Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [21]
For another, during the latter half of the dormancy of psychology, Christian scholars who winnowed and modified Greek theories of psychology added to them, on theological grounds, certain nonscientific hypotheses about human nature that live on in popular thinking to this day. A look at how and when these hypotheses were developed will help us understand such contemporary debates as whether consciousness can exist in a disembodied mind (as in, say, out-of-body or back-from-death experiences) or whether it is a concatenation of physical and chemical events occurring in a living brain.
The Commentators
Theophrastus
When Aristotle left Athens in 323 because of political turmoil, he named his longtime friend and colleague Theophrastus head of the Lyceum; he also later bequeathed to him his library and the original manuscripts of all his works. Clearly, Aristotle had the highest regard for him.
Theophrastus (372–287) was indeed a distinguished teacher and scholar. He ran the Lyceum efficiently for many years, and was so eloquent a lecturer that two thousand people at a time would come to hear him. And he was phenomenally industrious, completing during his lifetime 227—some say 400—works on religion, politics, education, rhetoric, mathematics, astronomy, logic, biology, and other subjects, including psychology.
Yet Aristotle, for all his good judgment, could not foresee that almost no one would remember or read any of Theophrastus’s works except the most trifling of them, the Characters. This was a series of brief satirical portraits of such archetypes as the Flatterer, the Garrulous Man, and the Stupid Man—the original exemplars of a genre of literature that has been popular ever since. The sketches are psychological writing in the broad sense that they report behavioral phenomena, but they add nothing to our understanding of the origins or development of traits or patterns of personality.
Theophrastus’s other works have been deservedly forgotten. In them he restated, compiled, commented on, and criticized, but added little to, what others had said before him. This is especially true of On the Senses, his treatise on psychology; he says many sensible things, but they are no more than evaluations of, or faultfinding with, the work of his predecessors. This is typical:
[Democritus] attributes perception, pleasure, and thought to respiration and to the mingling of air with blood. But many animals are either bloodless or do not breathe at all. And were it necessary for the breath to penetrate the entire body and not merely special parts—[a notion]…he introduces for the sake of a part of his theory—there would be nothing to prevent all parts of the body from remembering and thinking. But reason does not have its seat in all our members—in our legs and feet, for instance—but in specific parts by means of which, at the proper age, we exercise memory and thought.*1
The Hellenists
Theophrastus’s writing about psychology is typical of what one finds in the works of post-Aristotelian philosophers of the Hellenistic period, the two centuries following Alexander’s death and the dividing up of his empire by three of his generals. Such commentary broke no new ground, but it did begin the compilation of the defects of Greek psychological thinking that two millennia later would drive a few inquisitive men to devise new hypotheses and, for the first time, test them scientifically.
What was true of psychology in the Hellenistic era was true of much other intellectual activity. The compilation and criticism of the ideas of thinkers of the preceding centuries flourished as libraries grew, particularly in Alexandria, where Ptolemy I, King of Egypt, established the greatest library of antiquity. Only in certain sciences did new ideas appear: geometry, which Euclid greatly expanded;