Chapter 1 TIMELINE 1220–1920...the foundations of knowledge laid down by Aristotle and his 13th-century Christian inter-preter, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). The calls by Sir

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)

Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543)

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)

Johannes Kepler (1571–1630)

René Descartes (1596–1650)Henri IV is assassinated (1610)Jesuits’ Collège de la Flèche is founded (1604)

Descartes’s L’homme and Le Monde (1630–1633)Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637)Isaac Newton (1643–1727)

Martin Luther (1483–1546)

TIMELINE 1220–1920Chapter 1

(In 25-year increments)

1220

1470

1545

1570

Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648)

John Locke (1632–1704)English Civil War (1641–1651)

Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy (1644)

1595

1620

Charles I is executed (1649)English Restoration begins under Charles II (1660)

1645

COPYRIG

HTED M

ATERIAL

William III ascends to the English throne (1688) Glorious Revolution (1688)Locke’s An Essay Concerning HumanUnderstanding (1690)

David Hartley (1705–1757)Robert Whytt (1714–1766)Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777)

Georg Prochaska (1749–1820)

Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828)

François Magendie (1783–1855)

1695

James Watt (1736–1819)Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829)

1720

Hartley’s Observation of Man, His Frame, His Duty, andHis Expectations (1749)Whytt’s On the Vital and Other Involuntary Motions ofAnimals (1751)

1745

Charles Bell (1774–1842)Marshall Hall (1790–1857)Jean-Pierre-Marie Flourens (1794–1867)William Cullen (1794–1878)

Charles Darwin (1809–1882)

Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud (1796–1881)

1770

Gall develops his “science” of phrenology (1796)Charles Lyell (1797–1875)Johannes Müller (1801–1858)Lamarck proposes a theory of evolution (1809)

1795

1670

Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687)

HMS Beagle docks at Falmouth, England (1836)Eduard Hitzig (1839–1907)David Ferrier (1843–1928)

Christine Ladd-Franklin (1847–1930)

Johns Hopkins awards Ladd-Franklin her PhD, earnedin 1882 (1926)

1920

Helmholtz’s Handbook of Physiological Optics(1856–1867)

1845

Gustav Fritsch (1837–1927)Douglas Spalding (1840–1877)

C. Lloyd Morgan (1852–1936)Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859)

Broca uses postmortem autopsy (1870)Darwin’s Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)

1870

Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871)

Ladd-Franklin presents her theory of color (1892)

Ladd-Franklin’s Colour and Colour Theories (1929)

Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation(anonymous; 1844)

Magendie helps create sensory-motor distinction (1822)Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–1833)

John Hughlings Jackson (1835–1911)

1820

Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894)Paul Broca (1824–1880)Müller’s Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen(1833–1840)

CHAPTER 1ORIGINS OF A SCIENCE OF MIND

Since it is the understanding that sets man above the rest of sensible beings, and gives him all theadvantage and dominion which he has over them; it is certainly a subject, even for its nobleness,worth our labour to inquire into.

—John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690

INTRODUCT IONThe discipline of Psychology, the history of which we explore in the following pages, did not existbefore the mid- to late 19th century. Thus, to begin our history, we have to understand theintellectual and practical developments that made the emergence of such a field possible. As wediscuss in this and the next chapter, at least four strands of thought and practice were importantfor the emergence of Psychology by the end of the 19th century: philosophy, physiology, evolutionby natural selection, and creation of a psychological sensibility through everyday practices. Takentogether, these four strands made possible both the science and the profession of Psychology,which Graham Richards has termed ‘‘big P’’ Psychology to differentiate the discipline from itssubject matter, ‘‘little p’’ psychology (Richards, 2002). The latter includes the everyday psychologythat people have used, and continue to use, to make sense of their lives.

The last strand, the creation of a psychologicalsensibility, is explained and elaborated in thenext chapter. In this chapter, we unravel thefirst three strands by introducing you to basicideas from the work of philosophers ReneDescartes and John Locke, the development ofan experimental approach to understanding therelation between mind or brain and behavior in19th-century physiology, and Charles Darwin’swork on evolution and how it included humanswithin the domain of natural laws.

We take as our point of departure the earlymodern period, that is, from the 17th centuryon, as the appropriate time to begin our analysesof the events that made possible the relativelyrecent emergence of Psychology. In terms ofplace, we begin with events and people inEngland and western Europe. This is not toclaim that people in no other place or timewrote or thought psychologically about life;as we argue in later chapters, a backgroundof thought relevant to psychology in other

cultures came to the fore nearer our owntime. Rather, our aim is both pragmatic andhistoriographical. We are pragmatic becausespace is limited. Our historiographic rationaleis that we think a sound argument can be madethat the psychological sensibility characterizingour own time is of relatively recent origin, datingfrom changes in human experience and humansociety that were first directly noticeable in theearly modern period in England and Europe, andthen exacerbated by rapid social changes broughton by such macroscale events as the IndustrialRevolution and the spread of Protestant religiousbeliefs and practices.

Lastly, we think it is useful to consider eventsand contributions to the development of a psy-chological sensibility from both elites—that is,those of the upper classes who had access toresources, education, and the power to dissemi-nate their views—and everyday people. It is moreusual in a textbook to consider only the contri-butions of elites, typically philosophers or ‘‘men

4 CHAPTER 1 ORIGINS OF A SCIENCE OF MIND

of science’’; this chapter focuses on such contri-butions. The next chapter examines changes ineveryday life that many people encountered andincorporated to make meaning in their lives. If,as we suggested in the introduction of this book,Psychology emerged from ways of living, thenit follows that we should ask questions aboutwhen and how changes in everyday life occurred.While a full set of answers is not possible, sinceno complete record exists of how people lived andacted in earlier periods, we can provide at leasta partial description and analysis based on extantrecords and writing. While we have an extensiverecord of philosophical thought from the earlymodern era, which we draw on in this chapter, inthe next chapter we use what is available in thehistorical record to suggest how nonelites con-tributed to the emergence of practices that arealso part of the lineage that led to the emergenceof Psychology.

PHILOSOPHY: DESCARTES ANDLOCKE AS EXEMPLARS

The gradual emergence of thought about man innaturalistic terms occurred, paradoxically, in thecontext of faith, both Protestant and Catholic.Religion and conflicts about correct beliefs andthe proper conduct of daily life provided abackground for this thinking that held bothpromise and threat. Nations went to war, andhumans lost their livelihoods and often theirlives over these matters. Both Descartes andLocke were profoundly affected by this context ofreligious and political strife, and each attemptedto find ways to restore certainty of knowledge andorder in civil society. Importantly, their thoughtalso contributed to the eventual emergence ofPsychology.

If any one word could characterize the 17thcentury in England and Europe, it might wellbe ‘‘uncertainty.’’ The modern nation-state wasemerging, and war among nations was endemic.Civil strife that led to civil war in Englandbrought horrors nearly unimaginable that left

their marks for generations afterward. TheEnglish civil war was directly related to religiousbeliefs and practices, but religion was also animportant factor in changes elsewhere in Europeas the new orientation to personal faith andreligious practice introduced by Martin Luther(1483–1546) in the 16th century spread unevenlyacross the continent. Families, as well as nations,were often divided over questions of faith,whether to follow the traditions of the RomanCatholic Church or one of the new Protestantfaiths. When these faiths were linked to thepower of the state, many people were persecutedand killed for their beliefs and many fled toother countries. So, on both the national and thepersonal levels, it was a time of uncertainty as thefabric of life was rewoven in a period of intensesocial upheaval.

