The Story of Psychology

by Morton Hunt

  In Scotland, Thomas Reid (1710–1792), Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), and Thomas Brown (1778–1820), professors at Scottish universities and good Presbyterians all, modified associationism to make it more palatable to believers. They felt that as it was expounded by Locke and Hume, it was mechanistic and degrading to the humanity of man. Moreover, Hume’s skepticism about causality and the reality of the external world was contrary to religious dogma. All three men therefore altered and added to associationism in an effort to repair these defects.

  Their chief answer to Locke, Berkeley, and Hume was actually remarkably simple: subjectivism and skepticism were belied by common sense. People in all ages and nations have believed in the external world and in causality because common sense tells them to—the very view Dr. Johnson expressed by kicking the stone. It was hardly good science, but at least it did no harm.

  Reid also made the very good point that the simple laws of association seemed grossly inadequate as an explanation of complex mental functions. He therefore revived and enlarged the ancient concept of mental faculties—special innate abilities—and named several dozen of them.50

  Later psychologists would struggle to prove, or disprove, the existence of such faculties.

  Brown made a smaller but more concrete contribution to associationism: he proposed that there were both primary and secondary laws of “suggestion” (association), and that the latter, under special conditions, altered the operation of the former. Thus, the word “cold” might produce at one time and place the association “dark” but at another time and place the association “hot.” This valuable insight, however, was ignored until the advent of the experimental approach to learning nearly a century later.

  James Mill (1773–1836), social theorist, Utilitarian philosopher, and journalist, offered his own version of associationism in Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829). Instead of enlarging the theory, he drastically simplified it. He said that there were only two classes of mental elements—sensations and ideas—and that all association comes about through one factor, contiguity, the simultaneity or nearness in time of two experiences. Complex ideas were nothing but simpler ones conjoined; the idea “everything” was not an abstraction but a mere heap or accumulation of all of one’s simple and complex ideas. Robert Watson says that “this brings association as a doctrine to its nadir in logical, mechanistic, and molecular simplicity.”51 Nonetheless, some leading twentieth-century behaviorists would sound like Mill’s intellectual off-spring.

  John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), James Mill’s son, primarily a philosopher, discussed psychology in his Logic (1843) and his Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865). He restored to mainstream associationism much of what his father had pruned from it, particularly hypotheses about the formation of complex ideas. Unlike the elder Mill, he envisioned them not as mere assemblages of simple elements but as fusions of those elements, much like chemical compounds that have characteristics unlike those of their component elements. Accordingly, he said, the laws of association cannot tell us how any complex idea comes to be or what it is composed of; we can learn that only from experience and direct experiment. Mill thus helped steer associationism toward experimental psychology.

  Alexander Bain (1818–1903), a friend of John Stuart Mill’s, lived well into the era of scientific psychology. Some scholars say he was the last of the philosopher-psychologists, others that he was the first real psychologist in that he devoted most of his life to psychology and brought more physiology into it than any of his predecessors. The physiology was not imaginary, like Hartley’s; it was gleaned from his visits to nineteenth-century anatomists and his reading of their works. The mechanisms described in his discussion of the senses and of movement came closer to modern theory than those of earlier protopsychologists.

  But the physiology of his time could not account for higher mental processes. Bain’s psychology was therefore largely mainline associationism. He did, however, point out some of its limitations. He noted that it could not explain novel or innovative ideas. And though he denied that there are innate ideas, he said that the minds of infants are not really blank sheets of paper; they possess reflexes, instincts, and differences in acuteness. No school or great theory is linked with his name, but his work contained a number of germinal ideas that others would soon develop.

  German Nativism

  While explorers of the mind were adventuring in one direction in Britain and in France (where empiricism caught on among intellectual liberals during the Enlightenment), others in Germany were continuing to pursue the direction taken by Descartes. Something about the German culture and mentality gave its philosophers a bent for murky metaphysics, mind-body dualism, and nativism. Yet that direction, too, yielded something of value, chiefly the theory of mind developed by Immanuel Kant, the greatest philosopher of the idealist school.

  Before Kant, the German philosophers, for all their intelligence, had contributed little to humankind’s understanding of its mental processes. One, in fact, possibly the most brilliant mind of the seventeenth century, made forays into psychology that accomplished almost nothing; his brand of metaphysics, like a faulty compass, led him astray. Still, he is worth a moment’s notice if only because his ideas exemplify the tradition that led to the work of Kant.

