The Sciences of the Soul: The Early Modern Origins of Psychology

By Fernando Vidal

Fernando Vidal’s trailblazing text on the origins of psychology traces the development of the discipline from its appearance in the late sixteenth century to its redefinition at the end of the seventeenth and its emergence as an institutionalized field in the eighteenth. Originally published in 2011, The Sciences of the Soul continues to be of wide importance in the history and philosophy of psychology, the history of the human sciences more generally, and in the social and intellectual history of eighteenth-century Europe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780226855882

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

The Century of Psychology

In 1774, an article in a Swiss encyclopedia wondered, What science or art deserving of our attention does not have psychology as its foundation, its source and its guide? Indeed,

It is to ourselves that we relate all things, it is the influence of things upon ourselves that leads us to applaud or condemn them; it is therefore the relation of things to ourselves that makes them of interest to us; and without knowledge of the nature, faculties, qualities, state, relations and destination of the human soul, we can pass judgment on nothing, decide nothing, determine nothing, choose nothing, reject nothing, prefer nothing and do nothing with certainty and without error. Psychology is consequently the first and most useful of all the sciences, the source, the principle and the foundation of them all, as well as the guide which leads to each.¹

This triumphant passage in praise of the most useful of all the sciences is representative of what psychology became in the eighteenth century. It is also indicative of a state of mind. Enlightenment psychologists were convinced that psychology was the queen of the sciences, the science which laid the foundations necessary for action and thought. While the importance of self-knowledge and of the science of the soul as the most valuable and noble of knowledges was an earlier commonplace, it was redefined in the eighteenth century. Henceforth, knowing oneself would involve a new empirical science, increasingly called psychology, which corresponded to the methodological and epistemological ideals of the Enlightenment. This science was not new in the sense that it was created ex nihilo in the eighteenth century. It already existed within an Aristotelian universe in which it served as an introduction to the different sciences of living beings, describing the vegetative and sensitive functions, as well as, for humans, a relatively stable set of faculties (the external senses, the common sense, imagination, memory, and the intellect).

So psychology was not invented in the eighteenth century but remade.² Its object was transformed by the critique of Aristotelian frameworks: the soul ceased to be the principle of life responsible for generation, growth, sensation, and thought and was reduced to mind (mens). The science of the soul, often termed psychology from the last third of the sixteenth century, was redefined as the science of the mind. As an empirical science, it was to be based on observation and experimentation, dealing with the soul only in its relation to the body. It distanced itself from the theological and metaphysical discourses on the nature, origin, and ultimate end of an immaterial substance.

As regards the organization of knowledge, eighteenth-century psychology incorporated subjects from logic, metaphysics, and morals and positioned itself at the center of another uncharted field, that of anthropology, or the general science of the human being. The changes involved were by no means purely structural and lexical; on the contrary, they accompanied, sustained, and promoted psychological ways of understanding the human being and of grounding knowledge, from logic to legislation and from aesthetics to pedagogy. They were to propel humanity into enlightenment and enable human perfectibility to be realized. Such transformations also led to the creation of a new conceptual and social space, not that of psychology as a profession with its associated institutions but that of a discipline which broke with the Aristotelian scientia de anima and claimed a value and an autonomy of its own.

PSYCHOLOGY AS A DISCIPLINE

I speak of psychology as a discipline partly in order to engage with a sterile but ongoing debate concerning, essentially, the date at which psychology became a scientific discipline. Even if this question were relevant—and it seems to me badly framed—the answer would not be very important, and to prove this, I would anyway have to retain, rather than reject, the notion of discipline. I use the term, however, for a more essential reason.

