CHAPTER 2 29/09/2011 18:31 CHAPTER 2 - Irish School of ...greenmedicine.ie/school/images/Library/Thales-To- Hippocrates... · CHAPTER 2 29/09/2011 18:31 ... CHAPTER 2 CHAPTER 2 THALES

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CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2

THALES TO HIPPOCRATES: BEFORE PSYCHOLOGY

When beginning a study of the history of psychology, there are problems thatmust be addressed. The first is to define what psychology is and what it has been,historically. The other is where to begin such a history. Neither are particularly easyquestions nor will everyone agree on the answers.

A DEFINITION OF PSYCHOLOGICAL THOUGHT

Psychology as an independent, academic discipline and as a research special-ty, a laboratory science, has been in existence for only a little more than a century. Psychological thought, however, embedded in a number of disciplines such as phi-losophy, medicine, physiology and even physics, passing under a multitude of titlesand using widely differing terminologies has existed throughout the whole history ofhuman thought. The problem encountered in attempting to trace the history of psy-chological thought is to discriminate psychological thought from the other approach-es and concepts in which it has been embedded. We need a definition for psychologi-cal thought that holds not only for our present day but for the past as well.

Psychological thought, both in the distant past and in the present day, seemsto have centered on three fundamental questions: 1) How do I know the things Iknow? 2) How do I feel the things I feel? 3) How do I do the things I do? The firstquestion deals with knowledge and its sources and includes concepts dealing withsensory and perceptual phenomena, as well as with judgments, attitudes, learning,memory and similar topics. The second question deals with feelings and is con-cerned with the nature of emotions and motivations. The third question deals withactions and behaviors. These three blanket concepts, knowing, feeling and acting,seem to have filled humans with wonder throughout the centuries and constitute thecore of what is called psychological thought in this book. In any given period, inter-

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est in one question or the other may have predominated to the diminution of the oth-ers.

"All men by nature desire to know."[1] So reads the first sentence of Aristotle'sMetaphysics. A desire to know has served to motivate philosopher-scientists in theirabsorption, not only with psychological matters, but with all fields of knowledge. We can discern other motives but the search for knowledge is a basic drive implicitthroughout this survey. Aristotle's remark introduces his history of the earliest sci-ence-philosophy, which came into being about 600 B.C. in Ionia, on the coast of AsiaMinor and spread from there to the rest of ancient Greece. But, to some extent thestudy of psychological thought precedes even that distant period and includes civi-lizations other than ancient Greece.

ORIGINS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL THOUGHT.

Aristotle speculated about the origin of the search for knowledge that includespsychological thought. "It is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and atfirst began to philosophize [love wisdom]."[2] It is in this seeking for wisdom, the at-tempt to explain the nature of things that we find the beginning of all philosophy andscience. Perhaps it is with the "wonder" about which Aristotle speaks that we shouldbegin this history.

The point of our beginning is a time as distant and as ancient to Aristotle asAristotle's Greece is to our own time. Aristotle explained that "a man who is puzzledand wonders things himself ignorant" and seeks wisdom to escape ignorance.[3] Hu-mans throughout the ages seem to have abhorred ignorance. The reason is probablysimple enough to guess. Where there is ignorance, there is fear; where there isknowledge, there is some degree of reassurance and relief from fear. Having no ex-planations, ancient people made their own, based on their experiences. Many of themyths and fables that have come down to us from are quite likely explanations usedto fill the void of ignorance early people faced. Aristotle recognized this as well, say-ing that "even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of wisdom, for the myth is com-posed of wonders."[4] We can only imagine the fear of ancient peoples who had noone to comfort them with explanations of thunder or of the invisible action of the

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wind.

If the objects of the outside world were a source of wonder to ancient peoples,those closely connected with an individual's personal life must have been an evengreater source of thought and concern. Consider the experience of sleep. Everyoneknew about sleep, had experienced it and had seen others asleep, but what was it? Itwas a state in general appearance to that of death, but the sleeper could be rousedback to life by a loud sound or a slap on the face. On awakening, the sleeper mightreport experiences that occurred while in sleep -- travels, adventures, even a meetingwith people known to be long dead. Those who had been with the sleeper could tes-tify that he had not left their sight -- at least not in his body. What, then, was thesource of these wondrous experiences?

The most mysterious event of all must have been the observation of death. Aperson who was alive, active and powerful only a few moments before was now mo-tionless, as in a sleep or a faint. In this case, however, the person would not awakenand in time the body itself would alter and decay.

The mysteries surrounding sleep, dreams and death required explanationsand ancient peoples supplied them. What is remarkable is that the explanations forthese phenomena are so similar. These explanations of the nature of life and deathwere not just flights of imagination, however, but were speculations based on obser-vations on the nature of the human state in life and death. These observations, sincethey were based on the human body, were shared by all people, no matter where orhow they lived. It is within these explanations and descriptions that we find theseeds of psychological thought.

Consider some of the differences between the living and the dead that couldhave been known to ancient people without a knowledge of internal anatomy. Thechest is the key here and it is not just by chance that people in ancient times almostuniversally located life functions there. The chest contains an essential requirementfor a life source -- movement. To the ancients, objects that could move on their ownwere alive or filled with something that was itself alive. The chest is in constantmovement and it is a movement of its own, apparently independent of the person'sown existence. The most obvious movement is the expansion and contraction of thechest cavity with respiration. This movement is present in the living person but stopsin death. It is also connected in some way with the breath. On the relaxation of thechest an invisible substance escapes the mouth and nose. It is a substance like that

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chest an invisible substance escapes the mouth and nose. It is a substance like thatwhich invisibly blows the leaves in the trees and in greater force, pushes stormsalong. This substance, the breath, is also found only in the living. There are manyother observations that ancient people could have made; the breath is warm andmoist; a person in a rage or in battle or some other form of physical or emotional ex-ertion breathes more quickly than someone who is resting; if the breath is blockedfrom entering the mouth and nose, the person will die; if a blow on the chest "knocksthe breath" out of a person he is incapacitated until breathing returns to normal.

A second movement in the chest is that of the heartbeat. The presence of theheartbeat is a distinct difference between a living person and one who is dead. Thisrhythmic beat speeds up in a person who is excited or undergoing exertion and be-come subjectively louder. At rest it slows down. In battle a wound may spurt bloodin a rhythm like that of the heartbeat. The blood is warm and moist in the living, butcold and dry in the dead. If too much blood is lost, the heartbeat stops and the per-son is dead.

So without any real knowledge of the internal organs of the human body, an-cient people could well have connected respiration with breath and heartbeat withblood and associated both of these events with differences between life and deathand between high and low emotionality in the living. These observations could easi-ly have been made and the literature from the most ancient times for which there aredocuments indicate that they were made. The chest, then, takes on the earliest locusof life and with it the locus of the psychological processes of knowing, feeling andacting that make up so much of living activity.

In one of the most ancient texts available to us, an Egyptian stele or stone writ-ing dating from 700 BC but which is apparently a copy of a papyrus from at least3400 BC, we find the chest region mentioned along with the activities of an entity,Ptah, who dwelt there:

It happened that the heart and the tongue acquired power over all (the other) mem-bers [of the body], teaching that he (Ptah) lived as the governor in every body, and asthe tongue in every mouth of all the gods, all cattle, all reptiles, and everything else --at the same time Ptah (as heart) thinks, and (as tongue) commands as he wishes.... The company of the gods (of Ptah) create the sight of the eyes, the hearing of the ears,the breathing of the nostrils and make announcement to the heart. (The heart) it is

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which maketh every information to come forth, and the tongue it is which repeatswhat the heart has thought out.

Thus every kind of work and every handicraft, and everything done with thearms and every motion of the legs, and every action of all the limbs take placethrough this command, which is planned by the heart, and is brought to pass by thetongue, and giveth value to everything.[5]

Ptah, a local deity in the Memphis district of ancient Egypt, was later supplant-ed in favor of Ra (Amen-Ra) of Thebes. In this document, over 5000 years old, wefind not only the heart or chest region being recognized as the locus of life and also asthe seat of intellectual functions, volition and action, in short-- knowing, feeling andacting. This is an early form of a faculty psychology, where different operations orfunctions serve a central executive entity, a soul.

The Hebrew scriptures also make use of a breath soul. In Genesis, Godbreathes the breath of life, ruah, into the clay, adamah and makes man, Adam. Thisbreath, once in the body, becomes a living nephesh, something like a soul. The wordnephesh is a breath-related word and seems to have been influenced by the Babylon-ian term napistu, used for the entity that is in the living but not in the dead. The termis associated with the human breath and with the earthly breath, the wind.[6] In laterHebrew writings, the locus of the soul would be the heart. By then, the Hebrewbreath-soul had taken on cognitive functions as well as the role of the spirit.[7] Heartand blood also take on special meaning in the Hebrew texts. The Book of Deuterono-my states, for instance, "You may eat meat whenever you wish. But make sure thatyou do not partake of the blood; for the blood is the life, and you must not consumethe life with the flesh."[8]

The Hebrew scriptures came from a variety of sources and across a large timespan. In these writings we find the life force and the knowing, feeling, and actingprocesses located in several places -- the heart is the seat of desire, thought, wisdom,and courage. The lower abdominal area, particularly the genitals and kidneys, wasalso given credit as a center of life and as the home of the moral sentiments. Memoryand emotion were located in the bowels.[9]

It is difficult to generalize on the basis of so few surviving documents, but it

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would appear that as thought developed from the earliest documented ideas, around4000 BC towards the 8th century BC, the heart and blood competed with the lungs ordiaphragm and breath as the locus for biological and mental life. Many of our owncommon-sense idioms represent some of these concepts of heart as the basis for men-tal events. For instance, memory ("I learned it by heart"); emotion ("I love you withall my heart"); courage, ("he had great heart).

