by Morton Hunt
Three authors, however, are worth passing notice before we move on to the dawn of modern psychology.
One is an obscure Serbo-Croatian writer named Marulic, who seems to have been the first to make written use, in an obscure manuscript dating from about 1520, of a newly coined word, psychologia. 43 The term did not soon catch on, though one or two other authors used it. But in 1590 a German encyclopedist named Rudolf Goeckel (Latinized as Goclenius) used it in the title of a book: Psychologia Hoc Est, de Hominis Perfectione (Psychology This Is, on the Improvement of Man). In the course of the next century the new word gradually became the recognized name of the science.
The third author is Juan Luis Vives, a sixteenth-century Spanish Catholic philosopher of Jewish origin. After tutoring Princess Mary, elder daughter of England’s Henry VIII, and spending some time in prison for opposing Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, he devoted himself to writing. One of his works, a lengthy book titled De Anima et Vita, is largely a recapitulation of Aristotle and Augustine but is notable for one thing: Vives compiled a far longer list than his predecessors of the ways in which images and thoughts can be linked by association in the mind, and was a forerunner, if not the actual inspiration, of the seventeenth-century associationists. One twentieth-century associationist even called him, with doctrinaire exaggeration, the father of modern psychology.44
But modern psychology, unlike any living creature, had many fathers.
* Theophrastussays elsewhere that thinking takes place in the brain.
* Godor the Good or the Supreme.
* By“suffer” and “suffering” Tertullian refers not to pain but to being subject to feelings (“passions”) rather than having mental control of them.
THREE
The
Protopsychologists
The Third Visitation
In The Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon, having summarized the state of knowledge in his time—in 1605 it was still possible for one person to do so—concluded with this bold forecast:
When I set before me the condition of these times, in which learning hath made her third visitation or circuit, in all the qualities thereof: the excellency and vivacity of the wits of this age; the noble helps and lights which we have by the travails of ancient writers; the art of printing, which communicateth books to men of all fortunes; the openness of the world by navigation, which hath disclosed multitudes of experiments, and a mass of natural history…I cannot but be raised to this persuasion, that this third period of time will far surpass that of the Græcian and Roman learning.1
Such sweeping predictions usually prove wrong, but not this one. Within the century, knowledge would reach a level not even Bacon could have imagined, thanks to the “new learning” of science fostered by major social developments that had been reshaping European society. The semiprimitive feudal way of life centered about church, castle, and keep had given way to larger national groupings, the revival of city life, and the expansion of trade and industry, and the Reformation had weakened the grip of church-centered traditionalism over men’s minds and induced a spirit of questioning and intellectual ferment in Protestant lands and, by a kind of social osmosis, even in Catholic ones.
These developments spurred advances in both utilitarian and pure knowledge. Seventeenth-century businesses, armies, and monetary and taxation systems required new, efficient ways of thinking about and handling data. On the purely intellectual side, many thoughtful men turned from engaging in theological hairsplitting to gathering factual information about the real world. For both reasons, this was the century that produced the decimal system, logarithms, analytic geometry, the calculus, the air pump, the microscope, the barometer, the thermometer, and the telescope.
Not that science was universally welcomed. Renaissance humanism had revived the Platonic tradition, with all its mysticism and scorn of the material world, and many intellectuals, echoing Petrarch, Erasmus, Rabelais, and Vives, disparaged science. Religion offered more dangerous opposition: Throughout the seventeenth century not only Catholics but Lutherans and Calvinists harshly punished heretics, and anyone who publicly espoused a scientific theory in conflict with the doctrines of the established church of his country was risking his good name, social position, fortune, and possibly his life.
Despite such obstacles, science flourished. In every major country of western Europe, inquisitive men peered through microscopes and telescopes, mixed reagents in glass flasks, burrowed into the earth, dissected animal and human cadavers, and calculated the movements of the stars and planets. Among these men were such illuminati, in England, as Wallis, Harvey, Boyle, Hooke, Halley, and Newton; in France, Descartes, Fermat, Mariotte, and Pascal; in Italy, Galileo, Viviani, and Torricelli; in Switzerland, Jacques and Jean Bernoulli; in Germany, Leibniz; and in Holland, Huygens and Leeuwenhoek.
Most of them, deeming themselves to be partners in a great movement, wrote to one another to share their thoughts and results. By mid-century, in Oxford, London, and Paris, scientists and science-minded amateurs were meeting in informal groups—“invisible colleges,” they were called—to exchange their findings and debate their theories. In 1662 Charles II conferred a charter on the London group, designating it the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge; through its Philosophical Transactions and similar journals on the Continent, scientists began to create an information network and subculture of their own.
Although psychology was far slower than the physical sciences to emerge from its philosophic-theological chrysalis, some of the finest minds of the age turned their attention to it and for the first time in two millennia began formulating new answers to the questions first asked by Greek philosophers. Although the seventeenth-century protopsychologists and even their eighteenth-century successors had no way to investigate the mind other than by meditation and reflection, they were aware of the new findings of physicists and physiologists; they produced not mere reworkings of earlier theories but two distinctly new versions of old psychologies.
