Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [2]
We today may smile condescendingly; we know from modern studies of children brought up under conditions of isolation that there is no innate language and that children who hear no speech never speak. Psamtik’s hypothesis rested on an invalid assumption, and he apparently mistook a babbled sound for an actual word. Yet we must admire him for trying to prove his hypothesis and for having had the highly original notion that thoughts arise in the mind through internal processes that can be investigated.
Messages from the Gods
For it had not occurred to anyone until then, nor would it for another several generations, that human beings could study, understand, and predict how their thoughts and feelings arose.
Many other complex natural phenomena had long engaged the interest of both primitive and civilized peoples, who had come more or less to understand and master them. For nearly 800,000 years human beings had known how to make and control fire;2 for 100,000 years they had been devising and using tools of many kinds; for eight thousand years some of them had understood how to plant and raise crops; and for over a thousand years, at least in Egypt, they had known some of the elements of human anatomy and possessed hundreds of remedies—some of which may even have worked—for a variety of diseases. But until a century after Psamtik’s time neither the Egyptians nor anyone else thought about or sought to understand—let alone influence—how their own minds functioned.
And no wonder. They took their thoughts and emotions to be the work of spirits and gods. We have direct and conclusive evidence of this in the form of the testimony of ancient peoples themselves. Mesopotamian cuneiform texts from about 2000 B.C., for instance, refer repeatedly to the “commands” of the gods—literally heard as utterances by the rulers of society—dictating where and how to plant crops, to whom to delegate authority, on whom to make war, and so on. A typical clay cone reads, in part:
Mesilin King of Kish at the command of his deity Kadi concerning the plantation of that field set up a stele [an inscribed stone column] in that place… Ningirsu, the hero of Enlil [another god], by his righteous command, upon Umma war made.3
A far more detailed portrait of how early people supposed their thoughts and feelings arose can be found in the Iliad, which records the beliefs of Homer in the ninth century B.C., and to some extent those of the eleventh-century Greeks and Trojans he wrote about. Professor Julian Jaynes of Princeton, who exhaustively analyzed the language of the Iliad that refers to mental and emotional functions, summed up his findings as follows:
There is in general no consciousness in the Iliad… and in general, therefore, no words for consciousness or mental acts. The words in the Iliad that in a later age come to mean mental things have different meanings, all of them more concrete. The word psyche, which later means soul or conscious mind, [signifies] in most instances life-substances, such as blood or breath: a dying warrior bleeds out his psyche onto the ground or breathes it out in his last gasp …Perhaps most important is the word noos which, spelled as nous in later Greek, comes to mean conscious mind. Its proper translation in the Iliad would be something like perception or recognition or field of vision. Zeus “holds Odysseus in his noos.” He keeps watch over him.4
The thoughts and feelings of the people in the Iliad are put directly into their minds by the gods. The opening lines of the epic make that plain. It begins when, after nine years of besieging Troy, the Greek army is being decimated by plague, and the thought occurs to the great Achilles that they should withdraw from those shores:
Achilles called the men to gather together, this having been put into his mind by the goddess of the