James Ward (psychologist)

James Ward (27 January, 1843 - 4 March, 1925) was an English psychologist and philosopher. He was born in Kingston upon Hull, the eldest of nine children. His father was an unsuccessful merchant. Ward was educated at the Liverpool Institute and Mostyn House, but his formal schooling ended when his father became bankrupt.

Apprenticed to a Liverpool architect for four years, Ward studied Greek and logic and was a Sunday School Teacher. In 1863 he entered Spring Hill College, near Birmingham, to train for the Congregationalist ministry. An eccentric and impoverished student, he remained at Spring Hill until 1869, completing his theological studies as well as gaining a University of London BA degree.

In 1869-70 Ward won a scholarship to Germany, where he attended the lectures of Isaac Dormer in Berlin before moving to Göttingen to study under Lotze. On his return to Britain Ward became minister at Emmanuel Congregational Church in Cambridge, where his theological liberalism unhappily antagonised his congregation. Sympathetic to Ward's predicament, Henry Sidgwick encouraged Ward to enter Cambridge University. Initially a non-collegiate student, Ward won a scholarship to Trinity College in 1873, and achieved a first class in the moral sciences tripos in 1874. With a dissertation entitled 'The relation of physiology to psychology', Ward won a Trinity fellowship in 1875. Some of this work, 'An interpretation of Fechner's Law', was published in the first volume of the new journal Mind (1876). For the rest of his life, the Dictionary of National Biography reports that he "held himself aloof from all institutional religion; but he did not tend towards secularism or even agnosticism; his early belief in spiritual values and his respect for all sincere religion never left him."

During 1876-7 he returned to Germany, studying in Carl Ludwig's Leipzig physiological institute. Back in Cambridge, Ward continued physiological research under Michael Foster, publishing a pair of physiological papers in 1879 and 1880.

However, from 1880 onwards Ward moved away from physiology to psychology. His article "Psychology" for the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was enormously influential - criticising associationist psychology with an emphasis upon the mind's active attention to the world.

He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1919 to 1920.