The Rationalists
Descartes
Everyone with even a smattering of higher education knows that René Descartes was one of the most influential philosophers of the modern era, the inventor of analytic geometry, and a physicist of some accomplishment. Few, however, realize that he was, says the historian of psychology Robert Watson, “the first great psychologist of the modern age.” But, adds Watson, “this is not the same as saying that he was the first modern psychologist. Unlike some scientists of his day, he still made metaphysical assumptions, and consequently his psychology was subservient to his philosophy.”2 Nevertheless, he was the first person since Aristotle to create a new psychology.
Descartes was born in Touraine in 1596; he acquired tuberculosis from his mother, who died of it a few days after his birth, and was a sickly infant, a weakling during childhood, and a small and relatively frail adult. His father, a prosperous lawyer, sent him off at eight to the Jesuit college at La Flèche, where he got a thorough grounding in mathematics and philosophy. His teachers, recognizing both his physical weakness and unusual mental ability, permitted him to remain in bed reading long after the usual hour of rising, and it became his lifelong practice to lie abed and cogitate all morning. Fortunately, he inherited enough money from his father to make this regimen feasible.
In his late teens the small and rather homely Descartes tried the social life and casinos of Paris, found them boring, and turned to the solitary study of mathematics and philosophy. But he grew troubled as he realized that so many learned men had arrived at so many different answers to the important philosophic questions. Discouraged and depressed, he decided to seek answers in the real world; he enlisted first in the army of Prince Maurice of Nassau and later that of the Duke of Bavaria. It is unclear whether or not he saw action but clear that he found ordinary men no wiser than scholars. After several years, he returned to the world of private thought.
Even before returning to private life Descartes had a me
morable philosophical epiphany. At twenty-three, he spent one cold morning shut up in a “stove”—his word, but probably a small heated room—and had several visions through which he realized that he could ignore the disparate opinions of the “ancients” and use the rigorous reasoning of mathematics to achieve philosophic certainties. Thus was rationalist philosophy founded.
After returning to civilian life, Descartes spent some time traveling, then lived in Paris for some years, all the while studying philosophy and the physical sciences. At thirty-two he moved to Protestant Holland, partly because in Paris friends too often broke in on his quiet meditations, partly because he was afraid that his approach to truth—first, doubt everything—might lead to accusations of heresy. This he deeply feared; he sought to stay on good terms with the Catholic Church, even interrupting his discussion of body and mind in one work to say, typically, “Recalling my insignificance, I affirm nothing, but submit all these opinions to the authority of the Catholic Church, and to the judgment of the more sage.”3
In Holland he lived mostly in peace, though he was sometimes attacked by Protestant extremists for holding dangerous views; to preserve his quiet and privacy he moved twenty-four times in twenty years. But he was not an ascetic or recluse; he welcomed the visits of fellow savants, had a mistress and a daughter (who died in childhood), and always lived in comfortable surroundings with a retinue of servants.
His most important works, Discourse on Method (1637) and Meditations on First Philosophy (1642), were written during his years in Holland; much of his psychology is in these works. The rest is in The World, written in 1633 but not published until after his death. He was about to give it to the printer when he learned that Galileo had been condemned by the Inquisition for maintaining that the earth moves around the sun, and since his own book espoused that idea, he suppressed it.
Though cautious in such matters, Descartes rashly accepted the invitation of Queen Christina of Sweden in 1649 to teach her philosophy. He was received in Stockholm with high honors but learned to his dismay that the Queen wanted him to tutor her at 5 A.M. He who had always lain in bed until noon had to arise in darkness three times a week and trudge through the bitter cold winter night to her library. In February 1650, he caught cold, developed pneumonia, and, after receiving the last rites, died at the age of fifty-four.
Although Descartes’ philosophy is not our concern, we must look at its starting point, since this is the foundation of his psychology. He begins the construction of his philosophic system with the insight that came to him the morning in the “stove”:
[I thought] I ought to reject as absolutely false all opinions in regard to which I could imagine the least ground for doubt, so as to ascertain whether after doing so there remained anything in my belief that was wholly indubitable.4
He therefore doubts his senses, since they sometimes deceive; all the reasoning he had previously been convinced by, since men may fall into reasoning errors even in the simplest matters of geometry; and, indeed, all the thoughts that enter his mind when he is awake, since similar thoughts, entering it in sleep, are illusions. This leads him to a second and crucial insight:
Immediately I noticed that even while I thus wished to think all these things were false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thought this, was some thing; I observed that this truth —I think, therefore I am— was so certain and so evident that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, brought forth by skeptics, could shake it. I concluded that I could without scruple accept it as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking.
Next, he asks himself what this thinking “I” was that necessarily existed. He could imagine, he says, that he had no body and existed in no specific place, but he could not imagine that he did not exist, since his thinking proved otherwise. From this he makes a dramatic inference:
I concluded that I was a thing or substance whose whole essence or nature was only to think, and which, to exist, has no need of space or of any material thing or body. Thus it follows that this ego, this mind, this soul, by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body… Even if the body did not exist, the soul would not cease to be all that it now is.5
And so, while he doubts whatever the ancients may have said, he reestablishes through his own reasoning the old dualism of body and mind.
