Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [5]
What kind of men (and, in recent decades, women) have felt compelled to find out what lies in the vast and invisible cosmos of the mind? All kinds, as we will see: solitary ascetics and convivial sybarites, feverish mystics and hardheaded realists, reactionaries and liberals, true believers and convinced atheists—the list of antinomies is endless. But they are alike in one way, these Magellans of the mind: All of them, in various ways, are interesting, impressive, even awesome human beings. Time and again I felt, after reading the biography and writings of one of these people, that I was fortunate to have come to know him, privileged to have lived with him vicariously, and greatly enriched by having shared his adventures.
The explorations of the interior world conducted by such people have surely been more important to human development than the explorations of the external one. Historians are wont to name technological advances as the great milestones of culture, among them the development of the plow, the discovery of smelting and metalworking, the invention of the clock, printing press, steam power, electric engine, lightbulb, semiconductor, and computer. But possibly even more transforming than any of these was the recognition by Greek philosophers and their intellectual descendants that human beings could examine, comprehend, and eventually even guide or control their own thought processes, emotions, and resulting behavior.
With that realization we became something new and different on earth: the only animal that, by examining its own cerebration and behavior, could alter them. This, surely, was a giant step in evolution. Although we are physically little different from the people of three thousand years ago, we are culturally a different species. We are the psychologizing animal.
This inward voyage of the past twenty-five hundred years, this search for the true causes of behavior, this most liberating of all human inquiries, is the subject of The Story of Psychology.
ONE
The
Conjecturers
The Glory That Was Greece
“In all history,” the philosopher Bertrand Russell has said, “nothing is so surprising or so difficult to account for as the sudden rise of civilization in Greece.”1
Until the sixth century B.C., the Greeks borrowed much of their culture from Egypt, Mesopotamia, and neighboring countries, but from the sixth to the fourth centuries they generated a stupendous body of new and distinctive cultural materials.* Among other things, they created sophisticated new forms of literature, art, and architecture, wrote the first real histories (as opposed to mere annals), invented mathematics and science, developed schools and gymnasiums, and originated democratic government. Much of subsequent Western culture has been the lineal descendant of theirs; in particular, much of philosophy and science during the past twenty-five hundred years has been the outgrowth of the Greek philosophers’ attempts to understand the nature of the world. Above all, the story of psychology is the narrative of a continuing effort to answer the questions they first asked about the human mind.
It is mystifying that the Greek philosophers so suddenly began to theorize about human mental processes in psychological, or at least quasi-psychological, terms. For while the 150 or so Greek city-states around the Mediterranean had noble temples, elegant statues and fountains, and bustling marketplaces, living conditions in them were in many respects primitive and not, one would suppose, conducive to subtle psychological inquiry.
Few people could read or write; those who could had to scratch laboriously on wax tablets or, for permanent records, on strips of papyrus