David Hartley

David Hartley (1705 to 1757) was an English philosopher and physician, widely treated as the founder of the Associationist school of psychology. Born near Halifax in Yorkshire, the son of an Anglican clergyman, he studied at Jesus College, Cambridge, and then practised medicine in Newark, Bury St Edmunds, London and Bath, where he also campaigned for smallpox inoculation. His major work, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749), tried to do for the human mind what Newton had done for physics, by explaining all mental life through a single law of association. Hartley tied that law to the physiology of the brain and nerves, so that the way sensations link and fuse is described both as a bodily process and as a psychological one, and he used it to account for memory, learning, skilled action and the moral emotions. Like Locke, he took the mind to be a blank slate before sensation, and his optimistic view of human moral progress shaped later thinkers such as Joseph Priestley.