An Historical Introduction To Modern Psychology

Gardner Murphy, Murphy, Gardner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136325687
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

This is Volume XXII of thirty-eight in a collection on General Psychology. Originally published in 1928, this study looks at the developments since the nineteenth century in literary and philosophic psychology underwent profound changes, chiefly as a result of the progress of biology.

Part I
The Pre-Experimental Period

Chapter I
The Intellectual Background of Seventeenth-Century Psychology

"Their fine ways of explaining Nature mechanically charmed me."

—Leibnitz

FROM colour-theories to defence-mechanisms, from the functions of a white rat's vibrissæ to the mystic's sense of unutterable revelation, from imaginary playmates to partial correlations—wherein lies that unity of subject matter which leads us to speak, compactly enough, of " contemporary psychology"? From behaviourism or Gestalt psychology to psychoanalysis or the objective measurement of character, the eye wanders over an interminable range of experiments, measurements, hypotheses, dogmas, disconnected facts, and systematic theories. In a sense it is true to say that through all this vast melange the very birth-cry of the infant science is still resounding. In another sense psychology is as old as occidental civilization, and all these seething multitudes of investigations and opinions spring from an inconceivably rich and variegated history. The complexity of contemporary psychology suggests that its understanding may well require the use of that genetic method which it has itself repeatedly demanded in recent years. Whatever difficulties there may be in finding unity in the various psychological disciplines, there is at least one unity to which we may cling for orientation and perspective, for appreciation and synthesis; and this is the tranquil unity of history.

The centuries since Descartes and Hobbes have woven together the psychology of antiquity and the physical science of the Renaissance, the nineteenth-century triumphs of biological science and the twentieth-century genius for measurement, while a multitude of social forces, as well as strokes of individual genius, have shown unities of method and conception underlying all the problems of psychology, and indeed of life itself. For what is experimental psychology if not an embodiment of the notion of a fundamental unity between psychology and physiology, and what is behaviourism if not an attempt to make that unity more complete; what is psychoanalysis if not an insistence on the fundamental unity of normal and abnormal, and of conscious and un conscious motives; what is the Gestalt psychology if not an emphasis upon those Aristotelian "forms" which contribute the patterns both of the things of the physical world and of the data of immediate experience?

Yet each of these movements towards unity is itself but a more complete and systematic expression of movements that have been with us at least since the seventeenth century: behaviourism, for example, a refinement of Descartes' automatism and Hobbes's mechanism; the emphasis on the unconscious a reminiscence of Leibnitz's idea of perceptions of which we are not aware; experimental psychology itself an application of that experimental and quantitative conception of nature which Galileo and Newton so brilliantly set forth.

And the venerable antiquity of psychology shows through the gloss of its newness, and makes the finality of each new emphasis seem, perhaps, a little less final. Not indeed that there is very great usefulness in that cheerful modern dogma which asserts that each achievement of science gives but a new name to the discovery of some Hellenic thinker. But psychology has made its recent rapid advances only because of the richness of its own history, and because of the centuries of general scientific progress which lie immediately behind us.

An historical approach to contemporary psychology necessitates at the outset a clear picture of the psychology of the early nineteenth century. But the early nineteenth century will be intelligible only if we first give brief attention to some tendencies at work several centuries earlier, and largely outside of the special field of psychology. We must attempt a brief sketch of some phases of the Renaissance, and of some psychological schools which grew out of it.

The revival of learning and the Renaissance were, of course, vastly complicated social and intellectual movements, the origin and nature of which are not, at least in our own day, to be stated in any clear and final terms. But the following facts seem to be reasonably well established. The Crusaders of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had discovered and carried back to Europe much of the civilization of the Near East, in which many elements of classical culture had been embedded. New phases of culture showed themselves; the new universities of the thirteenth century promoted the study of the Classics, and a great artistic revival, the ProtoRenaissance, spread over southern Europe. The true Renaissance began, roughly speaking, even as early as the fourteenth century, and reached its greatest height in the sixteenth.

