A History of Psychology

Modern Psychology Volume III

George Sidney Brett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317851745
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in 2002. Volume III in the History of Psychology series involves modern psychology taking in the transition in Britain, France and Germany, and then moves onto general scientific tendencies, from Fechner to Wundt, its scope and British psychology in the nineteenth century and the conflict of views.

PART I

THE AGE OF TRANSITION

CHAPTER I

THE TRANSITION IN BRITAIN AND FRANCE

§ 1. BEFORE the year 1411, when the University of St. Andrews was founded, the young Scotsman went either to Paris or to Oxford for his education. About 1265 John Baliol had founded a college at Oxford, and occasionally a student was bold enough “to brave the perils of a journey to Oxford and the treatment he met with there after he reached it.” But the attractions of Paris seem to have been more alluring, and the greater number down to 1411 preferred France as a country less foreign than England. At Paris several Scotch teachers made some reputation; the national distinctions would, of course, be no barrier to a common understanding, while Latin was the language of academic instruction. The fifteenth century saw the rise of colleges at Glasgow and Aberdeen, as well as that already mentioned at St. Andrews. At the end of the sixteenth century another college (Marischal) was founded at Aberdeen, and Edinburgh University came into existence (1582).

The early constitutions of these universities followed the models of Paris and Louvain. The scope of the teaching and the material were, consequently, identical with those of the later mediæval period. In the time of James II the Faculty of Arts at Glasgow prescribed in Logic the works of Aristotle and in Philosophy more Aristotle, namely the eight books of physics, the psychological treatises and some others. The history of the struggles out of which the Scotch system of education finally emerged would not be in place here. A new scheme put out in 1640 prescribed Aristotle’s De Anima as a subject for the fourth-year course, but in 1695 the commissioners of the universities made a vigorous protest in favour of home products: each university was directed to produce a treatise, and the whole collection of treatises, four in number, was to be revised and adopted by the commissioners. The scheme finally lapsed, and Scotland resigned the task of creation: fortunately it began at the same time to develop.

We have now reached the beginning of the eighteenth century, and with it a new era marked by that most revolutionary change, the change from the Latin to the vernacular language. Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) was the first to take this step which at once gave him a distinct position. Hutcheson was a pupil of Gerschom Carmichael, and it would be unfair to speak of Hutcheson as a self-made teacher; he was made by Carmichael and always bore the impress of Carmichael’s teaching both in his preference for ethical subjects and his tendency to move away from the old system. It was Carmichael who united in his training and his developed thought the old and the new; through him Scotland was led to oppose Hobbes on questions of politics and adopt Locke in its “mental philosophy.” All this made for culture, and it is as culture that we must estimate the Scotch philosophy of this period. Its traditions kept it close to the best work of antiquity; its vitality enabled it to assimilate what was relatively new material. Hutcheson naturally felt the charm of Shaftesbury, for Shaftesbury’s spirit was Hellenic and his novelty had a classic flavour; in both cases it was the bottle rather than the wine that was new.

Locke gave to Scotland its method and directed its thought on the new psychological lines. Hutcheson explicitly begins from Locke, with the regular machinery of external and internal senses; but he is never quite at one with Locke, and has a vague presentiment that the human understanding is not adequately analysed by the author of the Essay. There are two directions in which this dissatisfaction shows itself. In dealing with the Understanding, Hutcheson maintains that there are ideas given along with sensations, belonging indifferently to all, such as duration, extension and number. Further, Hutcheson thinks the number of senses ought to be increased: we have a sense of Beauty, a sense of Goodness, and so on. As psychology this was poor stuff, but its historical significance is considerable. The first point seems to be a reminiscence of Aristotle; Hutcheson desires to include among the elements of the mind not only the senses but also the Aristotelian “common sense.” The second tendency belongs to that part of Hutcheson’s nature which produced his first work, the Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. The æsthetic vein was strong in Hutcheson; it accounts for his dissatisfaction with Locke’s analysis of the understanding and also for his own uncastigated vagueness.