Although no one event sparked the changesin the structure of life and thought in Europe,the assassination of the king of France, Henri IV(Henry of Navarre), in 1610, was crucial in thatit made salient the need to find a new foundationfor civil society. Henri IV was tolerant ofreligious diversity and provided guarantees forthe civil rights of religious minorities, whowere primarily Protestant. Powerful Catholicsfeared that he secretly planned to weakenCatholicism, and they arranged to have himkilled. His assassination was a rejection ofreligious tolerance. Given the tensions betweenfaiths across Europe and the high political stakesinvolved, Henri’s assassination was taken asevidence that only force could resolve religiousdisputes. In 1618, the Thirty Years’ War beganthat involved most states of Europe and led towidespread devastation and a marked reductionin population. Among the elites, those with timeto reflect and write, a pressing concern becamehow we can find certainty for knowledge andliving that religion seemingly failed to provide.

Not only was there religious conflict, butthe challenges to orthodox understanding ofthe natural world by Nicholas Copernicus(1473–1543), Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), andJohannes Kepler (1571–1630) seemed to shake

PHILOSOPHY: DESCARTES AND LOCKE AS EXEMPLARS 5

the foundations of knowledge laid down byAristotle and his 13th-century Christian inter-preter, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). Thecalls by Sir Francis Bacon around the begin-ning of the 17th century for a science basedon observation of the world and the collectionof those observations into a coherent frame-work through inductive reasoning was also achallenge to orthodox thinkers. This contextfor the new philosophies placed the study ofman within a naturalistic framework. Whileseveral philosophers were prominent, we havechosen two, Descartes and Locke, as our ex-emplars of the new natural philosophy. Whatlinked these two preeminent thinkers was theirquest to find a certainty that could underpincivil life.

Rene Descartes (1596–1650)

Descartes was 22 years old when the ThirtyYears’ War began. Descartes’s mother died whenhe was young. He lived with his grandparents andhis two older siblings because his father, a lawyer,worked some distance away. A precocious child,at age 8 he was placed in the College at LaFleche, a Jesuit school. When he graduated atage 16, he had probably received as excellent aneducation as was available at the time. He wasschooled in the Aristotelian beliefs, for example,about the organic soul and the intellective soul.Only humans were blessed with the latter and itschief characteristic, reason.

Two cautions are needed as we proceed.First, Descartes was not a psychologist, nor washe a protopsychologist. He was a philosopherconcerned with placing knowledge on a surefoundation and from that foundation construct-ing knowledge about how the Creation worked,including the human brain and body. Descartes’sworry about the certainty of knowledge was withhim even as he finished school. What com-pounded this worry was the state of his worldas a young man. As the long period of conflictthat became the Thirty Years’ War continued,

Descartes, along with other thoughtful people,perceived that the underpinnings of society wereinadequate to support an enduring civil society.This, combined with the disputatiousness and in-conclusive arguments of the leading philosophersand theologians of the day, led Descartes to seeka way to have certain knowledge.

His search led him to the method of doubt.Descartes decided to accept only those thingsthat were so clear and distinct to him that therecould be no possibility of doubt. As he later wrote,‘‘Immediately I noticed that while I was tryingthus to think everything false, it was necessarythat I, who was thinking this, was something’’(cited in R. Smith, 1997, p. 129). This led himto the famous phrase, cogito ergo sum, ‘‘I amthinking, therefore I exist.’’ For Descartes, therational soul, the I, was central. From that point,then, an argument was made for the existence ofGod and God’s perfection as expressed in naturallaw. These indubitable facts, Descartes argued,were the foundation stones that made certaintyof knowledge possible.

Second, Descartes was very much a personof his culture, time, and place. That is, hewas a Catholic who sought avidly to keep hiswork within the bounds of orthodox belief. Hisadherence to Catholicism can be seen in hisinsistence that the mind is immaterial and theprovince of God. This meant that the soul(mind) is entirely distinct from the body. Thesoul is the seat of reason and directly amenableto divine influence; it cannot be reduced tomateriality or explained in terms of mechanics.However, the implication of this is that allthat is not soul can be examined in terms ofmechanics and is amenable to explanations basedin natural law. Descartes proposed that manyfunctions previously considered to be mental andimmaterial should be considered properties ofthe body. These included memory, perception,imagination, dreaming, and feelings; all of thesewere properties of the body and so couldpotentially be understood in naturalistic terms.This is the basis of what came to be referred toas the mind–body split or mind–body dualism.


To explain these functions, Descartesrelied on an understanding of mechanicsderived partly from then-recent discoveriesin medicine—William Harvey’s (1578–1657)articulation of the heart as a pump for theblood—and from the artists and craftsmen ofhis time who had refined automata. Automataare self-moving mechanical objects, such asrobots. Evidence shows that automata date fromearly in Chinese history, but they had beenrefined and made newly popular in the 16thand 17th centuries. The word ‘‘automaton’’ wascoined in the early 17th century. Some automatathat Descartes would have been familiar withincluded dolls that seemed to play musicalinstruments or enact a play. He also knew theroyal gardens at St. Germain-en-Laye, outsideParis. There, using hydraulic pressure activatedwhen visitors stepped on hidden plates, statueswould move seemingly on their own. Descartesused the principle of this mechanical movementas a generative metaphor for understandingthe functions of the body, including memoryand other properties of the nervous system.He supposed that the cavities in the brain, theventricles, were filled with animal spirits, whichcould flow through (hollow) nerves to effect bod-ily movement, just as the water filled the pipesat St. Germain and caused the statues to move.

FIGURE 1.1 Rene Descartes

Still, the question remained as to how the bodyand soul interact. Descartes proposed the pinealgland in the center of the brain. The pinealgland, Descartes supposed, could both receiveimpressions of the body via the animal spiritsand transmit motions to the body. This had theeffect of reserving the soul as the seat of reasonand the special province of divine influence.This approach fit with both the teachings ofthe Catholic Church and the new mechanicalphilosophy.

What is important about Descartes for thelater development of both a psychological sen-sibility and the discipline of Psychology is thathis work was critical for the transition to under-standing humans in terms of natural law from theolder conceptions that placed man at the apex ofcreation, a ‘‘little lower than the angels,’’ as thebiblical psalmist had it. That is, his work wascritical for a new articulation of man that placedhis attributes firmly in the natural world, withwhat was increasingly referred to as human na-ture. His writings became a point of departure formany later writers who responded to his work,not always sympathetically. What emerged fromhis contributions was a legacy that led toward anunderstanding of man as fully part of nature.

John Locke (1632–1704)

How do we gain knowledge? For Locke, thiswas a fundamental question to which the answerwas human experience. In proposing that hu-man knowledge comes through sense experience,Locke laid the foundation for both empiricalphilosophy and, much later, the human sciences,including Psychology. As with Descartes, how-ever, Locke was not a protopsychologist, nor didhe seek to establish a discipline of Psychology.Locke was concerned with finding a basis forcivil society that would diminish the likelihoodof incessant conflict and loss of human life. ForLocke, the way to do so was through helpingpeople form clear and distinct ideas, free of theexcesses of political and religious enthusiasms.

PHILOSOPHY: DESCARTES AND LOCKE AS EXEMPLARS 7

Locke’s desire to find a new, less conflictual basisfor human society is understandable given thepolitical and religious context of his life.

