Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [19]
Nor is soul, or psyche, an entity that can exist apart from the body. “It is clear,” he says, “that the soul is not separable from the body, and the same holds good of particular parts of the soul.”22 He rejects the Platonic doctrine of the imprisoned soul whose highest goal is to escape from the bonds of matter; in contrast to Plato’s dualism, his system is essentially monistic. (But this is his mature view. Because his views changed during his lifetime, Christian theologians would be able to find ample material in his early writings to justify their dualism.)
Once he has these matters out of the way, Aristotle gets to his real interest: how the mind uses both deduction and induction to arrive at knowledge. His description constitutes, according to Robert Watson, “the first functional view of mental processes…[For him] psyche is a process; psyche is what psyche does.”23 Psyche isn’t an immaterial essence, nor is it the heart or blood (nor, even if he had located psyche in the brain, would it have been the brain); it is the steps taken in thinking—the functionalist concept that today underlies cognitive science, information theory, and artificial intelligence. No wonder those who know Aristotle’s psychology stand in awe of him.
His description of thought processes sounds as if he based it on laboratory findings. He had none, of course, but being so diligent a collector of biological specimens, he may well have done something analogous, that is, scrutinized his own experiences and those of others, treating them as the specimens on which he based his generalizations.
The most important of these is that the thinking mind, whether functioning deductively or inductively, uses sense perceptions or remembered perceptions to arrive at general truths. Sensation brings us perceptions of the world, memory permits us to store those perceptions, imagination enables us to re-create from memory mental images corresponding to perceptions, and from accumulated images we derive general ideas. Radically differing with his mentor, Plato, Aristotle did not believe that the soul is born with knowledge. According to Daniel Robinson, he believed that
human beings have a cognitive capacity by which the (perceptual) registration of externals leads to their storage in memory, this giving rise to experience, and from this—“or from the whole universal that has come to rest in the soul”—a veritable principle of understanding arises (Post. Anal. 100 1–10).24*
It is an extraordinary vision of what scientific psychology would document twenty-three centuries later.
Because he was a creature of his time, some of his comments about memory seem nonsensical now; he said, for instance, that we remember things best when the memory is moist, worst when it is dry, and that very young persons have poor memories because the surface (of the wax tablet–like memory) changes rapidly through growth. But many of his observations were perceptive and close to the mark. For example, the more often an experience is repeated, the better it is remembered. Another: Events experienced only once but under the influence of strong emotion may be better remembered than others experienced many times. And another: We recall things from memory by relying on various kinds of connections among our ideas—similarity, contrast, and contiguity. To find a lost memory, for instance, we call to mind something we believe or know will lead us to the memory we are after.
Whenever we try to recollect something, we experience certain of the antecedent movements [i.e., memories] until finally we come to the one after which customarily comes the one we seek. This is why we hunt up the series, having started in thought either from a present intuition or some other, and from something either similar or contrary to what we seek, or else from that which is contiguous to it.25
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