In talking about Hutcheson, we are clearly going beyond the limits of psychology in the narrow sense. The profit of so doing consists in the fact that, sooner or later, a developed psychology has to include those topics which seem, at this stage, to lead a precarious existence as parasites of other subjects. The same remark applies to George Turnbull, a Regent in Marischal College, Aberdeen (1721–6), who represents the sterner type of mind. Turnbull had learned much from Hutcheson and from Shaftesbury; but he regarded the natural sciences as the types of true method and believed that the study of mental philosophy could be conducted most successfully by the method of observation and induction; his turn of mind is shown by his rejection of the old word metaphysics, the name for formalism.

Turnbull vanished in 1727 from the Scottish academic circles. In 1739 Hume’s Treatise appeared, but its significance seems to place it in another context, and it has been discussed already (ii. 272). The true Scottish succession was continued in Thomas Reid, whose lectures were attended by Dugald Stewart. During Reid’s time at Glasgow (1764–86), Adam Ferguson at Edinburgh earned a great reputation; his book on psychology and ethics (Analysis of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy 1766) was translated into German by Garve (1772) and reviewed by Tetens. Ferguson was succeeded by Dugald Stewart, so that Reid’s influence spread from Glasgow to Edinburgh (1810). Stewart was followed by Thomas Brown (1810–20), who published his Physiology of the Mind in 1820 and left Lectures on the Philosophy of the Mind to be published after his death in 1822. The scope of thought was steadily widened by these writers. Reid stood for the direct development of the Scottish philosophy, somewhat jarred by collision with Hume’s reduction of Locke’s doctrine to his own unique positivism. Stewart developed Reid’s ideas. Brown succumbed to the fascinations of Condillac and De Tracy, as interpreted by Dr. Young, of Belfast. Finally, Hamilton inaugurated a new and complex period of thought.¹

The Scottish school, as a whole, recognizes no mechanical or physiological aspect of psychological processes. It remains distinctively within the limits of “mental philosophy.” Hamilton’s doctrine of sensations was influenced by the advance of physiology, but only to a slight degree. Alexander Bain was the first to develop a doctrine which is at once physiological and psychological: he is therefore the only one to whom we can look for a psychological system. None the less, the earlier writers were highly esteemed by such men as Herbart and Beneke, and it will be necessary first to show what contributions they made to psychology and how they modified what was, in the main, a traditional body of doctrine.

§ 2. Thomas Reid (1710–96) may be accounted the real founder of the Scottish school of philosophy. This school claims attention from the historian on account of its duration and its influence; for psychology it did but little, since it took from the first an unfortunate direction. The student of Reid’s works might well be inspired with the highest expectations; for the opening promises him a complete renovation of the philosophical sciences by means of a thorough psychological analysis. The result is disappointing. The physiological groundwork is first rejected, especially Hartley’s doctrine: and we are told that the relation of a sensation to its external cause must be “resolved into the will of God or into some cause altogether unknown.” Doubtless Hartley was wrong, but this is a counsel of despair. Reid is also much too fond of saying that he will countenance nothing that degrades the dignity of man, an attitude of mind that savours too little of science and bespeaks a prejudice in favour of sentimentalism. These were both deep-rooted tendencies of the age, and Reid often speaks as if the shadow of the mediæval theology was still upon him. While the rejection of physiology might have made Reid a good psychologist, this does not seem to have been the case. As a philosopher he took upon himself the task of answering Hume; the disastrous outcome of “idealism” was to be counteracted by a new realism. So far as the psychological part of this was concerned, all Reid’s successors seem to agree in finding faults. Reid was continually at war with a doctrine about ideas which he ascribed to Descartes, but wrongly. He insisted, against this doctrine, on the immediacy of consciousness, and was uniformly understood to mean by consciousness a special faculty. He spoke vaguely of “common sense,” and made it impossible for anyone to say exactly what that was. Whichever way we turn we seem to meet in Reid doubtful assignations of doctrines to others and unstable doctrines of his own invention.

The real basis of all this confusion seems to have been in the misunderstanding of Aristotle. Dugald Stewart corrects Reid, Brown corrects Stewart, and Hamilton corrects everybody. There is no sound historical learning until we come to Hamilton, and anyone who will read Hamilton’s notes to Reid’s works cannot fail to be struck with the fact that the whole line of Scottish writers moves from Reid onward by progressive discoveries of an unknown past. Stewart and Brown are particularly prolific in novel suggestions, adorned with footnotes which express their astonishment at the way in which earlier writers had anticipated their most original efforts. To a large extent this is explained by the history of Scottish education outlined above. In the history of psychology it was a transition period, consisting at first of a reaction against “sensualism” and later (in Brown) of direct reproduction from the ideologists who were opposing Condillac.