Clearly, if the sine qua non of a discipline is its incarnation in a profession and in institutions, then psychology is not a discipline before the last third of the nineteenth century, when it was allegedly born as a science. Yet it can reasonably be considered to be one much earlier, according both to the traditional sense of discipline, and to the history and sociology of science. For discipline is the concept which has ensured the continuity and substance of the history of knowledge in the Western world.³ In medieval usage, disciplina could be synonymous with ars or scientia, sometimes with a connotation of rigor that restricted its application to subjects using demonstrative methods.⁴ Disciplina is derived from discere, to learn, which in classical Latin also designated the act of learning, of being taught or educated. It is what one learns from a master: seventeenth-century lexicons define it as Scientia acquisita in discente and informatio mentis a Magistro accepta.⁵ In this sense, what was taught from the Middle Ages onward as animastica or scientia de anima in the framework of physics or natural philosophy was certainly a discipline. But instead of leading to a profession, it was one of the preparatory courses for medicine, law, and theology.⁶

Early modern universities typically involved two propaedeutic cycles. The first included the arts of grammar and rhetoric, the second, the sciences of logic, ethics, physics, and metaphysics. Physics, or the science of nature (phusis) prepared for medecine. It covered, among other subjects, the vegetative and the sensitive soul, while the rational soul fell within metaphysics. Psychology before the eighteenth century was therefore comparable to natural history before the end of the sixteenth century: it was taught almost exclusively from canonical works (Aristotle’s De anima and its commentaries) and remained epistemically subordinate to other sciences, which it served in an instrumental and propaedeutic role.⁷ The social expression of this subordination was that psychology was a discipline but not a profession; there was no community or even isolated individuals who devoted themselves exclusively to the scientia de anima. As Johann Georg Sulzer (1720–1779), a thinker known for his writings on aesthetics, explained, the different branches of scholarship (Gelehrsamkeit) are called arts and sciences, and although the name of science is usually reserved for those concerned with general truths drawn from the nature of things, all may be called disciplines.⁸

A discipline, though, is obviously not reducible to its pedagogical function. It is also a social and intellectual structure characterized by the existence of scholars who devote themselves to it. It consists of a body of knowledge, and a set of issues, rules, methods, disagreements, and debates. It has a terminology of its own, a set of works and individuals associated with the field and recognized as authoritative, as well as periodicals, textbooks, and curricula. Last, a discipline may be linked to specific institutions such as faculties, departments, or societies.⁹ It was in the course of the eighteenth century that psychology developed the consistency and scope that made Kant think it should be promoted to the rank of separate university discipline (see chap. 4). The process of disciplinary consolidation ultimately required administrative decisions, but Kant’s observation, made in the 1770s, implies that the borders, contents, methods, and place of psychology within the sciences had already been theorized by that time.

A discipline may cover several different fields. This has long been the case for psychology, whose object, methods, goals, and key questions have always been defined in the most diverse ways. Psychology itself does not exist as a unitary and homogeneous entity. The singular may be useful for naming institutions and fashioning a professional identity, but one has only to open a standard psychology textbook to realize that the unity expressed in its title is, as Georges Canguilhem declared in the mid-1950s, nothing but a pact of pacific coexistence between specialists.¹⁰ Yet the American Psychological Association, the largest association of psychologists in the world, blithely explains that psychology is the study of the mind and behavior, and that it addresses all aspects of the human experience, from the functions of the brain to the actions of nations, from child development to care for the aged. It goes on: In every conceivable setting from scientific research centers to mental health care services, ‘the understanding of behavior’ is the enterprise of psychologists.¹¹ The vague and general nature of such a definition proves that psychology is nothing other than what psychologists do, and that any definition such as that of the APA is a function of the interests of the body that formulates it. As a result, and for precisely the reason that psychology cannot really be defined as anything other than what the people who say they practice it actually do, it has a strong disciplinary identity which resides in the individuals, texts, and institutions which act in its name.

