Abstract
BY the death in Sydney of Prof. G. F. Stout, emeritus professor of logic and metaphysics in the University of St. Andrews, at the age of eighty-four, British philosophy and psychology have lost one of its most representative and distinguished figures. A first class in the Classical Tripos in Cambridge in 1882, followed in the next year by a first in the Moral Sciences Tripos, seem, on the face of it, strange preparation for a man who was to become a dominant figure in British psychology for the next two generations, and who, as late as 1936, after fifty years of academic life, could enter into equal fray with the new Gestalt experimental psychologists from Germany. But three further factors must be taken into account: the presence of Ward at Cambridge, the nature of British philosophy and Stout's own penetrating insight. That Ward was one of the dominating influences in his life, Stout himself was ever ready to admit. Ward's article on psychology, in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica"of 1885, ultimately embodied in his "Psychological Principles", was the precursor of Stout's "Analytic Psychology"(1896) and his "Manual of Psychology" (1898), and both these latter books bear the marks of this influence. But both Ward and Stout were following in the clearly marked tradition of British psychologists and philosophers from the seventeenth century onwards, and Stout himself was, until his death, the ablest survivor of a type of philosophy which included Locke, Hume, the two Mills and the Scottish school.
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WRIGHT, J. Prof. G. F. Stout. Nature 154, 481 (1944). https://doi.org/10.1038/154481a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/154481a0