A History of Western Psychology, David J. Murray, Prentice Hall,
Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1988 (1983)

This highly illuminating treatment of the topic begins with two
prefaces noting the mention of psychology by most of the greatest
thinkers throughout history. A prologue provides a concise overview of
Western history from c. 3000 to the time of writing.

1. The Beginnings of Psychology (8-44): Jaynes' generally unaccepted
theory of the bicameral mind is mentioned. There is little in the Book
of the Dead on mind or personality and no attempt in Mesopotamia at
explanatory or descriptive psychology.

PreSocratic Greeks held diverse views, including an atomic theory and
considerations on how sensations occurred. Alcmaean postulated a
connection between vision and the brain. He also saw health as balance.
Platonic dialogues, perhaps not completely consistent, continued
speculation on sensation. Plato saw the mind as the seat of reason and
compared memories to various birds fluttering in an aviary, captured
but not necessarily easy to grab hold of.

Aristotle thought there must be an overall common sense integrating
information received from the five specific senses. His take on nature
versus nurture was that humans have an innate capacity to learn. The
Hellenistic and Roman periods witnessed four main philosophical schools
(Sceptics, Cynics, Stoics and Epicureans, these last subscribing to an
atomic theory and attributing free will to a swerve in the falling
atoms; Epicurus also taught that atheism was preferable to fearing
divine punishment after death.)

Quintilian stressed the importance of early education. Pliny the Elder
described medicinal drugs and animal behaviour. Plotinus came close to
distinguishing conscious and unconscious.

As to physiological psychology, Hippocrates posited the brain as the
centre of mental activity. Hippocratic writings describe four humours
and Galen elaborated these as personality types: phlegmatic, sanguine,
choleric and melancholic. This view persisted to the Seventeenth
Century. Galen also wrote on irascible and concupiscible emotions.
Herophilus may have been the first to dissect the human body. He was
the first to realize the importance of nerves. This did not happen 
again until the Nineteenth Century. Rufus of Ephesus saw nerves, brain
and spinal cord as one anatomical entity.

2. Early Christian and Medieval Psychology (45-68): Christianity
distinguished between an animal's life giving soul and a human's
immortal soul, something above mere physical examination. Arnobius
stressed nurture.

   Nemesius had an exceptionally detailed description of the physiology
   of the whole body, but he added little to what Galen had already
   said. Imagination is localized in the front part of the brain, the
   intellect in the middle of the brain, and the memory in the hindmost
   part of the brain. He followed Galen in asserting that sensory
   nerves are soft and motor nerves hard; he had a historically
   valuable account of theories of blood flow in ancient times and
   concludes that Galen's system is essentially correct. Like Galen, he
   believed the body to be, in its turn, compounded of the four Greek
   elements. An explicit distinction is made between voluntary and
   involuntary movement. p. 50

Augustine underlined human capacity to understand. He explained evil as
the absence of good. In his Confessions, he is seen as one of the first
to write on child psychology. The Confessions contain extensive
introspection. St. John of Damascus considered psychological functions
and emotions.

Aristotle was translated into Arabic. Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd commented
on reason, the active intellect. Aquinas synthesized Aristotlian
thought in Latin. Other Latin scholars included Peter Abelard, Albertus
Magnus, Bonaventure and Duns Scotus. This last wrote on illusions and
differences in reasoning ability. Roger Bacon advocated experimental
research. Pedro Hispano (Pope John XXI) produced a lengthy work on the
soul.

3. The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (69-101): The Renaissance
witnessed an outburst of intellectual activity, in part fuelled by the
printing of newly recovered Classical writings. Many works considered
free will and the soul. Vives, who also wrote a book about women's
education, wrote De Anima which examined, "memory, understanding, and
will." (p. 73) He noted the connection between phsyiological changes
and emotions. Juan Huarte (1529-1588) stated the importance of early
nutrition in the development of intellectual qualities.

Descartes, from reflexes and mechanical statues, postulated the
mechanistic nature of animals. He considered emotions. He distinguished
human soul from the physical and, as Aristotle, described innate
tendency. Thomas Willis anticipated hormones and nervous discharge, and
contributed significantly to psychiatric treatment. Hobbes considered
the senses alone the source of knowledge. Spinoza held that soul was
inseparable from body, that will was only a word denoting awareness. He
enumerated forty eight emotions, forty three seemingly from Descartes.

Locke thought concepts, ideas, derived from sensation and reflection.

   Like the concepts of extension and duration, the concept of one's
   self is an aquired one, the result of abstractions and cognitions
   during one's lifetime. The essence of an assertion that one is or
   has a self is that one is conscious of experiencing, sensing,
   perceiving, thinking, and so on. One's knowledge of a continuously
   existing self is the result of comparing the present objects of
   which one is aware with one's memory of objects of which one was
   previously aware. It is this continuity of consciousness that is the
   criterion of asserting that one has a continuing self or identity,
   and Locke looked ahead to nineteenth-century psychiatry when he
   pointed out that part of oneself can carry out an act of which
   another part is unaware: the self is more fragile than we like to
   think. Locke's argument has been criticized many times since its
   inception; Allison (1966) nevertheless calls it "the earliest
   systematic treatment of the problem of personal identity in the
   history of modern philosophy" p. 99

Christian Thomasius (1655-1728) may have been the first to suggest
using a questionnaire in psychological research.

