The Story of Psychology (17 page)

Hume concluded that we believe in causality and in the reality of the external world not because we really know that they exist but because the skeptical view that he has set forth is too hard to live with:

Hume’s devastating assault on the concept of causality is of great importance in the history of science, and nowhere more so than in psychology, which, struggling to become a science, was seeking to discover the laws of mental causation. Some psychologists in Hume’s time, and many later on, would therefore maintain that psychology cannot yield causal explanations and should attempt to deal only in correlations— the probabilities that two things will continue to occur together or in sequence. Ironically, the empiricism and associationism that Hume meant to be the foundation of his system of morals lives on; his system of morals, a gentle utilitarianism, is quite forgotten.

Empiricist-associationist psychology disposed of some of the intractable problems in the theory of mind-body dualism and innate ideas, but in all sciences a new theory that answers old questions usually raises new and different ones. The new psychological theory not only led to subjectivism and cast doubt on the validity of causal explanations but, by
reducing the major mental processes to perception and association, was able to say nothing illuminating about such high-level mental phenomena as consciousness, reasoning, speech, unconscious thought, problem solving, and creativity. It would, in fact, eventually prove most useful, in somewhat different form, as a theory of animal psychology.

Its simplistic explanation of how the mind forms abstract ideas worked well enough for concepts derived from perceptions, such as equality, but was unconvincing about those with no perceptual basis, such as virtue, soul, nonbeing, possibility, necessity, or the nondimensionality of a point in geometry.

Furthermore, except for Hobbes’s atomistic conjecture about nervous impulses, the new theory ignored the physiology of mental phenomena and could say nothing explanatory about reflexive reactions, let alone all those high-level automatic responses which make up much of everyday human behavior.

From Locke’s time on, a series of empiricist-associationists, mostly in Great Britain, sought to solve some of these problems, but with only minor success, if any. Nonetheless, some of their work represents courageous venturing into the unknown; if they crossed no uncharted oceans, some of them at least mapped a few miles of alien coastline.

David Hartley (1705–1757) was one of the latter. A scholarly physician, he was inspired by Locke’s work to write at length about associationism in his
Observations on Man
(1749). Although he added nothing original, his treatment of the subject was organized and systematic, and thereby, says the great historian of psychology, Edwin G. Boring, turned it into a “school.”
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In addition, Hartley, as a doctor, was sharply aware of Locke’s omission of physiology; he sought to present a more holistic psychology by discussing each phenomenon first in mental terms and then in physiological ones. An admirable effort; unfortunately, in the mid-eighteenth century the neurophysiology he offered was largely imaginary. From Newtonian physics he derived the idea that external vibrations in matter must cause corresponding vibrations of infinitesimal particles within the nerves. These vibrations produced miniature counterparts or “vibratiuncles… the physiological counterpart of ideas,”
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a pure figment of his imagination, yet a little closer to the truth than Descartes’ theory of hollow nerves and animal spirits. It did, furthermore, keep an interest alive among associationists in the physical substrate of mental events.

In Scotland, Thomas Reid (1710–1792), Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), and Thomas Brown (1778–1820), professors at Scottish universities and good Presbyterians all, modified associationism to make it more palatable to believers. They felt that as it was expounded by Locke and Hume, it was mechanistic and degrading to the humanity of man. Moreover, Hume’s skepticism about causality and the reality of the external world was contrary to religious dogma. All three men therefore altered and added to associationism in an effort to repair these defects.

Their chief answer to Locke, Berkeley, and Hume was actually remarkably simple: subjectivism and skepticism were belied by common sense. People in all ages and nations have believed in the external world and in causality because common sense tells them to—the very view Dr. Johnson expressed by kicking the stone. It was hardly good science, but at least it did no harm.

Reid also made the very good point that the simple laws of association seemed grossly inadequate as an explanation of complex mental functions. He therefore revived and enlarged the ancient concept of mental faculties—special innate abilities—and named several dozen of them.
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Later psychologists would struggle to prove, or disprove, the existence of such faculties.

Brown made a smaller but more concrete contribution to associationism: he proposed that there were both primary and secondary laws of “suggestion” (association), and that the latter, under special conditions, altered the operation of the former. Thus, the word “cold” might produce at one time and place the association “dark” but at another time and place the association “hot.” This valuable insight, however, was ignored until the advent of the experimental approach to learning nearly a century later.

James Mill (1773–1836), social theorist, Utilitarian philosopher, and journalist, offered his own version of associationism in
Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind
(1829). Instead of enlarging the theory, he drastically simplified it. He said that there were only two classes of mental elements—sensations and ideas—and that all association comes about through one factor, contiguity, the simultaneity or nearness in time of two experiences. Complex ideas were nothing but simpler ones
conjoined; the idea “everything” was not an abstraction but a mere heap or accumulation of all of one’s simple and complex ideas. Robert Watson says that “this brings association as a doctrine to its nadir in logical, mechanistic, and molecular simplicity.”
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Nonetheless, some leading twentieth-century behaviorists would sound like Mill’s intellectual off-spring.

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), James Mill’s son, primarily a philosopher, discussed psychology in his
Logic
(1843) and his
Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy
(1865). He restored to mainstream associationism much of what his father had pruned from it, particularly hypotheses about the formation of complex ideas. Unlike the elder Mill, he envisioned them not as mere assemblages of simple elements but as fusions of those elements, much like chemical compounds that have characteristics unlike those of their component elements. Accordingly, he said, the laws of association cannot tell us how any complex idea comes to be or what it is composed of; we can learn that only from experience and direct experiment. Mill thus helped steer associationism toward experimental psychology.

Alexander Bain (1818–1903), a friend of John Stuart Mill’s, lived well into the era of scientific psychology. Some scholars say he was the last of the philosopher-psychologists, others that he was the first real psychologist in that he devoted most of his life to psychology and brought more physiology into it than any of his predecessors. The physiology was not imaginary, like Hartley’s; it was gleaned from his visits to nineteenth-century anatomists and his reading of their works. The mechanisms described in his discussion of the senses and of movement came closer to modern theory than those of earlier protopsychologists.

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.

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.

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:

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.
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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. Seeking to explain the source of consciousness, he postulated a process he called “apperception,” which, by means of certain innate patterns or beliefs, enables us to become aware of and to understand our many tiny unconscious perceptions. We know, for instance, without learning it, that “whatever is, is,” and that “it is impossible for a thing to be and not to be at the same time.” Similarly, the truths of reason—principles of logic—are inherent. These innate ideas are not specific concepts but ways of understanding experience. Kant would transform this notion into a historic theory.

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.”
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It is the two-clock theory of Geulincx again, except that now every infinitesimal monad is a clock, keeping time with every other one.