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History Psychology:3 English Errors in6 PsychologyIn psychology as well as in other branches of philosophy the influence of Descartes was considerable though indirect. His subjective starting-point, cogito, ergo sum, his insistence on methodic doubt, his advocacy of reflection on thought and close scrutiny of our fundamental ideas, all tended to encourage the method of internal observation, whilst the mechanical explanation of the "Traité des Passions" favored the advent of physiological psychology. It was probably, however, John Locke's "Essay on the Human Understanding" (1690) which did most to foster the method of analytic introspection which constitutes the principal feature of modern psychological method. Notwithstanding the confused and inconsistent metaphysics and the many grave psychological blunders with which that work abounds, yet his frequent appeal to inner experience, his honest efforts to describe mental processes, and the quantity of acute observations scattered throughout the work, coming also at an age when the inductive method was rapidly rising in popularity, achieved a speedy and wide success for his book, and gave a marked empirical bent to all future English psychology. Psychological observation and analysis were still more skillfully used by Bishop Berkeley as a principle of explanation in his "Theory of Vision", and then employed by him to establish his psychological creed of Idealism. Finally, David Hume, the true founder of the Associationist school of psychology, still further increased the importance of the method of introspective analysis by the daring skeptical conclusions he claimed to establish by its means. The subsequent British adherents of the Associationist school Hartley, the two Mills, Bain, and Herbert Spencer, continued this method and tradition along the same lines. There is constant direct appeal to inner experience combined with systematic effort to trace the genesis of the highest, most spiritual, and most complex mental conceptions back to elementary atomic states of sensuous consciousness. Universal ideas, necessary truths, the ideas of self, time, space, causality as well as the conviction of an external material world were all explained as the outcome of sensations and association. The reality of any higher activities or faculties essentially different from the lower sensuous powers was denied, and all the chief data formerly employed in establishing the simplicity, spirituality, and substantiality of the soul were rejected. Rational or metaphysical psychology was thus virtually extinguished and erased from English philosophical literature during the nineteenth century. Even the more orthodox representatives of the Scotch school, Reid and Dugald Stewart, who avoided all metaphysical argument and endeavored to controvert Hume with his own weapons of appeal exclusively to experience and observation, had only further confirmed the tendency in the direction of a purely empirical psychology. The great need in English psychological literature throughout most of the nineteenth century, on the side of those defending a spiritual doctrine of the human mind, was a systematic and thorough treatment of empirical psychology. Excellent pieces of work on particular questions were done by Martineau, W. G. Ward, and other writers, but nearly all the systematic treatises on psychology were produced by the disciples of the Sensationist or Materialistic schools. Yet, if philosophy is to be based on experience, then assuredly it is on the carefully-scrutinized and well-established results of empirical psychology that any satisfactory rational metaphysical doctrine respecting the nature of the soul, its origin, and its destiny must be built. It was in their faulty though often plausible analysis and interpretation of our states of consciousness that the greatest errors in philosophy and psychology of Bain, the two Mills, Spencer, and their disciples had their source; it is only by more careful introspective observation and a more searching analysis of the same mental facts that these errors can be exposed and solid foundations laid for a true metaphysical psychology of the soul. In France, Condillac, La Mettrie, Holbach, and Bonnet developed the Sensationalism of Locke's psychology into an increasingly crude Materialism. To oppose this school later on, Royer-Collard, Cousin, Jouffroy, and Maine de Biran turned to the work of Reid and the "common sense" Scotch school, appropriating their method and results in empirical psychology. Some of these writers, moreover, sought to carry their reasoning beyond the mere inductions of empirical psychology, in order to construct on this enlarged experience a genuine philosophy of the soul, as "principle" and subject of the states and activities immediately revealed to introspective observation. 4 Next to German |
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