Mixed up in all these considerations are three kinds of "psychic" entities whichshould be separated, although they were not always so separate to the ancient mind. Perhaps the first consideration of importance to ancient people was some concept oflife-force, something that separated the living from the dead -- something oftentranslated as "vitality." Secondly, was the concept of mental life, the knowing, feel-ing and acting aspects of the individual. A third concept, was that of the spirit dou-ble, some aspect of the human personality that exists beyond the death of the body.

These ideas were considered by the ancient Mesopotamians, Egyptians andHebrews as well as the Greeks. Perhaps the most significant early document inwhich all of these concepts are present is Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The epic wasprobably produced in the 8th century BC and was passed down orally for many gen-erations before being written down. These tales epitomize not only the views ofHomer's day but show some fragments of much earlier traditions.

It is with Homer's Iliad that we find early reference to psyche. The term is as-sociated with the breath, but it was used by Homer in the sense of a spirit double, asoul, the incorporeal part that lives on after death. It was only several centuries laterthat we find the term psyche used in our psychological definition of knowing, feel-ing, and acting. Homer represents psyche as a shade, an image of the dead person,without vitality, with no emotion, no motivation and no power to act. Psyche ismerely an empty intellect consisting of impotent knowledge. Even memory is notavailable to the shade. As Homer represents it, the psyche of the person after deathgoes down to Hades where is leads a shadowy life after death. Hades is not Hell; it isnot a place of punishment, but it must have been fairly dull. In the Odyssey,Odysseus goes down to Hades to find out what had happened back home in Atticawhile he has been away. He has to give the shades a drink of blood before they can take on some aspect of human motivation and regain their memories of past events. Blood sacrifices were a common part of ancient Greek rituals for the dead, and thepre-Homeric Greek graves seem to have been designed for blood offerings for the

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dead, perhaps to give them vitality.[10] Just what the role of the Homeric psyche hasduring life is difficult to say. It may well be conscious only in human sleep and itsmeanderings, the source of dreams. Most of the living human functions during wak-ing hours were attributed by Homer to three other processes, menos, thymos andnoos.

Menos was something shared by all vital, living things. It has been variouslytranslated, but "vitality" is probably the most useful term for our purposes. Menoswas the source of all action in humans as well as in animals. Since the primary re-quirement to the ancients for life was self-initiated movement, this would includesome objects we consider today to be inanimate. So one finds menos in the action ofthe sun on objects and in the action of rivers and wind. In humans, menos is the urgeto action but also the steadfastness of control, the restraint to prevent action. Menoshas been associated with metabolism, the slow burning fire in living things. JamesM. Redfield, reviewing Homer's usage of menos says:

The life of the animal is slow-burning. In a monster like the chimera the menos with-in is breathed out in fire....Less spectacularly, the vigor of a man is also the fire withinhim.... When Agamemnon filled with menos, his "eyes were like to shining fire...;"This menos must be fed with food and drink...; it is an organic fire, i.e., the metabo-lism. Menos comes and goes...; it is diminished by pain....; As long as some spark ofmetabolic fire persists, however, life continues.[11]

Closely related to menos is thymos. Thymos was considered to be the locus ofthe feelings and emotions, of wishes, plans, hopes and inclinations. Thymos wassometimes associated with the lungs, the phrenes, but not necessarily to the breath. In a variety of uses, thymos may be as likely associated with a fluid like the blood orwith the warmth of blood and breath. Thymos was a substance that filled thephrenes, which through primitive observation could be blood as likely as breath. Thymos directs the vitality of menos. It is a type of intelligence, but it is a practicalintelligence, more like craft than thought. Thymos dealt with scheming and actionsthat are responses to present situations rather than long term planning or creativethought. Thymos, then, is impulsive thought, thinking at a practical, concrete level,more related to passion than to reason. In fact, the common translation of thymos is

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passion or the passions. Thymos existed both in animals and humans, but not in ob-jects we presently consider to be inanimate.

For creative intelligence, Homer used the concept of noos. He meant by theterm, understandings." Noos derived the meanings from the perceptions of the out-side world and was also the source of imagination, and the consideration of non-con-crete concepts. Noos, like thymos was located in the chest region, in the stethos or di-aphragm. To the ancient Greeks, it was likely the source of the movement of thelungs or perhaps correlated with the movement of the chest. Noos was of a higherlevel of intelligence than thymos and existed only in humans or more accurately inmales. It was believed at that time that women did not have noos. Only men had itand even then only a few special men, such as Odysseus. This may be the source ofthe notion of women being ruled by emotion [thymos] while men are ruled by reason[noos]. Whatever the reasoning, we find that women also get noos by the 6th centuryBC. Noos did not involve emotion as did the thought of the thymos. Noos may wellhave been the psyche in the living person. The ancient Greeks sometimes altered thenames of entities with their state.

In these concepts, then, menos, thymos, noos, and psyche, we have not only asophisticated motivational and intellectual system but also an early differentiationbetween man and other creatures. Man alone has noos, abstract thought about theoutside world and the future time. Even man seldom made use of this noos. Heshared with the animals the processes of concrete thought, thymos, connected withreactivity and adjustment to particular situations. He shared with both animals andall other living entities, including the sun, menos, the underlying source of vitalityand energy. This three-level concept of life and intellect will recur in slightly alteredform in the ideas of the earliest philosopher-scientists of the sixth century BC, later inthe writings of Plato and through Plato and Aristotle to the writers of the Middleages and, in many respects, to our own time. All that, however is getting ahead ofthe story.

Of particular significance to a history of psychology are thymos and noos. They represent psychological functions to the degree they were considered at thattime, and as such represents a beginning of psychological thought in ancient Greece. Menos represents life force and as such is a starting point for biological science. Psy-che as used by Homer represents an early consideration of metaphysical matters.

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IONIA AND THE RISE OF NATURALISM.

When Aristotle was talking about the lovers of wisdom, he was thinking aboutthe Greeks of the 6th century BC who began formal consideration of the world aboutthem, including psychological considerations. These Greeks were not of the main-land, however. Homer, in his Iliad and Odyssey was writing in the 8th century BCabout the glories of Mycenae, what is today the Greek mainland, of the 12th centuryBC. Homer was, himself, an Ionian Greek, living on the coast of Asia Minor, in whatis modern-day Turkey. In many ways, Homer was recounting the story of a lost age,since the glories of the culture of Mycenae were largely destroyed during the take-over of mainland Greece by the Dorians. With the dominance of the Dorians, main-land Greece went into a decline, something like a dark age, for several centuries. TheMycenian culture survived, however, by the flight of the inhabitants of Attica andPeloponesia to Ionia. There they founded Greek cities, safe from Dorian barbarismwhere they continued the development of culture and the arts. It was in these out-posts of Greek culture in the 6th century BC that the flowering of philosophical andscientific thought took place. A main center of this cultural miracle was Miletus insouthwestern Turkey. Miletus became the trade center for the Aegean Sea, with con-tacts southward to Egypt and throughout the European coastline to what is todayItaly and even France.

In what sort of world did these Greeks of the sixth century BC, these lovers ofwisdom, live? Their environment was still largely pastoral, punctuated by tribal vil-lages. Activities still consisted of tilling the fields, bartering in the markets, engagingin mercantile sea voyages, and tending flocks. People worshiped in the temples oftheir choice, went to war, gossiped in the square, bought and sold slaves, malignedrulers (if the times permitted it), visited courtesans, and engaged in or watched ath-letic contests.

What set them off from other peoples to make this area the home of a new wayof thinking, naturalism? There are several possibilities. One has to do with their reli-gion. It was not that the Greeks were less religious than the still earlier Egyptian orOriental peoples. Their cities abounded with temples and statues of the gods butthere was this difference: It was difficult to be a heretic, at least in terms of the offi-cial pantheon of gods. Their priests had little or no political power. Men worshiped

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cial pantheon of gods. Their priests had little or no political power. Men worshipedthe family and city divinities and accepted or rejected other gods more or less at indi-vidual discretion. Also, these Greek outposts were at the crossroads of many ancientcivilizations. The contact with a variety of races with the widely differing beliefs andcultures certainly prevented anything like a strict orthodoxy of thought that isolationmight have encouraged.

The relative peacefulness associated with this commercial life also led to theaccumulation of wealth. Coinage had recently been devised by the neighboring Lydi-ans which made possible the accumulation of surplus wealth. This structure, in turnmay have led to the leisure of some classes of the citizens, allowing time for creativethought. This new thought went far beyond practical concerns of commerce and pol-itics to the central question of the origin of things and the nature of the world itself. "Naturalism," the belief that nature requires for its operations only principles inher-ent in nature without appeal to supernatural factors, found a favorable social settingin this environment.

