Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [50]
He does, to be sure, say that we combine simple ideas to form complex ones, and notes that repetition and pleasure play a part in forming such combinations. But he says nothing about the laws of association and does not treat the topic as one of broad relevance. His interest in it is limited to the unreasonable connections or trains of thought found in certain kinds of illnesses and in some bizarre phenomena of everyday life. He tells of a friend who had a surgical operation (no anesthetic yet existed) and who, though grateful to the surgeon, could never bear to look at him afterward, so powerful was the association of the surgeon’s face with pain. He also tells of a man who learned complicated dance steps in a room that had a trunk in it, and later was able to dance well only in a room in which there was a similar trunk.
Yet if Locke’s treatment of the association of ideas was limited, it stimulated others to work out the ways in which such connections and sequences of ideas are formed in the mind. Eventually, behaviorism would reduce all mental life to associations, and even after psychology escaped from the domination of behaviorism, association would remain one of its principal themes. Locke’s thinking was clouded by leftover metaphysics and traces of theology, but he moved psychology away from philosophy and in the direction of science. He wrote with becoming modesty of the contribution he hoped the Essay would make:
Everyone must not hope to be a Boyle or Sydenham; and in an age that produces such masters as the great Huygenius, and the incomparable Mr. Newton…it is ambition enough to be employed as an under laborer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge.40
In his case, such modesty was as unwarranted as it was becoming.
Locke died in 1704, at the beginning of a century in which the exact sciences advanced by leaps and bounds. Among its notable strides was the work of Galvani in physiology, Volta in electricity, Dalton in atomic theory, Euler and Lagrange in mathematics, Herschel and Laplace in astronomy, Linnaeus in botany, Jenner in preventive medicine, and, later, of Cavendish, Priestley, and Rutherford in discovering, respectively, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen.
Psychology made no similar bounds forward, and would not until the emergence of experimentalism in the nineteenth century. For the most part, the eighteenth-century protopsychologists were either rationalistnativists in the Cartesian tradition or empiricist-associationists in the Hobbist-Lockean tradition. Still, some of them did advance each of these basic theories in ways that affected the future of psychology. It is worth meeting them briefly and glancing at their contributions.
Berkeley
The theory for which the philosopher and protopsychologist George Berkeley (1685–1753) is famous always amuses undergraduates in history of philosophy courses and gives professors the opportunity to quote Cicero: “There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it.” Berkeley’s philosophy was absurd, but many remember it; his psychology was sound, but nearly everyone has forgotten it.
His place in history rests almost entirely on three books he wrote before he was twenty-eight. For the rest, his life is of little interest. He was born in Ireland, studied philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin, earned a doctorate and was ordained a deacon of the Anglican Church at twenty-four, traveled and preached for some years, and spent the rest of his life as Bishop of Cloyne in County Cork, Ireland.
Berkeley was inspired to write his first noteworthy book, An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), by a brief passage in Locke that asked whether a man born blind, who later gains vision, would be