Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [44]
In one respect Spinoza’s psychology is seriously at odds with modern psychology. Although he was a monist, regarding thought and matter as twin aspects of the same underlying reality, he maintained that there is no interaction of mind and body: “The body cannot determine the mind to thought, neither can the mind determine the body to motion or rest” (Ethics, Third Part, Prop. 2). Nor is interaction necessary, since both stem from the same reality. Professor Watson calls Spinoza’s doctrine “monistic parallelism” and sums it up as follows:
Every bodily event coexists with and is coordinate to a mental event. Body and mind correlate, but they do not cause one another any more than the convex side of a glass causes the concave. Apparent interaction arises from ignorance on our part and shows only the coincidence of actions; it is a matter of appearance, not a reflection of reality.21
Thus, for all Spinoza’s modern cosmology and determinism, his explanation of the relation of mind and body is much like Geulincx’s two-clock theory, and just as unreal and fantastic. Spinoza’s parallelism influenced some nineteenth-century German psychologists, but it has vanished completely from modern psychology.
None of this is to belittle his ethics, the basic message of which—that through knowledge of ourselves and the causes of our emotions we can escape our bondage to them and live as good people—is as valid and as inspiring as ever. But that is the subject of other works, not this one.
The Empiricists
We have only to cross the English Channel to find a wholly different philosophic milieu and genre of psychology. The English have had their mystics, scholastics, and metaphysicians, but for at least the past four centuries most of their philosophers and psychologists have been realistic, pragmatic, and down-to-earth. By the early decades of the seventeenth century, it was typical of English thinkers to be commonsensical and empirical in their search for knowledge. They relied on experiment, or, where that was impossible, everyday experience and good judgment. The Royal Society urged its members to communicate in “the language of artisans, countrymen, and merchants [rather than] that of wits or scholars.” The society’s first historian, Bishop Thomas Sprat, proudly asserted that “our climate, the air, the influence of the heaven, the composition of the English blood; as well as the embraces of the ocean… render our country a land of experimental knowledge.”22
Whether those influences or subtler social ones account for the English empirical bent, there is no doubt that it existed then, as it does now. In psychology, it produced a series of protopsychologists who rejected Descartes’ doctrine of innate ideas and who, while dutifully mentioning God and the soul, proposed earthly explanations of human mental activities and behavior. They are known as the empiricists, not because they were experimentalists (they were not; unlike the natural scientists, they had no idea how to conduct experiments in psychology) but because they believed that the mind develops by empirical means: ideas are derived from experience. The debate between nativists (believers in innate ideas) and empiricists began in ancient Greece, reappeared in new and sharper form in the seventeenth century, and has continued to this very day, where, couched in contemporary research-based terms, it is at the core of the remarkable developments in psychology to be spelled out later in this history.
Hobbes
The first of the English empirical psychologists was Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), although he is known primarily as a political philosopher. The son of a vicar, he was born prematurely owing to his mother’s terror at hearing of the Spanish Armada. This, he said, accounted for his timid disposition—“Myself and fear were born twins”; and his timidity, or at least the feeling that his fellow human beings were inherently dangerous, underlies the antidemocratic political philosophy