by Morton Hunt
The whole action of the mind [i.e., soul] consists in this, that by the simple fact of its willing anything it causes the little gland, to which it is closely joined, to produce the result appropriate to the volition12 … [Conversely,] the movements [of the gland] which are excited in the brain by the nerves affect in diverse ways the soul or mind, which is intimately connected with the brain, according to the diversity of the motions themselves.13
The body thus engenders in the soul such passions as love, hatred, fear, and desire. The soul consciously considers each passion and freely wills to act in response to it—or, if it deems the passion undesirable, to ignore it. Why, then, do we ever do wrong? Not because the soul chooses to or is in conflict with itself, said Descartes, but because very intense passions may produce “commotions” of the animal spirits that override the soul’s control of the pineal gland, eliciting responses contrary to the soul’s judgment and will.
But one of Descartes’ major goals in setting forth his psychology was to show how to control the passions through reason and will. He offered much sensible advice, such as when powerful passion is aroused, one should deliberately divert one’s attention elsewhere until the agitation calms down, and only then make a judgment as to what to do. Most of what he said about controlling the passions is on this level; it is the least interesting part of his psychology.
He classified the passions, but without giving any illuminating theory as to their origins. There are six primary ones—wonder, love, hate, desire, joy, and sadness—all the rest being varieties or combinations of these. Unlike his dramatic description of his search for a first philosophic principle, his discussion of the passions was definitional and dry as dust. A single example will serve:
Love is an emotion of the soul, caused by the motion of the spirits, which incites it to unite itself voluntarily to those objects which appear to it to be agreeable. And hatred is an emotion, caused by the spirits, which incites the mind to will to be separated from objects which present themselves to it as harmful.14
Although Descartes’ explanation of the interaction between body and soul is quite wrong—the pineal gland, which produces melatonin and influences vision and sleep, has no influence on either efferent or afferent nervous impulses—the mechanical details are unimportant. What is important is his theory that body and mind are separate entities, composed of different substances, which interact in a living person, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes competitively, and that this competition is the most crucial aspect of human existence. The theory greatly influenced the human search for self-understanding, but not for the better. Raymond Fancher, a historian of psychology, sums up the weakness and the power of Descartes’ dualistic theory:
On the one hand, he taught that a person was a machine, capable of being studied by the methods of natural science. On the other hand, he taught that the most valuable and unique human attribute, the soul, was beyond the reach of scientific method and could be understood only by rational reflection. And then finally the interaction between body and soul was said to be deducible through a combination of anatomical inference, psychological introspection, and a peculiarly empty logical analysis…
Despite the logical difficulties with parts of Descartes’ position, most people—at least in the West—continue to think of their minds and their bodies as separate but somehow interacting aspects of themselves. This is a tribute to the power of Descartes’ theory. Whatever its faults, his interactive dualism captured the Western imagination to such an extent that it became accepted almost as a matter of course. Few theories, in any discipline, can claim equal success.15
The Cartesians
Over the next century a number of Descartes’ followers, usually referred to as the Cartesians, tried to modify his psychology so as to explain how the soul, an immaterial substance not occupying any space, could act upon the material, three-dimensional pineal gland, or vice versa.
Their chief approach was to suggest that actually there is no causal contact between body and mind; God sees to it that whatever happens in one sphere is accompanied by the appropriate happening in the other. This theory would seem to keep Him continually busy, running two worlds for each living person, but one ingenious Cartesian, Arnold Geulincx (1625–1669), suggested that body and mind are like two clocks that God winds up and sets running in perfect harmony with each other, after which He need do nothing more. Mental events only seem to produce physical responses, physical experiences to produce mental responses, but in fact each train of events merely occurs in perfect synchrony with the other.16
Whether “parallelism,” as this theory is called, is best thought of as metaphysics, theology, or wonderful nonsense, it is clearly outside the realm of psychology; let us pass it by.
Spinoza
But we must not pass by the work of one other major philosopher who, by purely rationalist means, arrived at very different answers from Descartes to the questions of free will, causality, and the body-mind problem. He was Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677), the gentle, quiet Dutch Sephardic Jew whom Bertrand Russell calls “the noblest and the most lovable of the great philosophers” and whose Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (1677) is the most austerely rationalist, but one of the most exalted, of philosophic works.
His influence on psychology, however, is problematic; some scholars have thought it major, others minor. In part, their opinions vary because the Ethics, in which Spinoza discusses psychological matters, is hard to understand, being formidably geometric in presentation (axioms, propositions, demonstrations, and QEDs) and filled with metaphysical terminology. But in larger part appraisals of his contribution vary because some of his ideas about the universe and about psychology seem so modern, others so archaic.
