The Story of Psychology (18 page)

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.

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 church steeple and thought. It then took him only a few months to write what became his most famous work,
The Critique of Pure Reason
(1781), of which he candidly said in his Preface, “I venture to assert there is not a single metaphysical problem that has not been solved here, or to the solution of which the key at least has not been supplied.”
⁵⁵

Although his prose in the
Critique
and elsewhere is all but unintelligible to most readers—his terminology is difficult and his arguments abstruse—he gives his basic view about the mind clearly enough in the Preface. It is true, he says, that experience furnishes us with only very limited knowledge, but it is far from being the mind’s only source of knowledge:

And such clear and certain truths do exist, mathematics being a case in point. For instance, we believe, and feel perfectly certain of our belief, that two and two will always make four. How do we come by that certainty? Not from experience, which provides us only with probabilities, but from the inherent structure of our minds, from the natural and inevitable manner in which they function. For the human mind is not merely blank paper upon which experience writes, and not a mere bundle of perceptions; it actively organizes and transforms the chaos of experience into sure knowledge.

We start to acquire such knowledge by recognizing the relations of objects and events in space and time—not through experience but through inherent capability; space and time are forms of
Anschauung
(“intuition” or “looking at”) or innately determined ways in which we see things.

Then, having organized our sense data in space and time, we make other judgments about them by means of other innate ideas or transcendental principles (Kant’s term is “categories”); these are the built in machinery by which the mind comprehends experience. There are twelve categories, including unity, totality, reality, cause and effect, reciprocity, existence, and necessity. Kant derived them from a painstaking analysis of the forms of the syllogism, but his basic reason for believing they exist in the mind
a priori
is that without them we would have no way of making sense of the chaotic mass of our perceptions.

It is not from experience, for instance, that we learn that every event has a cause; if we lacked the ability to perceive cause and effect, we should never understand anything about the world around us. Therefore it must be that we innately recognize causes and effects.
⁵⁷
The other categories, similarly, are not innate ideas in the Platonic or Cartesian sense but are principles of ordering that enable us to fathom experience. It is they, not the laws of association, that organize experience into meaningful knowledge.

Kant’s view of the mind as process rather than neural action steered German psychology toward the study of consciousness and “phenomenal experience.” Dualism persisted, since “mind” was apparently a transcendental—Kant’s word—phenomenon, distinct from perceptions and associations.
⁵⁸
His theory would give rise to other varieties of nativist psychology, particularly in Germany, and would have its modern counterparts, if not descendants, in this country, among them Noam Chomsky’s theory of the innate capacity of the child’s mind to comprehend the syntax of spoken language.

Kant’s nativism led to certain valuable lines of inquiry about the workings of the mind, but in one respect it proved to be a serious hindrance. He held that the mind is a set of processes that take place in time but do not occupy space, and this led him to infer that mental processes cannot be measured (since they occupy no space) and therefore that psychology cannot be an experimental science.
*
⁵⁹
Others in the Kantian tradition would continue to hold that view. While it would later be proven as erroneous as Descartes’ belief in animal spirits and hollow nerves, it would retard the development of psychology as a science.

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.

W
hile 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.

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 an adjoining
chambre de crises
, where they are attended and soothed until they have recovered. After the session, many of those who were present and who had been afflicted by everything from the “vapors” to paralysis feel relieved of their symptoms or even cured. No wonder Mesmer, though his fee is enormous, is besieged by those seeking treatment.

Although today his procedures seem pure flimflam, and he himself was given to sharp practices, most scholars think that he truly believed in what he was doing and in the theory by which he accounted for his results. Mesmer, born in Swabia, came from a family of modest position—his father was a forester, his mother the daughter of a locksmith— but he worked his way through the Bavarian and Austrian educational systems, first meaning to become a priest, then a lawyer, and finally a doctor. At thirty-two he received his medical degree in Vienna; his professors, fortunately for him, were unaware that much of his dissertation,
On the Influence of the Planets
, was plagiarized from a work of a colleague of Isaac Newton’s. Despite the title, his dissertation was not about astrology; it proposed that there was a connection between Newton’s “universal gravitation” and the condition of the human body and mind. In the part of the dissertation that was Mesmer’s own work, he advanced
the theory, based on a passing comment by Newton, that the human body is pervaded by an invisible fluid that is responsive to planetary gravitation. Health or illness, Mesmer argued, depends on whether the body’s “animal gravitation” is in harmony with, or discord with, that of the planets.

Two years after earning his degree, he married a wealthy Viennese widow much older than himself and thereby gained entrance to Viennese society. Freed from the need to practice more than part-time, he devoted much of his attention to cultural and scientific developments. When Benjamin Franklin invented the glass harmonica, Mesmer, a competent amateur musician, bought one and became a skillful performer on it. Passionate music lovers, he and his wife saw a good deal of Leopold Mozart and his family, and twelve-year-old Wolfgang’s first opera,
Bastien und Bastienne
, had its debut in the garden of the Mesmer home.

While enjoying these delights, Mesmer was becoming a medical and psychological pioneer. In 1773 a twenty-seven-year-old woman came to him suffering from symptoms that other doctors had been unable to relieve. Nor was Mesmer able to help her until he recalled a talk he had had with a Jesuit priest named Maximilian Hell, who suggested that magnetism might influence the body. Mesmer bought a set of magnets, and the next time the woman came to see him he gingerly touched the magnets, one after another, to different parts of her body. She began to tremble and shortly went into convulsions—Mesmer decided this was “the crisis”—and, when she had calmed down, declared that her symptoms were much relieved. A series of further treatments cured her completely. (Today, her illness would be considered a hysterical neurosis and her recovery the result of suggestion.)