The Story of Psychology (12 page)

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.
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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.
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But modern psychology, unlike any living creature, had many fathers.

I
n
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:

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.

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.”
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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 memorable 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.”
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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”:

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:

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:

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.
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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.
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