When Locke was only 10 years old, thefirst English Civil War began, with the usualhorrors that such wars bring. For the next 19years, until the restoration of the monarchy in1661, the British Isles were in near-constantconflict—political, military, or both. Religiousdifferences were the contextual surround forthe war, but political machinations between theking and Parliament were central. When KingCharles I was captured and then beheaded, itmarked perhaps the passing of an age in whichit was thought that the monarch was God’srepresentative on earth. The viciousness on bothsides of the war must have brought great distressto Locke. When Charles II was crowned andthe monarchy restored in 1661, Locke was stilla young man, making his primary living as atutor and adviser to the Earl of Shaftesbury.Locke was engaged with the politics of his ageand was drawn into the political intrigues ofthe time. For a period in the 1680s, Locke hadto leave England and live in Holland. He wasthere when the Glorious Revolution occurred,which deposed King James, brought Williamand Mary to the throne of England, and led tothe establishment of a constitutional monarchywith enhanced power for the English Parliament.

Given these events, we can understand whyLocke became so committed to finding a newbasis for society. His ideas developed from the1660s to the publication of his major work,An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in1690. The Essay is remarkable in many ways,but especially noteworthy is Locke’s use of mindrather than soul. In doing so, he deliberatelychanged the terms of the debate about humanknowledge. Descartes had reserved reason as anattribute of the soul, thus always leaving a spacefor the operation of divine influence, especiallyin regard to innate ideas given by God. Lockerejected the notion of innate ideas, such as God,although he did argue that humans have an innatepower to reflect on their experiences. Instead of

FIGURE 1.2 John Locke

innate ideas, Locke argued that all ideas comethrough experience. That is, at birth our mindsare a tabula rasa (blank slate) on which sensoryexperiences are inscribed. The contents of themind are those ideas that come from experiences.

Knowledge, then, is a matter of the mindgathering experiences, or ideas, from the materialworld. Locke proposed a way in which we couldunderstand how ideas could move from simpleto complex through association. In doing so,Locke seemed to offer a model of mental lifethat corresponded to Sir Isaac Newton’s modelof the mechanical basis of the physical world.Newton’s Principia Mathematica was published in1687, 3 years before Locke’s Essay, and in someways Locke’s work echoes that of Newton. Just asNewton had proposed a model of how complexsubstances are due to the combination of lesscomplex materials, so Locke’s model suggestedthat complex ideas form from combinations ofsimple ideas, a position that became known asassociationism. As he wrote, ‘‘As simple ideasare observed to exist in several combinationsunited together, so the mind has a power toconsider several of them united together as oneidea; and that not only as they are united inexternal objects, but as itself has joined themtogether. Ideas thus made up of several simpleones put together, I call complex; such as are


beauty, gratitude, a man, an army, the universe’’(Locke, 1690, p. 159). Why is this so importantfor us today? First, Locke, like Newton, madehuman experience central to knowledge. Thisled to subsequent emphases by philosophers onwhat was later called epistemology, the study ofthe way we know. And it placed a premium onempiricism, that is, knowledge gained throughthe senses, which came to characterize Britishphilosophy and led to later developments thatwere crucial for a discipline of Psychology.

Beyond this, Locke’s work made individualexperience gained in the material world highlyimportant. In the political and religious contextof his time, this generated great debate, withsome even labeling Locke an atheist. But thepractical result was the privileging of the em-pirical world, thus strengthening arguments fornatural religion and for a society predicated uponhuman experience. It is this emphasis on humanexperience that is arguably Locke’s greatest con-tribution and one that had the greatest importfor later developments in political and scientific,including psychological, realms.

The Legacy of Descartes and Lockefor Psychology

The time from the publication of Locke’s AnEssay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690 tothe early years of the 19th century is often calledthe ‘‘long’’ 18th century. Some scholars and textshave referred to it as the Age of Enlightenmentor Age of Reason. Many people contributed tothe debates about intellectual and practical issuesthat were conducted among educated people andwere central to changes in governance and theway humans in Europe related to one another.The legacy of Descartes and Locke found inthese contributions and debates is that now suchissues about man are framed as part of natureand that the right way to understand and discussthem is in terms of human nature. This is notto say that religious beliefs and creeds played nopart in these discussions. Especially in the case of

Descartes, the relationship of this new thinkingto religious belief was much pondered. Theoutcome, however, was that man was increasinglyseen as part of nature and was to be understoodin terms of the natural world.

PHYSIOLOGY AND MEDICINE:THE SEARCH FOR MATERIALEXPLANATIONS OFHUMAN NATURE

While philosophers and educated people en-gaged with notions of man as part of nature,efforts were also made to systematically explorewhat this would mean in terms of the functionsof the human body, including the brain. Theterm ‘‘experiment’’ or ‘‘experimental’’ came intovogue to express this systematic exploration. Bythe end of the 19th century, the experiment be-came the method of discerning truth and the lab-oratory became the place where truth, throughexperimentation, was discovered. In terms of thehuman nervous system, this was a long and cir-cuitous route with many points of contention anddebate. The legacy of Descartes to this debate wasthat the higher mental powers—rationality, pur-posiveness, and so on—remained the provinceof divine influence. So while the functions ofthe body, including the ‘‘lower’’ centers of thebrain and the nervous system, could be under-stood in naturalistic or mechanical terms, thehigher powers, including the cerebrum, were offlimits. The effort to extend naturalistic expla-nation to the higher mental powers—indeed, toequate the brain and the mind—became a majordebate in the 19th century. Perhaps not surpris-ingly, medicine was an arena where this workfirst occurred.

Medicine and Naturalistic Explanation

Harvey had described the circulation of the bloodin 1628, demonstrating empirically that circula-tion of the blood is due to the action of the

PHYSIOLOGY AND MEDICINE: THE SEARCH FOR MATERIAL EXPLANATIONS OF HUMAN NATURE 9

heart, thus potentially understandable in natu-ralistic terms. After Locke, in the 18th century,physicians began to describe the actions of themind in physiological terms, thus opening thedoor to experimentation as a way to potentiallydemonstrate this. The British physician DavidHartley in his Observations on Man, His Frame,His Duty, and His Expectations (1749), employedNewton’s suggestion that vibrations in nervoustissue could be responsible for some visual effectsto develop a physiology of the nervous systempredicated on association of ideas that couldaccount for relations between mind and body.However, it should be noted that Hartley’s aimwas religious, to inspire his fellow man to pursueGod’s design for humans.

The experimentation and writing of the18th-century British physicians Robert Whytt(1714–1766) and William Cullen (1794–1878)both facilitated the public’s understanding thatmind and brain were intimately connected andoffered a way to elide the old mind–body dualismthat bedeviled research on mental processes.Whytt suggested in his 1751 book On the Vitaland Other Involuntary Motions of Animals thatan organism’s response to stimuli involved theaction of volition, a function of the highermental powers, but this volitional responsewas not necessarily conscious. Whytt calledthis the principle of sentience, whose mainfunction was the preservation of life and theunity of the organism. Before Whytt, onlytwo kinds of action were thought possible:voluntary (rational) and physical (mechanical).Whytt’s work proposed a third action, the actionof stimuli on the organism. Thus, stimulatedmotion was best viewed as occurring on acontinuum between voluntary and automatic,rather than as in absolute categories of free willor mechanism, and depended on the conditionsnecessary for preservation. The result of thisstimulated motion was always to preserve theorganism; thus, self-regulation was the effect.This implied the importance of function andoffered an alternative to Cartesian dualism inunderstanding the relation of mind and body.

