B O O K R E V I E W S

SPECIAL REVIEW:

REFLECTION ARISING FROM J. R. KANTOR’S SCIENTIFIC EVOLUTION OF PSYCHOLOGY, VOL. 1.

HARRYTHORNTON

University of Otugo, N m zealand

Kantor’s title is “The Scientific Evolution of Psychology”. He considers the subject in this first volume in relation to the following: Classical Greece, the Hellen- istic Age, the Greek and Latin Fathers, Neo-Platonism, Augustine of Hippo, and Thomas Aquinas. This represents a period of some 1800 years. It also has reference to three cultures viz. the Greek, the Christian, and the Islamic.

In the age of Classical Greece, viewed retrospectively, Socrates is dominant. He sets a limit to much of the thinking of the Pre-Socratic philosophers. This is especially so where their cosmological reflections come close to thought about Mind and value. One most important relevant passage is in Plato’s Phaedo at 97b-99b., which tells how Socrates, when he was young, was attracted by the view of Mind taken by Anaxagoras. Later, however, he rejected it. The same sense of a term being reached at this time by the thinking of the Pre-Socratic philosophers is reflected by Aristotle in Metaphysics Book I . The views of his predecessors are elucidated and assimilated in terms of Aristotle’s own philosophy, particularly in terms of his doc- trine of causation.

The generally prevailing view, then, is that with Socrates and Plato the centre of interest shifted from a more directly inquiring attitude about the world to the human individual and to associated questions about conduct and value. Kantor goes in the face of this. He wishes to make out that Socrates is naturalistic. He even tries to do this from the Phaedo passage already mentioned. I do not think that he succeeds. The Phaedo passage does not appear to contain a “psychology of Socrates” as he says. Socrates is rejecting Anaxagoras’s ‘Mind’ because it tends to exclude anything associated with responsible, purposive and personal action, and is yet claimed as a key principle for understanding the world. If we are going to talk about “naturalism”, the direction of what Socrates intends would definitely appear to be anti-naturalistic. In view of this, it is scarcely credible that he is propounding a “naturalistic psychology”. It is puzzling when Kantor adds that Socrates is formu- lating and rejecting the “physiological pattern of twentieth century behaviourism”. This position surely leads away from naturalism. The usual understanding of what Socrates is doing here is that he is advancing an intensely spiritualistic philosophy, involving responsibility for a divine soul. Philosophy, the love and pursuit of wis- dom, is a soldierly standing on guard over the soul and its interest as long as this life

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lasts. I do not wish to appear to be too closely committed to one interpretation of Socrates, but Kantor’s treatment seems confused and wide of the mark. If it is true, it requires much more to establish it than the sketch of the case provided by Kantor. I cannot myself accept it, as it stands, as true. Supposing it to be wrong, and ac- cepted by many on trust or through predilection-this would be regrettably damag- ing arid misleading. Kantor follows the same line in the chapter on Plato. This is, of course, to be at odds with the whole tradition of understanding Plato. It will be surprising if it goes unchallenged by classical scholars, but it is so alien to their accepted assumptions that it might be ignored, or dismissed with irritation and contempt-apart from the deplorable consideration that few of them are likely to read a work of some 600 pages about the history of psychology.

There is a problem in Kantor’s book about the attribution of “Naturalism” to the peoples of antiquity, although I agree that there are also difficulties about “Idealism”. In this, as in the influence of the attitude expressed in his title, “The Scientific Evolution of Psychology”, he is ‘in the toils’. His difficulties here require restraint from us, and the fullest efforts of our understanding, but “naturalistic”, “scientific”, “evolutionary” belong to a surprisingly emotionalistic variety of words nowadays. Historians have to be careful. Even “neutrality” isn’t much of a refuge! That Greek culture in the Age of Periclean Athens-or as a whole, for that matter-was unconditionally ‘naturalistic’ is scarcely admissible. As such, Kantor maintains, it was the matrix for the thinking of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Like Russell, in his history of philosophy, I understand, he makes great use of this idea as a thesis, which may indeed be considered structural in relation to his book. The thesis is that, within a culture, everything, including philosophy and science, be- longs to the context of that c u l t u r e t o its matrix, to use the magic-mathematical expression preferred. They vary together; thought is a function of the matrix of society-again the mathematical magic, for this is to say that thought is a function of a society in the mathematical sense. In particular, we are assured, this means that Greek psychology and philosophy were “naturalistic”. I n all this, the complexity of culture drops out of sight. That it contains a certain truth may, I think, be admitted. But what that truth is is not so easy to determine that i t can be taken for granted. Whether it can be so naively used in the way Kantor uses it is, I believe, much more than doubtful. A counter-principle is implied in the remark of Alfred Cobban to the effect that the development of philosophical thought is out of step with changes in other fields because it depends so much upon the accident of individual genius.

