THEODULE ARMAND

RIBOT (1839- )  , French psychologist, was born at Guingamp on the 18th of December 1839, and was educated at the Lycee de St Brieuc . In r856 he began to teach, and was admitted to the lcole Normale Superieure in 1862 . In 1885 he gave a course of lectures on " Experimental Psychology " at the Sorbonne, and in x888 was appointed professor of that subject at the College of France . His thesis for his doctor's degree, republished in 1882, H6ridite: etude psychologique (5th ed., 1889), is his most important and best known book . Following the experimental and synthetic methods, he has brought together a large number of instances of inherited peculiarities; he pays particular attention to the physical element of mental life, ignoring all spiritual or non-material factors in man . In his work on La Psychologie anglaise contemporaine (187o), he shows his sympathy with the sensationalist school, and again in his translation of Herbert Spencer's Principles of Psychology . Besides numerous articles, he has written on Schopenhauer, Philosophie de Schopenhauer (1874; 7th ed., 1896), and on the contemporary psychology of Germany (La Psychologie allemande contemporaine, 1879; 13th ed., 1898), also four little monographs on Les Maladies de la memoire (1881; 13th ed., 1898); De la volonte (1883; 14th ed., 1899); De la personnalite (1885; 8th ed., 1899); and La Psychologie de l'attention (1888), which supply useful data to the student of mental disease . Other works by him are:—La Psychologie des sentiments (1896); L'Evolution des idees generaley (1897) ; Essai sur l'imagination creatrice (1900) ; La Logique. des sentiments (19o4); Essai sur les passions (1906) . Of the above the following have been translated into English:—English Psychology (1873); Heredity: a Psycho-logical Study of its Phenomena, Laws, Causes, and Consequences (1875); Diseases of Memory: An Essay in the Positive Psychology (1882) ; Diseases of the Will (New York, 1884) ; German Psychology of to-day, tr . J . M . Baldwin (New York, 1886) ; The Psychology of Attention (Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago, 1890); Diseases of Personality (Chicago, 1895) ; The Psychology of the Emotions (1897); The Evolution of General Ideas, tr .

F . A . Welby (Chicago, 1899) ; Essay on the Creative Imagination, tr . A . H . N .

Baron (1906) .