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Theodule Armand Ribot

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Theodule Ribot

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THEODULE ARMAND RIBOT (1839-1903), French psychologist, was born at Guingamp on the 18th of December 1839, and was educated at the Lycee de St Brieuc. In 1856 he began to teach, and was admitted to the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1862. In 1885 he gave a course of lectures on "Experimental Psychology" at the Sorbonne, and in 1888 was appointed professor of that subject at the College of France. His thesis for his doctor's degree, republished in 1882, Heredity: 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 nonmaterial factors in man. In his work on La Psychologie anglaise contemporaine (1870), 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 (18 74; 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 generales (1897); Essai sur l'imagination creatrice (1900); La Logique des sentiments (1904); Essai sur les passions (1906). Of the above the following have been translated into English : - English Psychology (1873); Heredity: a Psychological 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);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 (189); The Evolution of General Ideas, tr. F. A. Welby (Chicago, 1899); Essay on the Creative Imagination, tr. A. H. N. Baron (1906).