psychology, to which he really belonged. He still retained a small quantum of intuitive beliefs, and did not appear to see that the very existence of these could not be explained by his theory of mental action. This accounts for the comparative neglect into which his works have now fallen. They did not furnish a coherent system, and the doctrines which were then new have since been worked out with greater consistency and clearness.

Brown's other work included a criticism of Erasmus Darwin's Zoonomia (1798), and he was one of the first contributors to the Edinburgh Review, in the second number of which he published a criticism of Immanuel Kant's philosophy, based entirely on Villers's French account of it. Read Less