Amongst psychologists a widespread view holds that psychology emerged as a separate discipline in the final decades of the nineteenth century, with the establishment of Wilhelm Wundt's laboratory of psychology at the University of Leipzig in 1879 playing a pivotal role. This view was energetically propounded by Edwin G. Boring of Harvard – author of a classic work on the history of experimental psychology originally published in 1929 – and has often been repeated since. Boring and other early historians of psychology were, of course, aware of diverse ‘precursors’ of psychology in physiology and (reaching much farther back, indeed at least to Aristotle) in philosophy. But events in the last decades of the nineteenth century have generally been held to mark a watershed in the emergence of a new discipline now recognized as psychology.

Fernando Vidal takes issue with this standard view of the history of psychology in this seminal book, a meticulous and highly erudite treatise on the emergence of a discipline going by the name of psychology one or two centuries before Wundt's establishment of his laboratory. With the demise of the Aristotelian world view the science of the soul, as expounded by Aristotle, gave place to a modern view of mens or ‘mind’, initially proposed by Descartes and later taken up by a multitude of scholars – ‘psychologists’ to Vidal. Vidal's cast of characters ranges from the familiar (John Locke playing a prominent role although, curiously, Hobbes is completely bypassed) to a host of now more or less forgotten scholars. A unique feature of Vidal's work is the careful attention paid to these lesser-known contributors to a slowly emerging psychology based on experience.

The term ‘psychology’ seems initially to have developed in the works of Protestant scholars. Some have wanted to attribute the term to Philipp Melanchthon, Luther's close collaborator, but this remains speculative. The earliest example of a published work with ‘psychology’ in its title is Psychologia: hoc est de hominis perfectione, Rudolph Goclenius's 1590 compendium of works dealing with theological issues concerning the origin of the soul. This is rather curious, given that, as noted by Vidal, the word ‘psychology’ only appears in the title of the work and its use there in no way seems to herald a novel approach to the study of the soul or of mind. The term, however, gradually gained in currency and crops up with increasing frequency in the works of numerous scholars in various countries in the following centuries, as impressively documented by Vidal in careful readings of dozens of publications from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

From a discussion of the early origins of psychology in Protestant Europe, Vidal moves on to a discussion of early historical works dealing with psychology as a specific field of study, and to the emergence of a historical psychology dealing with early stages in the evolution of the mind, so-called ‘Homeric’ and ‘Biblical’ psychologies. The book also contains detailed and clear expositions of the place of psychology in two early encyclopedias, the Parisian encyclopedia of d'Alembert and Diderot and its Swiss counterpart, the Yverdon encyclopedia.

Vidal's book serves to answer a question posed at the outset: ‘Did psychology exist in the eighteenth century?’ (p. xi). The book is a sustained argument in favour of answering this question in the affirmative. Indeed, as I read the book, Vidal would have us accept not only that an ‘experiential’ or empirical psychology had emerged in the eighteenth century, but also that the notions of experimental psychology and of psychometrics were also in place much earlier than has been generally held. This is, of course, debatable. It is abundantly clear from The Sciences of the Soul that the general concept of psychology as a field of study had emerged in the eighteenth century, but still the differences from what was to follow should not be minimized. To mention a thinker not discussed by Vidal, one of Søren Kierkegaard's early works is Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology (1843). However, this is a very different kind of experimental psychology from that developed by Gustav Theodor Fechner and Wundt in the latter half of the century. Yet the title of Kierkegaard's book shows clearly the influence of the tradition so carefully discussed by Vidal. Kierkegaard was quite comfortable with the term ‘psychology’ (a subject taught at least from the beginning of the nineteenth century at the University of Copenhagen). It seems likely that these earlier traditions of psychology were important in paving the way for the enthusiastic acceptance that the ‘new psychology’ was eventually to receive at the end of the nineteenth century.

The index of the book leaves something to be desired. Persons are only indexed in some of the places where their contributions are discussed and some important contributors (the encyclopedist Gabriel Mingard, amongst others) do not even make it into the index. Vidal in various places refers to the importance of textbooks in disseminating a non-Aristotelian view of psychology, yet the term ‘textbook’, regrettably, is not indexed. Apropos textbooks, it would also have been most interesting if Vidal had provided examples of university curricula encompassing psychology in the period under discussion. However, these are minor shortcomings in this highly significant contribution to the early history of psychology. It will be indispensable for any further study of the origins of modern psychology.