It gloried in explorations of all kinds, not only physical but intellectual. But perhaps the realm of geographical discovery is as representative and enlightening as any. A beautiful epitome of the whole movement is found in the coinage of the Spanish empire, changing as a result of the explorations of Columbus. In the days before the discovery of America, some of the coins of Spain bore the words Ne Plus Ultra. Spain and the Pillars of Hercules were the edge of the world. Then came Columbus and the age of the explorers. The inscription was changed. Ne was removed; and the words read Plus Ultra. There was " more beyond."

Everywhere men sought for the new, both in the new appreciation of the culture of antiquity, and in the search for new knowledge and new possessions, material and immaterial. Among the more obvious expressions of the movement was the search for new routes to the East, and the beginning of the building of empires to include the "New World," the colonization of which was one of the great achievements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As the Holy Roman Empire slowly decayed, France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands played their parts, each looking for lands and wealth beyond anything dreamed of in the past. In the economic sphere an equally novel change was appearing. During this period went on apace the" Commercial Revolution " which followed upon the growth of towns and the development of trade by land and sea, deriving from new routes to the East and from the general improvement in means of travel and communication. The political revolution in which Cromwell was the leader and Charles I was executed, and even more definitely, the Revolution of 1688, in which the House of Orange was called to the throne, marked the emancipation of the commercial classes in Great Britain. They meant the end of the traditional " divine right of kings," and the beginning of the self-assertion of a middle class, the great trading class which grew up as these economic changes occurred.

Such tremendous unrest and activity were bound to show themselves in the intellectual world, as everywhere else; they were apparent in the interests, spirit, and modes of thought of those who devoted themselves to art, to letters, to philosophy, and to practical affairs. In science a revival had begun as early as the twelfth century. The first great achievement was that of Copernicus (1543). His doctrine that the earth and the planets moved in circles about the sun (the revival of a theory dating from the third century B.C.) was the beginning of modern astronomy. But inductive methods were not yet understood. Copernicus was far from being a bold investigator; his method was almost purely deductive, having as its purpose the substitution of a simple conception for the complicated Ptolemaic system. His views seem, moreover, to have been inspired by Greek philosophy.

After Copernicus came Tycho Brahe, who spent his life making and recording with scrupulous exactness such observations on the motions of the heavenly bodies as the best instruments of his time permitted. He found the Copernican system unacceptable. It did not agree with his observations, and he did not guess that the reason for the inconsistency lay in the fact that the orbit of the earth's motion about the sun is not a circle but an ellipse. Even Tycho, the observer, believed that heavenly bodies must of necessity move in perfect curves, and to him the perfect curve was the circle. Nevertheless, in the hands of Tycho and his immediate successors, science was beginning to take on a definitely empirical cast, the spirit of indifference to the perfection of theory, and eagerness for accurate data as the first step toward a sound hypothesis. In the work of Kepler there was a combination of the work of these two predecessors. Through close study and the most brilliant mathematical genius, he succeeded in showing that Copernicus was essentially correct, but that the figures accumulated by Tycho necessitated the assumption of elliptical rather than circular orbits. With Kepler came into being the first great fusion of inductive with mathematical method.

A similar step was being taken by Gilbert in England in the study of magnetism. For him direct observation was the basic method; he varied the conditions of observation in a way genuinely deserving the modern term "experimental." The foundation was then very speedily laid for the development of experimental science; and in many branches of physical science such investigations were soon under way. The work done by Gilbert was admired by Galileo, who in the first half of the seventeenth century extended the experimental method and went far beyond Gilbert both in the range and in the importance of his observations. Galileo and his followers concerned themselves primarily with the fundamental problems of mechanics and optics.

In all this group we can distinguish the leaders and the trumpeters, those collecting data and those blaring forth to the world what had been and what was to be done. Francis Bacon was the herald of the new empirical spirit as it fought its way among the many forces of the Renaissance. He was, in fact, given credit for the invention of the inductive method; but he was so far from originating such a method that he did not even recognize the significance of the work of Gilbert (nor the immensely important discoveries of Harvey). Nevertheless, as a systematizer and interpreter, he con tributed much to the rapid spread of enthusiasm for empirical methods.