On the other hand, not every field of study becomes a discipline. For example, while research into ocular vision was a coherent field in 1860s Germany, the attempts to set up university posts and institutes failed, and its research programs ended up flourishing within opthalmology, psychology, and physiology. The borders of a field or a research program do not necessarily coincide with those of instituted disciplines, and even a large degree of consensus on methods and core issues is not enough to constitute one.¹²

In short, speaking of a discipline, in the singular, is a convenient abstraction that does not reflect the processes involved in the production of knowledge and the distribution of resources.¹³ What Pierre Bourdieu calls a scientific field can be understood as a set of competing disciplinary programs rooted in particular contexts, which vie with one another for authority and legitimacy, as well as for the control of the social, political, and economic power which often accompany them.¹⁴ It is in these terms that one can analyze the creation of institutions and professions, that is, the establishment of formal structures within which scientific activity takes place and groups authorized to carry it out are formed. The scientific and the social processes generally go hand in hand and involve defining requisite training and accreditation procedures, and establishing hierarchies and systems of reward and legitimation. The production of knowledge is therefore inseparable from social realms, be they disciplines, professions, institutions, or a Republic of Letters.¹⁵

Psychology is not professionalized until the end of the nineteenth century. However, in the eighteenth century there were already individuals calling themselves psychologists, publications and teachings classed under psychology, as well as a forceful discourse that championed psychology and advocated it as the foundation of the knowledge system. Despite the variety of geographically dispersed projects which Enlightenment psychologists undertook, a common identity was emerging. Immanuel Kant could express the wish for empirical psychology to be taught by its own teaching body at universities in the 1770s because he considered its core issues, contents, and intellectual identity to be sufficiently developed to be granted an autonomous institutional existence.

There is additionally a third sense of discipline we must consider, beyond the discursive and epistemic aspects on which I will be focusing. For Michel Foucault, a discipline is not solely a branch of knowledge but also a set of social practices involving both the practitioners and their subjects or clients. A discipline fashions the experience and behavior of those who practice it while also dictating the practice of others. For example, the discipline of self-observation and attention to self and other to which late eighteenth-century pedagogues subjected themselves was aimed at fashioning the bodies and minds of their pupils. A discipline would therefore be a way of imposing power relations, which themselves make possible the constitution of knowledge.

Writing turned out to be one of the major instruments of discipline in this sense. A disciplined person is one whose world is that of the administrative or scientific document which in turn constitutes a new source of knowledge and consolidates a discipline. So it was with the late eighteenth-century physician who drew up tables of patients admitted to the mental asylum, or the psychologist who examined himself and others, noting down everything with the conviction that no detail may be deemed secondary. For Foucault, these techniques, which were designed to discipline bodies and minds, heralded the establishment of disciplines such as pedagogy, psychiatry, or psychology, whose methods and epistemologies they partly defined.¹⁶

How should we study the emergence and development of such disciplines? Writing a history of psychological ideas (including systems and particular notions such as imagination or attention) brings to light some of psychology’s contents. Examining spiritual or mystical discourses points to models of the soul whose links to empirical psychology can be explored.¹⁷Studying forms of sociability (academies, correspondence, master-pupil relations) confirms the existence of networks of individuals who identify with psychology. Analyzing curricula and university textbooks allows one to track how psychology developed within institutions, and research into administrative decisions, buildings, and staffing elucidates some of the material processes on which the institution and profession were grounded, while the reconstitution of practices and methods gives access to the personal and collective disciplines through which the science became instituted concretely. For the period covered here, all of these approaches are worth developing further.

The subject, however, may also be broached more obliquely. I will address the history of the concept of psychology from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the invention of a psychological tradition, the articulation of psychology with the general science of man and the history of humankind, the classification of the sciences and the psychological appropriation of logic, morals, and metaphysics, and, last, certain consequences of Enlightenment empirical psychology for the construction of modern identity. I will attempt to bring out the role played by the representation of the organization of knowledge in establishing the forms, contents, and borders of the sciences of the soul, as well as the variety of paths which, in the eighteenth century, led to empirical psychology.

The themes explored here may at first sight appear marginal in comparison with histories of psychological ideas. I will, morever, be less concerned with the epistemic cultures of psychology, that is, the modes of production of psychological knowledge through localized practices, than with the mechanisms by which psychology was recast and emerged as a modern discipline.¹⁸ Such mechanisms belonged to a cultural field that was broader than psychology alone and affected every system of knowledge and interpretation of the human being. This is why, in the wake of Jean Starobinski and his ideal of a history of ideas without borders, historical semantics will be particularly important to us, as will a Begriffsgeschichte and the perspectives opened up by the history of scholarship, or Wissensgeschichte.¹⁹ Such an oblique approach will help throw into relief certain aspects of the subject which could otherwise pass unnoticed.