The period of Miletus' ascendency lasted about 150 years and there were cer-tainly a large number of "lovers of wisdom" there who would later be grouped underthe title "philosopher." We know today only a few of the main figures, those whomade significant additions to the thought or who represented turning points in theline of the thought.

The fragments of the writings of early Greek thinkers show both the breadth oftheir interests and their cheery obliviousness to incipient divisions between the spe-cialized fields of philosophy and science.[12] Their conception of nature was all-embracing. Science and philosophy were one. To be sure, there were a few differentpractitioners - physicians, lawyers, and engineers - but philosopher-scientists took astheir province the whole of the universe and of man, speculating, observing, andthinking about the universe - every aspect of it that struck their fancy. Their "philoso-phy," as we would call it, would be distinguished by us from their "science," only bythe broad sweep and vagueness of the philosophical assertions.

PURISM, NOMOTHETICISM, NATURALISM AND QUALITATIVISM.

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To orient ourselves to these formal beginnings of philosophy-science, let usconsult its first history as given by Aristotle. Proceeding from his statement aboutthe desire to know, he makes it clear that the early thinkers were seeking knowledgeabout nature for its own sake.[13] An attitude favoring purism was advocated, asdistinguished from the utilitarian attitude of seeking knowledge for its application. Aristotle also considers the relative values of science, as we would call it, and experi-ence.[14] The former is a knowledge of universals, the latter of individuals. Al-though, as we shall see, he did not entirely dismiss information about individuals,knowledge and understanding, as he sees them, come from the study of universals. Many centuries later this attitude would be called "nometheticism" emphasizing thediscovery of generalities, (and general laws), rather than dealing with particularevents or individuals (hereafter referred to as "idiographicism").

A naturalistic attitude prevails in the writings of the first philosophers. It isevident that they did not share to any appreciable degree in the anthropomorphic in-terpretation of the gods put forth by many of their Greek contemporaries.

They had a tremendous confidence in their superior ability to reason, to see the fun-damental order behind the varied appearances of the world. They preferred to cor-rect the theories of their predecessors, not by empirical means, that is, by use of newobservations, but by pointing out errors in reasoning. This faith in human reason asthe primary, if not exclusive, source of knowledge, came to be known later as "ratio-nalism," The belief that knowledge based on experience, or "empiricism," existedbut in a casual and incidental form. The use of experiment, the manipulation of theenvironment to test particular questions, much later the preferred form of empiricalmethodology, was used very rarely.[15]

These early thinkers were searching for the "essence" of things as Aristotle wasto call it.[16] They were seeking these essences in broad terms. Theirs was a qualita-tive attitude, one based on general description, rather than a quantitative one basedon measurement. Their activities are sometimes called speculation, simply rational-izing the processes behind the appearances of the world, but this is to denigrate theirgreat pioneering feats. Both observation and reason were employed as they are stillin our attempts to systematize scientific knowledge..

THALES AND MOLARISM, VITALISM AND DEDUCTIVISM

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THALES AND MOLARISM, VITALISM AND DEDUCTIVISM

The first philosopher-scientist, whose thinking exemplified adherence tonomotheticism, naturalism, rationalism, qualitativism, and purism was Thales ofMiletus. Virtually nothing is known of his life with any degree of certainty.

Thales was born about 636 B.C. He appears to have led a very active and, tosome extent, a very practical life. Aristotle recounts how Thales took advantage ofhis knowledge of the stars to foretell a great harvest of olives in the coming year.[17] He managed very cheaply to make deposits on the use of all olive presses during thetime of harvest. When his fellow citizens wanted to use these presses at the sametime, he rented them at a large profit. Aristotle draws the somewhat disingenuousconclusion that Thales did this to show that philosophers could easily be rich if theyso desired, but that their true ambitions are of another sort. It is also possible thatThales carried out the transaction in order to make a living. Neither he nor his suc-cessors were paid for their philosophical or scientific efforts. They either worked atsomething else or were supported by inherited wealth.

We owe to Thales the recognition that to solve a problem, one must look forprinciples on which to base a solution. In this spirit he approached the problem ofthe nature of the world itself. Despite the multiplicity of appearances, he assumedthat there must be some basic unity of substance in the universe. He reached the con-clusion that water is that original substance, because from water all other things -earth, air, and living things - are derived. The reasons for his choice cannot be estab-lished with any assurance, although some of the phenomena on which he must havebased his conclusions seem evident. Water is the only substance readily known toman in the three states of solid, liquid, and gas. Rising steam had been recognized asthe same substance as the water within the kettle since that historical occasion whenthe first kettle boiled over. There are manifestations of water in snow, ice clouds, fog,dew, rain, hail, and in the seas and rivers. Water indeed appears to be everywhere.

At the very dawn of philosophic-scientific thinking a molaristic attitude wasadvanced. The definition of a molaristic attitude, a preference for wholes rather thanparts, for relatively larger rather than smaller units, seems pallid against the sheerscope of this order. The very boldness of the view that everything is water helps tobring out what is meant by this attitude. To be sure there were molecular units in thevarious examples advanced. But they were but parts of the whole which was that

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which received emphasis.

The early Greeks held the conviction that man is composed of the same sub-stance as other entities and, along with all animate beings, is part and parcel of thematerial world. The characteristics of man were used by them to elucidate the natureof world, just as other matter was shown to help explain the nature of man. Theysaw the world as macrocosm, man as microcosm, each serving to give some accountof the other.

It is not surprising that Thales' choice of the ultimate matter - water - was in-fluenced by biological observations. A passage from Aristotle suggests that Thalesviewed the whole world as alive and animated.[18] "All things are full of gods." It isquite likely that the view Thales held what was the common view of the time that ob-jects that could move on their own contained menos and so were alive. Aristotle tellsus that Thales thought the magnetic stone must possess life because it is able to moveiron; and that the soul is motivational in nature as well. Thales is said to havereached this view not only from knowledge of the properties of a magnet but alsofrom studying the attraction of briskly rubbed amber for straw and dried leaves. Working with both the magnet and amber and finding the same manifestation ofmovement, he may have concluded that all objects had the power of movement pro-vided one could hit upon the way to bring that movement about, and inanimate ob-jects, through this power must be alive. This line of reasoning probably led Thales toadopt a "vitalistic" position. Vitalism is a belief that living things possess some sortof life principle, since their activities are not explicable by what we would call physi-cal-chemical constituents. (The opposite approach is commonly termed"mechanism.")

Aristotle believed that Thales thought water the ultimate substance because allliving things depend on water for nourishment, and because the sperm is moist. Considerable evidence from mythology shows that water was believed by the Greeksto be the generative or life-giving fluid.[19]

Although the evidence is scanty, Thales seems to have used deductive logic,that is, having adopted the position that water was the universal principle of allthings, he sought out particular instances that supported this view. Aristotle creditsSocrates, who came later, with being the first to use induction,[20] that is, proceedingfrom individual cases to general principals.[21] This is not to say that Thales did notuse observation and thus induction. Certainly his principle had some basis in experi-

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use observation and thus induction. Certainly his principle had some basis in experi-ence. It is that to the degree he used a formal, logical process, it was probably moredeductive than inductive.

Thales had propounded the problem of the nature of matter and indicated thedirection for those who followed. Later thinkers offered alternatives to Thales'premise that water was the basis of all matter. The nature of the primary substanceswas disputed by many who came after him. Anaximenes (c. 540 B.C.) argued that airwas the primary material since, aside from its basic state, it existed in the more rari-fied condition of fire and in the more concentrated forms of earth and of water. Hera-clitus (c. 500 B.C.) opted for fire, prompted probably by a desire to account forchange, which concerned him more than stability. "Everchanging" seems to havebeen his metaphor for change, epitomized in by far the best known Heraclitean frag-ment, "It is not possible to step twice into the same river."[22] Empedocles (c. 400B.C.) brought together the earlier claims for a primordial substance by advancing theargument that each of the four elements, - earth, air, fire, and water - was a primarysubstance. In the centuries to come, Empedocles' position was to have the widest fol-lowing.

The nature of the soul concerned many thinkers. It was often dealt with as anaspect of this problem of the constituent character of the universe. The questionarose of whether or not there are two fundamentally different substances, body andsoul (referred to as dualism), or one substance, either body or soul (monism).

The Greek concepts of menos, thymos, noos and psyche have already been dis-cussed and the Greeks of the 6th century BC seemed to hold to beliefs very similar tothose expressed by Homer two or more centuries before. These terms are often sub-sumed under one term, "soul" and the reader should be aware that its meaning is notnecessarily that of an immortal part.

What was the interest of the philosopher-scientists in this matter of the soul? Their concern was the actual construction of the soul, whether it was made up of oneor more of the elements. As noted before, Thales held that "all things are full ofgods,"[23] that is, spirits. Life properties were an integral part of his conceptions ofall matter. He is also credited by many philosophers with the idea that soul has itsessence in moving and is, in itself, self-moving.[24] Those who came after him aremore specific.

