Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [57]
Another aspect of monadology would have led psychology into a culde-sac if anyone but Leibniz had taken it seriously. Since monads are impervious to outside influences, how is it that anything ever happens in the world—and that it looks as if things influence each other? Leibniz’s answer was that God has arranged for all the changes in the infinity of monads to occur in “pre-established harmony”; nothing interacts with anything else but only seems to. So whatever happens in mind exactly parallels what is happening in body, without any interaction between them: “God has originally created the soul, and every other real unity, in such a way that everything in it must arise from its own nature by a perfect spontaneity with regard to itself, yet by a perfect conformity to things without.”54 It is the two-clock theory of Geulincx again, except that now every infinitesimal monad is a clock, keeping time with every other one.
The theory would have made psychology pointless, since it portrays mental events as following a fixed and preordained order and psychological responses to outside stimuli as mere illusion. Which only shows whither a splendid mind can travel when steering by a faulty compass. Fortunately, few others followed his route.
Kant
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is considered by many the greatest of modern philosophers; he is certainly one of the most difficult to understand, though that may not be an appropriate criterion. Happily, we are interested only in his psychology, which is comprehensible.
Kant’s biography sounds like a parody of the life of the ivory-tower intellectual. Born in Königsberg, Prussia, he entered the university at sixteen, taught there until he was seventy-three, and never traveled more than forty miles from the city. Barely five feet tall and hollow-chested, he led a bachelor life of unvarying routine, ostensibly to preserve his frail health. He was awakened by his manservant at 5 A.M. the year round, devoted two hours of the morning to study and two hours to lecturing, wrote until 1 P.M., and then dined at a restaurant. Precisely at 3:30 P.M. he strolled for an hour, whatever the weather, along a walk of linden trees, breathing only through his nose (he thought it unhealthful to open his mouth outdoors) and refusing to converse with anyone. (He was so punctual that his neighbors, who set their watches by his daily walk, were worried when he failed to appear on time one day. He had been reading Rousseau’s Émile and was so captivated that he forgot himself.) He spent the remainder of each day reading and preparing for the next day’s lecture, and retired between 9 and 10 P.M.
Kant wrote and lectured on many topics: ethics, theology, cosmology, aesthetics, logic, and the theory of knowledge. Liberal in both politics and theology, he sympathized with the French Revolution until the Reign of Terror, and was a believer in democracy and a lover of freedom. He was a disciple of Leibniz’s until, in midlife, he read Hume and, he said, “was awakened from my dogmatic slumbers” and became inspired to develop a much more detailed theory of knowledge than Leibniz’s.
Kant was convinced by Hume that causality is not self-evident and that we cannot demonstrate it logically, but he felt sure that we do understand the reality around us and do experience the causal relationships among external things and events. How is that possible? He sought the answer by pure cerebration. For twelve years he stared out the window at a nearby