A LONG PAST BUT A SHORT HISTORY?

Explicitly or implicitly, histories of philosophy have tended to identify the Enlightenment as the century of psychology.²⁰ This, however, has had the paradoxical effect of making eighteenth-century psychology invisible.

One often reads, even in recent works, that psychology was born as a science in the last third of the nineteenth century, thanks to Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig. Wundt founded an Institute of Experimental Psychology in 1879, the first of its kind, which immediately spawned others across Europe and the Americas. But the received wisdom that he was the founder of modern psychology, taking a purely experimental approach and rejecting philosophy, is no longer tenable.²¹ It is the post-Wundtian new psychology which seems to have instituted psychology as a natural science.²² It was called new because it reacted against the abstract principles of the psychological thought of the Enlightenment and was committed to empirical fact and the experimental method. For the many North Americans who spent time at German universities in the 1880s and 1890s, attending Wundt’s lectures and working in his laboratory was a sort of apostolic call to the ‘new psychology.’ ²³ There was of course some recognition that prior to this there existed observations, questions, ideas, and theories of a psychological nature, but these were relegated to a past deemed of questionable relevance to the history of scientific psychology.

For Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909), one of the pioneers of experimental psychophysics, psychology had a long past but a short history: Die Psychologie hat eine lange Vergangenheit, doch eine kurze Geschichte.²⁴ The English translation reads, Psychology has a long past, yet its real history is short—and that is the first sentence of his 1908 elementary textbook of psychology. In 1929, the American psychologist and historian of psychology Edwin Boring (1886–1968) noted that histories of psychology treat the new psychology as the end point of centuries of philosophical reflection on the mind and focus on the discipline’s past at the expense of its short scientific history.²⁵ Boring, who saw Wundt as the first person who deserved the label psychologist, sought rather to influence the future path of the discipline by stressing its autonomy and the model of the laboratory as an ideal of scientificity.²⁶ Ebbinghaus’s phrase, repeated at second and third hand, still seems to possess some incantatory power, as though merely pronouncing it were enough to convey an atemporal idea of science, justify the peri–odization and contents of historical narratives, and legitimate the choice of antecedents, precursors, and foundations.²⁷ It is invoked in histories that assimilate the prescientific or philosophical past of psychology to a vast body of psychological ideas—ranging from Plato or Aristotle up to the modern period inaugurated by Descartes, and extending into the sensualist, empiricist and associationist philosophies of Locke, Condillac, and the Scottish philosophers of the Enlightenment. When philosophical speculation on the soul is abandoned, so the story goes, the empirical approach can be instituted, from which in the nineteenth century can emerge a psychology whose history may at last be written.

Determining what belongs to the history of a particular science is a general problem for the history of science.²⁸ In the case of psychology, the narrative of its past generally bears on ideas, contexts, individuals, and events deemed to have been relevant for its future; it is the discipline as it stands at present which determines the elements of the narrative. This is particularly so for works, especially textbooks, which seek to narrate the history of psychology (with both nouns in the singular), while their contents reproduce, with very minor changes, their own previous versions. Such an approach is especially prejudicial to the eighteenth century, owing to certain issues that make it distinctive in the discipline’s prehistory, particularly relating to the history of historiography. For example, whereas in the late nineteenth century historical narratives about psychology served to legitimate the chronicler’s notion of what psychology ought to be, earlier ones—the first of which appeared in the eighteenth century—were instrumental in actually fashioning the discipline.

