Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [46]
Hobbes foresaw an objection: we can think of things that we have never seen. This phenomenon, too, he readily explained:
Imagination being only of those things which have formerly been perceived by sense…is simple imagination, as when one imagineth a man, or horse, which he hath seen before. The other is compounded; as when, from the sight of a man at one time and of a horse at another, we conceive in our mind a centaur.
Hobbes’s presentation of empirical psychology, though rudimentary and based on fictitious physiology, is a landmark. It is the first effort to explain how sense impressions are transformed into higher mental processes.
He was a pioneer in a second way: he was the first modern associationist. Aristotle, Augustine, and Vives had all said that memories are recalled through linkages, but Hobbes’s contribution, though incomplete and elementary, was clearer and more specific. Although he used the term “train of ideas” rather than “association,” he is the earliest figure in the tradition that eventually led to experimental psychology in the nineteenth century and to behaviorism in the twentieth.
“When a man thinketh on anything whatsoever,” he stated, “his next thought after is not altogether so casual as it seems to be. Not every thought to every thought succeeds indifferently.”27 Again using physics as a model, he likened the succession of thoughts to the “coherence” of matter, one thought following another “in such manner as water upon a plane table is drawn which way any one part of it is guided by the finger.”28 But laying aside the physical simile, he gave a genuinely psychological account of how associations work. Sometimes, he said, the train of thoughts is “unguided” and without design, at other times “regulated” or voluntary, as when we consciously try to remember something or to solve some problem. He thus anticipated the modern distinction between free association and controlled association.
The examples he gave of coherence leading the mind from one thought to another are as good as any in contemporary psychological literature. This is in Leviathan:
In a discourse of our present civil war, what could seem more impertinent than to ask, as one did, what was the value of a Roman penny? Yet the coherence to me was manifest enough. For the thought of the war introduced the thought of the delivering up of the king to his enemies; the thought of that, brought in the thought of the delivering up of Christ; and that again the thought of the thirty pence, which was the price of that treason; and thence easily followed that malicious question, and all this in a moment of time; for thought is quick.29
And in a later work, Human Nature (1658), he said that the connection of any two ideas in memory is the result of their coincidental occurrence when first experienced:
The cause of the coherence or consequence of one conception to another, is their first coherence or consequence at that time when they are produced by a sense: as for example, from St. Andrew the mind runneth to St. Peter, because their names are read together; from St. Peter to a stone, for the same cause; from stone to foundation, to church, and from church to people, and from people to tumult; and according to this example the mind may almost run from anything to anything.30
It was only the seed of associationist psychology, but it fell on fertile soil.
Locke
Although Hobbes was the first English empiricist in psychology, John Locke (1632–1704), born forty-four years later, developed the nascent theory and is often called “the father of English empiricism.” He too was both a political philosopher and a protopsychologist; in the latter role he espoused principles similar