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Alexander Bain (1818-1903) was one of the first psychologists who stressed the importance of physiology for psychological studies and was interested in the cerebral localizations of faculties. In the 70s in Germany, Gustav Fritsch and Edward Hitzig had shown that some areas of the brain controlled specific movements, and in Great Britain David Ferrier had published in 1876 the results of his experiments, pleading in favour of the thesis of cerebral localizations. They ran against the conclusions of the German physiologist Friedrich Goltz, who considered that there were no centres specialized in specific voluntary movements. The confrontation between Ferrier and Goltz reached its climax at the London international medical congress in 1881, and Ferrier’s theories prevailed in the 90s. Bain and his disciple George Croom Robertson, in the review Mind founded by Bain in 1876, always ran counter to Ferrier’s theories. According to them, cerebral localizations applied to mental phenomena only in the elementary states which Bain had described in The Emotions and the will, that is postulating a relationship between thought and sensory-motor functions, but as part of a more general correlation which concerned only fundamental functions. The results furnished by physiology were always submitted to the requisites of psychology.