At all events, reducing Enlightenment psychology to the psychological ideas of the century is in all respects misleading and a sort of historiographi–cal illusion.²⁹ This is, in the first place, quite simply because a science of the soul called psychology was already in existence before the eighteenth century. While we should be attentive to specificities of time and place, and while there was not one psychology and hence no single narrative of its history, we can nevertheless make some generalizations: Empirical psychology designated a science which was grounded in experience and whose object was the soul united with the body. By definition it excluded the soul as an explanatory principle and tended to account for the operations of thought in terms of sensation rather than the intrinsic properties of some immaterial mind. This science was of course not empirical or scientific if these adjectives imply quantitative laboratory research, but if viewed in context and judged by its own criteria, psychology in the eighteenth century must indeed be regarded as part of the natural history of the human being.

The opening lines of the Essay on Psychology, published in 1754 by the Genevan Charles Bonnet (1720–1793), formulate the core principle of Enlightenment psychology: We know the soul only through its faculties; we know these faculties only through their effects. These effects manifest themselves through the intermediary of the body.³⁰ In the wake of John Locke (1632–1704), the impossibility of knowing substances in themselves was a given. Consequently, empirical research could address the manifestations of the soul as observed in oneself or in others by means of the internal and the external senses. That is why Enlightenment psychology explicitly abandoned the problem of the union of body and soul and concentrated on the interaction between them; its frequent neuropsychological orientation reflected the belief that the nerve was the intermediary between the the two substances. As a result, and despite its speculative appearance, Enlightenment psychology was clearly rooted in a natural–philosophical perspective. This is shown not only by its refusal to treat the soul as a metaphysical or theological concept but also by its appeal to observation, experience, experimentation, and introspection, as well as by its attempts to apply mathematical reasoning or physical models to mental phenomena, and to use medical knowledge, anatomy, and physiology to interpret the relations between the body and the soul.

What then of the century of psychology? Is it part of the past or the history of the discipline? This question must be raised, since the idea that the Enlightenment is the century of psychology immediately encounters the paradox that general works on the Enlightenment, on the history of science at the time and the history of psychology as a whole, hardly touch on what went by the name of psychology.³¹ We must examine, then, what is understood by this term, as well as the historiographical and interpretive choices determining its use.

When psychology designates the whole range of psychological ideas or concepts, it effectively coincides with much of Enlightenment culture. Psychological subject matter could be found in a wide range of fields, from the natural sciences, medicine, theology, moral philosophy, metaphysics, and logic to literary works, travel writing, pedagogy, and child–rearing manuals, treatises on aesthetics, legislation, and politics, as well as dictionaries and grammars. One can then pick and choose what one calls psychological, according to one’s preconceived idea of psychology. While the notion of a century of psychology, as advanced by the major surveys of the Enlightenment, finds its confirmation here, such an approach can lead only to inconsistent results strongly colored by individual choices—which tend to exclude precisely what was actually called psychology.

General histories such as the ones I am referring to here assimilate psychology to theories of the functioning of the mind, of the acquisition of knowledge, or of empirical modes of thought that were inspired to various degrees by John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). In the 1930s, Carl L. Becker described the Essay as the psychological gospel of the century;³² Ernst Cassirer explained how psychology provided the foundations for the theory of knowledge and how the psychological origin of ideas became a logical criterion;³³ Paul Hazard noted that Locke drew the eighteenth century’s attention to the most necessary and delicious of games: psychology.³⁴ For Isaiah Berlin, the major intellectual project of the Enlightenment was precisely the transformation of philosophy into some kind of scientific psychology.³⁵ Peter Gay, writing in the late 1960s, argued that psychology was the foremost Enlightenment human science.³⁶ Georges Gusdorf considered Locke to be the first great name in psychology, despite not being a psychologist in the modern sense of the term.³⁷ And Roy Porter, in the early 1990s, maintained that the objects of what we call psychology could be found in moral philosophy, metaphysics, and the theory of the understanding, and that, second only to Locke’s critique of innate ideas, psychology emerged as the all–important human science and the key to mankind’s advancement.³⁸

