Contributions of American mental philosophers to psychology in the United States

Professors of mental philosophy who taught and wrote textbooks in colleges and universities in the United States before the Civil War contributed significantly to the development of the new psychology that replaced mental philosophy in the last quarter of the 19th century. Their contributions have been neglected in textbooks on the history of psychology, even those devoted to the history of psychology in the United States. These mental philosophers eased the transition to, and influenced the nature of, the new psychology in the United States by establishing a place in the curriculum for mental philosophy that the new psychology came to occupy; by identifying the topics for laboratory methods to address; by pursuing an empirical, inductive, scientific approach to the study of the mind; and by their tradition of functional analysis that came to characterize psychology in the United States.