Journal 0.f rhe Hirrory of [he Behavioral Sriences Volume 24, Orrober 1988

CRAWFORD, WILLIS, AND ANTHROPOLOGIE ABSTRACTED: SOME EARLY ENGLISH USES OF PSYCHOLOGY

CHRISTOPHER FOX

This study notes some early English uses of the word psychology, several of which predate the 1693 occurrence given in The Oxford English Dictionary. The study also raises a question about the contribution of such searches when they fail to consider historical contexts.

In a 1983 paper in JHBS, Hendrika Vande Kemp has uncovered several early uses of the term psychology (or a variant) in an English title, one which predates the former earliest known title, Friedrich Rauch’s Psychology (1840), by one hundred and thirty- eight years: John Broughton’s Psychologia: Or, A n Account of the Nature of the Ra- tional Soul (London, 1703).’ I should like here to supplement this finding, by noting several other early uses of the term, and also raise a question about the value of such discoveries.

First, let’s look at some early occurrences -one in a title, others elsewhere. In the later eighteenth century, Charles Crawford published A Dissertation On the Phaedon of Plato . . . To which is annexed A Psychology: Or, A n Abstract Investigation of the Nature of fhe Soul (London, 1773). A computer search of The Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue shows this to be one of only two works in English published between 1700 and 1800 with the word psychology (or a derivative) in a main title. The other is, as Vande Kemp indicates, Broughton’s Psychologia.

If psychology turns up in only two main early English titles, the word does never- theless appear elsewhere, in isolated texts. One of the more extensive attempts to track down the term itself has been undertaken by Francois H. Lapointe, in several papers published in the 1970s. In the first of these, the “Origin And Evolution of The Term ‘Psychology”’ (1970), Lapointe argues that though the word was “widely used” on the continent, the “first employment of the term psychology in Great Britain . . . would seem to have been among a group of Aberdeen philosophers toward the end of the eighteenth century.”2 In attributing the word specifically to George Campbell of Aber- deen, Lapointe is correct; for Campbell did use psychology in 1776.3 Yet he was by no means the first writer in English to d o so. According to the Oxford English Dic- tionary, the earliest written use of the word psychology in the language came long before Campbell, in a 1693 translation of Etienne Blancard’s medical dictionary, presumably his Lexicon M e d i c ~ m . ~ G. S. Rousseau accepts this 1693 date, though with some ap- parent ~uspic ion .~

Suspicion is justified, for the Oxford English Dictionary (as it turns out) is wrong. Ten years before Blancard, in Samuel Pordage’s 1683 translation of Two Discourses concerning the Soul of Brutes, Thomas Willis termed his study of corporeal souls (to us, of comparative anatomy and physiology) a “Psychelogie or Doctrine of the

CHRISTOPHER Fox is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, 46656. He is the editor of Psychology and Literature,in the Eighteenth Century (1987) and the author of a forthcoming book with the University of California Press, Locke and the Scriblerians: Identity and Consciousness in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain (1989).

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SOME EARLY ENGLISH USES OF PSYCHOLOGY 379

Three decades before that, an anonymous “Doctor of Physick” called the opening sec- tion of his Anthropologie Abstracted (London, 1655) “Psychologie, the nature of the Rational1 Soule d isc~ursed .”~

I do not wish to multiply examples, though other pre-1693 uses exist. Sometime before his death in 1688, Ralph Cudworth, for instance, employed the word three times in attacking the “vulgar psychology” of modern writers, most certainly Thomas Hobbes.8

A question I would like to raise in closing is this: Once we have found such ex- amples, what do we do with them? In past surveys of the word, this has often become a problem. After citing Broughton’s Psychologia, Vande Kemp for instance tells us, in one sentence, that though “the term itself is not anglicized . . . an understanding of its meaning by an English audience is assumed.”’ No further attempt is made to explain what Broughton meant by the word or how an English audience, in 1703, understood it. Yet, an examination of Broughton’s text lo and its contexts (in late seventeenth-century debates over the immortality of the soul and the possibility of God endowing matter with a capacity of thought)” shows an answer to these questions to be far from clear.

In his survey of early uses, Lapointe moves with similar dispatch. He quotes George Campbell’s 1776 use and then proceeds, promptly, to the next example.’* Perhaps too promptly, if we stop and look more closely at Campbell’s text, The Philosophy of Rhetoric. That, for instance, Campbell also identified “psychology” as one of “the branches of physiology” is not discussed by Lapointe; here and elsewhere in his survey, there is little attempt to analyze terms or isolate different historical uses of the same word. We moderns might feel momentary comfort, for example, in seeing another word we recognize, physiology, until we learn that “physiology” for Campbell includes “astronomy, geography, mechanics, optics, hydrostatics, meteorology, medicine, chymistry” [sic] along with “natural theology” or the study of “the Supreme Being.”13 What do we make of that? Can we continue to say that psychology is, after all, psychology, just as physiology is - well - physioIogy?

In other words, can we always assume that nominal identity implies conceptual identity? That, in this case, psychology meant the same thing to earlier writers it means to us? Naive as it is, this assumption seems to underlie - and undermine- some previous attempts at a history of the term. It has been said that “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Words, like cultures, are caught up in the dynamics of time. Future histories of the term might, then-one suspects- benefit by taking history itself into account.

NOTES

1. Hendrika Vande Kemp, “A Note On The Term ‘Psychology’ In English Titles: Predecessors of Rauch,”

2. Francois H. Lapointe, “Origin And Evolution Of The Term ‘Psychology,”’ American Psychologist 25

3. George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 2 vols. (London, 1776), I: 143. 4. Lapointe does note the Blancard translation in his subsequent paper, “Who Originated The Term

5 . G . S. Rousseau, “Psychology,” in The Ferment of Knowledge, ed. Roy Porter and G . S. Rousseau (New

6. Thomas Willis, Two Discourses concerning the Soul of Brutes, Which is that of the Vital and Sensitive

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 19 (1983): 185.

(1970): 643.

‘Psychology’?” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 8 (1972): 334.

York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 146.

of Man, trans. Samuel Pordage (London, 1683), p. 7.

380 CHRISTOPHER FOX

7. Anatomical1 Collecrions (London: 1655), p. 1.

8. James G. Buickerood for calling Cudworth to my attention. 9. Vande Kemp, p. 185.

10. In his preface (A4), Broughton claims that hi5 book will attack those who attempt to destroy “the Distinc- tion” between “Body and Spirit” or ascribe “all lo Body.” See John Broughton, Psychologiu: OR, An Ar- count of the Nature of the Rational Soul, In Two Parts (London: 1703). 11. For an account of the context of Broughton’s book, see John W. Yolton, John Locke And The Way of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), especially pp. 154-58. 12. Lapointe, ‘‘Origin,” p. 643. 13. Campbell, I : 143. For a larger discussion of Campbell’s classification, and the question of the history of the term in English, see Christopher Fox, “Defining Eighteenth-Century Psychology: Some Problems and Perspectives,” in Psychology and Literature in ihe Eighteenth Century, ed. C. Fox (New York: AMS Studies in the Eighteenth Century, 1987), pp. 1-22.

Anthropologie Abstracted: OR THE Idea of Humane Narure Reflecfed in briefe Philosophicull, ond

Ralph Cudworth, Treatise of Freewill, ed. John Allen (London: Parker, 1838). pp. 19, 20, 21. I thank