One upon a time in the West

The start of the nineteenth century was not propitious for any form of empirical psychology since Kant, the most influential philosopher of the period, had ruled that the self which was the origin of all our beliefs and actions was entirely inaccessible to either the person themselves or by extension to anyone else. This was quite simply because the self, which was taken by Kant to be ‘pure self-consciousness’, was unable to reflect on itself, since this form of the self was ‘not…an object of experience’, but was a ‘necessary condition of experience’ (all quotations from Körner 1955:112). Thus neither experimentation as practised by the scientist nor systematic introspection (the empirical tool of the theoretician and philosopher) would be able to uncover this foundational self. All that one could do was to list and describe the nature of the given or a priori categories of knowledge about the world as ways of accounting for our knowledge about the world, and to treat the outward expression of the foundational self as a mere presentation rather than the thing itself. It is not too much to argue that attempts to overthrow this doctrine were one of the major driving forces behind much of nineteenth-century psychology, as we saw earlier in James’s treatment of the self.

The only form of psychology allowed by Herbart, who was Kant’s material and philosophical successor at Königsberg, was what he termed the ‘statics and Dynamics of the Soul’, an interesting if, in its historical context, somewhat bizarre attempt to model the collision of hard and soft ideas in the mind using contemporary mathematical methods (see Boring 1950 for the most complete account extant of Herbart’s formal system). What is more significant about Herbart for later German psychology, however, is his continuing use of an idea first suggested by Leibniz, then reinterpreted by Kant and incorporated into his own system of the a priori, that is, the notion of apperception. For Leibniz, apperception was the reflected-on version of the percept or the original sensation. In Kant’s hands, apperception became the permanent and omnipresent link between the inaccessible self (and hence its unobservable operations) and its external presentations or expressions. Thus reflection on a percept was, in principle, possible by the self, but the nature of its activity could only be inferred at best from the resulting and external presentations. The problem for the start of the century, therefore, became whether one could have a psychology consisting of the study of the pure self or ego, or one that merely investigated its products.

An important starting-point here is the work of the Scottish School, which is often linked to the earlier intellectual movement of the Scottish Enlightenment, including the School’s fundamental rejection of the views of David Hume, often cited as the movement’s crème de la crème. Hume is best known for his thoroughgoing empiricism and associationism, and its more radical extensions (in his case to account for causality), where associationism argues that human ideas are formed from the simple conjunction of external events in time and space. The Scottish School rejected such a foundationless approach to moral belief and action, and instead invoked the notion of a Common Sense, that is, a source of built-in and collective truths about the world which allowed one access to the ‘the commonsense of mankind’, whose ‘original and natural judgements’ were the ‘inspiration of the Almighty’ (Thomas Reid 1764; cited in Leahey 2000:178–80). Although Reid’s student DUGALD STEWART was more favourably inclined to Hume, the School nevertheless assumed certain innate powers or faculties of the mind, which An important starting-point here is the work of the Scottish School, which is often linked to the earlier intellectual movement of the Scottish Enlightenment, including the School’s fundamental rejection of the views of David Hume, often cited as the movement’s crème de la crème. Hume is best known for his thoroughgoing empiricism and associationism, and its more radical extensions (in his case to account for causality), where associationism argues that human ideas are formed from the simple conjunction of external events in time and space. The Scottish School rejected such a foundationless approach to moral belief and action, and instead invoked the notion of a Common Sense, that is, a source of built-in and collective truths about the world which allowed one access to the ‘the commonsense of mankind’, whose ‘original and natural judgements’ were the ‘inspiration of the Almighty’ (Thomas Reid 1764; cited in Leahey 2000:178–80). Although Reid’s student DUGALD STEWART was more favourably inclined to Hume, the School nevertheless assumed certain innate powers or faculties of the mind, which

One upon a time in the West