Anaximenes of Miletus also followed the naturalistic explanation for the na-

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Anaximenes of Miletus also followed the naturalistic explanation for the na-ture of things. He chose as his element, air. Air had a long tradition of connectionwith life and with the actions of the gods. Anaximines, in some regards, turned thetables on the gods. Rather than having the gods as the source of the winds, Anax-imines made the air the essence of the gods. In that regard then, even gods fell with-in the natural world of Anaximines' philosophy.

Air also had the necessary requirement to be the basic essence of the things ofthe world, flexibility of form. Simplicius records a statement concerning Anaximinessaying that Anaximines' air "...differs in its substantial nature by rarity and density. Being made finer it becomes fire, being made thicker it becomes wind, then (whenthickened still more) water, then earth, then stones; and the rest come into being with these."[25]

In this system, living creatures are seen as a microcosm of the world order. "The liv-ing creature is a world order in miniature... As our soul, he [Anaximines] says, beingair holds us together and controls us, so does wind (or breath) and air enclose thewhole world."[26] Anaximines seems to have held the view that it is the breath-soulthat unifies the parts of the body into a whole. The ancient Greeks thought of the var-ious limbs as having separate existences. It is significant that Anaximines shows thatit is the soul that carries out central organization of the living creature, coordinatingthe individual human functions into a whole.

Diogenes of Appollonia, a follower of Anaximines, although living a centurylater, carried this notion along farther identifying not only life with the breath- soulbut also intelligence. He said that "men and animals live by breathing air. And thisis for them soul and intelligence, ... and if this is taken away they die and intelligencefails."[27]

It is apparent that the Greek philosophers became increasingly interested byquestions of knowledge and intelligence and came to identify knowledge, intelli-gence and a soul concept together under the term psyche. This new use of the termpsyche was drastically different from that used by Homer in the 8th century BC.

The Milesians had failed in their search for a single material essence, but wecan not really fault them, since modern science has yet to fully solve the problem. The failure of the Miletians was primarily a failure of method. They appear to havecome to their theoretical positions more by hunch and then seeking for confirmatoryexamples. Once having set up their theoretical position, they seem to have defended

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examples. Once having set up their theoretical position, they seem to have defendedtheir positions against others by logical argument rather than making further obser-vations. This failure at deciding which of the possible materials could be the essenceof the universe and the failure of method it exposes may well have led to discourage-ment as to just how much we are able to judge and know at all.

THE PROBLEM OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE.

Once knowledge or intelligence became a consideration for the new philoso-phers of the 6th and 5th centuries BC, the question arose as to what was true knowl-edge and what was the extent of that knowledge. The Milesians seem to have beenquite confident in their ability to separate the realities of the world fromappearances. They were, after all, seeking the ultimates, the essences behind the ap-pearances of things. They seem confident that they could know everything eventual-ly by their method.

Xenophanes of Colophon began questioning just how complete human knowl-edge really was. He was born around 570 BC in Colophon, a settlement in Ioniaabout 40 miles from Miletus. He was a poet with interests in matters of nature. In546/545 BC, Colophon and virtually all of Ionia fell to the invading Persians. Xeno-phanes was supposedly one of the group that escaped the invasion to form a newcolony in what is now Sicily where he lived well into his nineties. His writings werequite varied, including such topics as rain cycles, the origin of fossils and also on thematter of knowledge.

In the matter of human knowledge, Xenophanes hearkened back somewhat tothe older tradition of Homer, before the Milesians, when it was believed that humansdid not have true knowledge. Only the gods and other supernatural forces, such asthe Muses, had true, universal knowledge. The call to the muses for inspiration wasnot just a poetic convention for Homer. It was believed that the gods could speakthrough humans by divine revelation. Homer was probably quite serious when hecalled out: "Tell me now, muses that dwell in the palace of Olympus -- for you aregoddesses, you are at hand and know all things, But we hear only a rumor and knownothing."[28]

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Xenophanes rejected the Homerian conception of the gods having humanform and human characteristics, however, saying that there was but a single god: "inno way similar to mortals either in body or in thought."[29] Xenophanes' god was anebulous, natural force with complete knowledge since "all of him sees, all thinks,and all hears."[30] Since human beings do not see and hear everything, their knowl-edge can never be complete. As much knowledge as humans are able to get, howev-er, comes by way of experience, "by seeking."[31] While Xenophanes casts doubt onhumans ever having complete knowledge, he gave credence to the view that knowl-edge gained by experience (observation) is the only source available to humans. Healso pointed out that human knowledge is relative, dependent on context. As an ex-ample he points out that "If god had not created yellow honey, they would think figssweeter than they do."[32] Human knowledge and judgment are relative, but eternaltruths are not relative. We humans can have knowledge of a sort but only god canhave true, that is, complete knowledge.

The consideration of the nature of knowledge was carried on by another Ion-ian, Heraclitus of Ephesus who lived around 500 BC. Heraclitus was also trying tofind the essence of things. He chose fire as the basis for all material things, returningagain to the materialist explanation for the world. This cosmological thinking is ofless importance to us than his emphasis on sensory knowledge, knowledge by meansof observation. He wrote, "Those things of which there is sight, hearing, knowledge: these are what I honor most."[33]

Observations are at the basis of Heraclitus' human knowledge, but there ismore. He said that "Evil witnesses are eyes and ears for men, if they have souls thatdo not understand their language."[34] To Heraclitus, sense perception is not a guar-antee to knowledge. It is only the first stage. There must be something more. Thesoul must be able to interpret the information given by the senses. For genuine un-derstanding there had to be reason, logos, which, he says is held in common by allpeople.[35] Not all people make use of their reasoning powers, however, since Hera-clitus says that they "fail to notice what they do after they wake up just as they forgetwhat they do when asleep."[36]

Heraclitus realized how difficult it is to gain knowledge because "Nature likesto hide."[37] He also recognized the influence of emotion on knowledge saying "It ishard to fight against impulse [thymos]; whatever it wishes, it buys at the expense ofthe soul."[38] Heraclitus emphasized the importance of living in moderation so as to

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keep the demands of impulse within the control of the intellect. A later commentatorgives some additional detail on Heraclitus' view of intelligence:

According to Heraclitus we become intelligent by drawing in the divine logos whenwe breathe. We become forgetful during sleep, but on waking we regain our senses. For in sleep, the channels of perception are shut, and the intelligence in us is severedfrom its kinship with the environment -- our only connection with it being throughbreathing, by which we are, as it were, rooted in it. When it is separated in this, themind loses the power of remembering which it formerly had; but in the waking stateit once more flows forth through the channels of perception as through so manyopenings, and making contact with the environment recovers the power ofreasoning.

Just as coals, when they are brought close to the fire, begin to glow, and diedown when they are removed from it, so it is with thought; but when it makes con-tact with it through the many channels of sense, it becomes like nature to thewhole.[39]

Heraclitus is significant in our survey of ancient concepts of knowledge because hesaw both the value of human knowledge and its limitations. To sense is not to know,but knowledge itself depends on the connection afforded by the senses to the outsideworld.

Another early thinker to give emphasis to a sensory basis for knowledge wasAlcmaeon of Croton who was an Ionian Greek from the region near Ephesus andMiletus. Alcmaeon was a physician and carried on a study of many things, includingthe basis for knowledge. One later commentator tells us Alcmaeon`s position on thedifference between animals and humans:

For man, he says, differs from other creatures "inasmuch as he alone has the power tounderstand", since to think and to perceive by sense are different processes.... He nextspeaks of the senses Severally... the senses are connected in some way with thebrain; consequently they are incapable of action if (the brain) is disturbed or shifts its

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brain; consequently they are incapable of action if (the brain) is disturbed or shifts itsposition. For (this organ) stops up the passages through which the senses act.[40]

Here we find with Alcmaeon not only a consideration of the sensory basis of knowl-edge but the use of an organic basis for knowledge, the brain, and an attempt at ex-plaining some sensory dysfunctions and perhaps even the phenomenon of sleep. Wewill have more to say about Alcmaeon later in this chapter.

What developed with Heraclitus and particularly with Alcmaeon was a rudi-mentary empiricism , since they both held that human knowledge was limited to in-formation derived from the senses. Along with that they developed a philosophicalof the limits of the knowable. Humans could not know all things. That was for thegods. Humans were able to know only what came to them by the senses and Heracli-tus adds that merely sensing the world does not allow us to understand it unless wemake use of our logical processes, logos.

PARMENIDES, RATIONALISM, DEDUCTIVISM.

At about the same time the beginnings of primitive empiricism were initiatedanother view was developing in a Greek colony in Southern Italy called Elea. Par-menides lived in Elea and is often credited with the founding of the school that takesthe name of the town, the Eleatic School. He is sometimes said to have been a stu-dent of Xenophanes and sometimes of Heraclitus, but he came to approach the ques-tion of knowledge in a way different than did the Ionian thinkers we have consideredthus far. Parmenides came to question the validity of experience in gaining under-standing at all. Parmenides' views come down to us in fragments of two conjoinedpoems, the "Way of Truth" and the "Way of Seeming." The titles themselves indicatehis view. There is the way of truth and this is knowledge that comes to us from thegods. Then there is the way of seeming which is knowledge that comes to us throughexperience. Given a choice between the two, Parmenides would choose truth, reason,rather than the appearances of the senses. In many respects, Parmenides carried onthe limitations of knowledge initiated by Xenophon and Heraclitus to an extreme lev-el. The problem Parmenides faced with recur again and again over the coming thou-

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sands of years -- how much of what we know is real and how much is mere illusion?