Again, to call the Greek epoch ‘naturalistic’ is a curious, rather uncritical pro- cedure. It might equally be called ‘idealistic,’ ‘sceptical,’ ‘materialistic,’ ‘super- stitious,’ depending largely upon where you take up your point of view. But isn’t it the case that this type of term is primarily used by those in opposition? Its context is polemical. And does it not also belong to our modern western epoch? These remarks index great difficulties, but one thing is clear. The historian will prick up his ears and be very wary, especially where he has a time span of 2500 years, several cultural epochs, as well as Greek, Latin and oriental languages coming into the picture. On such territory, the exigencies of truth will often play havoc with the finish of his literary expression when he comes to detail.

The Hellenistic Period covers about seven hundred years, from the 4th century B.C., to the 5th century A.D. When we try to imagine ourselves within it, moving

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forward into it, so to speak, the dominating, penetrating force in it is Platonism. Plato’s thought is the most enduring element in the social, political and moral re- lationships of human beings. When we survey it retrospectively, imagining our- selves looking back upon it from a standpoint like that of Augustine, the enduring elements of Platonism are impressive-all the more so on account of being under opposition. On North-African soil, Platonism achieved great influence. The Neo- Platonists, Ammonius Saccas, Proclus, Plotinus, as well as the later Arabian thinker, Avicenna, witness to this.

While the development of Platonism with such thinkers was mainly meta- physical, and while it similarly influenced both the Greek and Latin Christian Fathers, it also exerted through them profound effects in ethical and social philoso- phy. The Greek Fathers made major contributions to the articulation of the Chris- tian doctrine of Creation, which was most decisive in differentiating the world of Christendom from the Greek-Hellenistic world. It was to become a part of Christen- dom, so basic as to belong to those things which are taken for granted. It was to assume a decisive role in the seventeenth century development of modern, theoretical science. Much of its significance lies in its being Hebraic in substance and Greek in articulation. The Latin Fathers culminate in Augustine, whose City of God is a magisterial reckoning with the whole of Hellenism from the Pre-Socratics to his own day. Deeply influenced by Neo-Platonism, he intended, in great measure, to oppose it in terms of the ‘transvaluation of values’ represented by his conversion, but in terms of temperament and of past habit, he scarcely could. The moral, political and social philosophy of Plato found in Augustine, mainly through his City of God an incomparable vehicle for becoming an ingredient in Christendom. Platonism and Hebraism thus come within a synthesis.

For our present purposes, in being concerned with Kantor’s book, ‘Christen- dom’ refers to the period between the 5th century A.D. and the 13th century. The dominating theme is Power. In the conflict for power, the protagonists are popes and emperors. Prospectively, its dominating, synoptic mind is Augustine. Retro- spectively, he is Thomas of Aquino.

In the opinion of the present writer, Kantor shows no awareness of this view of the time. Neither does he seem to have any idea of its relevance to psychology. For him, the age of Christendom was a confused, barbaric time during which men were escapists in their outlook, seeking to compensate for the misery of being in this world by indulgence in the phantasy of a transcendent world. His moral is that psychology-as an Aristotle envisaged it, for instance, in another age-was botched. However, I do not think that his way of seeing this age is of much his- torical worth. I would hold that the view which I have indicated is nearer the mark. The point is, of course, that it is most important for Kantor to get this as nearly right as possible, because the thesis governing his procedure is that the way men think is largely a function of the kind of culture to which they belong. His attitude to the age of Christendom does not appear to be governed by an historical outlook, so much as by an attitude taken up through adhesion to a naturalistic line of thought. But what is really implicit in this naturalistic attitude? A posi- tivistic view of cause and effect as obtaining in physics and chemistry, regarded as sufficient to account for everything and dispensing with the teleological concept as illusory-anything like this is an anachronism in the mediaeval, aa well as in

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the ancient world. Or, again, the idea that the account of things offered in the natural sciences can be extended to account for the whole world, and that hypotheses of any sort different from this are superfluous-this, too, read into those past ages is credulous and dogmatic. What, then, are we left with? Eating and drinking, making merry, copulating with a minimum of restriction-but isn’t such naive vitalism near phantasy? Why should it be supposed to have any particularly decisive role for the development of psychology? The thesis that naturalism and psychology stand or fall together is not so very obvious.