Why was this important for the later develop-ment of psychology? Whytt argued that the effectof a stimulus did not depend on whether it was aphysical or mental event. The importance of thestimulus lay in its function. A mental event couldfunction as a stimulus, just as a physical eventcould. This implied that the mind was intimatelyinvolved in bodily actions, not categorically sep-arate as Cartesian dualism suggested. If mentaland physical events were functionally equivalent,then perhaps psychological topics could be inves-tigated without being bound by the old categoriesof Cartesian dualism. This, in fact, is what beganto occur.

Cullen, who succeeded Whytt at the Univer-sity of Edinburgh, advanced Whytt’s work withan even greater emphasis on function and therole of stimulated motion as a self-regulatoryprinciple. Cullen replaced Whytt’s principle ofsentience with the concept of energy as the vitalprinciple. Energy was quantifiable, and the mea-sure of excitation in the organism was possible.Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887), who isdiscussed in Chapter 3, drew upon this work forhis later development of psychophysiology. Theimpact of the work of Whytt and Cullen hasnot often been noted in histories of psychologybecause of their affiliation with medicine, buttheir work was crucial in that they provided alanguage and a group of principles that placedthe role of the nervous system front and centerin understanding how the mind and body arerelated.

Relatedly, the work of Whytt and Cullen waspart of a broader movement in the late 18thand early 19th centuries toward emphasizingthe importance of understanding the relationbetween the organism and the environment interms of self-regulation. The latter principlecame to the fore by the end of the 18th centuryin several fields, the political economy of AdamSmith (1723–1790) being a prime example withits invisible hand as the regulator of the market(see Chapter 2). Here, again, we see the relationbetween technology and science in terms ofguiding or generative metaphors. In the 17th


century, we saw how Descartes drew upon thepopular technology behind automata to explainhow the body works. In the 18th century, theidea of a governor or self-regulator as foundin the new steam engines of James Watt wasemployed to explain how the organism engagedin self-regulation via feedback loops betweenmental–physical events and their stimulation ofthe organism.

In Europe in this period, several physiciansinvestigated the relationships among mind, brain,and body. Perhaps most notable was Albrechtvon Haller, whose experiment-based theoriessuggested a way for the mind to act on thebody through the nervous system. By the endof the 18th century, the Austrian physicianand anatomist Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828)had begun to argue that the brain was theorgan of mind and that its faculties wereempirically demonstrable. Gall was a major figurein what became a nearly century-long debateover the extent to which mental abilities, orthe functions of the brain and nervous system,could be understood in naturalistic terms. Animplication of this was the question of whethera soul or some higher power was needed toaccount for the most complex mental abilities,including the will. Some investigators sought toavoid the theological debate by contending thatmechanical processes only extended as far as thesubcortex. The cortex was reserved for the divineinfluence of some higher natural law. Gall’s workcalled that contention into question.

Gall was born in Germany and settled in Vi-enna, where he received his medical degree. InVienna he made his first scientific contributionswhen he demonstrated that two types of sub-stance were found in the brain: gray matter (thecell bodies of nerve cells) and white matter (sub-cortical brain areas containing nerve cell axons).He also showed that the two hemispheres of thebrain were connected by commissures. However,what Gall became known for was his organol-ogy, later renamed phrenology by some of hisfollowers. Organology was Gall’s method of dis-cerning mental abilities by reading the bumps on

FIGURE 1.3 Franz Joseph Gall

someone’s skull. Gall said that these ideas be-gan when he was a schoolboy and noticed thatsome of his classmates who performed betteron memory tasks than he did had bulging eyes.In his adult career, Gall further developed thisschoolboy insight.

The brain, Gall argued, was composed ofdistinct parts, each of which had a function.Furthermore, the size of each of these parts, asobservable through the examination of the skull,reflected the strength of the assigned function.Gall was not the first person to suggest thatmental abilities or functions might occur atspecific locales (the idea can be found in ancientmedical texts), but his contention that the brainwas the organ of mind and its workings couldbe understood entirely by empirical means didcreate controversy. First, it circumvented theduality of mind and body proposed by Descartes.Gall argued that all mental functions, includingthe higher powers reserved by Descartes as theprovince of divine influence, could be understoodas the workings of the brain. In that sense,Gall was engaging in a philosophical argument,one that had important implications for futureresearch. How was knowledge organized? Wasit just a collection of sense impressions? Gallargued that there had to be a physical, innatefoundation for organizing the knowledge that


came to us through our senses. Unlike thefollowers of Descartes, Gall’s point was thatthere was no division of mind and body andno need to reserve higher mental functions forthe providence of God.

Second, the search for a materialist basis formind proved extremely important, although con-troversial. Perhaps the controversy helped makeit important. Gall insisted that an empirical ap-proach to the question of brain function wascrucial. While Descartes had split the mind andbody and set the terms for discussion of men-tal faculties, his approach was philosophical. Aswe have seen in the cases of Whytt and Cullen,investigators were increasingly seeking to ac-count for mental abilities in terms of bodilyprocesses. These investigators were relying onempirical rather than purely rational or philo-sophical methods. Their efforts were stronglyresisted by some who felt they needed to allowfor higher processes in terms of mental facultiesthat were uniquely human, for example, the willand the intellect.

But the movement begun by Descartes andLocke to study man as part of nature, to findnatural laws to account for human mind andbehavior, had already reset the agenda or theterms for what counted as fact. By the endof the 19th century, the investigation of thenervous system—of mind and brain—was firmlyon the empirical and experimental basis on whichGall had insisted. Even those who sought toretain Descartes’s division of mind and bodywere constrained to provide evidence gatheredempirically and experimentally.

Jean-Pierre-Marie Flourens (1794–1867), aphysiologist and member of the French medicaland scientific establishment, was firmly com-mitted to the Cartesian position that reservedthe mind’s higher faculties as the province ofdivine influence. He reacted strongly to whathe perceived as Gall’s materialist arguments.Flourens sought to discredit Gall and his follow-ers by showing experimentally that no divisionof cerebral function existed. Using birds and afew mammalian species, Flourens systematically

FIGURE 1.4 Jean-Pierre-Marie Flourens

removed or ablated parts of the brain and thenobserved what happened when the animal re-covered. He found no specific losses of functionbut rather general losses across several functions.He argued that this preserved the unity of thesoul. What some critics, including Gall, pointedout was that Flourens had not been discrimi-nate enough in carefully removing portions ofthe brain but had cut across several possibly dis-tinct areas. Nevertheless, Flourens carried theday, at least among the medical and scientific es-tablishment, because of the prestige of his socialposition, the compatibility of his findings withthe established medical and philosophical views,and the usefulness of his results in discreditingthe basis of what was now being called phrenol-ogy, which had become part of a social movementperceived as radical and antiestablishment (moreon this in Chapter 2). Finally, and perhaps mostimportantly, Flourens’s use of the experimentalmethod fit with what was becoming the scien-tific norm for establishing fact—man could beunderstood in naturalistic terms as long as theinvestigation was experimental and laboratorybased.

Flourens’s championship of the unity of souland mind and discounting of the localization ofbrain functions was the received view in Frenchmedicine and physiology for many years. Therewere dissenters such as the respected physiol-ogist Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud (1796–1881), whocollected more than 100 clinical cases that hesuggested supported localization of function.


