PSYCHOLOGY
INTRODUCTION
A SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY
Psychology has a long past, yet its real history is short. For thousands of years it has existed and has been growing older; but in the earlier part of this period it cannot boast of any continuous progress toward a riper and richer development. In the fourth century before our era that giant thinker, Aristotle, built it up into an edifice comparing very favorably with any other science of that time. But this edifice stood without undergoing any noteworthy changes or extensions, well into the eighteenth or even the nineteenth century. Only in recent times do we find an advance, at first slow but later increasing in rapidity, in the development of psychology.
The general causes which checked the progress of this science and thus made it fall behind the others can readily be stated:—
“The boundaries of the Soul you cannot find, though you pace off all its streets, so deep a foundation has it,” runs a sentence of Heraclitus, and it hits the truth more fully than its author could ever have expected. The structures and functions of our mental life present the greatest difficulties to scientific investigation, greater even than those presented by the phenomena, in many respects similar, of the bodily life of the higher organisms. These structures and processes change so unceasingly, are so fleeting, so enormously complex, and dependent on so many factors hidden yet undoubtedly influential, that it is difficult even to seize upon them and describe their true substance, still more difficult to gain an insight into their causal connections and to understand their significance. We are just now beginning to recognize the full force of these difficulties. Wherever in recent years research in any of the many branches of psychology has made any considerable advance,—as in vision, audition, memory, judgment,—the first conclusion reached by all investigators has been, that matters are incomparably finer and richer and fuller of meaning than even a keen fancy would previously have been able to imagine.
There is, besides, a second obstacle. However difficult it may be to investigate the nature and causal connections of mental phenomena, everybody has a superficial knowledge of their external manifestations. Long before these phenomena were considered scientifically, it was necessary for practical human intercourse and for the understanding of human character, that language should give names to the most important mental complexes occurring in the various situations of daily life, such as judgment, attention, imagination, passion, conscience, and so forth; and we are constantly using these names as if everybody understood them perfectly. What is customary and commonplace comes to be self-evident to us and is quietly accepted; it arouses no wonder at its strangeness, no curiosity which might lead us to examine it more closely. Popular psychology remains unconscious of the fact that there are mysteries and problems in these complexes. It loses sight of the complications because of the simplicity of the names. When it has arranged the mental phenomena in any particular case under the familiar designations, and has perhaps said that some one has “paid attention,” or has “given free rein to his imagination,” it considers the whole matter explained and the subject closed.
Still a third condition has retarded the advance of psychology, and will probably long continue to do so. Toward some of its weightiest problems it is almost impossible for us to be open-minded; we take too much practical interest in arriving at one answer rather than the other. King Frederick William I was not the only person who could be persuaded of the danger of the doctrine that every mental condition is governed by fixed law, and that in consequence all of our actions are fully determined—a doctrine fundamental to serious psychological research. He believed that such a teaching undermined the foundations of order in state and army, and that according to it he would no longer be justified in punishing deserters from his tall grenadiers. There are even to-day numerous thinkers who brand such a doctrine dangerous. They believe that it destroys all possibility of punishment and reward, makes all education, admonition, and advice meaningless, paralyzes our action, and must because of all these consequences be rejected.
In a similar way the discussion of other fundamental questions, such as the real nature of mind, the relation of mind and body in life and death, becomes prejudiced and confused on account of their connection with the deepest-rooted sentiments and longings of the human race. In recent years this has been the case especially in connection with the question of the evolution of mental life from its lower forms in the animals to its higher in man. What ought to be taught and investigated on its own merits as pure scientific theory, as the probable meaning of experienced facts, comes to be a matter of belief and good character, or is considered a sign of courageous independence of spirit and superiority to superstition and traditional prejudice. All of this is quite comprehensible when we consider the enormous practical importance of the questions at issue. Yet such an attitude will scarcely be of much help in finding answers most correct from a purely objective standpoint; it rather discourages the advance of research along definite lines.
Nevertheless, as we have stated in the beginning, psychology has now entered upon a positive development. What favorable circumstances have made it possible to overcome, at least in part, the peculiar opposing difficulties?