In the prolonged struggle between non-worldly or spiritual and a this-worldly, temporal interpretation of European power and authority, Hildebrand or Pope Gregory VII (11th century) represents the extreme on the clerical side. On the other side, he is matched by Frederick I1 of Sicily (13th century), although Henry IV, the Salian emperor, ran him a close second. There were also emperors who threw their weight behind the ideal of European power inspired by the papacy e.g. Constantine (4th century), Charlemagne (9th century) and Frederick I (12th century).

The last-named died at Cilicia in Asia Minor, in 1190. He was on crusade (the 3rd). This brings us into contact with the east-west motif in the establishment of Christendom. Following the rise of Mahomet in the 7th century, the north African shore, the south of Spain, the eastern boundaries of Europe became a long frontier upon which hostility, menace and aggression against the religion, culture and society of Christendom might at any time arise. This remained so for a period of some eight or nine hundred years.

The recurrent need to be at grips with Islam is a factor which has an important function to fulfill within Christendom. It is a key to the four Crusades (logo’s, 1150, 119O’s, 1248). It is a key to policy for antipapal rulers like the Sicilian. And its bearing upon the understanding of the history of psychology is of the greatest importance. In our survey of the periods with which Kantor deals, Plat0 has followed us through Greece, Hellenism and Christendom. Aristotle was left high and dry in the 4th century B. C. when we took leave of Greece. Platonic writings they had over most of the time-especially the Timaeus. Aristotle, in our latter- day slang, went west. Only, to do it, he had actually to go east. Now, by the 13th century, Aristotle turns up, large as life, in a very important place indeed. His thought and writing appear basic to Thomas of Aquino’s massive, philosophical, theological summation of the position of Christendom itself. I n everything essential to Thomas’s handling of natural, as distinct from revealed, theology, Aristotle plays a key role-even if, as someone has said, he is turned into a hewer of wood and a drawer of water for Thomas’s purposes. Thus, it is Aristotle, and none but he, who emerges from the survey we have made. How is this curious circumstance to be understood?

Kantor’s chapters on Aristotle and on Thomistic scholasticism are certainly interesting and appear decisive for his first volume. The one on Aristotle comes fairly early (9th out of 20 chapters), the other is near the end (ch. 19). The sub- title of the Aristotle chapter is “Institutor of Biopsychology”. This makes prom- inent the surprisingly modern character of Aristotle’s contribution, epitomised by Kantor (on p. 57 para l), which is a procedure that I accept and welcome as the right view emerging from a straight-forward approach to the original texts.

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It also, incidentally, agrees with the view set forth by Ward in the first chapter of his Psychological Principles.

Now, from this position, open out fascinating prospects before th.e historian of psychology. Aristotle’s writings were forgotten in what was to become Europe. They did, however, find their way via the Near East and North Africa, into a position from which they were eagerly assimilated into the culture of Islam after the 8th century. Between the followers of Mahomet and the inhabitants of Chris- tendom there were some 700 years of ideological warfare, to use a term of our own day. The first 400 years of this are connected with our present purpose, for in the cultural front of this struggle, Christian thinkers found that they could neither think nor dispute with the Mahommedans except on the basis of Aristotle, so firmly had his thought been built in to the foundations of their main positions. Their problem was set them in these terms: argue on the basis of Aristotle and win with reference to Aristotle. It is in this context, I believe, that it becomes really intelligible why Aristotelian thought occupies the position it does in the massive system of Christian philosophy and theology elaborated by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. The historian has, then, to follow Aristotle’s writings into two utterly diverse cultures both of which have assimilated them. He has to see what happened to them in terms of the dominant ways of thinking in these cultures. And he has to have access to them through a straight forward approach to the writings themselves.

Christendom, with its conflict about spiritual and temporal power, compli- cated by the impact of the East-West menace, has to be kept clearly in mind. The points of Aristotelian contact have then to be determined and accumulated.