Bouillaud argued especially that language mustbe localized somewhere in the frontal lobes of thebrain. It was the work of Paul Broca (1824–1880),however, that firmly established localization ofarticulate language through the case of MonsieurLeborgne, who had lost his ability to speak. Be-fore the case of LeBorgne, Broca had alreadyestablished himself as a respected scientist. Likemany other scientists of his day, he was influencedby scientists elsewhere in Europe, principallyGermany, who were arguing that it was neces-sary to break phenomena down to their mostessential elements to study them. Broca thoughtthat perhaps the best way to understand the com-plexity of the nervous system was to look at thebuilding blocks of mental activity; localizationof function potentially offered a way to do this.Recent mapping of the surface of the cerebrumshowed its diversity of form, and Broca arguedthat a law of physiology was that structure orform and function were related. Thus, differentparts of the cortex may have different functions.When LeBorgne died, six days after coming un-der Broca’s care, an autopsy revealed damage tothe rear portion of the left frontal lobe. Othercases soon were found where damage to the samearea, second or third frontal convolution of thefrontal lobe, was found with attendant loss ofspeech. While these findings did not settle thedebate conclusively, they did sway medical andscientific opinion toward an acceptance of somesort of localization of function.

After Broca’s work became widely known,other investigators began providing support forlocalization of cerebral function, thus extend-ing naturalistic explanations to the highest levelsof the nervous system. In Germany, two physi-cians, anatomist Gustav Fritsch (1837–1927) andpsychiatrist Eduard Hitzig (1839–1907), used re-cent improvements in the control of electricityto stimulate what is now called the motor cor-tex of a dog. They found five sites that, whenelectrically stimulated, resulted in distinctivemovements—on the opposite side of the body.Flourens had argued that the cortex had nothingto do with movement or motor control. Fritsch

and Hitzig understood their work as directlycontributing support to cerebral localization.Perhaps paradoxically to 21st-century students,Fritsch and Hitzig were, like Flourens, commit-ted to a Cartesian model of divine influence onhigher centers of the brain and so restricted theirconclusions on localization of motor control tomotor centers and reserved other parts of thecortex for the higher mental powers.

David Ferrier (1843–1928) had no such com-punctions. Ferrier, later knighted, built on thework of Gall and John Hughlings Jackson, a fel-low neurologist, to demonstrate experimentallythe wide extent of cerebral localization. WhereFritsch and Hitzig had found five areas of motorcontrol, Ferrier found 15. His experimental ani-mals included fish, birds, amphibians, monkeys,and chimpanzees. Ferrier quite self-consciouslyreferred to his work as ‘‘scientific phrenology.’’The title of his book summarizing his work onlocalization was The Functions of the Brain, andhe dedicated it to Gall. Gall had predicted 50years earlier, in his book On the Functions of theBrain, that someone would scientifically validatehis insights in the next 50 years! Together withwork in sensory–motor physiology, covered inthe next section, this work on localization offunction helped make a science of Psychologypossible.

Research in the Physiologyof the Nervous System

The discovery of the distinction between sen-sory and motor nerves, made independently byCharles Bell (1774–1842) in 1811 and FrancoisMagendie (1783–1855) in 1822, helped createthe conditions for the exploration of the psycho-logical implications of nervous system functions.Both Bell and Magendie pointed out that eachtype of sensory nerve was specific to a sensorymodality—vision, hearing, touch, and so on.This became in the hands of Johannes Mullerthe doctrine of specific nerve energies, dis-cussed later. Two research streams were linked


to this conceptualization. One was the conceptof cerebral localization, already discussed. Theother was work on the nervous system that ledfrom the concept of specific nerve energies toa mechanistic model of human nervous systemfunction. Both streams were part of the extensionof a naturalistic model to encompass all of humannature. The concept of reflexes or reflex actionwas part of both streams. The discovery of spe-cific sensory and motor nerves helped refine thepreviously ill-defined concept of reflex actions.

The concept of reflexes was not new to the19th century. Whytt had employed the conceptin his work on stimulated movement. The workof Whytt and his successor, Cullen, as noted,was critical in making it possible to link psycho-logical questions to physiological methods. TheMoravian-born physiologist Georg Prochaskaemployed the concept of reflexive action as partof his vis nervosa and sensorium commune. The for-mer referred to the latent energy of the nervesthat found expression in reflexes. Sensorium com-mune encompassed the medulla, basal ganglia,and spinal cord. Its role was to link sensoryinput to motor responses, without reliance onconsciousness. These earlier uses of the reflexconcept were typically not precise or preciselylinked to physiological processes. But with thearticulation of the sensory–motor distinction, theEnglish physiologist Marshall Hall offered a spe-cific connection between local nerve action andbehavior. Hall’s use of the reflex concept meantthat behavior could be described in terms ofnerve action, that consciousness does not haveto be involved in behavior. This challenged thementalistic conceptions of human behavior. Ifthe brain and soul are equivalent, and the souldirects human behavior, then neurophysiologyor experimentation is unnecessary. If, however,at least some aspects of human behavior are basedin stimuli and responses at the physiological level,then experimental approaches to understandinghuman behavior are needed. Hall’s proposal ofreflex action and behavior was, at first, acceptedonly as accurate for the lower nerve centers. Bythe end of the 19th century, reflex action was

extended to the highest centers of the brain, asthe work of Fritsch and Hitzig and that of Ferriershowed.

The Mechanization of the Brain

Johannes Muller (1801–1858) is often referredto as the person who made physiology a trulyscientific field. His work occurred when Germanuniversities were expecting from professors origi-nal research by scholars devoted to specific topics.His handbook of physiology, published in severalvolumes from 1833 to 1840, fostered a critical,experimental approach to investigations of bod-ily processes that became the norm for otherscientists. Muller extended the Bell-Magendiesensory–motor distinction with his doctrine ofspecific nerve energies. Each sensory modal-ity, Muller argued, is specialized to respond inways that are unique to it. So, visual nerves whenstimulated give visual sensations. For example,pressing on the eye gives a visual sensation, justas looking at an object does. The doctrine alsosuggests that what determines our sensory ex-periences are not the objects-out-there in thephysical world; rather, it is the structure andfunction of our nervous systems that determineswhat we sense. In this work and in his handbook,Muller promoted the importance of laboratory-based experimental work. In doing so, Muller

FIGURE 1.5 Johannes Muller


opened a line of research in physiology that leddirectly to Hermann von Helmholtz and Wil-helm Wundt and helped make a physiologicallybased Psychology possible.

Helmholtz (1821–1894), perhaps the greatestscientist of the 19th century, made contribu-tions that changed physics, physiology, optics,audition, and psychology. While a student withMuller, Helmholtz joined with several fellowstudents—Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896),Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), and Ernst Brucke(1819–1892)—in committing himself to scien-tific explanations that relied only on physical andchemical explanations for all phenomena. Theirwork over the next half century made Germanythe center of first-rank scientific work in sev-eral fields. The application of their mechanisticapproach by others was also vital for helpingtransform Germany into an industrial and mili-tary powerhouse by the end of the century. It wasalso the background for the later development ofGestalt and holistic theories, especially after thedefeat of Germany in World War I.

