'Cartesian psychology' and Hull are connected terms. His career began as a mining engineer, but the effects of polio left him unable to follow this profession.

The lure of the emerging discipline of psychology attracted Hull (as it did many others). In Hull's case, he brought with him a mechanist tradition that he applied to learning and thinking. However, his wide interest in philosophy and general psychology, kept the restrictions of "strict" behaviorism from his work.

Construction of ingenious machines (for example, to check correlations amongst tests) eventually gave way to more theory based stimulus-response models. The "connectionism" proposed by Hull formed the theoretical basis upon which information processing models were constructed by cognitive psychologists.

Hull's forthright action in this regard is his perhaps his greatest legacy.