The method Parmenides employed differs drastically from the casual rational-ism of the followers of Thales and the primitive empiricism of Heraclitus and Al-cmaeon. Parmenides held to an extreme rationalism, where thought contained theonly truth and this truth was implanted in humans by the gods. If something can bethought of, conceptualized, then it has reality. It is for this reason that Parmenides de-nies the existence of void -- nothingness. Since a thought must be of something andwe can not think of nothing, nothingness cannot exist. Parmenides did not deny theexistence of sensory experience. He merely considered experience an unreliablesource of knowledge about the truth. If experience and reason come into conflict, it isclear that Parmenides will follow reason. Reason and thought give us truth, but thesenses give us only appearances.[41]

Parmenides' brought deduction and rationalism to its highest point in the pre-Socratic world. What is the origin of safe knowledge? Do we gain it by the evidenceof our senses, by observation and induction , or is our knowledge already present inour thought, needing only to be deduced in a well-reasoned manner? The rationalist-empiricist controversy from Plato and Aristotle to the present-day nativistic-environ-mentalistic arguments are derivatives of the same types of concerns.

There were many attempts to combat the radical deductivism and rationalismof Parmenides and his challenge to the validity of the senses as a reliable source ofknowledge. Parmenides was difficult to combat if for no other reason than that hisarguments about the unreliability of the senses seemed obviously correct. We allknow that our senses fool us and that our sense experiences are relative rather thanabsolute. After eating something sweet, sours taste much more sour. If two individ-uals can experience at the same world and see different thing, where is the truth ofour senses?

DEMOCRITUS AND EMPIRICISM, DETERMINISM, AND MECHANISM.

Although several thinkers opposed the rationalism of Parmenides, it wasDemocritus who seems finally to have succeeded in combating his position, although

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to do so he had to largely divide the psychological world from the physical. Dem-ocritus was a member of the school of thought called atomism, a view that held thatthe things of the physical world were made up of an infinite number of absolute unitscalled atoms. These atoms had different shapes, weights and sizes and created all ofthe forms viewed in the world by linking themselves together in various configura-tions. Not only were the inanimate objects of the world made up of these atoms, butanimate objects, including people, as well.

Democritus declared that some aspects of these atoms were perceptible direct-ly as a true indicator of the outside world. Heavy and light are properties of theatoms themselves, due to their concentration. Hard and soft are likewise due toproperties that are actually in the atoms themselves. All other experiences gained bythe senses, however, are internal to the individual and are not properties of the ob-jects in the world itself. Theophrastus tells us of Democritus' view:

Of the other objects of sense he [Democritus] says that they have no existence in na-ture, but that all are affects of our sense organs as they undergo the alteration whichbrings into being what appears to us. An indication that the aforementioned quali-ties do not exist in nature is that things do not appear the same to all living creaturesbut what is sweet to us is bitter to others, and to still others sour or pungent or astrin-gent; and so with the rest.[42]

Nearly 2000 years later these sensations would be called "the secondary quali-ties" and became important for Galileo, Descartes, Locke, and other moderns. Weshall return to this issue of the reliability of the senses after going into Democritus'theory of atoms in greater detail.

To Democritus, the outside world was made up only of atoms and void. Allthe things that we perceive are due to the interaction of these atoms with the sensoryreceptors. The interaction of atoms was the exclusive source of all phenomena. Theworld of Democritus ran itself. Naturalistic movement alone was sufficient; therewas no necessity for postulating a prime mover such as a god, or a vitalistic principle,that the universe was alive with spirits. The service of atoms was accountable forand determined all movement and contact between atoms. There is little doubt that

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and determined all movement and contact between atoms. There is little doubt that

Democritus must be identified as an exponent of "determinism," the attitude that ex-plains events in terms of antecedents. He is a "mechanist" as well, since physicalatoms to him are all that is necessary to account for nonliving and living things alike,without appealing to a vitalistic principle.

When applied to the problem of perception, Democritus's mechanical conceptgives us what may be called the first thoroughly psychological theory of the mind. Sensation and perception involve contact of non-bodily atoms with those of thebody. Their interaction produces an impression which spreads or reverberatesthroughout the body. An external object is perceived because its atoms pass in thisway through the organs of the body to the "mind."[43] The mind itself is made up ofatoms distinguishable from other atoms in terms of degree only, being of a sphericalshape, having greater rapidity of motion, and showing a "subtlety" of action.[44] Forthe atoms of the external object to make an impression on those of the body, the for-mer must possess a certain minimum strength. Although it was not understood inthis fashion at the time, much later this theory was conceptualized as the sensorythreshold (See Fechner, page 0000). The mind itself rises from the senses and there isno absolute separation of sense and thought.[45]

To Democritus the various senses reduced to the sense of touch because nomatter what the sensation - vision, smell, taste, or whatever - the atoms of the objectbeing senses were interpreted as having come into contact with the atoms of the bodyof the perceiver. Objects were thought to produce tastes in accordance with theirshapes: a sour taste, for example, being produced by atoms that are angular, thin,small, and winding.[46] Because the source of the sensation is at a distance from theobserver, vision demanded a more elaborate account. He said that the seen objectsends off images that mold the atoms of the air to the shape of the object; this air "fig-ure-copy" touches the atoms of the eye from whence it is conveyed to the mind.

This is a statement of the representative theory of perception which holds thatperception represents an object by being similar to it. A faint representation of theobject emanates from the object and is conducted to the experiencing element of thebody, the mind. Variations of this theory that the perception of an object is similar tothe object proved so appealing as to linger in scientific circles until the end of the lastcentury, despite repeated cogent objections. It may still be the view of the man in thestreet to suppose an object gives off some sort of emanation that forms a pattern ofsize, shape, and color, and that this pattern once impressed on the eyes is carried to

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size, shape, and color, and that this pattern once impressed on the eyes is carried to

the brain where this unchanged pattern is "seen."

If one assumes that there is a "real world," that is, a world that somehow hasan appearance we can directly experience, then Democritus's view would seem tomake our experiences illusory, that is, our experiences are not like the "real world." Sextus Empiricus, for instance, said about Democritus's view that:

"It is necessary to realize that by this principle man is cut off from the real. And in-deed it is evident that it is impossible to know what each thing really is."[47] In orderto overthrow Parmenides' argument of the unreliability of the senses, Democritusand the other atomists had to overthrow the faith in the reality of the sensed objects. There are no qualities in the outside world to perceive directly, with the exception ofweight and texture, the softness or hardness of things. One ancient commentatortells us that "Democritus says that color does not exist in nature; for the elements --both the solids and the void -- are without qualities."[48]

If this is so, then how do we come to any mutual understanding of things? Democritus tells us that "By convention are sweet and bitter, hot and cold, by conven-tion is color; in truth are atoms and the void.... In reality we apprehend nothing ex-actly, but only as in changes according to the condition of our body and of the thingsthat impinge on or offer resistance to it."[49] "By convention" here means, as Galenexplained it, "for us" and not according to the nature of the things themselves whichhe calls "reality."[50]

Democritus had noticed the relativity of sensory experience. He appears tohave noted that honey appears bitter to some individuals and sweet to others and de-clared that the honey was neither sweet nor bitter in itself. There was, instead, somecondition in the makeup of the individual's bodily structure that made a constantcomplex of atoms be perceived in a given way. Theophrastus tells that Democritussaid "that men `alter in make-up' according to age and condition -- from which it isclear that man's bodily state is a cause of what appears to him."[51] So according toDemocritus, nothing we experience is true. There are no qualities of the outsideworld to be perceived, so there is no "true" experience. Even more, different individ-uals on whom the atoms of the outside world impinge will perceive different things,depending on their own composition.

In the hands of Protagoras of Abdera (485-410 BC), this doctrine of the subjec-tivity of the senses was extended into the areas of judgment and knowledge. Pro-

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tivity of the senses was extended into the areas of judgment and knowledge. Pro-tagoras was a member of the group called sophists in Athens. He is perhaps bestknown for his statement "Of all things the measure is man: of existing things thatthey exist; of nonexistent things, that they do not exist."[52] This is clearly throughthe influence of Democritus' relativistic position.

With Democritus, Anaxagoras and Protagoras we return to the mainland ofGreece which was in the midst of a renaissance. They were all drawn to the court ofPericles in Athens. After the defeat of the Persians by the Athenians in 490 BC and itsresulting peace with Persia in 448 BC, the city state of Athens began to take on theglory that we associate with classical Greece. Pericles was the elected General from443 until his death in 429 BC, the period often called the "Age of Pericles." Periclessurrounded himself with intelligent, witty people, drawn not only from Athens, butfrom all over the Greek world. This was a necessity when it came to philosophicalthought since Athens seems to have produced no major philosophical thinkers beforeSocrates. This was the period of the plays of Sophocles and Euripides, the construc-tion of some of the most majestic temples of the Parthanon and some of the greatestworks of art of all time.

