Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [42]
Despite the logical difficulties with parts of Descartes’ position, most people—at least in the West—continue to think of their minds and their bodies as separate but somehow interacting aspects of themselves. This is a tribute to the power of Descartes’ theory. Whatever its faults, his interactive dualism captured the Western imagination to such an extent that it became accepted almost as a matter of course. Few theories, in any discipline, can claim equal success.15
The Cartesians
Over the next century a number of Descartes’ followers, usually referred to as the Cartesians, tried to modify his psychology so as to explain how the soul, an immaterial substance not occupying any space, could act upon the material, three-dimensional pineal gland, or vice versa.
Their chief approach was to suggest that actually there is no causal contact between body and mind; God sees to it that whatever happens in one sphere is accompanied by the appropriate happening in the other. This theory would seem to keep Him continually busy, running two worlds for each living person, but one ingenious Cartesian, Arnold Geulincx (1625–1669), suggested that body and mind are like two clocks that God winds up and sets running in perfect harmony with each other, after which He need do nothing more. Mental events only seem to produce physical responses, physical experiences to produce mental responses, but in fact each train of events merely occurs in perfect synchrony with the other.16
Whether “parallelism,” as this theory is called, is best thought of as metaphysics, theology, or wonderful nonsense, it is clearly outside the realm of psychology; let us pass it by.
Spinoza
But we must not pass by the work of one other major philosopher who, by purely rationalist means, arrived at very different answers from Descartes to the questions of free will, causality, and the body-mind problem. He was Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677), the gentle, quiet Dutch Sephardic Jew whom Bertrand Russell calls “the noblest and the most lovable of the great philosophers” and whose Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (1677) is the most austerely rationalist, but one of the most exalted, of philosophic works.
His influence on psychology, however, is problematic; some scholars have thought it major, others minor. In part, their opinions vary because the Ethics, in which Spinoza discusses psychological matters, is hard to understand, being formidably geometric in presentation (axioms, propositions, demonstrations, and QEDs) and filled with metaphysical terminology. But in larger part appraisals of his contribution vary because some of his ideas about the universe and about psychology seem so modern, others so archaic.
His most modern idea is his definition of God: Spinoza makes Him identical with the universe and all the mind and matter in it, subject to its laws, and hence unable to intervene in the order of events. In consequence, Spinoza was harshly condemned by some as an atheist but praised by others for seeing God in all things. The philosopher Bishop George Berkeley thought him “wicked” and “the great leader of our modern infidels,” but the German Romantic poet and dramatist Novalis called him der gottbetrunkene Mensch— the God-intoxicated man. It is possible to hold either of two equally diverse views about his psychology.
Spinoza was educated in Jewish learning at the synagogue in Amsterdam, where his family lived. But being of a scholarly and inquiring mind, he mastered Latin in his early twenties, took up the study of philosophy, and absented himself from services at the synagogue. The leaders of the Jewish community feared he would become a Christian and offered him a pension of a thousand florins a year if he would conceal his disbelief and appear now and then in the synagogue. An apocryphal story says that