While British figures played a major role in establishing psychology in the nineteenth century, the British cultural and intellectual setting has been less congenial for the study of the history of psychology than have the environments in either the United States or mainland Europe. In the United States, where the discipline became extensively institutionalized fairly early and rapidly, history of psychology quickly established a place for itself in undergraduate courses -for reasons with which we are now familiar: students could be persuaded that they were the heirs of Aristotle and Plato; they could be told a heroic celebratory tale of how psychology became scientific; and the courses could promote a general spirit of disciplinary patriotism.
In mainland Europe, history of psychology was aided by the fact that there was always a strong philosophical lobby arguing that psychology was a historical discipline anyway -Geisteswissenschaft rather than Naturwissenschaft. This philosophical orientation meant that historical psychology, if not history of psychology, had a constant presence. Moreover, numerous eminent figures in the mainland European story are difficult to classify in British terms as philosophers or psychologists: Wilhelm Dilthey, Harald Hoffding, and Ernst Cassirer, for example. As a result, few British psychologists knew (or know!) anything about most of them -particularly the Germans.
In Britain, by contrast, the absence of extensive institutionalization of the discipline combined with the long dominance of a self-consciously positivistic concept of psychology that rather pushed history of psychology to the sidelines, and only a handful of shortish, rather routine, British-authored undergraduate texts on the topic appeared, notably J. C.