Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [30]
Galen, for one, survives in Augustine, who echoes his statements that the soul or mind can be influenced by the condition of the body, and, conversely, that the soul or mind can influence the condition of the body. Too much bile, says Augustine by way of example, can make a person irritable, but a person made irritable by external events may cause his body to create too much bile.28
He draws on pagan philosophers cited by earlier Fathers for his account of the structure of the mind, which he describes in terms of the three functions of memory, reason, and will. But at times what he says about these three becomes thoroughly mystical, as when he uses psychology to explain how a trinity could also be a unity:
Since these three, memory, reason, and will, are not three lives but one life, nor three minds but one mind, it follows that they are not three substances but one substance … These three are one, in that they are one life, one mind, one essence. But they are three, in that I remember that I have memory and understanding and will; and I understand that I understand and will and remember; and I will that I will and remember and understand … And therefore while each as a whole is equal to each as a whole, and each as a whole to all as wholes, these three are one, one life, one mind, one essence.29
Augustine equates mind with soul in the living person but says that the soul is immaterial and indestructible, and that after death it leaves the body and becomes immortal. How does he know that? His argument: The soul, or mind, can conceive of the eternal, a concept it cannot possibly obtain from the senses. Just as to think is to exist, so to think of the higher sphere of existence is to be part of that existence.30
But he also often deals with mental life in more naturalistic terms. Sometimes he restates, in his own exalted manner, the views of those pagan philosophers who were most interested in the mechanics of sense perception and memory: “I enter the fields and roomy chamber of memory, wherein are the treasures of countless images imported into it from all manner of things by the senses.”31 In this mood he marvels at how images are deposited in memory by the senses, how memory contains not only images but concepts, and how what takes place in the mind is sometimes a sequence of memories experienced spontaneously and sometimes the result of a conscious search.
Yet like so many of the pagan philosophers, Augustine regards sense-derived knowledge as uncertain and untrustworthy, since we cannot be certain that our perceptions truly represent reality. What is certain, what is beyond any doubt, is the primary experience of self-awareness, for to doubt is to think, to think is to exist; the very act of doubting affirms that we are alive and that we think.32 Thus does he rebut Skepticism and affirm the Platonic theory of knowledge, relying even more strongly than Plato on introspection as the route to knowledge and truth. Drs. Franz Alexander and Sheldon Selesnick assert in their History of Psychiatry that “Augustine was not only the first forerunner of Husserl’s phenomenology and of existentialism but also a forerunner of psychoanalysis.”33
And indeed his use of introspection goes far beyond that of Plato. The remarkable self-revelations in Confessions are a first in literature; the lineage from there to Rousseau to Freud is patent. But this is introspection leading to self-knowledge, and Augustine was after still bigger game. In The City of God and other of Augustine’s theological works we find an account of how introspection can reveal higher truths. Through reason, he says, we can rise above the limitations of the senses to acquire concepts such as “number” and “wisdom,” but we achieve the highest levels of understanding only by transcending reason through the introspective contemplation