Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [4]
The signs of change were even stronger in Greece, where poets and sages began to view their thoughts and emotions in wholly new terms.7 Sappho, for one, described the inner torment of jealousy in realistic terms rather than as an emotion inflicted on her by a god:
Peer of gods he seemeth to me, the blissful
Man who sits and gazes at thee before him,
Close beside thee sits, and in silence hears thee
Silverly speaking,
Laughing love’s low laughter. Oh, this, this only
Stirs the troubled heart in my breast to tremble!
For should I but see thee a little moment,
Straight is my voice hushed;
Yea, my tongue is broken, and through and through me
’Neath the flesh, impalpable fire runs tingling;
Nothing see mine eyes, and a voice of roaring
Waves in my ears sounds.
—“Ode to Atthis”
Solon, poet and lawgiver, used the word nous not in the Homeric sense but to mean something like rational mind. He declared that at about age forty “a man’s nous is trained in all things” and in the fifties he is “at his best in nous and tongue.” He or the philosopher Thales— sources differ—sounded a note totally different from that of Homeric times in one of Western civilization’s briefest and most famous pieces of advice, inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: “Know thyself.”
Within a few decades there began a sudden and astonishing efflorescence of Greek thought, science, and art. George Sarton, the historian of science, once estimated that in the Hellenic era, human knowledge increased something like forty-fold in less than three centuries.8
One of the most notable aspects of this intellectual outburst was the abrupt appearance and burgeoning of a new area of knowledge, philosophy. In the Greek city-states of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., a small number of reflective upper-class men, who had neither scientific equipment nor hard data but were driven by a passion to understand the world and themselves, managed by pure speculation and reasoning to conceive of, and offer answers to, many of the enduring questions of cosmogony, cosmology, physics, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and psychology.
The philosophers themselves did not use the term “psychology” (which did not exist until A.D. 1520) or regard it as a distinct area of knowledge, and they were less interested in the subject than in more fundamental ones like the structure of matter and the nature of causality. Nonetheless, they identified and offered hypotheses about nearly all the significant problems of psychology that have concerned scholars and scientists ever since. Among them:
—Is there only one substance, or is “mind” something different from “matter”?
—Do we have souls? Do they exist after the body dies?
—How are mind and body connected? Is mind part of soul, and if so can it exist apart from the body?
—Is human nature the product of inborn tendencies or of experience and upbringing?
—How do we know what we know? Are our ideas built into our minds, or do we develop them from our perceptions and experiences?
—How does perception work? Are our impressions of the world around us true representations of what is out there? How can we know whether they are or not?
—Which is the right road to true knowledge—pure reasoning or data gathered by observation?
—What are the principles of valid thinking?
—What are the causes of invalid thinking?
—Does the mind rule the emotions, or vice versa?
There is scarcely a major topic in today’s textbooks of introductory psychology that was not anticipated, at least in rudimentary form, by the Greek philosophers. What is even more impressive, their goal was the same as that of contemporary psychologists: to discover the true causes of human behavior—those unseen processes of the mind which take place in response to external events and other stimuli.
This quest launched the Greek philosophers on an intellectual voyage into the invisible world of the mind—the universe within,