Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Classical Psychologists: Selections Illustrating Psychology From Anaxagoras to Wundt
The modern period is introduced with chapters from Thomas Hobbes' Human Nature, in which the founder Of empirical psychology reduces all mental processes to motions. An ample presentation is given of Descartes' The Passions of the Soul, Of which Professor David Irons says that it would be difficult indeed to find any treatment Of the emotions much superior to it in originality, thoroughness, and suggestiveness. Spinoza, who teaches in The Ethics that the soul and body are not two distinct substances, but that thought and extension are two of the many attributes Of the one real being, seeks to prove by the mathematical method in the part reproduced, that the order and connection of ideas are identical with the order and connection Of things. From Leibnitz' Philosophical Works selections have been made in which he presents his theory of monads, and likewise illustrates the interaction of soul and body after the manner of two clocks so constructed as to run in perfect harmony. Christian Wolff, whose name is chie?y associated with the faculty psychology, designates in those sections Of the Rational Psychology here chosen, the vis repraesentiva as the fundamental force and sufficient ground for everything that takes place in the soul.
English empirical psychology is next traced through Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. From Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding there is given, as Locke believes, the true history of the beginning of human knowledge, wherein all our ideas are derived from sensation and re?ection. Berkeley's Essay towards a new Theory of Vision is reproduced with desirable fullness, as it contains his noted research into the differ ence between the ideas of sight and touch, wherein he draws the striking inference that the visible world is a visible lan guage, which we learn to translate into the tactual experience that the visible phenomena naturally signify. Hume in the chapters from the Treatise of Human Nature would resolve all perceptions Of the human mind into impressions and ideas, differing only in force and liveliness, and also would derive our conception of necessary connection solely from the experience of the constant association of certain Objects. Hartley was the chief precursor of English associational psy chology, although preceded as he confesses by the modest Gay, and from the Observations on Man are reprinted his two principal doctrines Of vibrations, and Of association.
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