The Story of Psychology (2 page)
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Authors: Morton Hunt
Exploring the Universe Within
A Psychological Experiment in the Seventh Century
B.C.
A
most unusual man, Psamtik I, King of Egypt. During his long reign, in the latter half of the seventh century B.C., he not only drove out the Assyrians, revived Egyptian art and architecture, and brought about general prosperity, but found time to conceive of and conduct history’s first recorded experiment in psychology.
The Egyptians had long believed that they were the most ancient race on earth, and Psamtik, driven by intellectual curiosity, wanted to prove that flattering belief. Like a good psychologist, he began with a hypothesis: If children had no opportunity to learn a language from older people around them, they would spontaneously speak the primal, inborn language of humankind—the natural language of its most ancient people—which, he expected to show, was Egyptian.
To test his hypothesis, Psamtik commandeered two infants of a lower-class mother and turned them over to a herdsman to bring up in a remote area. They were to be kept in a sequestered cottage, properly fed and cared for, but were never to hear anyone speak so much as a word. The Greek historian Herodotus, who tracked the story down and learned what he calls “the real facts” from priests of Hephaestus in Memphis, says that Psamtik’s goal “was to know, after the indistinct babblings of infancy were over, what word they would first articulate.”
The experiment, he tells us, worked. One day, when the children were two years old, they ran up to the herdsman as he opened the door
of their cottage and cried out “
Becos!
” Since this meant nothing to him, he paid no attention, but when it happened repeatedly, he sent word to Psamtik, who at once ordered the children brought to him. When he too heard them say it, Psamtik made inquiries and learned that
becos
was the Phrygian word for bread. He concluded that, disappointingly, the Phrygians were an older race than the Egyptians.
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We today may smile condescendingly; we know from modern studies of children brought up under conditions of isolation that there is no innate language and that children who hear no speech never speak. Psamtik’s hypothesis rested on an invalid assumption, and he apparently mistook a babbled sound for an actual word. Yet we must admire him for trying to prove his hypothesis and for having had the highly original notion that thoughts arise in the mind through internal processes that can be investigated.
For it had not occurred to anyone until then, nor would it for another several generations, that human beings could study, understand, and predict how their thoughts and feelings arose.
Many other complex natural phenomena had long engaged the interest of both primitive and civilized peoples, who had come more or less to understand and master them. For nearly 800,000 years human beings had known how to make and control fire;
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for 100,000 years they had been devising and using tools of many kinds; for eight thousand years some of them had understood how to plant and raise crops; and for over a thousand years, at least in Egypt, they had known some of the elements of human anatomy and possessed hundreds of remedies—some of which may even have worked—for a variety of diseases. But until a century after Psamtik’s time neither the Egyptians nor anyone else thought about or sought to understand—let alone influence—how their own minds functioned.
And no wonder. They took their thoughts and emotions to be the work of spirits and gods. We have direct and conclusive evidence of this in the form of the testimony of ancient peoples themselves. Mesopotamian cuneiform texts from about 2000 B.C., for instance, refer repeatedly to the “commands” of the gods—literally heard as utterances by the rulers of society—dictating where and how to plant crops, to
whom to delegate authority, on whom to make war, and so on. A typical clay cone reads, in part:
Mesilin King of Kish at the command of his deity Kadi concerning the plantation of that field set up a stele [an inscribed stone column] in that place… Ningirsu, the hero of Enlil [another god], by his righteous command, upon Umma war made.
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A far more detailed portrait of how early people supposed their thoughts and feelings arose can be found in the
Iliad
, which records the beliefs of Homer in the ninth century B.C., and to some extent those of the eleventh-century Greeks and Trojans he wrote about. Professor Julian Jaynes of Princeton, who exhaustively analyzed the language of the
Iliad
that refers to mental and emotional functions, summed up his findings as follows:
There is in general no consciousness in the Iliad… and in general, therefore, no words for consciousness or mental acts. The words in the Iliad that in a later age come to mean mental things have different meanings, all of them more concrete. The word
psyche
, which later means soul or conscious mind, [signifies] in most instances life-substances, such as blood or breath: a dying warrior bleeds out his
psyche
onto the ground or breathes it out in his last gasp …Perhaps most important is the word
noos
which, spelled as
nous
in later Greek, comes to mean conscious mind. Its proper translation in the Iliad would be something like perception or recognition or field of vision. Zeus “holds Odysseus in his
noos.
” He keeps watch over him.
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The thoughts and feelings of the people in the
Iliad
are put directly into their minds by the gods. The opening lines of the epic make that plain. It begins when, after nine years of besieging Troy, the Greek army is being decimated by plague, and the thought occurs to the great Achilles that they should withdraw from those shores:
Achilles called the men to gather together, this having been put into his mind by the goddess of the white arms, Hera, who had pity on the Greeks when she saw them dying… and he said to them, “I believe that backwards we must make our way home if we are to escape death through fighting and the plague.”
Such explanations of both thought and emotion occur time and again, said Professor Jaynes.
When Agamemnon, king of men, robs Achilles of his mistress, it is a god that grasps Achilles by his yellow hair and warns him not to strike Agamemnon. It is a god… who leads the armies into battle, who speaks to each soldier at the turning points, who debates and teaches Hector what he must do.