The greatest combination of mathematical with empirical method in the seventeenth century was that effected by the genius of Sir Isaac Newton. Newton's work consisted both in the development of new mathematical method and in the continuation of the work of Kepler in the elaborate logical use of empirical results. He was adept in using the empirical data of others as well as his own. He contributed important original experiments, such as those relating to the composition of white light. Newton contributed much also to the philosophy of science. He gave expression to a system of thought which could be used coherently in the advancement of knowledge. He not only made observations and employed mathematical ways of generalizing from data, but occupied himself also with the fundamental conceptions with which, as he conceived it, science must deal: mass, motion, force, etc.

We need to keep in mind these three different kinds of scientific progress in the seventeenth century: the use of mathematical method; the desire to vary conditions, i.e., to experiment; and the interest in the philosophical significance of the new acquisitions.

A few words about the organization of science. The only country which had organized a definite means of scientific co-operation by the second half of the seventeenth century was France; its work was confined chiefly to the city of Paris. The French Academy of Sciences began to receive royal support in 1671, which furthered the collaboration of investigators. The new impetus to scientific work given by the French Crown is in striking contrast to the situation in Britain. Newton worked practically alone. There was indeed a Royal Society, which was intended to give better means of co-operation, but he remained far greater than his own circle; and pitifully inadequate funds were granted by the Crown. The same condition existed in the German States. Germany, of course, was not a political unit, and naturally enough there was even less co-operation among its scattered men of science than in France and Great Britain, although the German university system was destined in the eighteenth century to serve as a centre for the awakening interest in scientific effort. Galileo, in Italy, had worked alone, and under the suspicion of Church and State. The energies of Spain and Portugal were being expended in explorations and conquests in the New World. So, if we are inclined to ask why a given " discovery " was announced when the facts were already known to contemporary investigators, the answer is that almost until the beginning of the nineteenth century scientific progress throughout western Europe was, with few exceptions, the fruit of the efforts of individuals, frequently working without knowledge of kindred efforts in their own and other lands, and destined to be forgotten until some scientist or scholar of a later day stumbled upon their work.

This holds strikingly true in the biological sciences. The revival of classical medicine, particularly in the Italian universities, was actively proceeding in the sixteenth century. If vague notions of "humours," "vital principles," etc., persisted, they were scarcely more conspicuous than the similar conceptions of force, attraction, and the like, in physical science. The desire to describe, to understand in terms of observation, rather than by speculative and deductive methods, was just as marked in biological science as in other fields, though generalizations were more difficult. The empirical movement was active generally, and in the Netherlands it led in the seventeenth century to the inauguration of epoch-making clinical and post-mortem studies in anatomy. The reader will remember, for instance, Rembrandt's painting, the Anatomy Lesson, a representation of the then novel and amazing art of dissecting the human body. The same clinical spirit was manifested in the study of mental diseases; Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) gave descriptions of familiar types of insanity. In 1692 appeared Sydenham's Processus Integri, with a description of the varieties of mental disease, the empirical spirit and accuracy of which have been very generally recognized. But the most epoch-making discovery in the field of medicine was Harvey's demonstration in 1628 of the circulation of the blood. Before the time of Harvey the prevalent doctrine was Galen's theory of red and blue blood, each type of blood being supposed to pulsate backwards and forwards. Harvey demonstrated by actual experimentation that the blue blood became red in the course of circulation. And, almost at the same time, this discovery was paralleled in the field of instrumentation by great improvement of the microscope in the hands of the Dutchman, Leeuwenhoek, opening new fields to biological science.

Chapter II
The...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• The International Library of Psychology
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Preface to the Third Edition
• Part I The Pre-Experimental Period
• Part II From Weber's Experiments to the Age of Wundt
• Part III Contemporary Psychology
• Supplement Contemporary German Psychology
• Name Index
• Subject Index