The contributions of Helmholtz to psycho-logical topics included the measurement of thenerve impulse, previously thought to occur in-stantaneously. This indicated the possibility ofmeasuring aspects of mental activity, using whatwas soon called the reaction time method.Helmholtz also showed that the law of con-servation of energy applied to living organisms,including humans, as well as to the inorganicworld. Using frogs as his experimental animal,Helmholtz showed that the energy and heat ex-pended by a frog were equal to the caloriesavailable in the food the frog consumed. Hewent on to further work with these principlesand eventually formulated the law of the conser-vation of energy: Energy cannot be created ordestroyed; it can only be transformed from onekind to another. What this suggested was thatmachines, including the human machine, are de-vices for transforming energy from one kind toanother kind. His work on optics led to a crucialdistinction between sensation and perception.Sensations are, Helmholtz argued, merely the

FIGURE 1.6 Hermann von HelmoltzCourtesy of the authors.

raw data that comes through our senses. Thesedata are made meaningful by perception. In thisaccount, perception is a psychological processthat depends on the brain, prior learning, andour experiences.

In other psychologically related work,Helmholtz argued for a trichromatic theoryof color vision. Like the earlier work of theEnglish scientist Thomas Young, Helmholtzsuggested that color vision resulted from thestimulation of specific receptors in the retina.It is a trichromatic theory because there arethree primary receptor types—one each for red,green, and blue-violet. Other colors result fromstimulation of more than one receptor; whiteresults if all three receptor types are stimulated.One of American psychology’s first-generationwoman psychologists, Christine Ladd-Franklin(1847–1930), traveled to Germany to work


in Helmholtz’s laboratory and subsequentlypublished her own theory of color visionthat was long regarded as the best availableaccount of both the physical processes and thepsychological experience of color perception.In 1892, she presented aspects of her theoryto the International Congress of Psychologyin London. Helmholtz was in attendance andreceived her paper extremely favorably. In1929, her book Colour and Colour Theories,which reprinted over 37 years of her work on

color vision, was published. One reviewer forthe Saturday Review of Literature characterizedLadd-Franklin’s work as an account of the‘‘evolution of the color sense from its beginningsto man’’ and proclaimed that ‘‘in the fieldof color and color theories she has no peer’’(Helson, July 20, 1929). While not all aspects ofHelmholtz’s and Ladd-Franklin’s theories haveheld up, both theories were, in their own time,considered quite successful in accounting forcolor vision.

Sidebar 1.1 Focus on Christine Ladd-FranklinChristine Ladd was born in Windsor, Connecticut, on December 1, 1847, to awell-established New England family. When Vassar College, America’s first college

FIGURE 1.7 Christine Ladd-FranklinCourtesy of Rare Book and Manuscript Library, ColumbiaUniversity, New York.

for women, was established in 1865, Ladd was ecstatic.After a vigorous campaign to convince her father andaunt (her mother had died when she was 12 years old)to let her attend the college, she was admitted to thesecond entering class in 1866. While at Vassar, her mainacademic interests were science and mathematics. She wasparticularly influenced by the prominent astronomer MariaMitchell who was on faculty there. She graduated in 1869and spent the next decade teaching science and math insecondary schools throughout the Northeast. She quicklycame to abhor teaching, however, and she continued tostudy mathematics, occasionally publishing articles in theEducational Times.

In 1878, on the strength of her articles and her Vassardegree, she applied to Johns Hopkins University to pursuegraduate studies in mathematics even though the univer-sity did not admit women. Her credentials were sufficientto convince the board of trustees to let her enroll as a spe-cial student. While at Johns Hopkins, she published severalarticles in the American Journal of Mathematics. Underthe influence of the work of Charles Peirce, who acted asher dissertation adviser, she also became increasingly in-terested in symbolic logic. She turned her attention specif-ically to a long-standing problem in symbolic logic calledthe transformation of the syllogism. Her solution of thisproblem led prominent philosopher Josiah Royce of Har-vard University to remark, ’’It is rather remarkable that the

(Continued)


crowning activity in a field worked over since the days of Aristotle should be theachievement of an American woman’’ (as cited in Burr, June 24, 1922).

While at Johns Hopkins, Ladd also met and married Fabian Franklin, one of her graduateinstructors in mathematics. In 1886 she conducted an investigation of a mathematicalquestion concerning binocular vision, thus initiating her unfolding research on color vision.In 1891–1892, during her husband’s sabbatical year in Europe, Ladd-Franklin studied inthe Gottingen laboratory of George Elias Muller and then with Helmholtz in Berlin. In1892, she delivered a paper outlining her own theory of color vision at the InternationalCongress of Psychology in London. She spent much of the rest of her career elaboratingupon and defending this theory.

Although Ladd-Franklin had completed all requirements for her doctorate inmathematics and logic in 1882, and had earned fellowships throughout her graduatetraining, she was not awarded the degree until 1926 on the 50th anniversary of JohnsHopkins. Although almost 80 years old, she attended the ceremony to receive her degree.Despite her impressive accomplishments, she never held a formal, full-time academicposition. Determined to change the academic situation for other women, she wasinstrumental in establishing research fellowships for women and campaigned tirelesslyfor women’s equal participation in academic life. For more on her efforts to fight sexdiscrimination in Psychology, see Chapter 11.

Like Muller before him, Helmholtz’s theoryplaced importance on what happens withinthe human brain and nervous system ratherthan on the ‘‘real’’ physical properties of lightwaves. Again, this is part of the move towardplacing all of nature, including humans in alltheir complex functions, within a framework ofnature governed by definable natural laws. InChapter 3, we show how the work in thephysiological tradition of Muller and Helmholtzwas directly linked to the emergence of Wundt’sphysiological psychology. Later in the book, wereturn to some issues raised by cortical localiza-tion when we explore the rise of neuroscience.Now, we turn to the work of Darwin to examinehow it finally established human nature as justthat, part of nature and thus subject to lawfulrelationships like the rest of nature.

DARWIN, NATURAL SELECTION,AND THE LAWS OF NATURE

Charles Darwin (1809–1882), naturalist, was acareful observer and thinker who was both a

person of his time and a person whose ideastransformed the course of history. His workaffected many intellectual and scientific fields,including Psychology. At least four key contri-butions came to the development of Psychologyfrom the work of Darwin. Perhaps most impor-tantly, Darwin provided convincing evidence,both theoretical and practical, that humans arepart of nature, subject to the same natural laws asall other creatures. Second, Darwin’s approachcalled attention to the importance of consid-ering the function of attributes and behaviors,thus making even more salient the role of func-tional explanations begun by earlier scientists likeWhytt and Gall. Third, the scope and approachof Darwin’s work created a space for the study ofman in comparison with other animals (whatbecame the field of comparative psychology)and the necessity of understanding the devel-opment of humans (what became the field ofdevelopmental psychology). Fourth, the empha-sis on the role of natural selection of humanvariability facilitated thinking about individualdifferences, which became especially importantin the development of American Psychology and

DARWIN, NATURAL SELECTION, AND THE LAWS OF NATURE 17

helped create applications of differential psy-chology to vastly diverse populations: students,criminals, the mentally disordered, and so on.

Darwin was born in the small village ofShrewsbury west of Birmingham, England, theson of a well-to-do physician, Robert Darwin,and his wife, Susannah. Darwin was of animpressive lineage. His father, Robert, wasthe son of Erasmus Darwin, a well-knownphysician of the late 18th century and authorof a poetic treatise on evolution, Zoonomia(1794–1796). His mother was the daughter ofJosiah Wedgwood, the founder of Wedgwoodchina. Charles Darwin married his cousin, EmmaWedgwood, in 1839.

