Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [7]
The Forerunners
Along with their many other speculations, a number of the Greek philosophers of the sixth and early fifth centuries began proposing naturalistic explanations of human mental processes; these hypotheses and their derivatives have been at the core of Western psychology ever since.
What kinds of persons were they? What caused or at least enabled them to think about human cognition in this radically new fashion? We know their names—Thales, Alcmaeon, Empedocles, Anaxogoras, Hippocrates, Democritus, and others—but about many of them we know little else; about the others what we know consists largely of hagiography and legend.
We read, for instance, that Thales of Miletus (624–546), first of the philosophers, was an absentminded dreamer who, studying the nighttime heavens, could be so absorbed in glorious thoughts as to tumble ingloriously into a ditch. We read, too, that he paid no heed to money until, tired of being mocked for his poverty, he used his astrological expertise one winter to foretell a bumper crop of olives, cheaply leased all the oil presses in the area, and later, at harvest time, charged top prices for their use.
Gossipy chroniclers tell us that Empedocles (500?–430), of Acragas in southern Sicily, had such vast scientific knowledge that he could control the winds and once brought back to life a woman who had been dead for thirty days. Believing himself a god, in his old age he leaped into Etna in order to die without leaving a human trace; as some later poet-aster jested, “Great Empedocles, that ardent soul / Leaped into Etna, and was roasted whole.” But Etna vomited his brazen slippers back onto the rim of the crater and thereby proclaimed him mortal.
Such details hardly help us fathom the psychophilosophers, if we may so call them. Nor did any of them set down an account—at least, none exists—of how or why they became interested in the workings of the mind. We can only suppose that in the dawn of philosophy, when thoughtful men began to ask all sorts of searching questions about the nature of the world and of humankind, it was natural that they would also ask how their own thoughts about such things arose and where their ideas came from.
One or two did actual research that touched on the physical equipment involved in psychological processes. Alcmaeon (fl. 520), a physician of Croton in southern Italy, performed dissections on animals (dissecting the human body was taboo) and discovered the optic nerve, connecting the eye to the brain. Most, however, were neither hands-on investigators nor experimentalists but men of leisure, who, starting with self-evident truths and their own observations of everyday phenomena, sought to deduce the nature of the world and of the mind.
The psychophilosophers most often carried on their reasoning while strolling or sitting with their students in the marketplaces of their cities or courtyards of their academies, endlessly debating the questions that intrigued them. And probably, like Thales gazing at the stars, they also spent periods alone in deep meditation. But little remains of the fruits of their labors; nearly all copies of their writings were lost or destroyed.
Most of what we know of their thinking comes from brief citations in the works of later writers. Yet even these bits and pieces indicate that they asked a number of the major questions—to which they offered some sensible and some outlandish answers—that have concerned psychologists ever since.
We can surmise from the few obscure and tantalizing allusions by later writers to the philosophers’ ideas that among the questions they asked themselves concerning nous (which they variously identified as soul, mind, or both) were what its nature is (what it is made of), and how so seemingly intangible an entity could be connected to and influence the body.
Thales pondered these matters, although a single sentence in Aristotle’s De Anima