William Robert Bousfield

William Robert Bousfield (12 January 1854 – 16 July 1943) was a British lawyer, Conservative politician and scientist.

Biography Bousfield was the son of Edward Tenney Bousfield, an engineer, and his wife Charlotte Eliza Collins, who was a noted diarist. He was born at Newark-on-Trent, from which his family moved to Sticklepath in 1856 and then to Bedford, where they arrived in September 1858.

He attended Bedford Modern School before serving an apprenticeship as an engineer. In 1872 he was admitted to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, winning a scholarship there in 1873. Following graduation as 16th Wrangler in 1876 and a brief period as a lecturer at the University of Bristol, where he delivered the new institution's first ever lecture (on Mathematics at 9a.m. 10 October 1876), he decided to study law. In 1880 he was called to the bar at the Inner Temple. His knowledge of engineering led to him becoming a renowned expert on patent law. He became a Queen's Counsel in 1891 (which office became King's Counsel on the accession of a King in 1901). of which Bousfield was made a fellow in 1916. Psychons are described as immeasurably smaller than electrons or protons. The book argued for a psycho-physical interaction. The "psychonic substance" is utilized to explain consciousness, ideas, memory, the unconscious mind and evolution. Bousfield favoured Lamarckian evolution, taking the view that habits become ingrained in the "mental structure" of the organism which influence the psychic structure of the germ plasm. His other son John Keith Bousfield (1893–1945), was an army officer, businessman and member of the Legislative Council of Hong Kong.

Bousfield died in Ottery St Mary in July 1943, aged 89.

Selected publications

A Neglected Complex (1924) The Mind and its Mechanism (with Paul Bousfield, 1927) The Basis of Memory (1928)