By all accounts, Darwin was an indifferent stu-dent at the local Shrewsbury school, although hedid have an insatiable appetite for nature—oftengoing off on long hikes to collect worms, bugs,and other creatures. His father sent him to Ed-inburgh, Scotland, to be trained as a physician.Darwin had no stomach for the brutalities ofsurgery, and the medical training did not take. Atlast, he was sent to Christ College, CambridgeUniversity, to become an Anglican clergyman.This seemed to suit Darwin fine, as he couldeasily envision himself as a country parson withplenty of free time to pursue his naturalist re-search.

While Darwin was not a great classroom stu-dent, his formal education was useful. He wasan avid learner of those things that appealed tohis interests in natural history both at Edinburghand at Cambridge. For example, at Edinburgh,Darwin studied homologies, similarities due to acommon descent, in marine animals with RobertE. Grant (1793–1874), who also espoused atheory of evolution proposed by Jean-BaptisteLamarck (1744–1829). At Cambridge, whereclasswork was not necessarily the main engine ofinstruction and learning, Darwin came under thetutelage of John S. Henslow (1796–1861), profes-sor of botany, and Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873),professor of geology. Both of these men, like theother professors at Cambridge, were Anglicanpriests. Neither of them believed in evolution,

but both were excellent instructors, not only for-mally but also in the many excursions and walksthat Darwin participated in with them. In thesummer of 1831, before he was to take HolyOrders, Darwin accompanied Sedgwick on a ge-ological mapping tour of Wales. This experienceand the close bond he had with both men werecritically important in helping him move on tothe next phase of his education and launch hisprofessional life, as the onboard gentleman ofscience for the voyage of the HMS Beagle.

Journey to the Galapagos

In September 1831, Darwin interviewed withCaptain Robert FitzRoy of the Beagle for the po-sition of gentleman companion to the captain fora voyage to South America. The Beagle was com-missioned to map the coasts of South America,and a 2-year voyage was planned. Instead, thevoyage lasted nearly 5 years and became a triparound the world. Darwin, as the naturalist onboard, busied himself collecting specimens andmaking careful geological observations through-out the trip. He sent home, via other returningships, more than 2,000 specimens, including thefossils of previously unknown species. He filleda large scientific diary with thousands of geo-logical and zoological data. While on the trip,Darwin sent back to his mentors in Englandnumerous letters filled with his observations.Material excerpted from these letters was cir-culated in scientific circles and made Darwin acelebrated figure in British science even before hereturned.

When Darwin set out on the voyage, hewas a believer in what is called the argumentfrom design. This was the view that all specieshad been designed by a Divine Creator fortheir specific place in nature. Darwin hadalso been exposed to theories of evolution,especially that of Lamarck, as noted earlier.Lamarck proposed a theory of evolution in 1809that began with the spontaneous generationof living matter from nonliving matter. Since


then, Lamarck suggested, there has been asteady progression from simple forms of lifeto ever greater complexity. One mechanismfor this progression, Lamarck posited, was theinheritance of acquired characteristics. Thismechanism meant that changes in the adultorganism can be passed on directly to theoffspring. The well-worn example is the neck of agiraffe. According to the doctrine of inheritanceof acquired characteristics, giraffes stretchingtheir necks to reach higher leaves resultedin an increasingly elongated neck over manygenerations.

The implications of Lamarck’s theory werequite unsettling to many people, especially thoseintensely vested in and privileged by the statusquo. It suggested that life was not due todivine intervention and that human beings werejust animals, although perhaps more developedthan other animals. Lamarck’s theory had anote of progress in it, that life and societywere better characterized by change than by astatic model. In the 1820s and 1830s in Britain,Lamarck’s ideas were taken up by reformers,some of whom were radical. Many of thescientific elite, including Darwin’s Cambridgeinstructors and his peers when he returnedfrom his voyage, perceived these reformers asa threat to civil society and actively worked todiscredit them. An extremely popular book in the1840s, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation,published anonymously, created a sensation withits claims of a naturalistic origin of life. Althoughtechnically not a natural history of evolution butinstead a tract espousing a progressivist notionthat change was necessary to have a society withgreater equality of opportunity, the book did putthe word ‘‘evolution’’ in the mouths and on theminds of much of the rapidly expanding readingpublic. It was also roundly condemned by allwhom Darwin held in highest esteem. So, whenhe was developing his theory after the voyage,this was the context for his work.

No one event or observation on the voyageof the Beagle catapulted Darwin toward hiseventual theory. Rather, and this was consistent

with his character, it was the accumulation ofmany observations and the careful ponderingof what they meant that led him to slowlydevelop his theory over several years. However,the geological observations he made in SouthAmerica, where it was clear that what had oncebeen ocean floor or beach was now thousandsof feet above sea level, and the myriad lifeforms on the Galapagos Islands were amongthe most important experiences he had. Theformer suggested that the earth had changedover a long period. This position was called theuniformitarian hypothesis, and it fit with theideas of Charles Lyell, a geologist whose book,Principles of Geology, Darwin carried with himon the voyage. The uniformitarian hypothesissuggested that the physical geology of the earthwas formed as a result of long, gradual processes.It contrasted with the notion that geologicalforms were the result of sudden, catastrophicchanges, usually the result of divine interventionor handiwork—as in the biblical flood. Thus, theearth was much older than the literal reading

FIGURE 1.8 Charles Darwin

DARWIN, NATURAL SELECTION, AND THE LAWS OF NATURE 19

of the Bible would suggest and allowed enoughtime for the gradual change in organisms thatcould possibly result in new species.

The visit to the Galapagos Islands eventuallyprovided Darwin with the material that hewould use to articulate species change. TheGalapagos are a series of small volcanic islandsabout 600 miles west of Ecuador on the equator.Darwin collected a large variety of species thereand noticed the distribution of similar species,especially birds, across the islands. At the time,he did not see that many of the birds were ofthe same family. After his return to England,ornithologist John Gould pointed out that manyof the birds were finches, each uniquely adaptedto their island environments. When Darwinreturned to England and began to develop hisideas about species change, the geographicaldistribution of the finches would becomeimportant for the development of his theory.

The Beagle docked at Falmouth, England, onOctober 2, 1836, nearly five years after it leftPlymouth Sound. By the time it landed, Darwin’sname was well known in British naturalist circles.His father arranged investments for him so thathe could devote himself to a life of science. Hesoon launched a careful consideration of all datahe had gathered and was puzzling over what itmeant. We know from his notebooks—Darwinkept careful records of his observations andthoughts, which has proven a real boon forhistorians of science—that the question of specieschange emerged early in his puzzling.

Continuity: Humans and Natural Law

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selectionmade humans subject to the same natural laws asother animals. This principle of the continuityof life was one of the most controversial aspectsof Darwin’s work, one he did not stress in theOrigin of Species (1859). Yet, by insisting on conti-nuity, Darwin helped make it possible to think ofuniversal laws underlying behavior. If evolutionoccurs through a natural selection of variationsthat help an organism adapt to its environment,

then an important question becomes, What isthe function of the characteristic under study,whether it be an elongated bird beak or hu-man consciousness? How does the characteristichelp the organism adapt and survive? We haveseen that the question of function had becomea topic of investigation in the research Whytt,Cullen, Prochaska, and others. Darwin made thequestion of function central to an evolution-ary perspective. When the field of Psychologyemerged some years after Darwin’s work, ques-tions of adaptation and function and of theirderivative, learning, became central, especially inthe utilitarian American context.

