Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [59]
But only retard. Even as the Catholic Church could delay, but not ultimately prevent, humankind’s learning that the sun rather than the earth is the center of the solar system, the authority of the greatest of idealist philosophers could not prevent psychology from becoming a science through experimentation.
* Forgreater ease in reading, Spinoza’s interpolated references to axioms and previous propositions have been eliminated and other omissions not indicated.
* An Ananonymous correspondent replied:
Dear Sir:
Your astonishment’s odd:
Iam always about in the Quad.
And that’s why the tree
Will continue to be,
Since observed by
Yours faithfully,
God
* TheEnglish philosopher Samuel Clarke (1675–1729).
* Healso argued that all psychological knowledge is derived from subjective experience and has no a priori logical or mathematical basis. Hence it can never become a science proper. See Leary, 1978 and 1982.
FOUR
The
Physicalists
While eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers were sitting in their studies and reasoning about mental phenomena, a number of physicians and physicists were taking a very different route toward the goal of psychological knowledge. Emulating scientists like Harvey, Newton, and Priestley, they were using their hands and instruments to gather information, specifically about the physical causes of neural and mental processes. These pioneers of physicalist psychology are the ancestors of today’s cognitive neuroscientists; their outlook led to the present-day specification of the molecular transactions in the neurons that are the components of mental phenomena.
The Magician-Healer: Mesmer
Some physicalists, however, were quasi-scientists at best, and some only pseudo-scientists. Yet even the latter are part of our story, since their theories of certain mental phenomena, though later disproved, led others to seek and discover valid explanations of those phenomena.
Such was the case with Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815).1 In the 1770s, when German nativists and British associationists were still relying on contemplation to understand psychology, Mesmer, a physician, was applying magnets to patients on the theory that the mind and body can be healed of disorders if the body’s magnetic force fields are realigned.
The theory was pure nonsense, yet the treatment based on it had such dramatic success that for a while Mesmer was the rage of Vienna and then of pre-Revolutionary Paris, where we now look in on him. It is 1778; we are in a dimly lit, mirror-hung, baroque salon on the Place Vendôme. A dozen elegantly dressed ladies and gentlemen sit around a large oak tub, each holding one of a number of metal rods protruding from the tub, which is filled with magnetized iron filings and chemicals. From an adjoining room comes the faint keening of music played on a glass harmonica; after a while the sound dies away, the door opens wider, and slowly and majestically there enters an awesome figure in a flowing, full-length purple robe, carrying a scepterlike iron rod in one hand. It is the miracle-working Dr. Mesmer.
The patients are transfixed and thrilled as Mesmer, stern and formidable with his square-jawed face, long slit of a mouth, and beetling eyebrows, stares intently at one man and commands, “Dormez!” The man’s eyes close and his head sags onto his chest; the other patients gasp. Now Dr. Mesmer looks intently at a woman and slowly points the iron rod at her; she shudders and cries out that tingling sensations are running through her body. As Mesmer proceeds around the circle, the reactions of the patients grow stronger and stronger. Eventually some of them shriek, flail their arms about, and swoon; assistants carry them to