  Leibniz

  Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), born in Leipzig, Saxony, was a stooped, bandy-legged genius who earned a doctorate in law at twenty, served as a diplomat to the French and English courts, invented the calculus at the same time as Newton (with whom he became involved in a nasty dispute over who deserved credit for it), and wrote extensively on a variety of philosophic issues. Although many of his ideas are worthy of respect, Leibniz is best known today for two that are preposterous. One is familiar to all who have read Voltaire’s Candide:

  It follows from the supreme perfection of God, that in creating the universe he has chosen the best possible plan…For since all the possibilities in the understanding of God laid claim to existence in proportion to their perfections, the actual world, as the resultant of all these claims, must be the most perfect possible.52

  These are Leibniz’s words, not Voltaire’s; this is what Voltaire wickedly satirized in the person of Dr. Pangloss, who endlessly repeats his profound philosophic insight, “All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.”

  Leibniz’s other outlandish notion was that the universe is made up of an infinite number of “monads”—ultimate components of substance that are a kind of soul, dimensionless, pointlike, and impervious to outside influences. What appears to be matter throughout the universe is actually the way the immaterial monads perceive the arrangement of one another in space.53 Leibniz thought this up to solve a number of problems in classic metaphysics, including those of mind-body dualism. His theory is difficult to grasp, but since “monadology” began and ended with him, we need not bother trying.

  Monadology did, however, lead him to suggest that there are different levels of consciousness, a new idea in psychology. Monads, being infinitesimal, are not individually conscious, but when cumulate, their tiny perceptions add up to complex mental functions, including consciousness; the more complex the aggregation, the more so the mental function. Animals, though they perceive, are not self-aware, but human beings are; that is, there is more than one level of consciousness. That’s a long way from what Freud would mean by the unconscious and the preconscious, but it’s a beginning.

  One aspect of Leibniz’s psychology did lead in a useful direction. Seeking to explain the source of consciousness, he postulated a process he called “apperception,” which, by means of certain innate patterns or beliefs, enables us to become aware of and to understand our many tiny unconscious perceptions. We know, for instance, without learning it, that “whatever is, is,” and that “it is impossible for a thing to be and not to be at the same time.” Similarly, the truths of reason—principles of logic—are inherent. These innate ideas are not specific
concepts but ways of understanding experience. Kant would transform this notion into a historic theory.

  Another aspect of monadology would have led psychology into a culde-sac if anyone but Leibniz had taken it seriously. Since monads are impervious to outside influences, how is it that anything ever happens in the world—and that it looks as if things influence each other? Leibniz’s answer was that God has arranged for all the changes in the infinity of monads to occur in “pre-established harmony”; nothing interacts with anything else but only seems to. So whatever happens in mind exactly parallels what is happening in body, without any interaction between them: “God has originally created the soul, and every other real unity, in such a way that everything in it must arise from its own nature by a perfect spontaneity with regard to itself, yet by a perfect conformity to things without.”54 It is the two-clock theory of Geulincx again, except that now every infinitesimal monad is a clock, keeping time with every other one.

  The theory would have made psychology pointless, since it portrays mental events as following a fixed and preordained order and psychological responses to outside stimuli as mere illusion. Which only shows whither a splendid mind can travel when steering by a faulty compass. Fortunately, few others followed his route.

  Kant

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is considered by many the greatest of modern philosophers; he is certainly one of the most difficult to understand, though that may not be an appropriate criterion. Happily, we are interested only in his psychology, which is comprehensible.

  Kant’s biography sounds like a parody of the life of the ivory-tower intellectual. Born in Königsberg, Prussia, he entered the university at sixteen, taught there until he was seventy-three, and never traveled more than forty miles from the city. Barely five feet tall and hollow-chested, he led a bachelor life of unvarying routine, ostensibly to preserve his frail health. He was awakened by his manservant at 5 A.M. the year round, devoted two hours of the morning to study and two hours to lecturing, wrote until 1 P.M., and then dined at a restaurant. Precisely at 3:30 P.M. he strolled for an hour, whatever the weather, along a walk of linden trees, breathing only through his nose (he thought it unhealthful to open his mouth outdoors) and refusing to converse with anyone. (He was so punctual that his neighbors, who set their watches by his daily walk, were worried when he failed to appear on time one day. He had been reading Rousseau’s Émile and was so captivated that he forgot himself.) He spent the remainder of each day reading and preparing for the next day’s lecture, and retired between 9 and 10 P.M.

  Kant wrote and lectured on many topics: ethics, theology, cosmology, aesthetics, logic, and the theory of knowledge. Liberal in both politics and theology, he sympathized with the French Revolution until the Reign of Terror, and was a believer in democracy and a lover of freedom. He was a disciple of Leibniz’s until, in midlife, he read Hume and, he said, “was awakened from my dogmatic slumbers” and became inspired to develop a much more detailed theory of knowledge than Leibniz’s.