Due largely to Periclean democracy in Athens, the role of the sophists grew togreat importance. A sophist was a person who taught, among other things, properspeaking and techniques of debating and argument. They were simply professionalteachers and were paid for their educational efforts. A key to the sophist influence isthe Greek concept of areté which may be defined as "excellence." In earlier times theareté of a Greek citizen was based almost entirely on family ties, a typical aristocraticview of 'good breeding.' Under the democratic structures of Pericles' Athens, howev-er, areté had become attached to those individuals who showed skill and facility inthe functions of the law courts, where each contender had to argue his own case. Lawyers were not allowed. This excellence could also be demonstrated in the democ-ratic assemblies, the membership of which were determined by lottery of all male citi-zens. The literary education of Athenian youth ended around the age of fourteen, theremainder of their time before being called up to the required military service at theage of eighteen being spent largely in the learning of martial arts, wrestling, spearthrowing and the like. This four years has been described as intellectually fallow. Itis perhaps due to the search for intellectual stimulation and for areté that youth be-gan to be caught up in political and legal argumentation. Law suits became a passionfor Athenians. If one were to display areté in such settings, however, it was neces-sary to be able to argue well. To this purpose, the training in logic and debating of-

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sary to be able to argue well. To this purpose, the training in logic and debating of-

fered by the sophists was of great applicability. Protagoras was one of the most fa-mous of these sophists.

Protagoras and many other sophists taught, however, not only a set of skillsbut also a philosophical view of knowledge. Protagoras' statement, "Of all things themeasure is man," is a statement of complete subjectivism. If the wind feels cool toone person and warm to another, who is correct? There is no way to tell, Protagorasseems to say. They are both correct, because in their experiences is the reality, not inthe objects. Plato record's Protagoras' statements on this issue:

...[T]o the who is sick his food seems bitter and is bitter; to the man who is well it isand seems just the opposite. Now neither of these men is to be made wiser, for that isimpossible; nor should it be claimed that the sick man is ignorant because he believeswhat he does, or the well man because he believes otherwise. But a change must bebrought about from the one condition to the other, because the other is better. So it iswith education; a change must be brought about from a worse condition to a better;but whereas the physician makes this change by drugs, the sophist does it bywords....

But I believe that one can make a man who is in a depraved condition of souland has beliefs of a like nature good, so that he has different beliefs. These appear-ances some, through inexperience, call "true" but I say that some are "better" than oth-ers but not "truer." And the wise... when they have to do with the body I call themphysicians, and when they have to do with plants, farmers. For I maintain that thelatter induce in sickly plants good and healthy and true sensations instead of bad,and that wise and good orators make good things instead of wicked things appearjust to their cities. For I believe that whatever seems right or wrong to each city isright or wrong for it, so long as it continues to think so. But the wise man causes thegood things instead of the bad to appear and to be for them in each case. [53]

Through Protagoras' teaching, the sensory relativism of Democritus had be-come a moral relativism. The point Protagoras was trying to make in the above quo-tation was that laws of conduct are not absolute; they are determined by each citydue to their view of what is best for them. Laws of conduct are determined by social

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due to their view of what is best for them. Laws of conduct are determined by social

convention. The result of this thinking, however, was far more individualistic thanProtagoras seems to have intended.

Aristophanes, the great writer of Greek comedy, charged the sophists with"making the worse appear the better cause." The relativistic views of the sophists andtheir misinterpretation among their young pupils became s source of great concern inAthens. Rather than considering personal conduct ruled by the conventional wisdomof a given community, Protagoras' view was interpreted in an individual sense. Thatis, if a rule of conduct does not seem appropriate to an individual, there is no need toobey it.

Conservative elements in Athens reacted to what appeared to be the collapseof morals and respect for traditional values. The reaction was not only against thesophists but all the philosopher-scientists who had brought these new ideas toAthens. Thucydides, the author of the History of the Peloponysian Wars and Aristo-phanes were among this conservative element. Athens was not Ionia. There was,throughout the history of the city, an undercurrent of conservatism and orthodoxy. The movement was largely opposed to Pericles and the foreign intellectual elementhe had brought to Athens. The weapon used against these philosophers wasimpiety. A law was introduced by a zealot named Diopeithes against those "who donot acknowledge divine things or who give instructions about celestialphenomena."[54]

The first of the philosophers brought to trial was Anaxagoras who had taughtthat the sun was not a god but was a red hot iron mass. His position fell within bothcounts of the law. He was tried and, even though defended by Pericles himself, wasfined. Having had enough, Anaxagoras left Athens. There were attacks against otherteachers and thinkers, but the popularity of the sophists among the young continued,particularly after the beginning of the war with Sparta, the Peloponesian War. Thedemoralization of Athenian society by the plague of 430 BC and the ravaging of Atti-ca by the Spartans led to widespread lawlessness, loss of religious scruples and a gen-eral decline of morality among the Athenians. The sophists were blamed for much ofthis and several of the later disciples of Protagoras were tried for impiety and forleading the youth astray. The greatest of the thinkers who were tried and executedwas the very individual who had laid the basis for a refutation of the relativist skepti-cism of the sophists -- Socrates of Athens. This aspect of Greek history has been men-tioned here not only to demonstrate the thinking of Protagoras, but to demonstrate

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tioned here not only to demonstrate the thinking of Protagoras, but to demonstrate

how scientific and educational theory can have direct influence ( or have such influ-ences attributed to it) on society.

With the coming of Socrates, we can close the first major period of psychologi-cal thought in philosophy, beginning wit Thales of Miletus and ending with thephilosophical anarchy of the Athenian sophists. The dominant component of psycho-logical thought in this section has been the origin and source of knowledge. For con-sideration of emotion and motivation, however, we need to refer not so much to thephilosophers but to playwrights and others in Athens during the "Age of Pericles."

EMOTIONS AND DESIRES: IRRATIONALISM AND DETERMINISM.

The Athenian Greeks were interested in the nature of man's desires, but didnot add significantly to the view of thymos versus noos presented by Homer. Dem-ocritus held, for instance, that "Violent desires for one thing blind the soul to all oth-ers."[55]

The best documentation we have about desire and emotion in this periodcomes not from philosophers but from playwrights. Euripides (480-406 BC) is a goodsource for this "artistic" psychology. Euripides was the most realistic of the Greekwriters of tragedy, making less use of the religious and artistic convention of gods asbeing the source of the behaviors of humans than his predecessors, Aesiclus andSophocles. Euripides portrayed the actions of his characters in general as based onhuman motives. In his play, Medea, performed in Athens in 431 BC, for instance, Eu-ripides presented a situation where love has turned to hatred between Medea andher husband Jason, the argonaut. Jason had deserted Medea and their two childrenfor another woman. The hatred leads to a compulsion for revenge, even though thatrevenge requires her to kill her two children and thus bring grief and suffering onherself as well as on Jason. Even though she is able to reason out why she should notcommit the act and knowing that it will destroy her as well, the compulsion towardrevenge overcomes her reason. The last line of the monologue summarizes her real-ization:

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At last I understand the awful deed I am to do; but passion [thymos], that cause ofdirest woes to mortal man, hath triumphed o'er my sober thoughts.[56]

This is a classic representation of the battle between the rational and irrational as-pects of human motivation and reflects the conflict of thymos versus noos of Homer`sepic. Euripides has represented the conflict as an internal one and not determined byoutside forces. While Euripides still used the gods as dramatic devices in his plays,he was far more naturalistic than most writers of his day.

We also find a consideration of emotion and motivation in the writings ofThucydides, the historian of the Peloponysian War. In his history, Thucydides re-peats a debate between the Athenian military strongman, Cleon, and a citizen ofAthens named Diodotus. The debate has to do with what Cleon would do to the peo-ple of Mytylene, who, with three other walled towns on Lesbos had revolted againstthe Athenians in 428 BC. Cleon's solution was to massacre the population, thus pro-viding a lesson to any other cities thinking of revolt. Diodotus disagreed with the ef-ficacy of even the death penalty to prevent such revolts.

Now of course communities have enacted the penalty of death for many offences farlighter than this: still hope leads men to venture, and no one ever yet put himself inperil without the inward conviction that he would succeed in his design. Again, wasthere ever a city rebelling that did not believe that it possessed either in itself or in itsalliances resources adequate to the enterprise? All, states and individuals are proneto err, and there is no law that will prevent them.... Either than some means of terrormore terrible than this [death] must be discovered, or it must be owned that this re-straint is useless; and that as long as poverty gives men the courage of necessity, orplenty fills them with the ambition which belongs to insolence and pride, and theother conditions of life remain each under the thralldom of some fatal and masterpassion, so long will the impulse never be wanting to drive men into danger. Hopealso and cupidity, the one leading and the other following, the one conceiving the at-tempt, the other suggesting the facility of succeeding, cause the wildest ruin, and al-though invisible agents, are far stronger than the dangers that are seen.[57]

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So, according to Diodotus, Cleon's "example" would do nothing to discouragefuture revolts. He held to a naturalistic determinism, that humans are driven by nat-ural laws which can and do overwhelm their reason and sometimes lead them tobreak the laws of convention regardless of the penalties. Our behavior is not deter-mined solely by reason, but by the influence of other factors, including needs andpassion. This consideration of natural law versus human, conventional law in humanaffairs became an issue of great concern during the shakeup of Athenian society dur-ing the Peloponesian war. Thinkers began to turn away from the consideration of thenatural world outside of man and toward the inner world of human motivations andmorality. It is not surprising to find the two great `psychological' thinkers from thisperiod, Socrates and Plato, considering ethics more than problems of knowledge.