The Scottish school was primarily a school of philosophy. Its problem was the general theory of perception, and Reid’s merits are to be estimated finally according as he is or is not considered to have answered Hume. This subject belongs to general philosophy or to the sphere of epistemology, not to psychology. In the sphere of psychology Reid contents himself with merely stating the elementary and complex operations of the mind, refusing to accept any explanation of what he regards as primary facts, e.g. consciousness (as a faculty) and belief. In this way a large part of mental life is made immediate or innate; that is to say, the importance of the senses is reduced and Locke’s “sensualism” revised. The association of ideas, both name and thing, is rejected in favour of an “inductive principle.” Reid was both original and right in thinking that “ideas” are not associated, but his own exposition of “experience” is equivalent to the process called by others association; if, as is probable, Reid meant to assert the activity of the mind in “experience,” as opposed to “association,” his distinction may be reckoned valuable. That this was the case might be argued from the fact that Reid shifted the emphasis from interrelation of ideas to judgment, from mechanical union to something like a creative synthesis.

§ 3. Dugald Stewart was a man of rhetoric and poetical illustrations. Diffuse in style and unfortunate in his inventions, he is an attractive writer and gives his subject, The Philosophy of the Human Mind, new life and warmth. The spread of general culture was one of the objects at which the Scotch professors aimed; their classrooms were filled with eager listeners, lawyers and men of business, whose presence induced the lecturer to adopt methods foreign to the routine of class work. For the most part Stewart follows Reid, but he differs in many details. The doctrine of association is expounded at great length, though Stewart thinks there are no particular principles of association; anything may recall anything else. Wit, fancy and invention are three of the spheres in which association is particularly noticeable; and it is worthy of remark that Stewart speaks of habit as controlling association, not the reverse. Another type of association which is quoted is that of space with time; “we speak of long and short time.” Apparently any customary connection of ideas can be called an association. On the other hand, memory, as with Reid, is called a faculty and not analysed as an example of association. Association is said to presuppose “a faculty of retaining the knowledge which we require”: it also implies a power of recognizing the thoughts that recur, and this is not a part of the “association” as usually defined. On the other hand, without the associating principle the power of retaining our thoughts would be of little use. From this kind of over-subtlety Stewart goes on to discuss the value of a commonplace book and the kinds of memory which excite admiration in society!

In the works of later psychologists Stewart is credited with two distinctive points. In his discussion of attention (chap. ii) he notes the fact that there are gaps in ordinary experience; attention is required as the condition of retention, but “when we are deeply engaged in conversation or occupied with any speculation that is interesting to the mind, the surrounding objects either do not produce in us the perceptions they are fitted to excite, or these perceptions are instantly forgotten.” It follows “that a person may be conscious of a perception without being able afterwards to recollect it.” Consciousness and attention together make recollection possible. Consciousness without attention is something different. But Stewart does not actually call these unremembered perceptions “subconscious.” He regards them as forgotten links which join one idea to another without being remembered; they enable us to make sudden transitions, but “it requires a considerable degree of reflection to enable the person himself by whom the transition was made to ascertain what were the intermediate ideas.” Stewart speaks in apparent ignorance of any theory of subconsciousness, and does not oppose his view to that theory. There is also some obscurity in his own view, for, if reflection can recall the missing links, there must be some degree of retentiveness in consciousness alone; whereas Stewart ascribes retentiveness to the power of attention. On attention itself he remarks, characteristically enough, that “every person must be satisfied of its reality from his own consciousness.”

The other point is a criticism of Reid’s statement that “imagination is attended with no belief at all.” This Stewart presumes to call in question, and maintains that an imagination may be accompanied by belief and that “when imagination is very lively we are apt to ascribe to its objects a real existence.” We then “feel and act in the same manner as we should do if we believed that the objects of our attention were real.” This is very true.¹ It is also another remarkable sign of general superficiality; for this admission demands a complete revision of Reid’s psychology and a new statement of the difference between idealism and realism: but no such revision is attempted.

