"Firm scholarly conviction has it that psychology began as a scientific discipline only in the last part of the nineteenth century. Fernando Vidal thoroughly overturns that assumption in his compelling historical reconstruction of the development of psychology from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. He shows how the concept of soul, initially caught in scholastic rationalism, underwent an empirical transformation from the form of the body to the activities of the mind, a mind whose intense thought had been compared to 'a ligature applied to all of the nerves.' By contrast, Vidal's work–linguistically adroit, amazingly comprehensive, and scholarly satisfying–releases the nervous fluids to invigorate the mind of the reader. No other history comes close to his exquisite accomplishment."–Robert J. Richards, University of Chicago