His most modern idea is his definition of God: Spinoza makes Him identical with the universe and all the mind and matter in it, subject to its laws, and hence unable to intervene in the order of events. In consequence, Spinoza was harshly condemned by some as an atheist but praised by others for seeing God in all things. The philosopher Bishop George Berkeley thought him “wicked” and “the great leader of our modern infidels,” but the German Romantic poet and dramatist Novalis called him der gottbetrunkene Mensch— the God-intoxicated man. It is possible to hold either of two equally diverse views about his psychology.
Spinoza was educated in Jewish learning at the synagogue in Amsterdam, where his family lived. But being of a scholarly and inquiring mind, he mastered Latin in his early twenties, took up the study of philosophy, and absented himself from services at the synagogue. The leaders of the Jewish community feared he would become a Christian and offered him a pension of a thousand florins a year if he would conceal his disbelief and appear now and then in the synagogue. An apocryphal story says that when he refused, they tried to have him assassinated, but the attempt failed. It is historical fact, however, that they excommunicated him and pronounced him cursed with the curses that Joshua had laid upon Jericho and those which Elisha had laid upon a band of children who had mocked him and who, in consequence, were torn to pieces by she-bears. The excommunication and curses, the only dramatic note in Spinoza’s biography, had no effect on him; he led a quiet and uneventful life in Amsterdam and later at The Hague, earning a meager income as a lens grinder and tutor, living most of his adult years in a single room, going out but rarely, and dying of tuberculosis at forty-five.
Spinoza was greatly impressed by Descartes’ philosophy and, like him, used pure reasoning to deduce the nature of the world, God, and the mind. But he found Descartes’ theory about the pineal gland totally unconvincing and lacking in proof,17 and therefore saw no merit to his explanation of how body and mind interact. Unlike Descartes, who believed in free will, Spinoza saw all mental events, like all events in the physical world, as having causes, which in turn have preceding causes; he was, in short, a complete determinist, as he made clear in the early pages of the Ethics:* axiom 3: From a given determinate cause an effect necessarily follows; and, o
n the other hand, if no determinate cause can be given, it is impossible that an effect can follow.
PROP. 29: In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things are determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and act in a certain manner.
Demonst.: Whatever is, is in God; but God cannot be called a contingent thing, for He exists necessarily and not contingently. Moreover, the modes of the divine nature have followed from it necessarily and not contingently, whether it be considered absolutely or as determined to action in a certain manner.18
To decode this difficult language, for “God” substitute “the universe,” for “modes of the divine nature” read “mental and physical events,” and replace “contingent” with “not caused by something else.” It then becomes clear that Spinoza’s world, including human mental activity, is wholly subject to natural laws and capable of being understood.
He thus anticipates the fundamental premise of scientific psychology. He also says that the most basic of human motives is self-preservation;19again, this anticipates modern psychological theory. Yet his ideas affected the development of psychology only indirectly; his impact on modern thought, say Drs. Franz Alexander and Sheldon Selesnick in their History of Psychiatry, “was so pervasive that many of his basic concepts became a part of the general ideological climate” and in that way influenced Freud and others without their knowing it.20
Aside from these basic concepts, Spinoza’s psychology was limited in scope and had little follow-up. He discussed perception, memory, imagination, the formation of ideas, consciousness, and so on, but said almost nothing new about them. In defining “mind” and “intellect” he grossly oversimplified: “mind” is nothing but an abstract term for the series of perceptions, memories, and other mental states that we experience, “intellect” no more than the sum of one’s ideas or volitions.
But these subjects do not much concern him; his interest in psychology has to do with the passions (emotions); specifically, how we can escape from bondage to them by understanding their causes. His analysis of the emotions is largely patterned on Descartes’. There are three basic ones, he says (Descartes said six)—joy, sorrow, and desire—and forty-eight different emotions result from the interplay of these three with the pleasant or unpleasant stimuli of everyday life.
These explanations, though reasonable enough, are purely logical and superficial; they say nothing about unconscious motivations, childhood development, social influences, or other components of emotional behavior as it is understood by modern psychologists. Like the rest of Spinoza’s writing on psychology, these passages could have been written by Aquinas, were it not, again, for Spinoza’s pantheism and determinism.
In one respect Spinoza’s psychology is seriously at odds with modern psychology. Although he was a monist, regarding thought and matter as twin aspects of the same underlying reality, he maintained that there is no interaction of mind and body: “The body cannot determine the mind to thought, neither can the mind determine the body to motion or rest” (Ethics, Third Part, Prop. 2). Nor is interaction necessary, since both stem from the same reality. Professor Watson calls Spinoza’s doctrine “monistic parallelism” and sums it up as follows:
Every bodily event coexists with and is coordinate to a mental event. Body and mind correlate, but they do not cause one another any more than the convex side of a glass causes the concave. Apparent interaction arises from ignorance on our part and shows only the coincidence of actions; it is a matter of appearance, not a reflection of reality.21
Thus, for all Spinoza’s modern cosmology and determinism, his explanation of the relation of mind and body is much like Geulincx’s two-clock theory, and just as unreal and fantastic. Spinoza’s parallelism influenced some nineteenth-century German psychologists, but it has vanished completely from modern psychology.
