Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [56]
But the physiology of his time could not account for higher mental processes. Bain’s psychology was therefore largely mainline associationism. He did, however, point out some of its limitations. He noted that it could not explain novel or innovative ideas. And though he denied that there are innate ideas, he said that the minds of infants are not really blank sheets of paper; they possess reflexes, instincts, and differences in acuteness. No school or great theory is linked with his name, but his work contained a number of germinal ideas that others would soon develop.
German Nativism
While explorers of the mind were adventuring in one direction in Britain and in France (where empiricism caught on among intellectual liberals during the Enlightenment), others in Germany were continuing to pursue the direction taken by Descartes. Something about the German culture and mentality gave its philosophers a bent for murky metaphysics, mind-body dualism, and nativism. Yet that direction, too, yielded something of value, chiefly the theory of mind developed by Immanuel Kant, the greatest philosopher of the idealist school.
Before Kant, the German philosophers, for all their intelligence, had contributed little to humankind’s understanding of its mental processes. One, in fact, possibly the most brilliant mind of the seventeenth century, made forays into psychology that accomplished almost nothing; his brand of metaphysics, like a faulty compass, led him astray. Still, he is worth a moment’s notice if only because his ideas exemplify the tradition that led to the work of Kant.
Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), born in Leipzig, Saxony, was a stooped, bandy-legged genius who earned a doctorate in law at twenty, served as a diplomat to the French and English courts, invented the calculus at the same time as Newton (with whom he became involved in a nasty dispute over who deserved credit for it), and wrote extensively on a variety of philosophic issues. Although many of his ideas are worthy of respect, Leibniz is best known today for two that are preposterous. One is familiar to all who have read Voltaire’s Candide:
It follows from the supreme perfection of God, that in creating the universe he has chosen the best possible plan…For since all the possibilities in the understanding of God laid claim to existence in proportion to their perfections, the actual world, as the resultant of all these claims, must be the most perfect possible.52
These are Leibniz’s words, not Voltaire’s; this is what Voltaire wickedly satirized in the person of Dr. Pangloss, who endlessly repeats his profound philosophic insight, “All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.”
Leibniz’s other outlandish notion was that the universe is made up of an infinite number of “monads”—ultimate components of substance that are a kind of soul, dimensionless, pointlike, and impervious to outside influences. What appears to be matter throughout the universe is actually the way the immaterial monads perceive the arrangement of one another in space.53 Leibniz thought this up to solve a number of problems in classic metaphysics, including those of mind-body dualism. His theory is difficult to grasp, but since “monadology” began and ended with him, we need not bother trying.
Monadology did, however, lead him to suggest that there are different levels of consciousness, a new idea in psychology. Monads, being infinitesimal, are not individually conscious, but when cumulate, their tiny perceptions add up to complex mental functions, including consciousness; the more complex the aggregation, the more so the mental function. Animals, though they perceive, are not self-aware, but human beings are; that is, there is more than one level of consciousness. That’s a long way from what Freud would mean by the unconscious and the preconscious, but it’s a beginning.
One aspect of Leibniz’s psychology did lead in a useful direction.