Edward Bullough

Edward Bullough (28 March 1880 – 17 September 1934) was an English aesthetician and scholar of modern languages, who worked at the University of Cambridge. He did experimental work on the perception of colours, and in his theoretical work introduced the concept of psychical distance: that which "appears to lie between our own self and its affections" in aesthetic experience. In languages, Bullough was a dedicated teacher who published little. He came to concentrate on Italian, and was elected to the Chair of Italian at Cambridge in 1933.

Edward Bullough was born in Thun, Switzerland, on 28 March 1880, to John Bullough and Bertha Schmidlein. As a child he lived mostly in Germany, and was educated at Vitzthum Gymnasium, Dresden. At seventeen Bullough moved to England, and in 1899 matriculated from Trinity College in the University of Cambridge, where he studied Medieval and Modern Languages. He graduated BA (Class I) in 1902, MA in 1906, after which he taught French and German at Cambridge colleges and lectured in the university.

At this time Bullough became interested in aesthetics, and "prepared himself to deal with [its] problems … by a study of physiology and general psychology". In 1907 Bullough gave a course of lectures in aesthetics, the first such at Cambridge, privately printed as The Modern Conception of Aesthetics. He repeated the course annually "until shortly before his death". Bullough conducted experimental work on the perception of colours in the Cambridge Psychological Laboratory, the basis for a series of three papers in the British Journal of Psychology: "The Apparent Heaviness of Colours" (1907), "The 'Perceptive Problem' in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Single Colours" (1908), and "The 'Perceptive Problem' in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Simple Colour-Combinations" (1910). Bullough also had an interest in parapsychology, and was a member of the Society for Psychical Research.

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