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Other ancient peoples, even centuries later, similarly believed that their thoughts, visions, and dreams were messages from the gods. Herodotus tells us that Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire, crossed into the land of the hostile Massagetae in 529 B.C. and during his first night there dreamed that he saw Darius, the son of his follower Hystaspes, with wings on his shoulders, one shadowing Asia, the other Europe. When Cyrus awoke, he summoned Hystaspes and said, “Your son is discovered to be plotting against me and my crown. I will tell you how I know it so certainly. The gods watch over my safety, and warn me beforehand of every danger.” He recounted the dream and ordered Hystaspes to return to Persia and have the son ready to answer to Cyrus when he came back from defeating the Massagetae.
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(Cyrus, however, was killed by the Massagetae. Darius did later become king, but not by having plotted against him.)
The ancient Hebrews had comparable beliefs. Throughout the Old Testament, important thoughts are taken to be utterances of God, who appears in person in the earlier writings, or as the voice of God heard within oneself, in the later ones. Three instances:
After these things the word of the Lord came unto Abram in a vision, saying, Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward. (Genesis, 15:1)
Now after the death of Moses the servant of the Lord it came to pass, that the Lord spake unto Joshua the son of Nun, Moses’ minister, saying, Moses my servant is dead; now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, thou, and all this people, unto the land which I do give to them, even to the children of Israel. (Joshua, 1:1–2)
Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me. (Jonah, 1:1–2)
Disordered thoughts and madness were likewise interpreted as the work of God or of spirits sent by Him. Deuteronomy names insanity as one of the many curses that God will inflict on those who do not obey His commands:
The Lord shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart. (Deut., 28:28)
Saul’s psychotic fits, which David allayed by playing the harp, are attributed to an evil spirit sent by the Lord:
But the spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord troubled him… And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him. (I Samuel, 16:14–23)
When David’s fame as a warrior exceeded Saul’s, though, the divinely caused madness raged out of all control:
And it came to pass on the morrow, that the evil spirit from God came upon Saul, and he prophesied in the midst of the house: and David played with his hand, as at other times: and there was a javelin in Saul’s hand. And Saul cast the javelin; for he said, I will smite David even to the wall with it… [but David] slipped away out of Saul’s presence, and he smote the javelin into the wall. (I Samuel, 18:10–11 and 19:10)
But in the sixth century B.C. there appeared hints of a remarkable new development. In India, Buddha attributed human thoughts to our sensations and perceptions, which, he said, gradually and automatically combine into ideas. In China, Confucius stressed the power of thought and decision that lay within each person (“A man can command his principles; principles do not master the man,” “Learning, undigested by thought, is labor lost; thought unassisted by learning is perilous”).
The signs of change were even stronger in Greece, where poets and sages began to view their thoughts and emotions in wholly new terms.
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Sappho, for one, described the inner torment of jealousy in realistic terms rather than as an emotion inflicted on her by a god:
Peer of gods he seemeth to me, the blissful
Man who sits and gazes at thee before him,
Close beside thee sits, and in silence hears thee
Silverly speaking,
Laughing love’s low laughter. Oh, this, this only
Stirs the troubled heart in my breast to tremble!
For should I but see thee a little moment,
Straight is my voice hushed;
Yea, my tongue is broken, and through and through me
’Neath the flesh, impalpable fire runs tingling;
Nothing see mine eyes, and a voice of roaring
Waves in my ears sounds.
—“Ode to Atthis”
Solon, poet and lawgiver, used the word
nous
not in the Homeric sense but to mean something like rational mind. He declared that at about age forty “a man’s
nous
is trained in all things” and in the fifties he is “at his best in
nous
and tongue.” He or the philosopher Thales— sources differ—sounded a note totally different from that of Homeric times in one of Western civilization’s briefest and most famous pieces of advice, inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: “Know thyself.”
Within a few decades there began a sudden and astonishing efflorescence of Greek thought, science, and art. George Sarton, the historian of science, once estimated that in the Hellenic era, human knowledge increased something like forty-fold in less than three centuries.
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One of the most notable aspects of this intellectual outburst was the abrupt appearance and burgeoning of a new area of knowledge, philosophy. In the Greek city-states of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., a small number of reflective upper-class men, who had neither scientific equipment nor hard data but were driven by a passion to understand the world and themselves, managed by pure speculation and reasoning to conceive of, and offer answers to, many of the enduring questions of cosmogony, cosmology, physics, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and psychology.
The philosophers themselves did not use the term “psychology” (which did not exist until
A.D.
1520) or regard it as a distinct area of knowledge, and they were less interested in the subject than in more
fundamental ones like the structure of matter and the nature of causality. Nonetheless, they identified and offered hypotheses about nearly all the significant problems of psychology that have concerned scholars and scientists ever since. Among them:
—Is there only one substance, or is “mind” something different from “matter”?
—Do we have souls? Do they exist after the body dies?
—How are mind and body connected? Is mind part of soul, and if so can it exist apart from the body?
—Is human nature the product of inborn tendencies or of experience and upbringing?
—How do we know what we know? Are our ideas built into our minds, or do we develop them from our perceptions and experiences?
—How does perception work? Are our impressions of the world around us true representations of what is out there? How can we know whether they are or not?
—Which is the right road to true knowledge—pure reasoning or data gathered by observation?
—What are the principles of valid thinking?
—What are the causes of invalid thinking?
—Does the mind rule the emotions, or vice versa?
There is scarcely a major topic in today’s textbooks of introductory psychology that was not anticipated, at least in rudimentary form, by the Greek philosophers. What is even more impressive, their goal was the same as that of contemporary psychologists: to discover the true causes of human behavior—those unseen processes of the mind which take place in response to external events and other stimuli.