At the same time philosophers were the origin of knowledge, ideas of signifi-cance to psychology were emerging from another source - medicine.

HIPPOCRATES AND THE NATURALISTIC CONTRIBUTION FROM MEDICINEAND THE BEGINNINGS OF IDIOGRAPHICISM.

Medicine and psychology share an interest in the functioning of the humanbody and mind, and by the very nature of their art, medical practitioners must payattention to the individual. The physician is committed to an idiographic attitude -he must explain and treat the problems of individual patients. Treatment was to bedetermined by symptoms, not by some deduction from an abstract principle of thenature of man. This stands in sharp contrast to the nomothetic attitude of earlierphilosophers who sought general understanding rather than knowledge of particu-lars. But the psychology includes within its scope mind-body problems of a psycho-somatic nature. On these two counts, then, medicine is relevant to the history of psy-chology.

It is in the Odyssey of Homer that we first hear of Greek medicalpractitioners. They made their way through the land- coming into homes to sell theirservices to those who had use for them, and then moved on.[58] The sign of a highlysuccessful practitioner was the fame that preceded him wherever he went and thatlingered until his return. Asclepius, the first Greek physician of whom we have

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lingered until his return. Asclepius, the first Greek physician of whom we have

knowledge, was just such a person. His fame was so great that after his death he wasdeified with over three hundred temples erected in his honor. His priests jealouslyguarded their knowledge, passing it on only to those of the next generation whomthey initiated into its mysteries.

Although instances of surgical operations were not uncommon, the percentageof cures of blindness and of lameness reported in records that survive seems veryhigh, which suggests that many of these maladies had a psychosomatic basis. A fa-vorable receptivity to the suggestive influences of temple healing may have been dueto the reports of wonderful cues, and the use of rituals such as the wait to be re-ceived, the period of purification before admission to the sanctuary, the wearing ofspecial robes, and the drinking of sacred waters.[59] The peak of the treatment wasthe incubation, a period of sleep in the sanctuary. Several characteristic phenomenawere associated with this. The patient for example might see an apparition of a godand receive from him a message specific to his illness. He might have a dream inwhich a priest or a god would tell him what to do (an oracle), a dream foretelling thefuture (a vision), or even one in which the cure itself occurred. A certain amount ofrational treatment, such as occasional use of drugs, was combined with these magicalpractices, but surgical treatment, bleeding, and massage were left to lay hands. As aconsequence, the medical experience accumulated by the priests was almost exclu-sively "psychological" in nature. Faith healing, tempered by a bit of scanty scientificobservation, epitomized the approach of temple medicine.

Alcmaeon of Croton. Gradually, a new and more naturalistic and rationallybased medicine, relatively divorced from the supernatural and irrational aspects oftemple medicine, began to emerge. One of its founders who has already been men-tioned in this chapter was Alcmaeon of Croton, a physician who lived at the begin-ning of the fifth century B.C. Almost nothing is known of his life and only sparsefragments of his writings remain. Many of these fragments are of psychological andphysiological importance. After discovering passages from the eyes to the brain, Al-cmaeon concluded that not only did the brain receive perceptions of vision, audition,and olfaction, but it was also the seat of thought.[60] And because he considered itthe central organ of intellectual activity, Alcmaeon called the brain the soul. This washis way of naming the vital principle or source of life. Alcmaeon did not use theword "soul" in a theological sense and there was no necessary connotation of immor-

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word "soul" in a theological sense and there was no necessary connotation of immor-

tality. Soul was a convenient name for the central psychological agency. As a matterof fact, he did accept the immortality of the soul, for he considered it to be self-mov-ing, but his naturalistic description of it was divorced from his speculations about im-mortality.[61]

Alcmaeon made the advance of unifying the two entities or aspects of the soul,formerly localized in the head and lungs, into one entity centering in the head - onesoul, which performed all mental functions. Alcmaeon taught that the brain, whereall sensations are "somehow fitted together," contains the governing faculty of thesoul.[62] This brain is also the seat of thought; it serves to store and arrange percep-tions, and is responsible for memory and belief. Alcmaeon held that sensations reachthe brain through the medium of channels which start with the organs of sense. These passages were not the nerves as such, but, rather, channels for breath, thepneuma, mentioned earlier in connection with the thymos.

Thinking and perceiving were recognized by him as separate processes. Toput it in his terminology, Alcmaeon made a distinction between intelligence and sen-sation, claiming that man alone understands, whereas other creatures have sense per-ception but are without understanding.[63] This distinction between perception, orwhat is acquired through sensory experience, and understanding, which is indepen-dent of sensory experience, was to become a major concern for the Greeks, reachingits culmination in the formulations of Plato.

Alcmaeon's work on the senses was based upon observation of surgical opera-tions. Tradition has it that he was the first to undertake the excision of a humaneye.[64] His anatomical studies led him to the statement that the eye is enclosed in amembrane and is connected with the brain by "light-bearing paths" that join behindthe forehead. That these paths (the optic nerves) join, he showed by dissection. Healso observed that the eyes move together, not separately. The function of seeing, hestated, was brought about by the water and fire in the eye. Fire was thought to bepresent because when the eye is struck by a blow one sees light (intraocular light); the"water" of which he speaks is the aqueous humor. His theory attempted to combinethe concept of vision as a radiation from the eye and the idea that it is an image re-flected in the eye. Actually, these two notions are incompatible. The visual ray hy-pothesis, which concludes that seeing is an act of the eye, and the theory that the wa-ter of the eye, the aqueous humor, is a mirror that reflects objects cannot be recon-ciled.

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ciled.

In Alcmaeon's medical philosophy, health and disease are matters of equilibri-um - the first a balance, the second, a rupture of that balance. This equilibrium, orlack of it, rests upon paired qualities - wet and dry, cold and hot, bitter and sweet. Ifeach pair is in balance, we have health; if one quality predominates, we have sick-ness. Health viewed as equilibrium was to have far-reaching influence in the cen-turies to come through the Hippocratic doctrine of humors.

Hippocrates. Although Hippocrates was an older contemporary of Plato - hewas born about 460 B.C. - our information about his life is astonishingly meager. Afew facts seem clear if we trust the account of Plato, who wrote that Hippocrates wasa native of Cos and an Asclepiad, i.e., a member of a family or guild that could traceits origin back to Asclepius.[65] A number of medical schools had grown up inGreece in the course of the fifth century. The one of greatest fame was on the islandof Cos where Hippocrates had apparently studied. He became well known as hetraveled from city to city practicing and teaching. Although he had been a student atan Asclepiad school, no traces of Asclepiad mysticism can be found in his works.[66] Seemingly, he never recommended the use of temple medicine, despite his firm beliefin the healthful influence of the environment as exemplified in air, water, and place.

Over the centuries his fame grew. A host of legends about him developed. These legends would add to his already distinguished descent from Asclepius an an-cestry going back to Hercules as well. One account of his clinical acumen involveshis remedy for plague-ridden Athens. Because blacksmiths alone seemed immune tothe disease, Hippocrates suggested that fires be lighted in all public squares. Theplague disappeared and his reputation increased. By the time of Galen, Hippocrateshad become the prototype of all physicians.

The Hippocratic Writings consists of materials that today would be called text-books, papers, case histories, speeches, extracts, aphorisms, monographs, and manu-als; they encompass the entire field of medicine.[67] The Hippocratic Oath is proba-bly universally known. The Aphorisms, with adages concerning symptoms, diagno-sis of disease, and the art of healing, opens with its most famous sentence, "Art islong and life is short." It includes the history of medicine; the influence of air, cli-mate, and locale upon disease; the treatment of acute disease; epidemics; injuries tothe head; ulcers, and hemorrhoids.

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the head; ulcers, and hemorrhoids.

In his history, On Ancient Medicine, he states unequivocally his objection toearlier medicine: it depended upon the rationalistic method of the philosophers ofthe past who "first laid down for themselves some hypotheses to their argument,such as hot, or cold, or moist, or dry, or whatever else they choose ..."[68] This dog-matic starting point is false, he asserts. Medicine has a long-established existence ofits own as an art. Each physician starts by learning what others have learned andthen goes on to apply the empirical procedure. Of particular relevance to the historyof psychology is his paper, On the Sacred Disease,[69] which provides illustrations ofhis empirical interpretation of disease. This "sacred disease" was epilepsy, then asnow frightening to the beholder. The seizure of grand mal, the falling, the frothing atthe mouth, the loss of consciousness, can easily strike terror in witnesses to an attack. On regaining consciousness, the victim often complains of being buffeted by blowsfrom an unknown source. These dramatic phenomena suggested the intervention ofa spirit possessing the body of the sufferer. One must therefore admire the authorwho wrote sturdily and without compromise that "this disease seems to me to be nomore divine than others, but it has a nature, such as other diseases have, and a causewhence it originates, ... hereditary, like that of other diseases."[70] He indicates thatepilepsy is caused in the brain. Even more specifically he relates it to a humoral con-gestion in the brain that makes affected individuals phlegmatic, and which, in turn,brings on epileptic attacks.