4. The Eighteenth Century (102-136): This century saw considerable
progress in anatomical knowledge of the brain. Unzer (1727-1799) argued

   that complex behavior patterns such as instincts, passions, and
   voluntary acts all derived from the action of the vis nervosa in the
   brain and the nervous system." p. 105

Euler (1707-1783) postulated light as waveform and different colours as
different wave frequences. Hume, exploring moral behaviour, considered
emotions, association of ideas, the distinction of ideas from sensory
impressions and inferences of cause and effect relationships. Hume
understood that vanity and humiliation were extremes of moderate
healthy self esteem.

   Reason, he argued, rarely controls one's emotions, though it may
   control the expression of those emotions; will, he maintained, was
   just a convenient word to describe yet another feeling or
   impression. "By will," he said, "I mean nothing but the internal
   impression we feel that we are conscious of when we knowingly give
   rise to any new motion of our body or new perceptions of our mind...
   Hume also had a reductionist argument of the concept of the self: He
   argued that the logic that leads to such a concept is based on the
   notion of identity. In turn this notion, in the case of our personal
   identity, depends on observing that our thoughts have a certain
   resemblance to each other and cause each other. Thus the concept of
   self is another outcome of the operation of the laws of association.
   pp. 115-116

La Mettrie held ideas came from sensations and that psychological
processes were influenced by "illness, climate, and diet." (p. 117)
Condillac derived cognitive activity from sensations. Thomas Reid wrote
of self, common sense and instinct.

PreKantian German thought includes Leibnitz's (1646-1716) views on
consciousness and his "nativism concerning the way we understand." (p.
128) Christian Wolff (1679-1754) wrote on empirical (collection of
data) and rational (analysis of data) psychology and on a posteriori
(from experience) and a priori (unexperienced) knowledge. Kant (1724-
1804) examined a posteriori and a priori more closely. A priori
includes innate awareness (intuition) of space and time.

   Kant went on to argue that we make other judgements about our sense
   data, once they have been organized in space and time: We see
   immediately their quality and their quantity, and conceive of
   certain relations between them, such as cause and effect. Kant
   actually listed a total of twelve concepts of the understanding
   which he believed operate automatically on sense data; these are
   sometimes called categories. He suggested, then, that a considerable
   armory of unlearned organizings and understandings of sense data are
   brought to bear at the time the data are received. pp. 132-133

Soul, beyond space and time, was not amenable to intuitive or rational
examination; its strictly scientific study was not possible. An
empirical psychology could require introspection which would invalidate
it.

   Kant believed something could be salvaged from these criticisms: He
   believed that by studying the behavior of others, we could formulate
   valid concepts about them that would allow us to predict, or even
   control, their future behavior. He called this near-science
   "anthropology." He felt that in his time too little was known about
   the brain to allow of a "physiological anthropology," but he did
   feel that from everyday experience one could develop a "pragmatic
   anthropology" that might be of practical use. Kant lectured on
   pragmatic anthropology for many years and at the end of his life
   allowed the lectures to be published in Anthropology from a
   Pragmatic Point of View... p. 134

5. 1800-1879: the British (pp. 137-161): The year 1879 is the
traditional date for Wundt's institute and the founding of modern
psychology. While the British are usually discounted as having little
influence on that, they may come to be seen as being ahead of their
time. The British felt that there could be a science of psychology,
although they suggested various alternative names for it. They wrote on
knowing (whence association), feeling (whence classification of
emotions; Brown suggested past, present and future), willing (whence
voluntary and involuntary movement; Carpenter specified reflex,
routine involuntary and voluntary) and consciousness (whence identity
and the unconscious).

Alexander Bain (1818-1903) wrote The Senses and the Intellect (1855)
and The Emotions and the Will (1859), highly influential English
psychological textbooks.

6. 1800-1879: The Experimental tradition (pp. 162-198): Johann
Friedrich Herbart 91776-1841), interested in education, considered
psychology, learning, adding new "presentations" to existing ones and
the threshold between the conscious and the unconscious. Continuing
presentations mean an ever evolving "I." Friedrich Beneke (1798-1854)
held that people are born with dispositions (original faculties) and
that association occurs through intermediate "transferable" elements.
Physiological understanding considerably increased. Significant work on
the senses continued.

After some two hundred pages, the seventh chapter, at last brings the
reader to Wundt, often considered the beginning of psychology. A review
of this and the remaining chapters may be posted in future. For now, it
is felt this review of the very informative preWundt material can hint
at the degree to which early human thinkers pondered psychological
issues. The actual book splendidly conveying this better than any
review.

Michael McKenny, June 1, 2009 C.E.


Solarguard UN and USA



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