Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [36]
Yet by the fifteenth century certain social changes were bringing about conditions that would foster the first major advances in psychology since the Greeks. The introduction to Europe of gunpowder made castle walls and personal armor obsolete, and thereby outmoded the feudal system. With the dawning of the Renaissance there was an increase in the number of scholars who were not clerics and not bound by doctrinal orthodoxy. The invention of the printing press using moveable type, around 1440, made it possible for them to study outside the Church-dominated universities. The rediscovery of the learning of the past began to liberate people’s minds from the confines of medieval thought.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, scientists in a number of fields made the first significant advances in well over a millennium. Vesalius corrected many of Galen’s anatomical errors; Copernicus proved the sun to be the center of the solar system; Galileo discovered that there were mountains on the moon and that the Milky Way is made up of individual stars; Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood; and Agricola made important contributions to mineralogy, Paré to surgery, Mercator to mapmaking, Tycho and Kepler to astronomy, and Columbus and Magellan to geography.
Interest in psychology, too, revived, but at first without producing advances. In the sixteenth century hundreds of works were written, but almost all were routine commentaries on the psychological writings of Aristotle, Theophrastus, Galen, and others, or reworkings of Augustine’s and Aquinas’s discussions of free will and the nature of the soul. Certain thinkers, among them Machiavelli, Paracelsus, and Melanchthon, made shrewed psychological observations of one kind or another in their writings, but none furthered the science in any systematic fashion.
Three authors, however, are worth passing notice before we move on to the dawn of modern psychology.
One is an obscure Serbo-Croatian writer named Marulic, who seems to have been the first to make written use, in an obscure manuscript dating from about 1520, of a newly coined word, psychologia. 43 The term did not soon catch on, though one or two other authors used it. But in 1590 a German encyclopedist named Rudolf Goeckel (Latinized as Goclenius) used it in the title of a book: Psychologia Hoc Est, de Hominis Perfectione (Psychology This Is, on the Improvement of Man). In the course of the next century the new word gradually became the recognized name of the science.
The third author is Juan Luis Vives, a sixteenth-century Spanish Catholic philosopher of Jewish origin. After tutoring Princess Mary, elder daughter of England’s Henry VIII, and spending some time in prison for opposing Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, he devoted himself to writing. One of his works, a lengthy book titled De Anima et Vita, is largely a recapitulation of Aristotle and Augustine but is notable for one thing: Vives compiled a far longer list than his predecessors of the ways in which images and thoughts can be linked by association in the mind, and was a forerunner, if not the actual inspiration, of the seventeenth-century associationists. One twentieth-century associationist even called him, with doctrinaire exaggeration, the father of modern psychology.44
But modern psychology, unlike any living creature, had many fathers.
* Theophrastussays elsewhere that thinking takes place in the brain.
* Godor the Good or the Supreme.
* By“suffer” and “suffering” Tertullian refers not to pain but to being subject to feelings (“passions”) rather than having mental control of them.
THREE
The
Protopsychologists
The Third Visitation
In The Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon, having summarized the state of knowledge in his