Within this kind of framework, investigating eighteenth–century psychology amounts to selecting the highlights from empirical and sensualist philosophies, and documenting the many applications of the analytic method derived from Locke. The analytic method, as defined by Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715–1780) in his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746), consists in composing and decomposing our ideas to create new combinations and to discover, by these means, their mutual relations and the new ideas they can produce.³⁹ Condillac notes that, thanks to analysis, which does not aim to study the nature of the mind but only to know its operations, we determine the extent and limits of our knowledge and endow human understanding with new life.⁴⁰ He was echoed by the philosophes, who were convinced that the systematic application of analysis would enable the sciences to be reformed and the enlightened nature of the century to be secured. A typical statement of this conviction, full of confidence and enthusiasm, can be found in the exclamations of Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), a professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh: How many are the threads which, even in Catholic countries, have been broken by the writings of Locke! How many still remain to be broken, before the mind of man can recover the moral liberty which, at some future period, it seems destined to enjoy!⁴¹ In fields as disparate as political economy, aesthetics, education, or legislation, the process of enlightenment seemed to depend on knowledge of the nature and psychology of man. Metaphysics too was to undergo a psychological reformulation, understood as the implementation of Lockean principles.

Condillac, who is often seen as the Enlightenment’s foremost psychologist, declared that since the analytic method constitutes the foundation of every science, it should be termed metaphysics. But not even such a metaphysics could be called the first science:

For will it be possible to analyze all our ideas adequately if we do not know what they are and how they are formed? We must discover first of all how they originate and develop. But the science concerned with this object has as yet no name, since it is so recent. I would call it psychology, if I only knew of some good work by that name.⁴²

Condillac rejected the term because of his view of the history of discussions about the origins of knowledge: Immediately after Aristotle comes Locke, since the other philosophers who have written on this subject do not count.⁴³ Aristotle had established the principle of the sensory origin of knowledge without developing it, and that was how things had stood until Locke. Condillac’s summary brushes aside two thousand years of a futile science, which deals with nothing and leads nowhere. Since we progress from particular ideas to general notions, the latter cannot be the object of the first science.⁴⁴ From Aristotle to Locke, says Condillac, human knowledge was approached deductively, starting with abstract concepts, particularly the soul. Insofar as the existing Psychologies illustrated such an approach, they, and their titles, were to be dismissed.

Other philosophes took up the same argument with a different inflection. The Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794), who was fiercely anticlerical, wondered what philosophy monks will teach—the art of Scholastic quibbling, what the textbooks call natural theology and psychology, that is to say, theologians’ daydreams on the nature of God and of the soul.⁴⁵ Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) preferred the term ideology (which he invented to designate the analysis of thought) to psychology because, he explained, the latter meant science of the soul and evoked a vague quest for first causes.⁴⁶ At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Dominique–Joseph Garat, who taught at the écoles normales created during the French Revolution, regarded the word psychology as unfit to replace metaphysics, with its obscure connotations. Indeed:

[Psychology] gains almost no clarity in our language, since it is associated with almost none of its words: etymologically, it goes back to the idea of the soul rather than to that of the operations of the human mind; it would suggest that a type of knowledge which, by its very nature, should become universal and known to all, is a separate science.⁴⁷

Garat preferred to emulate Locke and teach the analysis of the understanding. At all events, it was necessary to get rid of metaphysics, that benighted science of the old schools which plunged into obscurity even the simplest and clearest ideas.⁴⁸ This critique was leveled at the notion of the soul almost to the same extent as at syllogisms and Latin.

Writing at the end of the Enlightenment, Condorcet, Destutt de Tracy, and Garat simply applied post–Lockean commonplaces to psychology, seen as nothing but theologico–Scholastic speculations on the nature of the soul. One need only recall the frequent references of Voltaire (1694–1778) to the subject, from the Philosophical Letters (1734) to the Dialogues of Euhe–merus (1777), for example: The word ‘soul’ is one of those words which everyone uses but does not understand.⁴⁹ We cannot understand it because we have no idea of it, and we have no idea of it because we cannot trace its referent back to sense impressions. If the soul exists, it cannot be known, and insofar as we can attribute thinking and feeling to the body, the soul is a superfluous concept. Yet, Voltaire observed, raisonneurs on the subject have never been lacking. Happily, after so many writers of the romance of the soul, there came a wise man who modestly recounted its history: Locke has expounded to man the nature of human reason just as a fine anatomist explains the powers of the body.⁵⁰ As the authors of the Preliminary Discourse of the Encyclopédie subsequently claimed, Locke reduced metaphysics to an experimental physics, a natural science of the soul. The following extract from that Discourse, so often considered emblematic of Enlightenment thought, condenses epistemological principles and methodological aspirations shared by most eighteenth–century psychologists, from militant materialists to convinced Christians:

Locke undertook and successfully carried through what Newton had not dared to, or perhaps would have found impossible. It can be said that he created metaphysics, almost as Newton had created physics. He understood that the abstractions and ridiculous questions which had been debated up to that time and which seemed to constitute the substance of philosophy were the very part most necessary to proscribe. He sought the principal causes of our errors in those abstractions and in the abuse of signs, and that is where he found them. In order to know our soul, its ideas, and its affections, he did not study books, because they would only have instructed him badly; he was content with probing deeply into himself, and after having contemplated himself, so to speak, for a long time, he did nothing more in his treatise, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, than to present mankind with the mirror in which he had looked at himself. In a word, he reduced metaphysics to what it ought to be: the experimental physics of the soul—a very different kind of physics from that of bodies, not only in its object, but in its way of viewing that object. In the latter study we can, and often do, discover unknown phenomena. In the former, facts as ancient as the world exist equally in all men. . . Reasonable metaphysics can only consist, as does experimental physics, in the careful assembling of all these facts, in reducing them to a corpus of information, in explaining some by others, and in distinguishing those which ought to hold the first rank and serve as foundations.⁵¹

In the same vein, but half a century later, the physician and philosopher Pierre–Jean–Georges Cabanis (1757–1808) maintained that once the study of the mind had been separated from that of the body, it had been obscured by vague metaphysical hypotheses. As a result, for Cabanis, there was no solid basis, no fixed point to which one might attach the results of observation and experience.⁵² In a text from 1809, he wrote that what is still today called metaphysics bears no relation to what once went by that name, claiming that "since Locke, Helvetius, and Condillac, metaphysics is but the knowledge of the operations of the human mind, the formulation of the rules which man must follow in his search after truth . . . in a word, the science of methods; methods founded on the knowledge of the faculties of man."⁵³

Such statements, of which one could cite many more examples, illustrate the philosophes’ use of Locke and the transformation of the metaphysical problem of the soul into the analytic question of the origin of human knowledge—a transformation to which some authors went so far as to attribute the freedom of nations: Almost at its birth, Garat confided to his pupils, the analytic art of the understanding discovered human rights; it is because this art existed that France is free, and that Europe should be free.⁵⁴ At the opposite end of the political spectrum, Count Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) referred to the same events but blamed the French for having trusted Locke and let themselves be voluntarily imprisoned— LOCKED in fast, as he put it.⁵⁵ He attributed to Locke the same position and function, albeit with a negative value, as did the Encyclopédie, Garat, Cabanis, or a Christian liberal like Madame de Staël (1766–1817) in On Literature Considered in Its Relationship to Social Institutions (1800, pt. 2, chap. 6). They all observed that Scholastic metaphysics had given way to the analytic study of intellectual operations.

This is the sense in which the Age of Enlightenment was the century of psychology. The expression also refers to the reformulation in psychological terms of important areas of scholarly culture, from logic to education, from the theory of knowledge to morals, or from religion to aesthetics.⁵⁶ The term psychology, however, was rarely used to designate the discipline which was taking shape under that name, particularly in Germany, and which was being embodied in books, periodicals, articles, teachings and a historiography.⁵⁷

* * *

While clearly no study on eighteenth–century psychology can limit itself to the sources and individuals who actually employed the term psychology, it is important, in order not to offer an idiosyncratic history of psychological ideas, to take into account what actually bore that name. This is why I will essentially confine myself to the categories used by the historical protagonists themselves. Such a choice has lexical, conceptual, and social aspects, since it adopts the definitions of the time and establishes its subject matter within a psychological field largely defined by the titles of contemporary works, the rubrics of periodicals, bibliographies, and biographies, as well as self–descriptions by historical protagonists.