§ 4. In France the philosophy of the nineteenth century began from Reid. In 1811 Royer-Collard was appointed professor at the Sorbonne. Taine gives an amusing account of this philosopher’s unfortunate situation. Condillac was still the Bible of the age; and from all such sceptical, materialistic views the new professor shrank in horror. Fresh to philosophy, with no doctrine of his own, what way of escape was open? One day, as he walked the streets, he chanced to catch sight of a little old book in a foreign language, lying neglected upon a stall; he looked at it and read the title—Essays on the Human Mind, according to the Principles of Common Sense, by Dr. Thomas Reid. “How much for this book?” he asked. “Thirty sous.” The price was paid and a new school of philosophy founded!

This may be a myth, but it contains a truth. France was tired of Condillac and analysis. Royer-Collard was a man of order, sprung from a puritanical stock, and trained by severe discipline to enforce sound views on others. Nature may be said to have destined Royer-Collard to teach Reid’s doctrines to the French; if the book reached him by chance, it was not chance that made him retain it. “By religion and by inclination, he was the enemy of Cabanis and of St. Lambert … Psychology in his eyes was not an end but a means. He analysed, not in order to analyse, but to refute the materialists and sceptics.” This criticism touches the weak spot in the work of this school; however much they felt the actual defects of the sensualists, these philosophers never went beyond dogmatic assertions valued for the end they served.

The edition of Reid’s works prepared by Sir William Hamilton contains, by way of preface, some of the encomiums bestowed on Reid by his French admirers. They show clearly the basis of the admiration which those works excited. One writer claims that Reid brought back those a priori elements which Locke had so ridiculously scouted; Cousin said that Reid’s mission “was to proclaim the application of the experimental method to the philosophy of the human mind, on the ruins of the hypothesis which had issued from the Cartesian school; this mission he has completely fulfilled, for he has purged philosophy, one after another, of the theory of ideas, of the desolating scepticism of Hume, of the idealism of Berkeley, of the demonstrations of Descartes; he has thus made a tabula rasa.” No criticism need be made on this estimate beyond what history itself has delivered. Reid’s purgation was too thorough; he removed much and put little in its place. The new point of view lacked all vitality; Royer-Collard, Cousin and Jouffroy adopted it without giving it any fresh vigour; it was morally less “desolating” perhaps, but for science it was no more than an elaborate epitaph. For that reason history has nothing of value to glean from the rhetoric of Reid’s disciples, and France was for a time nourished on improving declamations.

In reality deeper forces were beginning to emerge. The disciples of Reid were only symptoms of a more general outbreak of sentiment. While they contented themselves with a denial of scepticism and a defence of that degree of activity which Reid and his Scotch disciples had ascribed to consciousness, a greater than these was maturing a really aggressive voluntarism. This was the next move, made by Maine de Biran.

§ 5. Though the French philosophers of this period were never very effective, Taine’s view of the matter was not the last word. Progress was continually being made, and the evolution was both simple and normal. Condillac did not properly estimate the activity of the mind. Laromiguière (among others) emphasized attention and declared that there were internal as well as external senses: the statue could never have acquired such powers as are implied in the perception of beauty, moral truth and so forth. The next step to be taken was the full elaboration of a theory of activity with a consequent apotheosis of Will. By the end of 1822 Maine de Biran had accomplished this, and was by virtue of his achievement the acknowledged leader of the reaction toward spiritualistic psychology. To Taine this was darkness and anathema; yet even he wavers in his attack and makes some admissions which show him to be uncertain whether the spiritualists had not somewhere in their teachings a vein of truth.

This, in fact, they had, quite apart from their metaphysical flights or their tendency to obscurantism. It was an old truth, but France was still without share of it. Leibniz revived it from Plato, and from Leibniz onward it remained a possession of Germany; it was the insight into the fact that relations imply activity. Locke had not committed himself to the kind of language Condillac used; he had not excluded activity, though he had paid more attention to its effects than to its nature. Empiricism, which began by requiring a careful history of the actual life of thought or consciousness, had allowed itself to drift into the false position of appearing to deny the life it analysed. Hence the need of reaction and at the same time the barrenness of the reaction; when the life was reasserted there was noth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• PART I THE AGE OF TRANSITION
• PART II MODERN PSYCHOLOGY
• NOTES
• INDEX A. GENERAL WORKS AND ABBREVIATIONS
• INDEX B. AUTHORS