The possibility of using animals to under-stand human behavior emerged from Darwin’swork and became the field of comparativepsychology. Darwin himself explored this areain two books written later in life, The Descentof Man (1871), and Expressions of the Emotionsin Man and Animals (1872). George Romanes,a protege of Darwin’s, extended the applicationof Darwin’s evolutionary framework in an in-vestigation of animal mental ability. While hiswriting about animals was fascinating, it sufferedfrom a reliance on anecdotes about the suppos-edly amazing abilities or mental feats of variousanimals. It should be kept in mind that therewas (and is) a long, time-honored tradition inBritain of anthropomorphizing animals (anthro-pomorphism is attributing human characteristicsto animals). Others who followed, however, madethe comparative method more rigorous, includ-ing C. Lloyd Morgan and Douglas Spalding. Weexplore these developments in later chapters, es-pecially how studying animal behavior came to beused as a model for understanding how humanslearn and adapt.

Darwin’s theory also provided an impetus tothe study of children as a way of understandingevolution. Darwin kept a diary of the develop-ment of his first son, William, and later publishedan article based on it, ‘‘Biographical Sketch ofan Infant’’ (1877). Infants and young children,some thought, allowed us to see what humanswere like earlier in the evolutionary process. A


more extreme version of this idea, although notespoused by Darwin, is captured in the phrase‘‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.’’ That is, thedevelopment of a human, beginning with con-ception, displays all stages of human evolution.The study of children’s lives and how such stud-ies help us understand human behavior was animportant aspect of the early years of the devel-opment of Psychology in North America and inEurope.

Finally, the notion that variability providesthe material with which natural selection worksgave rise in psychology to the idea of individualdifferences. Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton(1822–1911), was captivated by the possibilityof understanding human differences within anevolutionary framework. We explore Galton’s

work in a later chapter, especially in relationto the development of methods in psychology.Again, the development of Psychology in Amer-ica facilitated a differential approach, and theidea of understanding different capacities (e.g.,intellectual or academic) or different propensities(e.g., criminality and creativity) seemed impor-tant in managing a rapidly changing society. Theidea of learning and adaptation that was inherentin Darwin’s theory lent itself to a focus on ap-plied problems, both in research and in practice.So, especially in America, psychological expertisewas viewed as having application to the diversequestions of how to improve schools and theperformance of children in those schools, how tounderstand worker performance, and dozens ofother applied questions.

SUMMARY

In this chapter, we sketched a history of someprincipal sources of a science of mind. Thesesources included philosophical debates, empir-ical and experimental work in medicine andphysiology, and the naturalist work and evo-lutionary theory of Darwin. We hope we haveindicated how deeply these sources were linkedto one another. That is, work in physiologyand medicine drew upon philosophical debatesabout the nature of being human and questionsof epistemology, and philosophers were keenlyinterested in developments in science, often seek-ing to use research results in support of their owntheories. Darwin was an inheritor of much priorwork that had placed questions about humansin a framework of naturalism. In turn, he in-terpreted the data drawn from his naturalisticobservations as showing that man was a creaturesubject to natural law like all other animals. Hiswork, like that of others before him, helped placegreat emphasis on function. When the new Psy-chology developed a few years later, questionsabout the function of behavior and the mind

became crucial in the new science, especially inthe United States. It would be going too far tosay that by the end of the 19th century therewas a consensus about human nature. What wecan confidently say is that for most educatedpeople in the Western world at the end of thisera, humans were understood to be part of na-ture and, thus, subject to the laws of nature. Bythis time, the discipline of Psychology had begun(see Chapter 3), and many of these new psy-chologists saw their work as explaining just whatthese laws were in regard to human thinking andbehavior.

Lastly, we also sought to indicate in thischapter just how deeply embedded these originsof a science of mind were in the social andcultural context of their times. War, politicalstruggle, economics, religion, and technologicalchanges were all critical parts of the culturalmatrix from which modern science, includingPsychology, emerged. In the next chapter, weturn to the practices of everyday life in this periodto examine the emergence of the Western notion

BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY 21

of the self. This was the necessary counterpartto the developments outlined in this chapter inthat the formation of an everyday psychology

was needed for the psychological sensibility uponwhich disciplinary Psychology could rely for itssubject matter.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY

A key text that has both inspired us and guidedour thinking about the history of psychologyin context, not only for this chapter but forall of our writing for this text, is RogerSmith’s Norton History of the Human Sciences(1997). His 2007 volume, Being Human, hasbeen equally helpful to us in how to thinkthrough the implications of historical narrativesabout human nature. Although idiosyncratic,Graham Richards’s Mental Machinery (1992) isan immensely useful book for the philosophicalbackground of this chapter. We also usedhis Putting Psychology in its Place (2002) forthe contrast between ‘‘Big P Psychology’’ and‘‘little p psychology.’’ As part of our generaloverview, we also found useful several chaptersin The Cambridge History of Science volumeThe Modern Social Sciences, edited by TheodorePorter and Dorothy Ross. For the early modernperiod and the roles of war, civil and religiousstrife, and philosophical problems engendered bythe emerging nation-states, Stephen Toulmin’sCosmopolis (1990) has been influential. Ourunderstanding of key events in the emergenceof modern science owes a great deal to the workof Stephen Shapin, especially, Leviathan and theAir-Pump (1985), A Social History of Truth (1994),and The Scientific Revolution (1996), althoughany fault of interpretation is entirely ours. RoyPorter’s Flesh in the Age of Reason (2003) helpedus understand debates about body and mind inthe 17th- and 18th-century contexts.

For work in physiology and medicine,we found many helpful articles and books,

chief among them were Anne Harrington’sMedicine, Mind and the Double Brain (1987), KurtDanziger’s article ‘‘Origins of the Schema ofStimulated Motion’’ (1983), and Roger Smith’sarticle ‘‘The Background of Physiological Psy-chology in Natural Philosophy’’ (1973). Johnvan Wyhe’s 2002 article on Gall helped us locateGall’s work in the context of medical debatesabout the functions of the brain. The philosoph-ical and social implications of the localization offunction debate have been superbly articulatedby Robert Young’s Mind, Brain, and Adaptationin the 19th Century (1991). Origins of Neuroscience(1994) by Stanley Finger is a useful encyclopedicapproach to most of the major, and many of theminor, figures and events in the prehistory of theneurosciences.

For information on Ladd-Franklin’s fasci-nating life and career, we recommend twopublications by historian of psychology LaurelFurumoto: ‘‘Joining Separate Spheres’’ (1992),and ‘‘Christine Ladd-Franklin’s Color Theory’’(1994).

There is such a vast literature on Darwin thatit is hard to know where to start or stop. PeterBowler’s short biographical study (1990) washelpful. Darwin and the Emergence of EvolutionaryTheories of Mind and Behavior by Robert Richards(1987) and From Darwin to Behaviourism byRobert Boakes (1984) were both helpful andare drawn on again for later chapters.

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Chapter 1 TIMELINE 1220–1920...the foundations of knowledge laid down by Aristotle and his 13th-century Christian inter-preter, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). The calls by Sir