Beginning with Aristotle’s departure from Plato’s Academy for Assos, 347 B. C., we find him associated with the young Alexander as tutor a t the court of Philip of Macedon. His famous pupil was to become legend, even in the national epics associated with the development of the Romance tongues. The theatre of his activities was to be the Middle East and the Near East. Of Alexander, Tarn has significantly said that he was more than a conqueror, that he diffused the language and civilisation of Greece, and that to him the ancient world owed a vast increase of its knowledge in geography and ancient history. Greece, and all Greece meant, was thus spilled into the Orient, where many strange tongues were waiting to assimilate it.

Alexander succumbed to illness at the height of his career in Babylon, 323 B. C. He was succeeded by able generals, notably Seleucus and Ptolemy. Both founded dynasties. Their rule covered Babylonia, Susania, Media, Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, i.e. the Middle and Near East, and the North African Shore. Many of the descendents in these dynasties were worthless enough, but the founders and the initiators, helped out by an occasional better ruler now and then set a stamp, and maintained a standard memorable in history. Alexandria was founded by Ptolerny I. It was a commercial centre, a maelstrom of cultures, but Greece was dominant. Ptolemy I1 founded the famous Museum and Library. For this, the most valuable manuscripts were purchased. Here the Hebrew tongue and the Greek tongue mingled, when the Septuagint translation of the Scriptures was made. Here the native traditions of Egypt came into connection with Greece through Manetho’s History of Egypt.

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Aristotle had founded the Lyceum c. 335 B. C. Not long after his death C. 320 B. C., his personal MSS. seem to have gone missing. They did not come west. They must have gone east. How else do they turn up centuries later on the North African shore? Alexander has been well-nigh forgotten, Alexandria and its glories have been destroyed, Mahornet’s followers hold sway from Bokhara to Seville- and, lo, in the middle of it all sit people like Avicenna (Ibn Sina: 980-1037 A.D.). He is an Aristotelian in his philosophy. He is also well-versed in Neo-Platonism. He has written a De Anima of his own. He is arguing the point on the ideological front in Islam’s war with Christendom, hot or cold, through the translators and middlemen thronging the Spanish peninsula, ready with Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Latin or what you will. From the other side, people like Thomas Aquinas were doing the same. Only, they don’t seem to have been such good linguists. At least, they knew only Latin, for the most part. But Thomas, too, writes his De Anima, and he does it in the form of a commentary on the original De Anima, by the one whom he often refers to as the ‘The Stagirite’, viz, Aristotle of Stagira.

The trail of Aristotle, dropped as we proceed through the periods of Hellenism and Christendom, surprises us with its challenge, when in the culmination of the Middle Age we find ourselves confronting Aristotle. Islam leads us on to Aristotle’s trail, taking us back by a path which consistently skirts the marches of Christendom, and even of the greater part of Hellenism, via North Africa and the Orient, back to 4th century Greece itself, where we first parted company with Aristotle. He was indeed the pupil and associate of Plato, but he was more. With a distinctive phi- losophy of his own, and an equally decisive, if different, relation to Socrates and to the Pre-Socrates, Aristotle stood related both by heredity and by temperament to Medicine, and to medical practice, in a way which I want to suggest must lie at the roots of his biological approach to things. If this is so, the trail of Aristotle leads back into the history of medicine.

Kantor sees psychology beginning on the right lines in the 5th and 4th cen- turies B.C. In the hands of Aristotle it could claim to be ((a definitely objective discipline.” Thereafter followed-let us say for some 2000 years-a long aberration. Psychology departed radically from its status. Finally, it has very recently strug- gled towards an objective position again.

As a ‘scientific historian’ he is bent on tracing out ‘the evolution of the scien- tific aspects of psychology’. In the sixteen centuries covered by this volume only Aristotle stands out clearly and unambiguously as a psychologist in the biological orientation acceptable at the present time. I agreq with this. I should like also to observe that Aristotle was a philosopher with a definite philosophical system. When he investigated psychology, however, his philosophy did not stand in his way. Consequently, it does not get into his reader’s way. Rather, he seems to have felt his biological interests uppermost in his mind, and also to have remembered that he was the descendent of medical men. Accordingly, in the measure that we today go directly to him, with the help that classical scholars can afford us, we find him quite surprisingly modern and fresh. He had many followers both in Christendom and in Islam during the centuries, but for the most part they are not adept, as he was, in keeping their philosophical and theological views from com- plicating and obscuring the investigation of psychology. “In gross”, I think that this is true. I also think that there is much to be learned from them, and I have

