Abstract
Between his appointment to the department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto
in 1908 until his death in 1944, George Sidney Brett directed the bulk of his writing and
teaching to the preservation of the relationship between the sciences and the humanities.
In the face of the unpalatable extremes of scientific determinism and the revolutionary
celebration of irrationalism, Brett resolutely asserted the unity of knowledge. This, he
insisted, rested upon discovering a point of intersection between nature, mind, and
society. Brett's writings emphasized the central role of psychology in preserving this
unity. In his estimation, psychology possessed close links to the natural sciences of
physiology and biology but, more importantly, the study of the human mind was also
vitally related to the traditional humanities of philosophy, history, and literature. His
belief — that humanistic, philosophical values underlay the structure of knowledge
—points to a fundamental divergence between English-Canadian and American
universities in the early twentieth century. Brett's standpoint was directed to resisting the
fragmentation and specialization which characterized the development of the social
sciences in American universities. The fact that Brett and some influential social
scientists at the University of Toronto pursued, until the 1940s, a method of organizing
their disciplines which preserved the unspecialized, philosophical, and historical
emphases associated with the humanistic ideal, indicates the need to revise explanations
of the rise of the social sciences in English-Canadian universities.
Philosophy, Psychology, and History: George Sidney Brett and the Quest for a Social Science at the University of Toronto, 1910‑1940
