The Story of Psychology (14 page)

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:

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.

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.

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 his 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.”
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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:

The notion, of course, was not new; it had been advanced in one form or another by Alcmaeon, Democritus, and Aristotle, among others. But Hobbes went farther than they, using a principle of physics that would later be known as Newton’s First Law of Motion to explain how sensory impressions become imagination, memory, and general knowledge:

Hobbes foresaw an objection: we can think of things that we have never seen. This phenomenon, too, he readily explained:

Hobbes’s presentation of empirical psychology, though rudimentary and based on fictitious physiology, is a landmark. It is the first effort to explain how sense impressions are transformed into higher mental processes.

He was a pioneer in a second way: he was the first modern associationist.
Aristotle, Augustine, and Vives had all said that memories are recalled through linkages, but Hobbes’s contribution, though incomplete and elementary, was clearer and more specific. Although he used the term “train of ideas” rather than “association,” he is the earliest figure in the tradition that eventually led to experimental psychology in the nineteenth century and to behaviorism in the twentieth.

“When a man thinketh on anything whatsoever,” he stated, “his next thought after is not altogether so casual as it seems to be. Not every thought to every thought succeeds indifferently.”
²⁷
Again using physics as a model, he likened the succession of thoughts to the “coherence” of matter, one thought following another “in such manner as water upon a plane table is drawn which way any one part of it is guided by the finger.”
²⁸
But laying aside the physical simile, he gave a genuinely psychological account of how associations work. Sometimes, he said, the train of thoughts is “unguided” and without design, at other times “regulated” or voluntary, as when we consciously try to remember something or to solve some problem. He thus anticipated the modern distinction between free association and controlled association.

The examples he gave of coherence leading the mind from one thought to another are as good as any in contemporary psychological literature. This is in
Leviathan:

And in a later work,
Human Nature
(1658), he said that the connection of any two ideas in memory is the result of their coincidental occurrence when first experienced:

It was only the seed of associationist psychology, but it fell on fertile soil.

Although Hobbes was the first English empiricist in psychology, John Locke (1632–1704), born forty-four years later, developed the nascent theory and is often called “the father of English empiricism.” He too was both a political philosopher and a protopsychologist; in the latter role he espoused principles similar to Hobbes’s, in the former role, very different ones.

In social polity, he argued brilliantly, contravening Hobbes, certain natural rights, including liberty, are not given up when men move from a state of nature to one of social living. His ideas are embedded in the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Locke’s liberalism was due partly to family background, partly to experience. His father was a Puritan attorney, and as a boy Locke knew what it was to be a member of a disfavored minority. But he was later disillusioned by the excesses of the victorious Puritans and eventually became an articulate spokesman for a balance of power between King and Parliament, and an advocate of religious toleration for all in England—well, not quite all; he drew the line, probably for politic reasons, at atheists, Unitarians, and Muslims.