This way of approaching psychology in the eighteenth century sets the received historiography of the discipline at a critical distance. It also supposes a certain disintegration of the very concept of enlightenment.⁵⁸ The great works of the 1930s, by Ernst Cassirer, Carl L. Becker, and Paul Hazard, gave the Enlightenment a unity which served to defend reason against totalitarian utopias. This unifying model came apart in the 1970s, and the positive heritage of the Enlightenment began to be contested. The dissemination of works such as Dialectic of Enlightenment was indisputably a factor in this.⁵⁹ The resultant fragmentation did not, however, always bring with it a critique of the Enlightenment. But it did mean that, broadly, intellectual history was replaced by cultural history,⁶⁰ with prominence increasingly given to local specificities and national or confessional differences, to the exploration of the darker, irrational or authoritarian, sides of the Age of Reason, to research into social and material aspects which had not hitherto been part of the picture, and to the discovery of antiphilosophe or other currents which played a part in the century’s processes of enlightenment.

As the Enlightenment’s coherence dissolved, so the concept of enlightenment lost historiographical usefulness or authority, and indeed it frequently has, though most often implicitly, been reduced to a purely chronological category.⁶¹ This process, however, has considerably enriched the field of eighteenth–century studies, especially in the history of science.⁶² The question What is enlightenment? has given way to the more active form, What does to enlighten mean?⁶³ The challenge is now to understand the Enlightenment in its heterogeneity, and to reformulate the question of its identity in the light of historically situated interpretations, and the diverse meanings of the verb to enlighten. Rather than analyze a spirit of the Enlightenment whose signs could be identified, scholars have begun examining the practices, values, experiences, and characteristics common to individual and collective protagonists. This method has produced different notions of the Enlightenment, each being simply the substantivized form of the adjective qualifying those who considered themselves, or were considered by others, to be enlightened by virtue of a certain way of life, or owing to certain ideals or philosophical and anthropological principles.

However, in the case of psychology, it is impossible to think of the Enlightenment as a web of practices without discourse.⁶⁴ As a discipline, eighteenth–century empirical psychology had little substance outside texts. Even if it involved—and, according to psychologists, really practiced—techniques of self–observation and observation of others, and even if it did aim at improving mankind and actually reforming minds and society, it was nevertheless embodied principally in the discourses which instituted it. These discourses do not correspond exactly to those on which the century of psychology is based, and provide a different image of the psychology of the century. In order to describe this psychology, let us begin at the beginning, with the history of its proper name.

CHAPTER TWO

Psychology in the Sixteenth Century: A Project in the Making?

The word psychologia appeared in the last third of the sixteenth century in the writings of Protestant Scholastics, and was put into circulation through philosophy textbooks used in their universities.¹ The use of the term and its dissemination were linked, from the Reformation onward, to the development of the cursus philosophicus as a didactic genre, and to a philosophical climate marked by the revival of Artistotelianism and the spread of Ramist doctrines of method.² How are we to interpret this neologism? Was it a new name for an old idea, or the sign of a novel epistemic enterprise? The question has received contradictory responses, but it is worth dwelling on, since it is relevant to the history of ideas and of psychological knowledge, as well as to psychology as a discipline. The name given to a field of knowledge is a factor in the processes through which the field acquires an identity, limits, and contents of its own. The name partially determines the vocabularies developed, the texts considered authoritative, the links to other disciplines, and the place assigned to the field within the general organization of knowledge. Since, despite the absence of the term at the time, we discuss the psychology of the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance in a loose and unsystematic way, and since, on the contrary, we often discuss Enlightenment psychology without examining what really bore that name, we will start by outlining the lexical and semantic history of the term, in order to identify its uses and circumscribe its