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more than a feeling that Kantor thinks so too. There is much about his treatment of the subject though, which does not let this readily appear. With young, naive readers, I think this could be misleading, and that more might have been done about it. A t the same time, Kantor, “the scientific historian” tracing out “the evolution of the scientific aspects of psychology,” finds himself describing the de- velopment of psychology. In his own words, he provides “ a chronological coverage of psychological development”. The main impression one gains from this is that it is really dispensable. No doubt, it is history, but it is not psychology. Thus there has been biographical history, geographical history, topical history, i.e. ideas of one sort and another associated with psychology, but actually all this constitutes a big chore. It has to be dealt with in order to loosen out from it the gold of scientific psychology. It is to be feared that the harvest is, comparatively speaking, some grains, very few, if precious. This almost leaves one asking: “Is there any history of scientific psychology?” I also have the feeling that the answer is something like : Yes, perhaps-Boring’s Sensation and Perception. His History of Experimental Psychology is biographical, geographical, topical, chronological, anecdotal-but ‘scientific’? Well, may be, it is undeniable that he is a ‘scientific historian’, but how far is his book about ‘scientific, psychology? If we take the criteria as observation, experimentation, calculation, critical theoretical reflection, the answer of course is: It is wholly about “scientific psychology.” This is so, a t least, provided we accept one or more of these criteria. But, then, on the same procedure, the story of the development of psychology is also about “scientific psychology.” I have the distinct impression that Kantor would not want to admit this, and also that his naive reader would not understand him to be admitting this. If one insists that all these criteria must be found together, then there simply is no “scientific psychology” in the story of his whole volume-not even in Aristotle. As for Boring, only his Sensation and Perception will pass.

I submit, then, that it is Medicine, and medical practice, which has really supplied the proper context for the origination of Psychology. Aristotle was bio- logical in his approaches to such a subject,, and empirical in his method, because he stood in relation to this context, which was already old in his time. This suggests an acceptable sense of a term like naturalistic as applied historically to psychology. Its naturalism is laid down by the consideration that the body or living organism is central to its subject matter. This follows directly from the biological-medical context to which it belongs. This is a sense of naturalism independent of meta- physical viewpoints, which is an important point, because there is a sense of natural- ism which is metaphysical through and through.

Kantor takes pains over a quite extraordinary enterprise, via. to convince us that Socrates and Plato were naturalistic thinkers. Within the usual field of the study of these thinkers, he is certainly kicking against the pricks in this attempt. He tries to carry it off by using the idea that philosophies are functions of their social and cultural matrix, but this general idea cannot dragoon realistic-idealists like Socrates and Plato into naturalistic moulds. It occurs to me that there is more to be said for Kantor’s idea on the lines on which I have presented Aristotle. But Socrates and Plato do not stand in relation to Medicine as Aristotle does. No doubt it has struck Kantor as odd that in writing the hiatory of psychology over 1800 years, it should appear that, speaking bluntly, only Aristotle turns out to be

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recognisable as a proper psychologist. Perhaps this is why he sets out in so deter- mined a manner to give him the company of Socrates and Plato on the ground that they are all alike products of the one cultural and social matrix of classical Greece. It affords some mitigation of the ensuing, appalling spectacle of century upon century during which men appear to have been only confused, frightened escapers from times of trouble. Of course, this is hardly a view that an historian would accept of these ages. But it certainly gives rise to a question to have to con- template this immense, pointless clutter of stuff , with only Aristotle recognizable as a proper psychologist, unless we are going to resort to special pleadings and explanations. I am not at present raising the question whether Kantor has an axe to grind, or whether one can write history, if one has. I am placing myself unre- servedly at his disposal. I do not think that he can interpret Socrates and Plato as he does. Yet I do not think he needs to. I have tried to indicate the Aristotelian trail of psychology on his understanding of it, stemming from the matrix of medicine, and borne by the currents of the practice of medicine mainly outside Christendom so that even accepting his view-so very negative as far as the development of scientific psychology within Christendom is concerned-it still makes good sense, although it may be doubted whether it does not remain very partial.