But he is a seventeenth-century man surrounded by science and its explorations of the material world, and, unlike the Platonists, he considers the objects of the corporeal world not mere shadows on the wall of the cave but as real as mind, not illusions but what they appear to be. This he bases on faith: since God provided our minds with bodies and senses, and since He is not deceitful, material objects must exist and be very like our perceptions of them.6
So far, this is pure rationalism. But as a man of his time, Descartes also had a quasi-empirical bent. He was keenly aware of the findings of the new physiology and himself performed dissections on animals, observing the relationship of the nervous system to the muscles. It seemed to him analogous to the design of certain statues in the royal gardens at St. Germain-en-Laye, which, operated by water conducted through pipes, made lifelike movements and sounds.
He therefore advanced a mechanical-hydraulic theory of much of human behavior. The fluid filling the ventricles or cavities of the brain—we know it today as cerebrospinal fluid—he took to be “animal spirits,” a highly purified component of blood, the coarser parts of which he supposed were filtered out by tiny arteries before it reached the brain. (This was his modification of the Greek notion that pneuma, air, the essential substance of soul, circulated through the nervous system.) Since the nervous system radiates out from the brain to all parts of the body, the animal spirits must flow from the brain through the nerves (which Descartes, like the Greeks, believed to be hollow; the microscope did not yet exist) and, reaching the muscles, cause them to swell and move.7
He imagined that the flow of animal spirits also powers digestion, the circulation of the blood, and respiration, and some psychological functions, like sensory impressions, the appetites and passions, and even memory. The latter, though seemingly a function of mind, he explained in mechanical terms. Much as holes in a linen cloth pierced by needles remain when the needles are removed, so repeated experiences make certain pores in the brain remain more open than others to the flow of the spirits.8 Descartes thus dispensed with Aquinas’s theory (derived from Aristotle) that the soul has “vegetative” and “sentient” as well as rational functions. In Descartes’ system it was purely rational; the other functions belong to the body.
Erroneous as his mechanical-hydraulic theory is in its details, it is impressively close to right in one major respect: it attributes the control of the muscles to impulses traveling from the brain through efferent nerves. Even more impressive is another of his guesses. He asked himself what initiates the flow of animal spirits to the muscles and again used the analogy of the royal automata, which were activated by water turned on when a visitor stepped on hidden pedals. In living creatures, he suggested, sensory stimuli play the same part by creating pressure on the sense organs; this pressure, transmitted by the nerves to the brain, opens particular valves, thereby causing bodily action of one kind or another. Descartes was thus the first to describe what would later be called the reflex, in which a specific external stimulus causes the organism to respond in a specific way.
But the mechanical-hydraulic theory did not explain consciousness, reasoning, or will. Those higher mental activities, Descartes believed, must be functions of the soul (or mind). Whence does this thinking soul get its information and ideas? He says that when it coexists with the body during life, it acquires some ideas via the body’s perceptions, passions, and memory, and it manufactures others—imaginary objects, dreams, and the like—out of remembered sensory impressions. But its most important ideas cannot come from such sources, for while he is aware of his own thinking and therefore knows that his soul exists, he never experiences his soul in a sensory fashi
on. The idea of the soul must be part of the soul itself. Similarly, such abstract concepts as “perfection,” “substance,” “quality,” “unity,” “infinity,” and the geometrical axioms seemed to him to be independent of sensory experience and so had to originate in the soul itself; they are innate.9
He reasonably added that such innate ideas do not exist full-blown at birth; rather, the soul has a tendency or propensity to develop them in response to experience. They are “primary germs of truth implanted by nature”; sensory impressions cause us to discover them within ourselves. For example, a child cannot understand the general truth “When equals are taken from equals, the remainders are equals,” unless you show him examples.10
His dualistic conception of body and soul presented one exceedingly difficult problem. When body and soul are locked together during life, they interact. The body’s experiences engender passions in the soul, and the soul’s thoughts and will direct the flow of animal spirits, producing voluntary movement—but where and how does the interaction take place? How can the incorporeal soul, possessing no solidity and occupying no space, connect with the corporeal body and receive its perceptions and experiences or exert any influence over it?
Earlier dualistic philosophers had ignored this problem; the physiologically aware Descartes could not. From his and others’ anatomical studies, he knew that the brain has two identical hemispheres but that deep within it is a tiny gland (the pineal body); because this is single, like the soul itself, and because of its position in the brain, it seemed to him the obvious junction of soul and body. He conjectured that, due to its position in the brain, “its slightest motions can greatly affect the flow of the spirits, and conversely the slightest changes in the flow of the spirits greatly affect the motions of the gland.”11 While he never explained how the corporeal pineal gland and the incorporeal soul could make contact, he felt sure that they did and that it was through the gland that the soul affected the body, and the body the soul:
