almost all were routine commentaries on the psychological writings of Aristotle, Theophrastus, Galen, and others, or reworkings of Augustine’s and Aquinas’s discussions of free will and the nature of the soul. Certain thinkers, among them Machiavelli, Paracelsus, and Melanchthon, made shrewed psychological observations of one kind or another in their writings, but none furthered the science in any systematic fashion.
Three authors, however, are worth passing notice before we move on to the dawn of modern psychology.
One is an obscure Serbo-Croatian writer named Marulic, who seems to have been the first to make written use, in an obscure manuscript dating from about 1520, of a newly coined word,
psychologia.
43 The term did not soon catch on, though one or two other authors used it. But in 1590 a German encyclopedist named Rudolf Goeckel (Latinized as Goclenius) used it in the title of a book:
Psychologia Hoc Est, de Hominis Perfectione
(Psychology This Is, on the Improvement of Man). In the course of the next century the new word gradually became the recognized name of the science.
The third author is Juan Luis Vives, a sixteenth-century Spanish Catholic philosopher of Jewish origin. After tutoring Princess Mary, elder daughter of England’s Henry VIII, and spending some time in prison for opposing Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, he devoted himself to writing. One of his works, a lengthy book titled
De Anima et Vita
, is largely a recapitulation of Aristotle and Augustine butis notable for one thing: Vives compiled a far longer list than his predecessors of the ways in which images and thoughts can be linked by association in the mind, and was a forerunner, if not the actual inspiration, of the seventeenth-century associationists. One twentieth-century associationist even called him, with doctrinaire exaggeration, the father of modern psychology. 44
But modern psychology, unlike any living creature, had many fathers.
* Theophrastussays elsewhere that thinking takes place in the brain.
* Godor the Good or the Supreme.
* By“suffer” and “suffering” Tertullian refers not to pain but to being subject to feelings (“passions”) rather than having mental control of them.
THREE
The
Protopsychologists
The Third Visitation
I n
The Advancement of Learning
, Francis Bacon, having summarized the state of knowledge in his time—in 1605 it was still possible for one person to do so—concluded with this bold forecast:
When I set before me the condition of these times, in which learning hath made her third visitation or circuit, in all the qualities thereof: the excellency and vivacity of the wits of this age; the noble helps and lights which we have by the travails of ancient writers; the art of printing, which communicateth books to men of all fortunes; the openness of the world by navigation, which hath disclosed multitudes of experiments, and a mass of natural history…I cannot but be raised to this persuasion, that this third period of time will far surpass that of the Græcian and Roman learning. 1
Such sweeping predictions usually prove wrong, but not this one. Within the century, knowledge would reach a level not even Bacon could have imagined, thanks to the “new learning” of science fostered by major social developments that had been reshaping European society. The semiprimitive feudal way of life centered about church, castle, and keep had given way to larger national groupings, the revival of city life, and the expansion of trade and industry, and the Reformation had weakened the grip of church-centered traditionalism over men’s minds and induced a spirit of questioning and intellectual fermentin Protestant lands and, by a kind of social osmosis, even in Catholic ones.
These developments spurred advances in both utilitarian and pure knowledge. Seventeenth-century businesses, armies, and monetary and taxation systems required new, efficient ways of thinking about and handling data. On
Three authors, however, are worth passing notice before we move on to the dawn of modern psychology.
One is an obscure Serbo-Croatian writer named Marulic, who seems to have been the first to make written use, in an obscure manuscript dating from about 1520, of a newly coined word,
psychologia.
43 The term did not soon catch on, though one or two other authors used it. But in 1590 a German encyclopedist named Rudolf Goeckel (Latinized as Goclenius) used it in the title of a book:
Psychologia Hoc Est, de Hominis Perfectione
(Psychology This Is, on the Improvement of Man). In the course of the next century the new word gradually became the recognized name of the science.
The third author is Juan Luis Vives, a sixteenth-century Spanish Catholic philosopher of Jewish origin. After tutoring Princess Mary, elder daughter of England’s Henry VIII, and spending some time in prison for opposing Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, he devoted himself to writing. One of his works, a lengthy book titled
De Anima et Vita
, is largely a recapitulation of Aristotle and Augustine butis notable for one thing: Vives compiled a far longer list than his predecessors of the ways in which images and thoughts can be linked by association in the mind, and was a forerunner, if not the actual inspiration, of the seventeenth-century associationists. One twentieth-century associationist even called him, with doctrinaire exaggeration, the father of modern psychology. 44
But modern psychology, unlike any living creature, had many fathers.
* Theophrastussays elsewhere that thinking takes place in the brain.
* Godor the Good or the Supreme.
* By“suffer” and “suffering” Tertullian refers not to pain but to being subject to feelings (“passions”) rather than having mental control of them.
THREE
The
Protopsychologists
The Third Visitation
I n
The Advancement of Learning
, Francis Bacon, having summarized the state of knowledge in his time—in 1605 it was still possible for one person to do so—concluded with this bold forecast:
When I set before me the condition of these times, in which learning hath made her third visitation or circuit, in all the qualities thereof: the excellency and vivacity of the wits of this age; the noble helps and lights which we have by the travails of ancient writers; the art of printing, which communicateth books to men of all fortunes; the openness of the world by navigation, which hath disclosed multitudes of experiments, and a mass of natural history…I cannot but be raised to this persuasion, that this third period of time will far surpass that of the Græcian and Roman learning. 1
Such sweeping predictions usually prove wrong, but not this one. Within the century, knowledge would reach a level not even Bacon could have imagined, thanks to the “new learning” of science fostered by major social developments that had been reshaping European society. The semiprimitive feudal way of life centered about church, castle, and keep had given way to larger national groupings, the revival of city life, and the expansion of trade and industry, and the Reformation had weakened the grip of church-centered traditionalism over men’s minds and induced a spirit of questioning and intellectual fermentin Protestant lands and, by a kind of social osmosis, even in Catholic ones.
These developments spurred advances in both utilitarian and pure knowledge. Seventeenth-century businesses, armies, and monetary and taxation systems required new, efficient ways of thinking about and handling data. On
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