The functioning of the humors just alluded to gave rise to the major theory ofindividual bodily function that was to dominate medical thought for many centuriesto come. Polybos, who was Hippocrates' son-in-law, is supposed to have written theNature of Man, the Hippocratic treatise concerning the theory of humors.[71] In pro-pounding the theory, this Hippocratic writer implicitly accepts the view of Empedo-cles that the universe is composed of air, earth, fire, and water, which combine to pro-duce all substances. These entities are unchangeable; water cannot become earth, norearth water. By mingling, they form concrete objects. Corresponding respectively tothese elements are the four combinations of qualities; warm-moist, cold-dry, warm-dry, and cold-moist. With this as its base, the theory postulates that these elementsand qualities take bodily form in the respective humors - blood, black bile, yellowbile, and phlegm. These humors make up the constitution of the body and causeboth disease and health. Deficiency or excess of one or another of the humors causespain. Some disorders are evidenced by the appearance of liquid excretions from thebody of the sick person, as from a cold in the head; or when the skin is broken and

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body of the sick person, as from a cold in the head; or when the skin is broken andblood comes forth; or, in the case of severe injury, where other fluids of the body be-come visible. Relatively direct reasoning would lead one to conclude that these flu-ids are of considerable importance in he economy of the body. To Hippocrates, thetheory of humors was a theory of disease. Only much later did Galen relate it to per-sonality, by adding to it in a relatively systematic fashion the theory of physical tem-peraments.

According to Hippocrates, therefore, a disease of an individual is a distur-bance of the harmony of the elements as manifested in the humors. Hippocratesagreed with Alcmaeon that cures depend upon restoration of the disturbedharmony. The humors tended toward equilibrium, a state to which they ordinarilyreturned because of the body's inherent tendency to recover from illness or injury. The concept of the crisis, or critical turning point, was utilized; it was the task of thephysician to assist nature by bringing his remedies to bear upon the patient at thesecritical times.[72]

The Hippocratic school was the first to relate to the brain the conscious life inits entirety, including the emotions.[73] It discussed this relation of the emotions tothe brain in specific terms. Overheating of the brain was thought to cause terror andfear, as shown by the flushed face. Conversely, when the brain is unduly cold, anxi-ety and grief result. Too much bile causes overheating; too much phlegm causesover-cooling.

Nerves had no place in the Hippocratic writings, and there was no distinctconcept of the functioning of muscles; in fact, muscles and tendons were often con-fused.[74] The coordination of parts of the body in movement was explained by thedoctrine of "sympathy," or "consensus," an immaterial connection between the partsof the body which brought about movement. Knowledge of the structural basis ofsympathy was lacking; it did not even occur to these theorists that such structuremight be sought

SUMMARY

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We began this chapter attempting to define psychological thought and came tothe conclusion that it can be described in terms of three questions: How do I knowwhat I know? How do I feel what I feel? How do I do what I do. Both in ancienttimes and in the present, these questions subsume most of what we would call psy-chological.

We considered on what the notions were that began psychological thoughtand the observations ancient humans could have made that would lead them to theideas they appeared to have about life and death.

Homer described much of the processes that underly psychological conceptsin his terms menos, thymos, noos and psyche, concepts that would influence thoughtfor thousands of years.

The real beginning of formal psychological thought, however, came with therise of naturalism and the philosopher-scientists and physicians of ancient Greece. They were concerned with natural rather than supernatural explanations of life andmatter. They were convinced that both the world and man could be understood interms of nature. According to Aristotle, theologians had treated science as mythwhile the philosopher-scientists set forth their theories in a demonstrable form. Lifefor Thales and those who came after him was not, as it was for Homer, explained bythe capricious whims of the gods. The Hippocratic writers similarly rejected super-natural influences in the causes and treatment of disease. A naturalistic attitude wasbecoming evident.

Thales and the other Greek pioneers were the first to pursue an interest in na-ture for its own sake - a puristic attitude. Before them, thinkers such as the poet Hes-iod, and, undoubtedly, farmers and sailors, had been interested in natural events. But their interest in nature must have been secondary, for it was dominated by othermore important utilitarian interests. Physicians also adopted a utilitarian attitude. Inpsychological matters this was to become, never the dominant attitude but, rather,counter-dominant to an emphasis on purism.

The philosopher-scientists advocated a nomothetic approach in their searchfor the basic constituent of the universe. In some measure the idiographic attitude ofthe physicians served as a balance. Both attitudes had their first champions at thattime, although, then as now, the nomothetic-idiographic distinction was a matter ofemphasis, not an absolute distinction. As was to happen again and again, a pattern

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emphasis, not an absolute distinction. As was to happen again and again, a patternof nomotheticism with purism, coexisted with another pattern of idiographicism ac-companying utilitarianism. Emphasis upon rationalism and a deductive attitude,that is, still another pattern starting with a general principle and then finding inci-dents, also seemed to characterize the way of proceeding.

This early scientific and philosophical thought was thoroughly qualitative inthat it took into account only similarities and differences in kinds or essences. It wasnot the way of thinking alone that prevented adoption of a quantitative attitude, thatis, a demand that what is dealt with be countable or measurable. This modern facetof scientific thought was also prevented by the early Greeks' inability to conceive of,or to apply to scientific problems, the mathematics at their disposal, and the absenceof any appreciable number of measuring instruments, aside from a few for astronom-ical calculations and devices. Attitudes would have to change before even the needfor such instruments would be appreciated fully. At any rate, it was not until thedawn of modern science that quantitativism became an integral part of scientific in-vestigation.

The experimental method was used very rarely. To the very limited extentthat they adhered to an empirical attitude, these pioneers may be said to have de-pended upon "nature's experiments," the phenomena of the earth, of the stars, and ofman that occurred naturally. Observation, as yet almost unaided by instruments,was the method from which most of our first scientific knowledge was derived. Af-ter all, the function of experiment is to direct observation, not replace it. Observationmay occur without experimental variations of conditions, and some of the Greeks cer-tainly were acute observers. Hailing them as the first scientists in the modern conno-tation of the word would be a mistake; they did not generalize cautiously from obser-vation and experiment. On the contrary, they proceeded by analogical reasoning toreach fantastically extensive generalizations. Sometimes there was a lucky hit, some-times not. Democritus, for example, allowed his reason to outrun his senses, havingno means of observation by which to verify his views concerning the atom. The firstinquiries about scientific problems nevertheless had been made. These scientist-philosophers wanted to account for the basic nature of the world, which they inter-preted as mechanical. The mechanistic theory of Democritus was the most significantfor the future - atoms differing only in size and shape, their contact accounting formovement.

Only the first groupings toward a dualism involving man and world or bodyand mind as separate entities was evident. The predominant view is exemplified by

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and mind as separate entities was evident. The predominant view is exemplified by

the lack of distinction between matter and what we today would call the secondaryqualities of matter. To the early Greeks, "heat" had as much reality, in the sense of ex-isting independently of the observer, as did the motion of the flames; to those whocame later, heat was an experience. On the other hand, the view of Democritus thatboth body and mind are composed of atoms gave a rather clear expression to amonism of a mechanistic-materialistic sort.

Many of the problems of importance to the philosopher-scientists, in point offact, were psychological in nature, provided one recognizes that the dominant con-texts of psychological study well into the modern period were conceived as subjec-tive. Contentual subjectivity is an attitude implicit in much of what has been dis-cussed - in dualism of soul or mind and body and in perception, to name two obvi-ous examples. Contentual objectivity as expressed in the study of behavior so charac-teristic of current psychology, received some incidental mention in the symptomatol-ogy of disease but hardly anywhere else in Greek thought.

This has been the merest sampling of ideas from the earliest period of record-ed psychological thought. We have come from a consideration of the thinking, feel-ing and acting aspects of human life as being primarily controlled by outside forces --gods or spirits -- to a consideration of control by natural forces, internal to the indi-vidual , which are more or less lawful. Knowledge, as treated by the ancient Greekthinkers has come from a secure belief in the ability to apprehend the essences be-hind the appearances with the Milesians and their followers, through a position ofsensation as being the basis of human knowledge, through an extreme rationalismthat held all knowledge inborn, through a relativistic view that held that the experi-ence is the only reality, that there is nothing "out there" we can know, in most cases.

All of the thought contained in this chapter can be viewed as the substrate onwhich the magnificent constructions of Plato and Aristotle's philosophy would bebuilt. It is with these two thinkers that the classical psychological positions becomecrystalized.

FOOTNOTES

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