Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [39]
Though cautious in such matters, Descartes rashly accepted the invitation of Queen Christina of Sweden in 1649 to teach her philosophy. He was received in Stockholm with high honors but learned to his dismay that the Queen wanted him to tutor her at 5 A.M. He who had always lain in bed until noon had to arise in darkness three times a week and trudge through the bitter cold winter night to her library. In February 1650, he caught cold, developed pneumonia, and, after receiving the last rites, died at the age of fifty-four.
Although Descartes’ philosophy is not our concern, we must look at its starting point, since this is the foundation of his psychology. He begins the construction of his philosophic system with the insight that came to him the morning in the “stove”:
[I thought] I ought to reject as absolutely false all opinions in regard to which I could imagine the least ground for doubt, so as to ascertain whether after doing so there remained anything in my belief that was wholly indubitable.4
He therefore doubts his senses, since they sometimes deceive; all the reasoning he had previously been convinced by, since men may fall into reasoning errors even in the simplest matters of geometry; and, indeed, all the thoughts that enter his mind when he is awake, since similar thoughts, entering it in sleep, are illusions. This leads him to a second and crucial insight:
Immediately I noticed that even while I thus wished to think all these things were false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thought this, was some thing; I observed that this truth —I think, therefore I am— was so certain and so evident that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, brought forth by skeptics, could shake it. I concluded that I could without scruple accept it as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking.
Next, he asks himself what this thinking “I” was that necessarily existed. He could imagine, he says, that he had no body and existed in no specific place, but he could not imagine that he did not exist, since his thinking proved otherwise. From this he makes a dramatic inference:
I concluded that I was a thing or substance whose whole essence or nature was only to think, and which, to exist, has no need of space or of any material thing or body. Thus it follows that this ego, this mind, this soul, by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body… Even if the body did not exist, the soul would not cease to be all that it now is.5
And so, while he doubts whatever the ancients may have said, he reestablishes through his own reasoning the old dualism of body and mind.
But he is a seventeenth-century man surrounded by science and its explorations of the material world, and, unlike the Platonists, he considers the objects of the corporeal world not mere shadows on the wall of the cave but as real as mind, not illusions but what they appear to be. This he bases on faith: since God provided our minds with bodies and senses, and since He is not deceitful, material objects must exist and be very like our perceptions of them.6
So far, this is pure rationalism. But as a man of his time, Descartes also had a quasi-empirical bent. He was keenly aware of the findings of the new physiology and himself performed dissections on animals, observing the relationship of the nervous system to the muscles. It seemed to him analogous to the design of certain statues in the royal gardens at St. Germain-en-Laye, which, operated by water conducted through pipes, made lifelike movements and sounds.
He therefore advanced a mechanical-hydraulic theory of much of human behavior. The fluid filling the ventricles or cavities of the brain—we know it today as cerebrospinal fluid