  Kant was convinced by Hume that causality is not self-evident and that we cannot demonstrate it logically, but he felt sure that we do understand the reality around us and do experience the causal relationships among external things and events. How is that possible? He sought the answer by pure cerebration. For twelve years he stared out the window at a nearby church steeple and thought. It then took him only a few months to write what became his most famous work, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), of which he candidly said in his Preface, “I venture to assert there is not a single metaphysical problem that has not been solved here, or to the solution of which the key at least has not been supplied.”55

  Although his prose in the Critique and elsewhere is all but unintelligible to most readers—his terminology is difficult and his arguments abstruse—he gives his basic view about the mind clearly enough in the Preface. It is true, he says, that experience furnishes us with only very limited knowledge, but it is far from being the mind’s only source of knowledge:

  Experience is by no means the only field to which our understanding can be confined. Experience tells us what is, but not that it must be necessarily what it is and not otherwise. It therefore never gives us any really general truths; and our reason, which is particularly anxious for that class of knowledge, is roused by it rather than satisfied. General truths, which at the same time bear the character of an inward necessity, must be independent of experience—clear and certain in themselves.56

  And such clear and certain truths do exist, mathematics being a case in point. For instance, we believe, and feel perfectly certain of our belief, that two and two will always make four. How do we come by that certainty? Not from experience, which provides us only with probabilities, but from the inherent structure of our minds, from the natural and inevitable manner in which they function. For the human mind is not merely blank paper upon which experience writes, and not a mere bundle of perceptions; it actively organizes and transforms the chaos of experience into sure knowledge.

  We start to acquire such knowledge by recognizing the relations of objects and events in space and time—not through experience but through inherent capability; space and time are forms of Anschauung (“intuition” or “looking at”) or innately determined ways in which we see things.

  Then, having organized our sense data in space and time, we make other judgments about them by means of other innate ideas or transcendental principles (Kant’s term is “categories”); these are the built in machinery by which the mind comprehends experience. There are twelve categories, including unity, totality, reality, cause and effect, reciprocity, existence, and necessity. Kant derived them from a painstaking analysis of the forms of the syllogism, but his basic reason for believing they exist in the mind a priori is that without them we would have no way of making sense of the chaotic mass of our perceptions.

  It is not from experience, for instance, that we learn that every event has a cause; if we lacked the ability to perceive cause and effect, we should never understand anything about the world around us. Therefore it must be that we innately recognize causes and effects.57 The other categories, similarly, are not innate ideas in the Platonic or Cartesian sense but are principles of ordering that enable us to fathom experience. It is they, not the laws of association, that organize experience into meaningful knowledge.

  Kant’s view of the mind as process rather than neural action steered German psychology toward the study of consciousness and “phenomenal experience.” Dualism persisted, since “mind” was apparently a transcendental—Kant’s word—phenomenon, distinct from perceptions and associations.58 His theory would give rise to other varieties of nativist psychology, particularly in Germany, and would have its modern counterparts, if not descendants, in this country, among them Noam Chomsky’s theory of the innate capacity of the child’s mind to comprehend the syntax of spoken language.

  Kant’s nativism led to certain valuable lines of inquiry about the workings of the mind, but in one respect it proved to be a serious hindrance. He held that the mind is a set of processes that take place in time but do not occupy space, and this led him to infer that mental processes cannot be measured (since they occupy no space) and therefore that psychology cannot be an experimental science.*59 Others in the Kantian tradition would continue to hold that view. While it would later be proven as erroneous as Descartes’ belief in animal spirits and hollow nerves, it would retard the development of psychology as a science.

  But only retard. Even as the Catholic Church could delay, but not ultimately prevent, humankind’s learning that the sun rather than the earth is the center of the solar system, the authority of the greatest of idealist philosophers could not prevent psychology from becoming a science through experimentation.

  * Forgreater ease in reading, Spinoza’s interpolated references to axioms and previous propositions have been eliminated and other omissions not indicated.

  * An Ananonymous correspondent replied:

  Dear Sir:r />
  Your astonishment’s odd:

  Iam always about in the Quad.

  And that’s why the tree

  Will continue to be,

  Since observed by

  Yours faithfully,

  God

  * TheEnglish philosopher Samuel Clarke (1675–1729).

  * Healso argued that all psychological knowledge is derived from subjective experience and has no a priori logical or mathematical basis. Hence it can never become a science proper. See Leary, 1978 and 1982.

  FOUR

  The

  Physicalists

  While eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers were sitting in their studies and reasoning about mental phenomena, a number of physicians and physicists were taking a very different route toward the goal of psychological knowledge. Emulating scientists like Harvey, Newton, and Priestley, they were using their hands and instruments to gather information, specifically about the physical causes of neural and mental processes. These pioneers of physicalist psychology are the ancestors of today’s cognitive neuroscientists; their outlook led to the present-day specification of the molecular transactions in the neurons that are the components of mental phenomena.

  The Magician-Healer: Mesmer

  Some physicalists, however, were quasi-scientists at best, and some only pseudo-scientists. Yet even the latter are part of our story, since their theories of certain mental phenomena, though later disproved, led others to seek and discover valid explanations of those phenomena.