None of this is to belittle his ethics, the basic message of which—that through knowledge of ourselves and the causes of our emotions we can escape our bondage to them and live as good people—is as valid and as inspiring as ever. But that is the subject of other works, not this one.
The Empiricists
We have only to cross the English Channel to find a wholly different philosophic milieu and genre of psychology. The English have had their mystics, scholastics, and metaphysicians, but for at least the past four centuries most of their philosophers and psychologists have been realistic, pragmatic, and down-to-earth. By the early decades of the seventeenth century, it was typical of English thinkers to be commonsensical and empirical in their search for knowledge. They relied on experiment, or, where that was impossible, everyday experience and good judgment. The Royal Society urged its members to communicate in “the language of artisans, countrymen, and merchants [rather than] that of wits or scholars.” The society’s first historian, Bishop Thomas Sprat, proudly asserted that “our climate, the air, the influence of the heaven, the composition of the English blood; as well as the embraces of the ocean… render our country a land of experimental knowledge.”22
Whether those influences or subtler social ones account for the English empirical bent, there is no doubt that it existed then, as it does now. In psychology, it produced a series of protopsychologists who rejected Descartes’ doctrine of innate ideas and who, while dutifully mentioning God and the soul, proposed earthly explanations of human mental activities and behavior. They are known as the empiricists, not because they were experimentalists (they were not; unlike the natural scientists, they had no idea how to conduct experiments in psychology) but because they believed that the mind develops by empirical means: ideas are derived from experience. The debate between nativists (believers in innate ideas) and empiricists began in ancient Greece, reappeared in new and sharper form in the seventeenth century, and has continued to this very day, where, couched in contemporary research-based terms, it is at the core of the remarkable developments in psychology to be spelled out later in this history.
Hobbes
The first of the English empirical psychologists was Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), although he is known primarily as a political philosopher. The son of a vicar, he was born prematurely owing to his mother’s terror at hearing of the Spanish Armada. This, he said, accounted for his timid disposition—“Myself and fear were born twins”; and his timidity, or at least the feeling that his fellow human beings were inherently dangerous, underlies the antidemocratic political philosophy for which he is famous.
Hobbes states in the first pages of Leviathan (1651), written during the turbulent years of the Civil War and Commonwealth, that all men are by nature the enemy of all other men and can live together in peace and prosperity only by ceding their right of self-determination to an autocratic government, preferably a monarchy. Without the “terror” through which such a ruling power enforces civilized behavior, life is inevitably “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” This dour philosophy came not from some sickly, ill-favored misfit but from a tall, handsome man who was lively, friendly, and exceptionally healthy throughout his long life.
Hobbes had reasons other than misanthropy for his Royalist views. After being educated at Oxford, he spent many years as tutor to several sons of the Cavendishes, a noble family (one of his pupils became the first Earl and another the third Earl of Devonshire), and in Paris he lived among Royalist émigrés during the Commonwealth and tutored the future Charles II.
It was fortunate for him that he had such connections. A devotee of the sciences, he was an outspoken determinist and materialist, and in his later years a group of bishops accused him in Parliament of atheism, blasphemy, and profaneness, and recommended that the white-haired, dignified Hobbes be burned. But the accusation failed to win action, the House of Lords defeated a bill condemning Leviathan, the King gave Hobbes a pension, and he prudently turned his mind and pen to less incendiary topics. Though “Hobbist” remained for many years a term of abuse among the clergy and believers, Hobbes lived quietly, continued to write and to play tennis in h
is seventies, translated Homer in his eighties, and died just short of ninety-two.
It is not Hobbes’s view of human nature but his empiricist epistemology that earns him a place in the pantheon of psychology. Having visited Galileo and been greatly impressed by his physics, Hobbes concluded that all events are matter in motion; applying this to psychology, he reasoned that all mental activities must be motions of atoms in the nervous system and brain reacting to motions of atoms in the external world.23 He did not say how the movement of atoms in the brain could be a thought; he simply asserted that it could. Only today are psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists beginning to answer that question.
Hobbes boldly declared that no part of the universe is incorporeal, that “soul” is only a metaphor for “life,” and that all talk of the soul as an incorporeal substance is “vain philosophy” and “pernicious Aristotelian nonsense.”24 Naturally, he dismissed the doctrine of innate ideas, since these were supposedly built into the incorporeal soul. He said that everything in the mind arises from sense experience: Complex thoughts are derived from simple ones, and simple ones from sensations:
