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Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 36 (2005) 55–94

Biological andBiomedical Sciences

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The history of psychological categories

Roger Smith

119021 Moscow, Obolenskii per. 2–66, Russian Federation

Received 27 January 2004; received in revised form 18 June 2004

Abstract

Psychological terms, such as �mind�, �memory�, �emotion� and indeed �psychology� itself,have a history. This history, I argue, supports the view that basic psychological categories refer

to historical and social entities, and not to �natural kinds�. The case is argued through a wide

ranging review of the historiography of western psychology, first, in connection with the field�sextreme modern diversity; second, in relation to the possible antecedents of the field in the

early modern period; and lastly, through a brief introduction to usage of the words �soul�,�mind�, �memory� and �emotion�. The discussion situates the history of psychology within a

large historical context, questions assumptions about the continuity of meaning, and draws

out implications for the philosophical and social constitution of �psychology� and �the psycho-logical� from the existing literature. The historical evidence, this paper concludes, does not

support the conventional presumption that modern psychological terms describe �naturalkinds�.� 2005 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Keywords: Psychology; Historiography; Natural kinds; Mind; Memory; Emotion

1. Introduction

The question of the historical or natural constitution of basic categories in the sci-ences is of great importance to historians and philosophers alike. It is certainly

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E-mail address: [email protected] (R. Smith).

mailto:[email protected] (R. Smith).

56 R. Smith / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 36 (2005) 55–94

central in understanding the nature of psychological knowledge. There is no doubt

that the majority of scientists, in this respect close to common opinion, take it for

granted that terms such as �mind�, �perception�, �memory� and �emotion� denote nat-

ural kinds.1 In the same way, people think it unproblematic to use �psychology� todenote a natural class of events in the world, though in this case the word clearly alsodenotes a discipline or occupation.

Common usage, however, skates over a number of questions of great range and

depth. At their centre is the complex issue of reflexivity. Many writers on psychol-

ogy, as well as philosophy and the social sciences, have drawn attention to this,

which is a family of issues rather than one delimited topic.2 By reflexivity, I invoke

two claims. Firstly, that it is always possible, in any reasoning or body of thought, to

find presumptions which that reasoning or body of thought cannot itself justify.

There are always unfounded presumptions—in the claim which I am now makingas in any other—and we can, �reflexively�, make these assumptions the focus of in-

quiry.3 Secondly, that knowledge of people changes the subject matter; whatever

knowledge �touches it immediately causes to move�.4 When we develop our knowl-

edge of human beings, we do not just change knowledge but potentially change what

it is to be human. It follows that �psychology is not only the study of human think-

ing, feeling, acting, and interacting: it has itself—like the other human sciences—

brought into being new ways of thinking, feeling, acting, and interacting�.5 It is thusnot chance but a matter of deep philosophical concern that �psychology� denotesboth state and discipline: the state and the discipline are bound in a reflexive circle.6

In my view, questions of reflexivity are not at all restricted to the human sciences (let

alone unique to psychology), but here I want to take up the matter only in relation to

psychological categories, and only in certain ways.7

Starting from these reflexive claims leads to conclusions at odds with the belief

that the evolutionary past, or indeed one god or another, has laid down a fixed hu-

man nature. A reflexive approach treats psychological categories as historically con-

stituted, while the biological view treats them as �givens�, natural kinds. To engage indebate between these positions is to enter a minefield—and there certainly are more

than just the polarised views that I have just described. My (relatively) circumscribed

1 For historical and sociological approaches to psychological �kinds�, see Danziger (1990a); (1997), esp.

pp. 181–194; Kusch (1999).2 Related to the human sciences, see: Giddens (1979); (1993), pp. 185–186; Gouldner (1970); Gruenberg

(1978); Morawski (1992); Richards (1987); Sandywell (1996), pp. 1–51.3 I draw on the conclusions, for example, of Putnam (1981), p. 52: ‘‘�Objects’’do not exist independently

of conceptual schemes. We cut the world into objects when we introduce one or another scheme of

description�.4 Foucault (1970), p. 327.5 MacIntyre (1985), p. 897.6 Graham Richards has drawn attention to this double signification, proposed to label the discipline

�Psychology� (big P) and the state �psychology� (little p), and explored implications for writing the history

of the field: Richards (1992a), pp. 1–6; (2002), pp. 6–10.7 I do not, for example, consider the �reflexive� relation of methodology and substantive claims about

psychological processes, or the �reflexive� recreation of the self through technology.

R. Smith / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 36 (2005) 55–94 57

purpose here is to comment on what different arguments imply for historical writing

about psychology. I do, as I must, take a position. It is a logical implication of the

present argument that all historians take a position: there are no neutral, �transcen-dental�, descriptions of being human. I suggest that it is possible for even very basic

categories in which we understand being human to change. Whether they have, inhistorical fact, so changed is a matter for historical research. But historical writing

should not presume that psychological terms, including �psychology� itself, describenatural kinds. This argument goes against �common sense�, the working assumptions

of most natural scientists and the belief of more than a few empirically minded

historians.

It is possible to turn debate about reflexive arguments into concrete historical

questions through the study of �psychological� terminology. If the psychological state

and the psychology discipline are parts of one reflexive circle, then we must under-stand the creation of specifically psychological ways of thought in connection with

the creation of psychological states. The history of this is visible in language. The

social psychologist Kurt Danziger made this specific suggestion in order to study

the historical constitution of psychological objects and these objects� social nature,including the psychological person.8 At this point, the history of psychological cat-

egories opens out into the enormously complex question concerning the sources of

the modern individual and of modern individualism. I will not go into this here.

What can be said briefly is that it appears impossible to write linear histories of glo-bal notions of what a person is. Historians, by and large, have turned away from at-

tempts to write the history of abstract notions of the individual in order to study

ways of shaping particular notions of �the self� and �the individual�.9 Though much

more wide-ranging than most studies, even the philosopher Charles Taylor�s Sourcesof the Self concentrated on three historical episodes shaping what he regards as the

distinctively modern view of what makes a person.10 What psychologists and histo-

rians of psychology have contributed in this field is important arguments for, and

research on, �historical psychology�.11 �Historical psychology� denotes the historyof (changing) psychological states as a source of psychological knowledge. Interest

in this field grew out of Marxian and sociological theories of the political, economic

and cultural roots of �the inner world�, following early work in the sociology of

knowledge as well as by such pioneers as Nobert Elias and Zevedei Barbu.12

I will use historical writing to question assumptions about the historical continu-

ity of basic psychological categories. To the extent that this questioning succeeds and

describes the history of categories, it will support the conclusion reached by a num-

ber of analytic philosophers—that statements have meaning by virtue of their placewithin a historically developing story.13 It is a very significant point, countering the

8 Danziger (1990a, 1997, 2002); (2004), pp. 220–222. See Brock (2004), pp. 6–10.9 See Heller, Soma & Wellberg (1986).

10 Taylor (1989).11 Staeuble (1991, 1993).12 Elias (1978); Barbu (1960).13 Hampshire (1960), pp. 17–18; MacIntyre (1981), p. 194; Taylor (1989), p. 47.


still widespread view that historical knowledge is perhaps interesting but, in the last

analysis, expendable. I want to add weight to the argument that our historical

knowledge is essential to a capacity to make meaningful statements about the

world.14 What we say about a person�s psychology, I argue, makes sense in the light

of the history of the language that we use.15

This paper, however, is a historiographic and not philosophical discussion of the

different positions historians of psychology have actually taken, whether implicitly

or explicitly. Standard histories of psychology presuppose that people have always

exhibited �psychological� states, that there is a basic unchanging core of such states

and that most cultures from ancient to modern times have recognised and had a lan-

guage for this. Given these presuppositions, it is natural to view the modern disci-

pline of psychology as the institutionalised, objective study of the domain of

�reality� presented in these states. It is also natural to use contemporary terms to de-scribe past beliefs. In Danziger�s pointed words, however:

14 I w

This e

Smith15 I sh

think

percep

meant16 Da17 Bo

The use of contemporary terms strongly suggests that the objects of currentpsychological discourse are the real, natural objects and the past discourse nec-essarily referred to the same objects in its own quaint and subscientific way.What this organization of historical material overlooks is the possibility thatthe very objects of psychological discourse, and not just opinions about them,have changed radically in the course of history.16

But research on change in �the very objects of psychological discourse� turns out tobe dauntingly complex, both conceptually and historically. I shall therefore start

with an apparently clear-cut question: when does the discipline of psychology begin?

2. �The modern origin� of psychology

At first glance, it looks as if historians and psychologists generally agree: experi-mental research on the mind, and the development of a specialist academic profes-

sion to carry it out, began in the late nineteenth century, following German

example. Textbooks read as if this is the case, and many of them until recently relied

on the authority of the American psychologist and historian of psychology, E. G.

Boring.17 Boring located a founding father and a founding moment in Wilhelm

Wundt�s establishment of teaching and research in experimental psychology at Leip-

zig University in the 1870s and 1880s. Nonetheless, at second glance, it is obvious

that historians do not agree about this at all.

rite about these philosophical claims in a forthcoming book, Being human, history, and the sciences.

xpands various attempts to explain the nature and purposes of �the history of the human sciences�:(1997a, 1998, 1999, 2001).

ould perhaps add that I do not attempt to discuss the empirical claim, which most psychologists

well founded, that there are psychological capacities which all people share (e.g. capacities of

tion). My argument is about whether it can be said that all people from ancient to modern times

the same thing when they wrote in ways which moderns identify as psychological.

nziger (1990b), p. 336.

ring (1950).


Boring had a particular vision of what psychology should be, and he wrote his

book because he feared that psychology was in danger of taking a different path.18

His history, though in some respects admirably wide, took its plot from an ideal

of scientific rather than practical psychology. The social fact, however, was that psy-

chology, when he wrote, was many different things; this has remained the case.The staggeringwidth or inclusiveness of psychology provokes comment.19 It is com-

mon practice to refer to Tibetan psychology, Hindu psychology, the psychology of

Plotinus, medieval psychology and so on, all in contrast to modern Western psychol-

ogy. But what is the common subject matter? Danziger recorded his shock, in Indone-

sia, of failing to find common ground between indigenous and imported psychologies;

even the most basic categories, such as mind, soul and self, differed.20 In such circum-

stances it is difficult to say what makes the two bodies of thought both �psychology�.The answer seems to be that convention divides up the world in a certain way, andtheWestern convention is that �psychology�, however loosely, describes a class of phe-nomena in the world which is �really there�. Hence other people, as well as western psy-

chologists, must have theories of psychology, if they have theories about the world at

all. An alternative way to respond to Danziger�s experience might be to say that the

Indonesian theories were simply not psychological theories at all, but were religion,

myth or superstition. Danziger�s own conclusion was more subtle and positive, and

the experience became a starting point for an empirical, historical search for what

has come to count as �psychology�. As he commented:

18 Ke19 E.g20 Da21 Ibi22 Ric

Clearly, �psychological� is itself an example of a psychological category with ahistory that needs investigation. Because it did not always exist, we have to fallback on modern conceptions of �the psychological� for the criteria that willenable us to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant material from the past.21

Whether these criteria would include or exclude his Indonesian interlocutor�s theo-ries in �psychology� is an open question.

Even if we describe as psychology only what goes on under that name in the West,we face a protean monster. If we restrict it further to what is called �the discipline� ofpsychology, the monster is still enormous. Graham Richards, himself a psychologist,

referred to �the chronic pluralism of the discipline�.22 There are indeed professional

bodies for psychology, both national and international, but they are huge (the

APA, the American Psychological Association, founded in 1894, has more than

110,000 members or affiliates) and diverse (the APA has fifty-five divisions represent-

ing different interests). At times, some psychologists have invested considerable intel-

lectual effort in the elaboration of a theory, or of a methodology, able to unite thefield and create a unified science. Those who did this hoped to show that the diversity

of actual psychological activity is a reflection of the diversity of human life and not a

lly (1981); O�Donnell (1979).

. Joravsky (1989); Rose (1999), pp. 9–10; Shamdasani (2003).

nziger (1997), pp. 1–5.

d, p. 14.

hards (2002), p. 328.


fundamental diversity in psychology. But the results, if this was the aim, have been

disappointing. There is considerable scope for scepticism about the possibility of uni-

fication. In the United States, Sigmund Koch famously undertook to publish a re-

view of the field as a science, but, after a number of large volumes, he turned

away in some despair: �After a hundred years of ebullient growth, psychology hasachieved a condition at once so fractionated and so ramified as to preclude any

two persons agreeing as to its ‘‘architecture’’�.23 It was the inaugural lecture on the

�unity� of psychology by Daniel Lagache at the Sorbonne in 1947 which was the

starting point for Canguilhem�s shafts against the claim of psychology to be a sci-

ence.24 Interestingly, Lagache, trained in psychoanalysis, had proposed the unity

of psychoanalysis and clinical psychology—hardly the sort of unity that Koch,

who had critically analysed learning theory, had in mind. Even �unity�, it seems,

has meant different things. Meanwhile, the philosopher Gilbert Ryle had argued thatonce �mind� is shown to be a disposition not an entity, psychologists lose any ratio-

nale they might once have had for searching for unity:

23 Ko24 Ca25 Ry26 Vid27 Da

Much as �Medicine� is the name of a somewhat arbitrary consortium of more orless loosely connected inquiries and techniques, a consortium which neitherhas, nor needs, a logically trim statement of programme, so �psychology� canquite conveniently be used to denote a partly fortuitous federation of inquiriesand techniques.25

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there is a bewildering variety of psy-

chological activity, though, of course, this does not of itself preclude belief that some

conceptual advance, or theory, will unify �psychology�. It does preclude, however, thesearch for �the origin� of what is not one thing as if it were one thing. Fernando Vidal

wryly observed: �Parler de la psychologie est donc toujours une enterprise paradoxale:

si elle est honnete, elle doit elle-meme dementir le singulier, qu�elle proclame la pluralite

qu�elle decrit�.26 It is possible for a psychologist, such as Boring, to write about �theorigin� of the one thing he or she thinks psychology should be. However, historianswho want to explain what is, not support what on philosophical grounds someone

might think should be, must write histories of psychologies in the plural (or, as I

would prefer to say, history of the human sciences).

This is an argument from the diversity of the present to the multiplicity of origins.

This is not a new claim for historians of psychology. They have, for example, com-

monly presented the late nineteenth-century shaping of psychology as a narrative of

differing national traditions, though historians of psychology who are also psychol-

ogists are perhaps reluctant to concede just how diverse the field is.27 In Britain,there was a noteworthy interest in individual differences, the distribution of these dif-

ferences in the population and the significance of this data in social, educational and

ch and Leary (1985), p. 2; see Koch (1959–1963).

nguilhem (1994). See Eribon (1991), p. 42.

le (1963), p. 305.

al (2002), p. 41.

nziger (1979) provided a model.


political questions. The result was a psychology intimately bound up with statistics.

In France, a clinical method and an interest in the exceptional, perhaps pathological,

individual case (the hysteric, the prodigy of memory, the double personality) was

characteristic of early work. In Germany, the dominant academic interest, supported

by an experimental methodology adapted from physiology, was in the consciouscontent of the rational adult mind. This interest interacted with philosophical ques-

tions about the foundations of knowledge. In the United States, a pragmatic temper

and the opportunity to obtain funding for a psychology aimed at the solution of so-

cial problems directed psychology towards a science of behaviour, with a methodol-

ogy appropriate for the study of learning and adaptation. In Russia, stark

opposition between a conservative politics of the soul expressed in Orthodox belief

and radical materialism led, in the Soviet period, to support for psychology as a the-

ory of �higher nervous activity�, in Pavlov�s phrase, which threatened to make psy-chology part of physiology. Such generalisations go only so far, but they do make

clear the sheer variety and complexity of psychology just at the time when, as con-

vention holds, the modern discipline emerged.

Further, it turns out to be difficult to agree exactly when psychology became a dis-

cipline even in the one national setting in which it was supposedly founded. All psy-

chologists are familiar with the fact that Wundt was appointed professor of

philosophy in Leipzig in 1875, published a book delineating the scope of a new field

of psychology (1873–1874), established a laboratory for experimental work (1879),launched a journal (1883), moved into a purposebuilt institute (1897) and attracted

and trained a large number of students who went back to their home universities to

spread academic work in psychology. This looks like a clearcut case of discipline for-

mation in Germany. But historians have shown that the German case is not clearcut

at all. We only have to look backwards or forwards from Wundt.28

There are many earlier examples of claims to establish psychology as science; the

best known is perhaps that of J. F. Herbart, professor of philosophy at the Univer-

sity of Konigsberg, who published his Psychologie als Wissenschaft in 1824–1825.Herbart developed a theory, grounded on metaphysical principles, which integrated

psychology (the formation of mental life and character), pedagogy and a science of

the state (Staatswissenschaft). In the late eighteenth century, other German-language

writers also advocated ways of describing and forming character, with the romantic

goal of shaping the soul and the administrative goal of strengthening the body pol-

itic. There were publications such as the Zeitschrift fur empirische Psychologie

(founded 1783), there were new empirical methods such as the diary method (the

proposal to make a systematic record of each child�s development) and there wereattempts to put these ideas into practice in schools and in self-fashioning. This liter-

ature and practice indicates the formation of a distinctively modern notion of the

self, the self-conscious self that is the subject of modern psychology. There were

also precise experiments on the senses, exemplified by J. E. Purkyne�s work on the

28 I draw upon a general history, with bibliographic essay, and I do not list again the sources on which

these conclusions rely: Smith (1997b).


brightness of colours, which now appear clearly to be pioneering contributions to

scientific psychology. After Herbart and before Wundt, a substantial number of writ-

ers, including F. E. Beneke and Theodor Waitz, continued to shape what they

planned as a coherent science of psychology. Thus, it seems, many writers, some

of whom occupied academic positions, conceived of a discipline of psychology andprovided this discipline with content long before Wundt.

Turning to Wundt�s work, and to its fate in subsequent decades, blurs the picture

of his founding act in another way. Wundt was concerned with establishing �psychol-ogy� as a contribution to the foundations of knowledge, and he himself held a chair

of philosophy, called his journal the Philosophischen Studien and continued to pub-

lish and teach extensively on mainstream philosophical topics such as logic and eth-

ics.29 He argued that psychology should become an independent body of knowledge,

separate from logic and not reducible to physiology. At the same time, he maintainedthat psychology�s institutional place was in philosophy, where it would avoid mind-

less experimentalism. He considered psychology the fundamental science of the

Geisteswissenschaften, not a natural science: �natural science seeks to determine the

properties and the temporal relations among objects. Thus natural science ab-

stracts . . . from the subject . . .Psychology cancels the abstraction and thus it investi-

gates experience in its immediate reality�. Moreover, he argued that experimental

methods are incapable of researching higher mental processes and the new levels

of psychological forces which, as he argued, emerge through social interaction. Whenhe entertained a science of higher thought, he wrote on language and culture in the

manner established earlier as Volkerpsychologie. He distinguished mental causality

from physical causality and strongly rejected any notion that the former could be re-

duced to the latter, not least (here sounding like Wilhelm Dilthey or Heinrich Rick-

ert) because the explanation �of psychological processes is everywhere shot through

with value determinations�.30 All the same, when students returned home from Leip-

zig, they took from Wundt what suited their local interests and concerns and did not

transmit Wundt�s whole project. Even in Germany, other scientists such as G. E.Muller and Hermann Ebbinghaus, not Wundt, were the moving spirits behind the

training of many students and behind a new journal in experimental research in psy-

chology conceived as an empirical natural science, the Zeitschrift fur Psychologie und

Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, founded in 1900. In 1900, there were a number of com-

peting and substantially different notions of what psychology was in Germany and

Austria.

Turning from the intellectual to the institutional context, it becomes even harder

to maintain the image of Wundt as the founder of a discipline. The universities didnot create separate departments of psychology, and in fact most teachers of psychol-

ogy continued to hold appointments in philosophy into the period of the Third

Reich.31 Of course, a considerable amount of experimental work was undertaken,

most famously by the Berlin gestalt school, but this was administratively under

29 For recent accounts of Wundt: Kusch (1999); Rieber and Robinson (2002).30 Quoted and trans. in Kusch (1999), pp. 132, 74.31 Ash (1990); Ash and Geuter (1985); Geuter (1983, 1992).


the aegis of philosophy. Where an occupation of psychology did achieve distinct so-

cial identity in the interwar years was in the �applied� areas of psychotechnics and

personnel assessment. By persuading institutions such as the military and public

transport of the value of experiment, measurement and assessment, psychologists

established themselves as a recognised occupational group, with a specialised train-ing, expertise and social organisation. Thus, discipline formation took place in a

piecemeal manner; there was no one seminal figure, and its roots were at least as

much in �applied� as in academic settings.

Of what is it, then, that historians of psychology are looking for the origins? With-

out a much more precisely defined notion of what a discipline is in general, and of

what the discipline of psychology is in particular, the textbook narratives of the ori-

gin of psychology in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century are inco-

herent. It appears tempting to throw out discipline formation as a useful plot in thecase of psychology. Or, more temperately, it appears necessary to restrict the plot to

particular occupational groups, with particular intellectual and practical projects, in

local settings. It may be that there are occupations which have a family resemblance

and can be grouped as �psychology�, but there are as many origins as there are occu-

pational groups. Only by studying particular activities can one avoid the incoherence

and teleology of the search for the origin of the discipline.

Foucault�s critique of the universalist claims of philosophical anthropology and

phenomenology is very suggestive in this connection. As he stated, �the goal of mywork . . .has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture,

human beings are made subjects�.32 He considered the subject of knowledge in mod-

ern psychology, the psychological self and all its attributes, to be a historical forma-

tion. However, although he had worked in institutions concerned with

psychopathology and even in psychology departments, he paid no special attention

to the formation of psychology either as a field of knowledge or as an institution.33

Nikolas Rose did do this, in a series of studies presupposing the historical claim that

the modern psychological subject originated in the period dating from about 1800, inassociation with modern forms of government.34 For Rose, the sites in which psy-

chology originated were the classroom, the clinic, the training session for health

carers and managers, the therapeutic encounter and all the other places where people

learn to discipline themselves. Psychology, he suggested, is located wherever modern

government goes on, which, in liberal democracies, is above all �in� the person, in self-

improvement, self-discipline and self-fashioning. Psychology has therefore, accord-

ing to this interpretation, not been primarily an academic discipline, although psy-

chologists have sought an academic identity by systematising knowledge accordingto particular regimes of truth. For Rose, the psychological �self�—even the notion

of such a thing—is modern, and what therefore requires study is when, how, why

and with what consequences people believe that psychological descriptions of self

provide appropriate descriptions of identity.

32 Foucault (1982), p. 208. See Foucault (1970, 1972).33 Eribon (1991), pp. 41–49, 61–63, 68–71.34 Rose (1985, 1998, 1999).


A number of social psychologists, including Danziger, K. J. Gergen and John

Shotter, have come to comparable conclusions, though in their cases through their

attempts to make the discipline of social psychology achieve what they think it

should achieve—namely, an understanding of the social nature of psychological phe-

nomena. Their work reformulates criticisms G. H. Mead made about the way psy-chologists were emptying psychological categories of social content at the

beginning of the twentieth century. Danziger studied psychological knowledge as

knowledge about the performance of a new kind of person, the experimental subject;

Gergen proposed to consider �social psychology as history� and Shotter discussed

enduring problems in psychology as problems which only social change at large

could address.35

There is a stark contrast between the standard account of the history of modern

psychology and the analyses suggested by Rose, Danziger and others. Only recentlyhas there been an attempt to incorporate the argument about the construction of

psychology in �applied� settings into textbooks.36 It is, however, a step which com-

pounds the difficulties about writing on �the origin� of the field to which I have

pointed. What field?

3. �The ancient origin� of psychology

After this discussion of modern psychology, I turn to the view that �psychology�has an ancient origin. It is, once again, seemingly common sense to say that psychol-

ogy has existed whenever and wherever we find people systematically studying some

part of what is �out there� (or �in there�) as the reality of the mind. The most sophis-

ticated writers as well as ordinary people agree that it is perfectly sensible to talk

about ancient Greek psychology, medieval psychology and Christian psychology,

to take only Western examples. The philosopher Anthony Kenny, for instance, as-

serted that �Aquinas� teaching about the intellectual soul is the key to his psychol-ogy�.37 It is often not clear, however, whether writers intend something formal and

precise by this. For example, a survey of �Hobbes�s psychology� (he did not, to my

knowledge, use the word) took as its remit the topics of �sense and imagination�,�appetite, pleasure, pain, and the passions�, �mental disorders�, �human nature and

psychological egoism�, �rationality and the good� and �free will�.38 Yet this does not

usually strike people as odd. On one occasion when I tried to express puzzlement

about what the subject matter of the history of psychology could be before there

was a social activity called psychology, my questioner simply did not see why I madea fuss. Plainly, she held, the ancient Greeks, like people later, wrote systematically

35 Danziger (1990a); Gergen (1973); Gergen & Gergen (1984); Shotter (1990).36 Jansz & van Drunen (2003); Richards (2002).37 Kenny (1999), p. 34.38 Gert (1996).


about memory, perception and reason—they studied the mind—and, in doing this,

they studied �psychology�, though they never used the term. It appears self-evident

that, even if the specific word �psychology� was not in use, people studied what the

word denotes; it is merely irritating and pedantic to question whether they studied

�psychology�. Modern and ancient categories share a family resemblance, even if lan-guage has changed.

This is a conceptual as much as an empirical matter. It is clearly a matter for his-

torical research to compare the meanings of different terms, which requires studying

local contexts of use before carrying out the comparison. At the same time it is a con-

ceptual matter because comparison involves a theory of meaning and a hermeneu-

tics. The common sense view holds that people in all ages have studied the same

thing when they have studied perception, memory, thought, instinct or behaviour.

This view assumes that there is a real, fundamentally unchanging world in relationto which knowledge, once gained, will remain true. It assumes a denotative theory

of meaning. The view allows for truth being so hard to attain that, unfortunately,

people have actually come to very different results. Such �failure�, however, doesnot prevent writers from calling all the results �psychology�. Opposed to this common

sense position is a contextual theory of meaning: we do not know what psychological

terms denote independently of the historical contexts in which they have come to

have the meaning that they have. From this point of view, even the category �psycho-logical� may itself have a history.

There are reasons why we cannot presume the continuity of meaning of key con-

cepts. John Dunn, Quentin Skinner and other historians and philosophers of polit-

ical and social theory have argued that understanding the meaning of a statement

requires knowledge of the communicative world to which the statement is a contri-

bution.39 This is a contextual theory of meaning. It cannot be said, they have argued,

that a text from the past means something given by the terms and purposes of a mod-

ern discussion, or by an �eternal question�. The clear implication for historical prac-

tice is that historians should interpret the meaning of a primary source byundertaking empirical research into the local world of which it is part. Dunn and

Skinner exemplified the point with studies of the political debates to which Locke�sTwo Treatises of Government (1690) and Hobbes�s Leviathan (1651) were contribu-

tions. In subsequent sections, I will apply this contextual thinking to a number of

psychological categories.

When, then, did the subject matter of psychological knowledge appear, when was

there a subject area of psychological knowledge and when did key psychological con-

cepts originate? The standard position is that a psychological subject matter origi-nated in the course of animal evolution. Then, ancient Greek culture (and perhaps

other ancient cultures), in the process of establishing proto-scientific ways of

thought, conceptualised basic psychological concepts such as memory, perception

and intellect. Using these concepts, the Ancients then shaped a subject area of psy-

chological knowledge. (For this account, it is a secondary question when this shape

39 Dunn (1968); Skinner (1988).


acquired the form of a discipline in an institutional sense.) Modern psychology is the

continuation of this ancient tradition.

I do not need to restate here the vulnerability of history written in this way to the

charge of �presentism�.40 A degree of sensitivity to the dangers of reading back

assumptions about psychology into the past is now conventional scholarly practice(though not always reflected in textbooks for psychology students). Whether this

sensitivity goes far enough I debate throughout this paper.

To address the question of �ancient psychology�, I turn to research on the back-

ground to modern psychology in the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth cen-

turies, and then to the supposed sources of categories such as soul, memory and

emotion. The early modern period is of little importance to those who stress the

development of psychology as part of the administration of modernity, but what

do historians of this period say about the continuity of the subject matter and ofthe science of psychology from ancient to modern times? It is here, if anywhere,

we might expect to find the means to assess whether the category �psychology� andkey psychological concepts transcend the centuries. Since the United States philoso-

pher and psychologist Gary Hatfield has made a strong and interesting claim about

the formation of psychology as a discipline in the early modern period, I shall devel-

op part of my argument as a review of his position.

4. Early modern �psychology�?

The early modern period was once largely terra incognita for historians of psy-

chology, who attended to little beyond some classic philosophical texts of Descartes

and Locke. The situation was in marked contrast to other areas of intellectual his-

tory, especially political thought, where argument over the interpretation of sources

from this period shaped the historiography of the whole field. Historians of psychol-

ogy approached the two centuries between about 1550 and 1750 with tunnel vision,looking for anticipations of modern psychology. A search for the first use of the

word �psychology�, a word found (in Latin) in book titles from the late sixteenth cen-

tury, was symptomatic—as if the introduction of the word gave new life to what had

been there since Aristotle and prophesied the coming of the later science.41 Searching

for the word was a lot simpler than specifying the subject matter of a history of �psy-chology� in the early modern period.

Danziger reacted critically:

40 See

are lim41 La

By con

The very notion of �Psychology� does not exist before the eighteenth century.Of course, there was no lack of reflection about human experience and con-duct, but to imagine that all such reflection was �psychological� in our sense

Stocking (1982). For presentism in the history of psychology: Young (1966); Smith (1988). There

its to a rejection of �presentism�: Blondiaux & Richard (1999).

pointe (1972) lists sixteenth-century usages and what historians of psychology have said about them.

trast, for the word�s context: Starobinski (1980); Mengal (1994, 2000).

42 Da43 Da

1991);44 Ha

ground


is to project the present on to the past. Before the eighteenth century there wasno sense of a distinct and identifiable domain of natural phenomena that couldbe systematically known and characterized as �psychological�. There were theo-logical, philosophical, moral, rhetorical, medical, aesthetic, political categories,but no psychological categories.42

This conclusion leaves the study of the mind in the pre-eighteenth-century period in a

very unclear position. Moreover, there are historical reasons to think that the divi-

sions of learning which Danziger called �philosophical�, �political� and so on also have

a history. If we give up belief that �psychology� has an easily identifiable subject mat-ter given by �nature�, and if we discard the attractive, easily assimilated narrative of

the field unfolding as it discovers what this �nature� is, the history of psychology as a

specific area evaporates before our eyes.

There have been a number of responses. Richards took the bold line that the con-

ceptual language of the early modern period did not allow for the subject matter of

what was subsequently psychology. The origins of psychology should therefore be

sought, he argued, in the creation of a psychological language, beginning in the eigh-

teenth century. Danziger himself focussed attention on the roots, in different con-texts of activity, of key concepts of modern psychological knowledge. Another

approach, that of the cultural historian G. S. Rousseau, linked an emerging area

of knowledge of self and feeling to the literary culture of sensibility and to a new

physiology of the nerves. Christopher Fox also turned to the literary context and

characterised a new English psychology by reference to the literary culture of the

early eighteenth century. My own response was to seek for accounts of human nat-

ure wherever they might be found (that is, among Danziger�s political, theological

and other categories), and to suggest ways in which elements from these accountslater entered into the subject matter of psychology.43

In a clear challenge to these views, Hatfield argued that there was an actual early

modern discipline of psychology which originated in the sixteenth century (if not be-

fore) and which then underwent transformation in the eighteenth century. Scholars,

he implied, have simply not known where to look in order to find it. He had a point.

As he showed, there is a long list of published texts, beginning with commentaries on

Aristotle�s De anima, which points to a tradition of systematic teaching about the

soul�s, or the mind�s, activity. This teaching, he stated, took place under the rubricof natural science, and it thus indicates the presence of a discipline of scientific psy-

chology in early modern Europe. In some cases, the authors of these texts explicitly

called the subject �psychology�.44 Hatfield therefore took issue with the whole notion

of the �invention� of the human sciences in the eighteenth century and instead argued

that an earlier science of psychology was �remade�. What was �invented�, in Hatfield�s

nziger (1997), p. 37. Also Mengal (1988), pp. 490–491.

nziger (1990b, 1997); Fox (1987); Richards (1992a), pp. 54–66, 91–94; (1992b); Rousseau (1980,

Smith (1997b).

tfield (1995), p. 184. Also Hatfield (1990), pp. 7–13, 21–66, and (1994), which covers the same

as Hatfield (1995).


view, is the story about the origin of scientific psychology in the late nineteenth cen-

tury.45 These are most interesting claims.

Standard accounts of Renaissance philosophy in large part support Hatfield�s his-tory. Though it is difficult to get a clear picture of what was taught since the content

and arrangement of courses varied considerably with time and place, and thoughpractice may have differed from theory, tentative generalisation is possible. Renais-

sance discussion of the soul followed Aristotle and his medieval commentators,

and it divided the topic into the organic soul, especially relevant to medicine, and

the intellective soul, or reason. Scholars paid more attention than their medieval pre-

decessors to Aristotle�s writings on animals, and they gave greater, and at times con-

siderable, attention to the organic soul in the natural philosophy curriculum: �ingeneral, therefore, psychology was seen both as the apex of natural philosophy and

as a transition to the higher study of medicine�.46 Teaching in natural philosophy alsoincluded commentary on the intellective soul, though further teaching on this took

place in the part of moral philosophy that concerned ethical argument, based on com-

mentary on Aristotle�s Nicomachean Ethics. What was taught on the soul was rele-

vant to many areas of learning and, in the last consideration, was not separable

from theological questions. In particular, commentators were drawn to �metaphysical

speculation on the ontological status of the intellective soul including its relation to

the celestial intelligences and the question of its immortality. It was to this last ques-

tion that particular attention had to be paid, since on the one hand, Aristotle is notexplicit about it, and on the other, Christian doctrine required an affirmation�.47

The historians from whom I have drawn these points, Katherine Park and Eck-

hard Kessler, refer to �psychology� without comment, and they use the word to de-

scribe discussion of the soul, at the centre of which, for teaching purposes, was

commentary on De anima. This is also Hatfield�s usage. All the same, Park and Kess-

ler framed their whole discussion with the statement that: �Philosophers and scien-

tists of the Renaissance did not treat psychology, the philosophical study of the

soul, as an independent discipline�.48 Hatfield himself concluded that it is only inthe sixteenth century that we can discern, in published texts, the existence of a dis-

cipline of scientific psychology. Though he did not clearly state an opinion about

the earlier shape of psychology, I understand him to mean that, by the late sixteenth

century, discussion of the soul as a natural object, part of the subject matter of nat-

ural philosophy, regularly went on independently of metaphysical and theological

commentary on the soul, and hence formed a separate science to a degree that it

had not done earlier. The historians Paul Mengal and Fernando Vidal have enriched

description of this subject matter, taken account of the religious dimension and indi-cated the changing position of discourse about the soul among the sciences of the

seventeenth century.49

45 Hatfield (1995), pp. 216–217. Also Hatfield (1990), pp. 252–255; (1997).46 Park & Kessler (1988), p. 457.47 Kessler (1988), p. 485.48 Park & Kessler (1988), p. 455.49 Mengal (1994); Vidal (1994).


In order to assess Hatfield�s thesis, it is necessary to note that it, as well as his writ-

ing on Descartes and, especially, on Kant, is part of a contribution to contemporary

philosophy of mind. He has questioned modern materialism by restating the argu-

ment that the conditions of reasoning are logically and epistemologically prior to

any scientific statements we might make about the material causes of reasoning. Thiswas the context for Hatfield�s detailed historical examination of relations between

�the natural and the normative� in the psychology of perception.50 It was also the

context in which he attempted to demonstrate the historical existence, from the six-

teenth to eighteenth centuries, of a non-materialist science of mind. It was only in the

nineteenth century, Hatfield argued, that it came to be thought that psychology must

be materialist in order to be a science. His history was therefore a resource in a wider

argument about the nature of psychological knowledge. Kant is clearly of great

interest in this setting. Writing at the end of the eighteenth century, Kant certainlydid assume that, in discussing psychology (a word which he used), he was writing

about a well entrenched area of study. In about 1770, before his �critical turn�, heeven, following convention, described psychology as a �science�.51 After 1770, when

he raised the topic of psychology�s status as knowledge, what he questioned was not

psychology�s existence and interest as a body of knowledge, but its nature as a �sci-ence�, having defined science in a specific and exceptionally rigorous way.

It is now possible to state the two questions which, for my purposes, Hatfield�swork raises: did study of the soul amount to a �discipline of psychology�; and isthe early modern science of the soul �psychology� in the modern sense of the word?

With these questions we come face to face with the general issue of the continuity of

meaning of categories. I take the first question now and the second question in the

following section.

Hatfield stated that there was an early modern discipline of psychology, using the

word �discipline� to denote �a department of knowledge characterized by its own sub-

ject matter and methods: as a ‘‘mental discipline’’ rather than a school discipline�.52

All the same, by uttering historical statements, he made claims about social and insti-tutional matters of fact. As Martin Kusch stated, �bodies of psychological knowledgeare social institutions�.53 The separation of cognitive and social meaning is not viable

since a discipline is nothing if not a certain practice in acquiring knowledge and pass-

ing it on—and even publishing texts is a social practice. The intellectual historian

Donald Kelley observed that the academic notion of a discipline originated with

the institutionalisation of relations between master and pupil, and knowledge is

in this sense �a culturally constructed phenomenon, and particular disciplines repre-

sent the cultural forms in which this knowledge has been preserved, transmitted, andtransformed . . .’54 Indeed, Hatfield�s views about the institutional, or social, form of

50 Hatfield (1990, 1992a, 1992b).51 Hatfield (1998); (1990), pp. 67–70.52 Hatfield (1990), p. ix.53 Kusch (1999), p. 1 (I have removed italics).54 Kelley (1997), p. 22.


psychology are part of his argument. He stated that all students learned psychology

as part of physica, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Aristotelian curriculum

about the natural world. It follows, on his account, that, �as the eighteenth century

opened . . . it was an academic commonplace that the science of mind or soul belongs

to physics or the science of nature�. When scholars attacked the Aristotelian curric-ulum, as became common in the second half of the seventeenth century, they neces-

sarily reshaped teaching on the soul. One result was the growth of interest in

empirical approaches to the study of the soul or mind. These new approaches, how-

ever, as Hatfield observed, were �manifold� and were not at all the product of activity

in one social location: �there was not one program for studying the mind empirically,

and there was not a single disciplinary matrix for doing so�.55

Hatfield�s own account of the seventeenth-century science of the soul pointed to

four different kinds of literature: textbooks on physica, commentaries on De anima,separate treatises labelled �psychologia� (which did not necessarily expound De ani-

ma) and books on human nature under the general heading of �anthropologia�, whichsometimes distinguished psychology as the study of the spiritual as opposed to mate-

rial dimensions of man. Separately from this, Hatfield, among others, has pointed

out that the work of both Descartes and Locke on the mind, once the mainstay of

histories of psychology of the period, belonged to logic as then understood, rather

than to a division of learning called psychology.56

There was no standard university curriculum or single classification of knowledge.The place of particular courses depended on such factors as local opinion about the

philosophical status of universals, or whether the teaching prepared students for

higher study in law and medicine. The historian Lawrence Brockliss described the

two-year preparatory course in French higher education in the early seventeenth cen-

tury as philosophy, subdivided into logic, physics, ethics and metaphysics. Physics

was the science of natural bodies, and hence the teaching of physics very much in-

cluded the soul. Logic (right reasoning) and ethics (the science of conduct) were

�practical�, as well as theoretical, areas of teaching, and for this reason logic includeddiscussion of the higher faculty of the soul, or intellect, and ethics included discus-

sion of the lower faculty, or will. The concept of the will also connected commentary

with jurisprudence. By the end of the seventeenth century, enhanced time and atten-

tion was clearly being given to physics, including the new Cartesian natural philos-

ophy, with a corresponding growth in importance of mathematics. Meanwhile,

teaching on metaphysics included, though perhaps not always, both ontology, which

remained predominantly Thomist, and the study of beings with spiritual substance—

God, the angels and the soul. Commentary on the soul, which was in the throes ofchange, therefore appeared in numerous contexts.57

This suggests a number of comments. There was, first, no late seventeenth-century

formation of a unified area of study around �psychology�, though the word was cer-

55 Hatfield (1995), pp. 184, 196.56 Hatfield (1990), pp. 12, 29–30, 64–65; Buickerood (1985).57 Brockliss (1987), pp. 185–227. See Tuck (1998), pp. 9–32.


tainly in use. Studies of the soul were notably diverse. Hatfield is certainly correct in

stating that De anima was systematically taught in physics in the seventeenth-century

central European universities; at the same time, however, material relevant to the

soul and conduct appeared in many parts of the curriculum. The notion of agency,

or free will, was central to jurisprudence, and the question of the soul, as Brocklissobserved, was everywhere related to �the inevitable Christian doctrine that the soul

was especially created by God and survived the death of the body�.58 This makes

it very questionable to refer to a �discipline� of psychology based around the study

of the soul. When it comes to the eighteenth century, Hatfield himself, faced by

the sheer diversity of relevant activity and institutional settings in which discussion

of the soul went on, referred to �psychological loci�. These �loci� make an eclectic list

under headings of cross-cutting character—only Hatfield�s conviction that they all

represent empirical psychology holds them together: �Wolffian psychology�; �newempirical approaches to mind: Kruger, Godart, Bonnet�; �Scottish sciences of man

and mind�; �Ehrfahrungsseelenlehre� (the empirical subject of the soul); and �psychol-ogy in the anthropological, medical, and optical literatures�.59 This is a wide list, but,

even so, it would be easy to expand the number of headings by including, for exam-

ple, empirical studies of children�s learning and of physiognomy. This diversity sug-

gests that there was a huge variety of opinion about the topics we regard as

psychology rather than a single, authoritative discipline. This list may also point

to ways in which eighteenth-century �psychology� differs from present day �psychol-ogy� as much as anticipates it.

Another heading, �pneumatology�, became common in the second half of the sev-

enteenth century, and it continued in use, in some settings, through the eighteenth

century. It denoted the area of natural philosophy concerned with spiritual entities,

including both angels and the soul. As scholars digested and argued with Descartes�sdualist philosophy, they paid more attention than they had earlier to the human

soul�s relation to the body as a problem for natural philosophy. Earlier discussions

had often treated this question as part of the ethics curriculum, a question of conductconcerning the soul�s relation to the passions. �Pneumatology�, in contrast, indicated

the existence of a branch of empirical philosophy concerned with spiritual entities;

but it is questionable to assert that such learning was �psychology�.Philosophy teaching, at least in France, was not formally divided between natural

and moral philosophy, though a de facto separation had come into existence by the

end of the seventeenth century. The moral dimension included elements of ethica,

oeconomica and politica, all of which pertained to character and conduct. Though

the collective term �philosophia moralis� or �moral philosophy� came into use, it didnot denote a coherent or systematic discipline. Interestingly, in the eighteenth-cen-

tury Scottish universities, teachings on the soul came together under this heading

of moral philosophy, but this did not happen elsewhere. As Hatfield noted:

58 Brockliss (1987), pp. 211–212.59 Hatfield (1995), pp. 196–214. For different summaries: Buickerood (1995); Goldstein (2003); Zammito

(2002), pp. 220–253.

60 Ha61 Ha

subjec62 Ry


In the Scottish Universities of the first half of the eighteenth century the mindwas studied in three areas of the revised Aristotelian curriculum: logic, meta-physics, and moral philosophy (which discussed appetite). By midcentury, apeculiarly Scottish phenomenon had occurred: within the university arts curric-ulum, the study of the mind in general became the special preserve of moralphilosophy . . .60

As Hatfield and others have also stressed, there was very considerable activity with

elements of systematic teaching and research under the heading of �Psychologie� inthe period of the German Aufklarung, and this formed a continuous tradition in sci-ence up until Wundt.61 It would be hard to say, however, that the same science ex-

isted in Britain in the same period (and certainly no discipline of psychology was so

named before the 1820s or 1830s), though there was systematic study of the intellec-

tual and active powers of mind. A large number of British authors, many of whom

worked outside academic institutions, began in the second third of the nineteenth

century to shape a field which they called �psychology�. Phrenology, mental pathol-

ogy and literature, along with philosophy, were all important to this.62

Learning on the soul flourished in a range of enterprises in the early modern per-iod. Scholars did not clearly separate moral and physical dimensions, and they dis-

cussed knowledge of the soul while teaching about conduct and religion and law, as

well as about natural philosophy. Further, if historical research lifts its eyes to the

senior faculties in the university—law, medicine and theology—and, beyond the uni-

versity to the wider world, the number of settings in which something like systematic

knowledge of the soul was important appears very large indeed. There was physiog-

nomy and portrait painting, the literature of the sermon, the letter, the diary and

self-fashioning, rhetoric, political theory, jurisprudence, the medical involvementwith all the tribulations of disturbed minds, and the rapidly expanding publishing

trade in self-help, controlling the passions and linking the fate of the soul to the stars.

Above all else, and on this Hatfield had nothing to say, there was the preoccupation

with the immortality of the soul. Rather than consolidating around a core subject

matter, this sheer range of interests grew with the shift to the modern worldview

in the seventeenth century.

When, then, did a discipline of psychology develop? I hope it is now clear that this

question is an artifice. There was as a matter of fact, neither in the eighteenth centuryor subsequently, no one discipline which could have one origin. The history of the

field is a history of the creation and recreation, in a great diversity of ways, of a huge

range of scientific and other activity. Certainly, there were �loci� of systematic and

concentrated activity: the teaching of De anima as part of physics in early seven-

teenth-century German universities, Scottish moral philosophy teaching on the ac-

tive powers of mind in the second half of the eighteenth century, and experimental

tfield (1995), p. 207.

tfield (1990), pp. 109–164; (1997), pp. 351–357; Kaufmann (2000). Also on shaping psychology as a

t area in the eighteenth century: Vidal (1993, 1994, 2000).

lance (2000); Smith (2004); Taylor & Shuttleworth (1998).


research on perception and reaction times in Leipzig or Gottingen at the end of the

nineteenth century. Was all this �psychology�? To answer this, it is necessary to attend

more closely to language and key terms, notably �soul� and �mind�.

5. Soul and mind

Hatfield, as I understand him, was more committed to a thesis about the roots and

nature of a science of mind than of a discipline of psychology. He argued that such a

science originated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it was, for him, a

secondary matter whether it was called psychology or not. He commented, apropos

�psychology�, that �the etiology of concepts must be distinguished from the (allied)

histories of word usage�.63 This appears to state that the history of the developmentof a concept can be separated from the history of the social life, or usage, of a par-

ticular word as a sign of the concept. It is surely questionable whether we can sep-

arate concept and sign in this way. What I have called the �common sense� view,that there has been, at least since Aristotle, an area of human thought concerned

with the workings of mind, appears implicit in Hatfield�s admonition. Because this

area of thought was always �there�, it is �merely� a matter of words, and it is of no

philosophical import, so Hatfield seems to say, what it is called. As Danziger

observed:

63 Ha64 Da

The objects of science are usually taken to refer to some distinct aspect of areality that is thought to exist independently of the science whose objects theyare. When we claim that psychological science adds to our knowledge of atti-tudes, motives, personalities and so on, we assume that psychological realitydivides up along the lines indicated by this received network of categories.64

Hatfield treats �mind� as a natural kind and, for this reason, equates it, for his pur-

poses, with �soul�.There are (at least) two large problems with a definition of psychology as �the

science of the mind�. First, it is empty of content unless we know something of

the contexts which have given meaning to the notions of �science� and �mind�.However, contexts, and therefore meaning, change over time. It appears cavalier

to equate �soul� and �mind�, especially in the light of changes in religious belief.

Second, by equating psychology with a science of mind, Hatfield and numerous

other historians of psychology marginalise the history of ways of life which have

shaped people, including people understood as psychological subjects. Both thereflexive argument and claims about the roots of modern psychological activity

in practical life make this vulnerable to criticism. Defining psychology as the sci-

ence of mind also gives little historical purchase on the methodological activity

(such as statistical analysis of experimental results or clinical and other tests)

tfield (1995), p. 220.

nziger (1997), p. 6.


so characteristic of the modern occupation.65 Moreover, how �psychology� shouldbe defined has, at times, been a prominent question in its own right.

Hatfield himself put forward something like a contextual argument: �My ap-

proach to the historical question of whether there was an eighteenth-century scien-

tific psychology is to begin with the concepts of psychology and natural science asthey were understood in that century�.66 He criticised writers on Descartes and Kant

who write as if �terms such as ‘‘philosophical’’, ‘‘psychological’’, and ‘‘mental pro-

cess’’ are applied as if their meanings were fixed across the modern period and re-

mained the same today�.67 To illustrate the difference between past and present, he

pointed out how comfortable early writers on the science of mind were with the idea

of mind as immaterial substance. Nevertheless, he did not question the continuity of

basic categories such as mind, psychology, science and reason, and he often used the

word �mind� interchangeably with �soul�.68 His rhetoric elided the different connota-tions of words, such as the distinction between natural science and natural philoso-

phy, and the multiple meanings of the word �nature� (though he once observed that

the word was �used in a bewildering variety of senses, some of which contradict oth-

ers�).69 But, for example, nineteenth-century natural science, organised on disciplin-

ary lines, was not the same as natural philosophy, conceived as common study of all

natural bodies. More especially, I suggest, Hatfield�s complete lack of interest in reli-

gious context, a lack of interest shared by most historians of psychology, showed it-

self in indifference to a possible distinction between �soul� and �mind�.This distinction has received strangely little comment.70 Perhaps this is because

the issues are simply too large and unwieldy; for instance, in the background is a sec-

ularisation thesis which uses a kind of zero-sum argument tying the decline of reli-

gious belief to the rise of modernity. This thesis would suggest that reference to

�mind� has progressively replaced reference to �soul�. And indeed in the contemporary

world there are philosophers �of mind� but not �of soul�, while it is African-American

and Caribbean culture that has given �soul� back to the everyday English language.

There are notorious problems for translation between different languages, presentas well as past. The social psychologist Gustav Jahoda, for instance, addressing �con-tinuities and change in theories of human nature�, noted: �If one looks up ‘‘mind’’in

an Anglo-German dictionary, one finds ‘‘Seele’’, ‘‘Verstand’’ and ‘‘Geist’’ which,

retranslated, are ‘‘soul’’, ‘‘reason’’ and ‘‘spirit’’; the corresponding terms listed in

an Anglo-French dictionary are ‘‘ame’’, ‘‘intelligence’’ and ‘‘esprit’’. There is thus

no exact equivalent of ‘‘esprit’’in English . . .� However, he then went on to say that,

�except for the terminological difficulties discussed above, there seems to be no fun-

damental difficulty with regard to ‘‘mind’’ as long as one thinks of it broadly as the

65 See Danziger (1990a, 1990b); Dehue (1995).66 Hatfield (1995), p. 186.67 Hatfield (1990), p. 4.68 Hatfield (1995), pp. 186–187.69 Hatfield (1990), p. 14.70 An important exception is found in the literature on translating Freud into English; see Ornston

(1991).


key feature of ‘‘human nature’’�.71 Hatfield would perhaps agree. But it may be that

this reference to �mind� as �the key feature of human nature� presupposes what a his-

tory of categories in the human sciences sets out to discover.

Here the test case is the interpretation of Aristotle. Let me venture some com-

ments, drawing as nearly all historians of the human sciences must, on the linguisticskills and scholarship of specialists. There are inescapable problems. For example, I

will refer in the conventional way to De anima, though this is of course a medieval

Latin title, not Aristotle�s; there is no extant manuscript dating from before the tenth

century of the Christian era, and some scholars have even questioned the original

unity of the work. Nor is �anima� a straightforward translation of �psuche�; indeed,there was a scholastic literature on the relation between �anima�, understood as the

sensory soul, and �animus�, understood as the intellective soul, both of which �psuche�encompassed.

Textbook histories commonly begin with Aristotle�s De anima, which they

unthinkingly describe as �on psychology�. Aristotle himself, in reaction against Pla-

to�s sharp separation of the soul and the physical world, treated the soul as the first

principle of living things: �for Aristotle, souls are just a particular kind of essences or

natures, namely the essences or natures of animate bodies. A soul is what essentially

distinguishes a living body from an inanimate body�.72 This is clear. Classical schol-ars, however, differ in their willingness to attribute a �psychology� to Aristotle, and

this difference appears to relate to whether they are eager or not to make Aristotlerelevant to modern discussion in the philosophy of mind. Those who believe in his

relevance tend to imply that he did have a �psychology�. One author, for example,

stated: �the De Anima is a work in theoretical scientific psychology� which made dual-

ism out of the question.73 Other authors qualify this usage, however: �By Aristotle�slights, psychology is not, strictly speaking, an independent science, with its own

method and subject-matter. He allocates the inquiry into the nature of the soul to

the phusikos concerned with the principle of living things . . .�74 Thus, it is relevant

to note, �in ordinary parlance, the antithetical term to psuche was likely to be not‘‘body’’ but ‘‘death’’�.75 This view, that there was no ancient discipline of psychology,

is amplified by the observation that questions concerning the soul, which were as

much practical as theoretical, cut across divisions of learning:

71 Jah72 Fre73 Wi74 Ro75 Ka

For Aristotle does not think of philosophy of mind as a distinct and unitarysubject: sometimes he treats psychology from the standpoint of a biologistinterested in all living beings and their functions; sometimes—in the Ethics

and Politics, the Poetics and Rhetoric—he confines himself to man anddraws an entirely different set of distinctions related to the practical pur-

oda (1992), pp. 3, 5.

de (1992), p. 96.

lkes (1992), p. 109.

rty (1992), p. 7.

hn (1979), p. 4.

76 Pre77 Qu78 Ro


poses of those works; sometimes he treats psychology as an adjunct to hismetaphysics.76

What specific content this leaves to �psychology�, the authors did not make clear.

Aristotle offered three closely related definitions of the soul, of which one is that

the soul is the �form of a natural body that has life potentially�. For the word �form�,he also used the phrase �the first actuality�.77 The soul�s capacities include specific

powers of nutrition, sensation, desire, locomotion and rational thought. In De ani-

ma, for whatever reason, Aristotle was most concerned with the powers of sensation

(and on this topic he commented further in De sensu, one of the short discussionscollected together by medieval scholars as De parva naturalia). This account of the

senses and of sensation does not map conformably onto modern discussion about

physiological and mental processes: the capacity of the soul for sensation cuts across

the modern mind–body distinction. Aristotle discussed the sensory soul and the sense

organs as a whole, and indeed he thought that the realisation of a sense perception

takes place both in the eye and in the heart (not the brain) where the sensory faculty

of the soul is located. He also discussed other faculties of the soul, though not in such

detail. These faculties, he claimed, form a hierarchy in nature: humans and animalsshare the sensory faculty, but only humans possess the rational faculty. His descrip-

tion of the rational faculty, �nous�, is the source of some notorious problems of inter-

pretation. On the one hand, Aristotle treated it as one faculty of the soul or form of

the body, and hence as inseparable from the unity of the living being. On the other

hand, Aristotle also wrote as if �nous� is a state of being in its own right, in which

reason can grasp its own nature and hence stand independent of the natural organ-

ism. Analysing the problem further, Aristotle introduced a distinction between active

and passive intellect, as if this distinction would in itself resolve, as opposed tomerely restate, the difficulty he faced in understanding reason�s place in, but capacityto stand apart from, a localised body.

Understanding how the soul works drew Aristotle and his commentators into the

theory of causes. The problems to which this gave rise, and the precise understanding

of how Aristotle himself dealt with them, are still disputed. For example, it is not

clear �whether—or how—the co-operation among the causal dimensions of explana-

tion is also required for those activities of the soul, which—like perception, desire,

and some kinds of locomotion—we call intentional�.78 That is, it is not clear howto relate Aristotle�s account of causes to a modern theory of intentionality, a key

term for many participants in contemporary debate about the nature and character-

isation of consciousness. That there is argument about relating past and present

seems natural enough, since the theory of causes was the target of the seven-

teenth-century critical turn against Aristotle, and this turn resulted in ways of

thought which also inevitably questioned his account of the soul. To conclude: the

subject �soul� in Aristotle is not the subject �mind� in the modern philosophy of mind.

face to Barnes, Schofield & Sorabji (1979), p. vii.

oted in Ackrill (1979), p. 65.

rty (1992), p. 8.


Yet, modern commentators often interpret Aristotle�s discussion in relation to

modern notions of mind, consciousness and the mind–body problem. Some of them

think that this will helpfully redirect modern questions in philosophical psychology,

such as those that concern the relation of brain and consciousness. This may or may

not be a profitable line of argument, but there is no direct translation between an-cient and modern concepts. Charles H. Kahn, for example, referred to the �incom-

mensurability between the Aristotelian view and most, if not all, modern theories

of consciousness�.79 Everyone agrees that �consciousness� is a modern concept, one

which, a number of writers assert, Descartes introduced when he made the �I� thethinking subject. Whether Descartes is, indeed, historically responsible for the mod-

ern notion of consciousness is not now my question—though it is clear that many

references to Descartes in modern debates in the philosophy of mind treat him as

an emblematic rather than historical figure. He did, all the same, refer (though notconsistently) to �mind� rather than �soul�.

The context was Descartes�s search for the grounds of certain knowledge, espe-

cially in his �Second Meditation� (first published in Latin in 1641); �Descartes sought

in the Meditations to evade scepticism, and the birth of the conscious mind was the

key to his solution�.80 He used the scholastic Latin term, �mens�, rather than �anima� inhis argument, and his French translator of 1647 then rendered this as �esprit�. In an

answer to objections made to his Meditations, Descartes explained that his choice of

words followed from wanting to distinguish his notion of a conscious mind from thescholastic understanding of the thinking subject. Translated into modern English, his

argument comes out as follows:

79 Ka80 Wi81 �Au

I, by contrast [to primitive men], realizing that the principle by which we arenourished is wholly different—different in kind—from that in virtue of whichwe think, have said that the term �soul�, when it is used to refer to both theseprinciples is ambiguous. If we are to take �soul� in its special sense, as meaningthe �first actuality� or �principal form of man�, then the term must be under-stood to apply only to the principle in virtue of which we think; and to avoidambiguity I have as far as possible used the term �mind� for this. For I considerthe mind not as a part of the soul but as the thinking principle in its entirety.81

It is easy to get confused, since what is at issue here involves variable meanings in three

languages. Rendering �mens� and �esprit� by �mind� in English builds modern meanings

into the text; but �mens� also might mean, as it meant earlier, the agent intellect of the

soul which Descartes recreated in his own terms as the knowing �I�. Translation must

choose whether to link Descartes with his past or with his future. Moreover, it isevident that local context is important for understanding usage of even these very gen-

eral terms. Descartes, when he referred to the mind, wanted to emphasise the original-

ity of his answer to scepticism, and he wanted readers clearly to see that his �mind�wasnot the Aristotelian �soul�. In the intense debate which his ideas caused in the second

hn (1979), p. 31.

lkes (1988), p. 216.

thor�s replies to the fifth set of objections�, in Descartes (1984), p. 246.


half of the seventeenth century, questions about the usage of words such as �soul�and �mind� and �spirit� became very involved indeed. There certainly was no

straightforward transition from reference to Aristotelian �soul� to Cartesian �mind�.This debate cannot be divorced from religion. The assimilation of Aristotelian

philosophy into the Christian West in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was con-tentious, in large part, was because it was hard to reconcile Aristotle�s notion of the

soul as the principle of the actuality of animate beings, with the Christian, or more

precisely Augustinian, view of the immortal soul. Some modern observers, indeed,

go so far as to see here the beginnings of the �crisis� of Christian belief, a crisis orig-

inating, according to this point of view, in the attempt to make human rational

knowledge of the natural world a foundation of truth.82 Be this as it may, in the cen-

turies that followed, any discussion of the soul was also inevitably a discussion about

immortality—and hence had implications for the key Christian doctrine of redemp-tion. Further, discussion of the nature of substance—spirit and matter—concerned

the central ritual of the faith: communion with the body and blood of Christ in

the celebration of the mass. No one could doubt the intensity and passion of these

matters of faith, which the assimilation of Aristotle suggested could also be matters

of reason. Debate was especially fierce in the century following the Reformation, at

the time when Hatfield and others have described the shaping of a science of the soul.

Two illustrations of the significance of religion to the science of the soul will drive

home this point. These examples suggest that Hatfield�s account of early modern psy-chology stresses certain aspects of learning at the expense of others in order to sup-

port a view of the continuity of notions of soul and mind. These examples also

question whether the sources of �psychology� lie in texts rather than in practical ques-

tions of which the texts are an expression. The religious setting puts a large distance

between the early modern science of the soul and the modern science of the mind.

The latter, I am suggesting, is indeed secular in a way the former is not.

As Daniel M. Gross has argued, the practical and religious context of teaching on

the soul is particularly clear in the work of the great reformer, Philipp Melanchthon,who reconstructed teaching on humanist lines in the newly Protestant universities of

central Europe. Teaching included rhetorica, a practical discipline which formed part

of the foundational studies for higher education and which linked knowledge of the

individual�s soul to social and religious conduct. Melanchthon stressed rhetoric as

the practical means for changing human souls and aiding their salvation. As a fol-

lower of Luther, he held that, although human beings are sinful, because they are

human-made, human events can be remade—if hearts and minds are opened to re-

ceive God�s grace:

82 Blu

For Melanchthon the end of rhetoric is not only to teach, but to transposeemotions and move the soul; it is for him, as it was for Aristotle, the prototyp-ical practical art of human nature . . . Everything human is polluted by sin . . .[t]herefore a premium is put on the art of moving people away from nature—a

menberg (1983).

83 Gr84 Gr85 Yo


complex task demanding an understanding of both physics and the workings ofan immaterial soul.83

The Lutheran universities gave prominence to the practical arts for the reform of the

soul, and teachers assumed that this required scientific knowledge of men�s and wo-

men�s physical nature and immortal soul alike. Gross concluded with a large scale

claim about the significance of practical knowledge of salvation for the sciences of

man:

The Humanist Melanchthon was in a unique position to articulate the humansciences in new and consequential fashion by adjusting breakthroughs in nat-ural philosophy to the new demands of Lutheran theology.

The human sciences are a direct result of a theology that puts tremendousweight on man�s fallen nature . . . [b]ut out of a deep pessimism about the nat-ural capacities of lapsed humankind came the drive to intervene systematicallyand radically in the human condition.84

Gross made no claim about the founding or existence of psychology as a discipline;

rather, he suggested that the practical arts of managing the soul, given meaning by

religion, fostered disciplined study and teaching about the soul�s capacities.The second illustration is from the work of C. F. Goodey on the roots of modern

notions of mental impairment or disability, especially in Locke. If English-language

historians of psychology once took Locke�s work to be the starting point of an

empirical science of mind or psychology, John W. Yolton, some decades ago, began

the scholarly process of putting his work back into context: �Locke�s popularity was

the way in which he orientated his discussions around the religious and moral ques-

tions of great significance to the majority of people in the seventeenth century�.85

Goodey, similarly concerned with context, suggested a specifically religious source

for the way Locke thought about disability. Goodey�s argument involved recognisingthe close connection between the practical ordering of human affairs, the science of

the soul and what may now appear particularly abstruse theology. Going further, he

suggested that this early modern discussion contributed to the development of psy-

chological concepts themselves—his case concerns �intelligence�—that is, it contrib-

uted to the conditions of knowledge which make psychology possible. This is

different from the claim that these discussions were a contribution to psychology.

It was important in a number of areas of political thought, jurisprudence and

theology to decide whether the restricted reason of particular individuals limitstheir participation in political society, their legal obligations and their spiritual con-

dition. Each person, it was assumed, has access to the moral law. But what, then,

is the status in the state, in law or before God, of a person, such as a child, an

idiot or a savage, who, because of a supposed deficiency of reason, is unable to

understand the moral law? Goodey argued that Calvinist theologians, debating

oss (2000), p. 7. See Mengal (2000).

oss (2000), p. 15.

lton (1956), p. 21.


predestination in the aftermath of the French Reformed Church�s assertion of dog-

matic orthodoxy in 1618, gradually conceptualised a psychological notion of inca-

pacity of reason. It was a serious question for Calvinists, defending themselves

against the Catholic accusation that predestination eliminates the possibility of

moral reform, to specify the sense in which they thought moral action possible.The outcome was that political and theological struggle over the dogma of predes-

tination, with a particular intellectual focus on the capacity of disabled individuals

to understand their obligation to God, fostered psychological concepts of human

difference: �this [Calvinist] doctrine�s division of humanity into elect and reprobate

led into early modern conceptualizations of intellectual ability and disability�. Thewritings of Richard Baxter in the 1650s, for example, writings which significantly

influenced British Non-conformity, discussed intellectual ability as the prerequisite

for human perfectibility. As the Dissenter Robert Ferguson observed in 1673:�there can be no act of Faith without a previous exercise of our Intellects about

the things to be believed�. These debates and their political implications, in turn,

very much concerned Locke. He certainly formulated clear questions about what

the mind can be said to know which gave rise to the reputation of the Essay Con-

cerning Human Understanding (1690) as a foundation for empirical science,

although he did not deny the centrality of matters of faith;

86 Go

His attention may have switched to the �previous exercise� of the understand-ing, but faith was no discarded husk. Reason and intellect did not muscle faithaside but came to its rescue, reinforcing its substructure, transforming it into�belief� and acquiring some of its characteristics along the way.86

When it came to the specific question of idiots, Locke thought that they were indeed

congenitally incapable of exercising the intellect which makes salvation and hence

immortality possible, and he therefore put them in a class of beings between beast

and man. The empirical analysis of intellect mattered for the purposes of salvation.

This discussion of historiography supports two main points: first, key concepts aswell as classifications of knowledge have changed; secondly, the human sciences in

general, and the cluster of activities called psychology in particular, are rooted in

ways of life and not only texts. This points historical work in a direction which lo-

cates difference where earlier writers have presumed identity. To question further the

historical continuity of categories, I discuss two key �psychological� concepts, �mem-

ory� and �emotion�. It must be admitted at once that this discussion is illustrative and

not systematic. The purpose is to suggest that standard approaches are both narrow

and structured by prior assumptions which take �memory� and �emotion� to be nat-ural kinds. A full blown discussion would have to go much further—into sources

and contexts in which writers use the terms, into the history of the human states that

these terms denote (�historical psychology�) and the history of other categories such

as �intelligence� and �imagination�. However, perhaps something can be said in a pre-

liminary way.

odey (2001), p. 2, quote on pp. 21 & 25. See Goodey (1994).


6. Memory

Why should we think of memory, primarily, as �psychological�? �Memory�, in

modern discourse, is a psychological concept, but it is obviously much more than

that since there is collective memory and every kind of memorial and archive—mem-ory in physical and cultural form.87 It is common enough to think of historical

knowledge as a kind of memory itself, subject to the same kind of forgetting and

reconstruction as a person narrating her or his own life: �history in its modern mode

might be understood as just one more technology of memory, one of a set of tech-

niques developed in order that societies might remember�.88 Memory is also pivotal

in the comparison of fiction and non-fiction, and of truth and untruth in story-tell-

ing—and psychoanalytic theories of unconscious memory have deeply troubled glib

distinctions.89 Evidently, historians of memory must chose from an extraordinarilycomplex subject matter, a subject matter that is perhaps, in the last analysis, insep-

arable from all human knowledge. It might even be said that memory is the means by

which the very possibility of inner experience was constituted in Western thought:

�only by memory can what gets lost in dispersion be grasped; memory gives man

the authentic relation—which makes him independent of the world—to his origin,

and to his metaphysical ‘‘history’’, and thus to his transcendent contingency�.90 JanetColeman wrote about ancient and medieval memory as, at one and the same time, a

capacity of the individual soul, the means by which this soul shares the understand-ing of the world soul and the consciousness which, later, became embedded in the

scholarly discipline of history.91 What I stress is that the history—that is, the �mem-

ory�—of memory includes knowledge of when, why and to what extent it became a

psychological category.

Even the contemporary psychology of memory is a huge area, subdivided into

specialist research concerned with short term and long term memory and so on.

Many researchers appear to conceive of each type of memory as a specific function

of the brain with a concrete, if as yet substantially unknown, mechanism. Such rei-fied notions of memory also appear in everyday descriptions of people�s good, bad or

object-specific capacity for memory. There has been a persistent assumption that

memory is some kind of �storage�, though the view that memory involves a recrea-

tion, in a context and according to interest, has gained ground. Further, as psychol-

ogists also point out, memory is in some sense part of every form of cognitive activity

in thought, perception and speech. Pascal, in the seventeenth century, stated simply

that �memory is necessary for all the operations of reason�.92 Memory also structures

or enters into self-identity and the way people exist in the world, as controversies

87 See Velody (1998/1999).88 Steedman (2001), p. 66.89 Forrester (1997).90 Blumenberg (1983), p. 315.91 Coleman (1992).92 Pascal (1995), Sect. 651.


over personality disorders and child abuse have made painfully clear.93 The history

of memory, even understood as a psychological function, is not and could not be the

history of the discovery of a unitary brain mechanism or mental process.

Danziger has nevertheless made the interesting claim that there is a sense in which

there is continuity between ancient and modern conceptions of memory as a psycho-logical function. This is because of the intimate connection between memory and

writing: �symbolic inscription functioned as the key metaphor which inspired the very

birth of the traditional concept of memory and has accompanied it ever since�.94

With current criticism of �storage� theories, this continuity, he suggests, may be bro-

ken. What I wish to emphasise, however, is the questionable assumption that earlier

accounts of memory were indeed �psychological� accounts.Aristotle added a short but specific account of memory, De memoria et reminis-

centia, later included in the Parva naturalia, to his discussion of sensory perception.His argument was that memory involves an image or copy retained by the soul, �andan image is an affection belonging to the common sense . . . Memory, even the mem-

ory of objects of thought, is not without an image�.95 Such images, he thought, re-

main as �affections� of �the common sense�, which he understood as �a common

power which accompanies all the senses, in virtue of which one perceives that one

is seeing and hearing�.96 Habit puts these affections, or remembered images, in order.

Then, at this point in the account, there is the passage which led historians of psy-

chology to refer to Aristotle as the originator of the notion of �the association ofideas�—though the discussion (to make only one objection) was about �images� not�ideas�. Linking memory to sensation, Aristotle took up a metaphor, the long life

of which has itself contributed to the sense of unity and continuity over time of

the subject of memory:

93 Ha94 Da95 Ar96 Ka97 Ar

For it is clear that one must think of the affection, which is produced by meansof perception in the soul and in that part of the body which contains the soul,as being like a sort of picture, the having of which we say is memory. For thechange that occurs marks in a sort of imprint, as it were, of the sense-image, aspeople do who seal things with signet rings.97

Metaphors, like words, have meaning as part of a discourse and are not timeless; but

passages such as this certainly have encouraged modern commentary on Aristotle as

a psychologist. This is a little ironic, since the metaphor is a singularly inappropriate

one for the complexity of memory processes, and a modern psychologist might there-

fore conclude that Aristotle�s suggestion that memory is like a physical impression is

an object lesson in how not to imagine memory. Indeed, put back into the context ofAristotle�s discussion of the soul, the metaphor appears superficial and not one

which he could have developed very far.

cking (1995).

nziger (2002), pp. 5–6.

istotle 449b30, trans. in Sorabji (1972), p. 49.

hn (1979), p. 13.

istotle 450a25, trans. in Sorabji (1972), p. 50.


Mediated through the overwhelmingly influential writings of Augustine, Platonic

rather than Aristotelian thought preoccupied Christian scholars before the twelfth

century, and a Platonic notion of memory existed long after. Plato conceived of

knowledge as recovered memory, recollection to our true selves and to true knowl-

edge of the good. Christian Platonists understood memory to be a transcendentalcategory, and they imagined an ideal of memory as the recovery of knowledge lost

by Adam at the Fall. In the Platonic dialogues of Socrates, Socrates disputed with

his pupils in order to demonstrate to them that they already possessed the knowledge

which they sought. Philosophical dialogue brought to awareness the �memory� ofknowledge that each rational being has, by virtue of his nature, embedded in the

soul. What Plato called �anamnesis� was not a process by which people recall images

lodged in the common sense (let alone as a material record); it was a capacity for

being in which the individual soul gains awareness of its true nature as a part ofthe world soul. In the thought of Augustine and later monastic scholars, this concep-

tion of memory fused with a spiritual life attempting to seek oneness with God. Dis-

cussion of the purpose and nature of memory was not centred on a record of

something past but on the means to move on to what is to come. But it is also the

case that Plato (in the manner of Aristotle describing the imprint of a signet ring)

likened certain mundane types of memory to inscriptions on wax tablets.

Modern historians certainly refer without any sense of awkwardness to �medieval

psychology�. Thus, Coleman: �The Cistercian theological anthropologies . . . com-prised one contribution to the wider twelfth-century interest in constructing a human

psychology that classified the soul�s powers�.98 Such usage, employing the word �psy-chology� to denote classification of the soul�s powers, connects Aristotle, medieval

scholars and the later teachers and expositors whose work Hatfield stressed. That

is one theme. At the same time, as Coleman�s discussion shows at length, much more

than �psychology� was at stake in medieval thought about the powers of the soul. It is

not enough to gloss selected texts: �textual exegesis must be replaced by a cultural

history which examines writings from diverse quarters whose centres of focus werenot on the mechanics of how mind recalls the past but rather on the practicalities

of how that past might be transformed and reconstructed to produce a future that

bore little resemblance to its past.� A Cistercian scholar such as Anselm strove to

understand the workings of the human soul, but his inspiration was to learn, by anal-

ogy, something of God. As Coleman states:

98 Co

memor99 Co

Man requires material or images drawn from external sources to formulate histhoughts whereas God is completely original and there is no distinctionbetween his thought and his expression . . .Anselm is therefore forced to shifthis focus to human psychology and human cognition because only an under-standing of the human process of knowing can provide an oblique understand-ing of the divine.99

leman (1992), p. 329; see pp. 416–418, 501, 526–527. On the wide scope of medieval accounts of

ia, see also Carruthers (1990).

leman (1992), pp. 116, 167.


It seems misleading to call this a project �in psychology� or to isolate certain of An-

selm�s statements as if they were statements �in psychology�. It might be possible to

follow the line of argument of certain Catholic and Orthodox Christian writers and

argue that modern psychology should change direction and become once again the

science of the soul�s powers, in which case medieval scholars such as Anselm wouldbe counted wise predecessors. But it hardly needs to be said that this is not the pro-

ject the overwhelming majority of modern psychologists have in mind. The history of

the powers of the soul is a history of a vision of life, to which �memory� was intrinsic,and this is not the same as a history of psychological processes of which �memory� ismerely one.

In a rich history of metaphors (subtitled A history of ideas about the mind, which

makes no claim for the ancient origins of psychology), Douwe Draaisma showed

how interesting it is, in relation to modern attempts to conceive of memory as brainfunction, to compare physical metaphors of memory over many centuries.100 From

Plato�s metaphor of writing on wax tablets, through �theatres� of memory, to modern

digital and neuronal metaphors, writers have repeatedly characterised memory as a

physical record or as process in a physical place. What else could memory be for a

modern materialist neuroscientist? Draaisma�s purpose, however, was not to praise

modern science for realising the potential of ancient truth but to analyse the contin-

uing challenges to knowledge of memory that such metaphors provoke. He also

showed that every metaphor has a context. Plato deployed a physical metaphor,but this was secondary to his notion of anamnesis. The �theatre� of memory was a

practical tool to aid the rhetoric of orators, and in the medieval and Renaissance

context, memory was part of the civilised means of persuading and ruling people.

It is since the seventeenth century, when discovery and technology—phosphores-

cence, photography, the computer, holography—have gone hand in hand with phys-

ical metaphor, that the idea of memory as a physical thing has become built into the

conventions of scientific research.

It is not at all clear where �psychological� knowledge of memory, as opposed tosome other kind of knowledge, starts and ends.101 Thus Draisma has gone on to

study the relation between memory and the sense of the life span as it changes with

the ageing process. For this purpose, he studied memory as it exists in people�s re-ports, in the phenomenology of life �passing by�. In Freud�s hands, this question of

the phenomenology of personal memory—what is consciously remembered and what

is not—became a discipline in its own right. In a famous phrase, Freud concluded

that �hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences�, and on the back of this insight he

constructed the edifice of psychoanalysis. It is possible to imagine a history of anal-ysis written as a history of the capacity of �memory� to store and to re-present all the

pleasure and pain of the unconscious mind, which, for Freud, is �the true psychical

reality�.102 All memorialists, whether writers of diaries or of formal histories, come

100 Draaisma (2000).101 See Collins (2001).102 Freud & Breuer, Studies on hysteria. In Freud (1953–1974), Vol. 2, p. 7 (first published 1895); Freud,

The Interpretation of dreams, in idem (1953–1974), Vol. 5, p. 613 (first published 1899/1900).


up against the judgement Nietzsche bequeathed to Freud: ‘‘�I have done that,’’ says

my memory. ‘‘I cannot have done that,’’ says my pride, and remains inexorable.

Eventually—memory yields�.103 This leads from memory into the world of the feel-

ings and motives, which also have a history.

7. The emotions

A standard reference work in the philosophy of mind, discussing the changing

meaning of the words �passion� and �emotion�, stated: �Much of these shifts in empha-

sis through time are no doubt merely the outcome of random linguistic drift. We

should expect that some of them, however, reflect real differences between different

implicit background models of the architecture of the mind�.104 Whether any histo-rian of language would be happy about the notion of �random linguistic drift� I donot know, but doubt, especially as an explanation of such a key category of modern

life as �emotion�. That words reflect models of mind is surely, but trivially, true. What

the article did not consider was whether there might be a history of �emotion� becom-

ing both part of what we call the psychological world and a possible object of study

in psychology. The author took it for granted that psychological states are natural

categories. He ignored the possible recreation of human experience through changes

in its representation in language.Since I was first struck by this example, the research of Thomas Dixon has made it

possible to think much more precisely about the history of emotion as an English-

language category. Most writers on the history of philosophy and psychology have

passed over the distinction between passion and emotion without comment. Danzi-

ger, however, cited emotion as a key example of a psychological category which

developed in tandem with modern notions of the individual.105 References to the

passions were far more common in discussion until the second quarter of the nine-

teenth century. As Dixon asserted:

103 Nie

1974),104 De105 Da106 Dix

The category of emotions, conceived as a set of morally disengaged, bodily,non-cognitive and involuntary feelings, is a recent invention . . . It is an immen-sely striking fact of the history of English-language psychological thought thatduring the period between c.1800 and c.1850 a wholesale change in establishedvocabulary occurred such that those engaged in theoretical discussions aboutphenomena including hope, fear, love, hate, joy, sorrow, anger and the likeno longer primarily discussed the passions or affections of the soul, nor the sen-timents, but almost invariably referred to �the emotions�.106

tzsche (1966), p. 80, Freud, The psychopathology of everyday life (note added 1910), in idem (1953–

Vol. 6, pp. 146–147.

Sousa (1994), p. 270.

nziger (1997), pp. 32–46.

on (2003), pp. 3–4. Also Dixon (2001).


The change occurred, according to Dixon�s persuasive account of the English-speak-ing world, when writers became interested in a more secular approach to the analysis

of human capacities, understood as events in the natural world. This linked capac-

ities to the body rather than describing them as actions of the soul. Writers replaced

the words �passion� (which then had negative moral connotations) and �affection�(which had positive moral connotations) with the more neutral sounding word �emo-

tion�. Thomas Brown�s discussion in his Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human

Mind (1820) was particularly influential.107

The change from a language of passions to a language of emotions was more than

merely verbal. �Brown�s category of ‘‘emotions’’ was, by definition, a category of pas-

sive (rather than active), non-intellectual feelings or states (rather than actions of a

power or faculty)�, as Dixon stated.108 J. D. Morell, a philosopher and critic of the

new language, made clear that he thought the moral representation of what it is to behuman was at stake. He objected to reference to the emotions on the grounds that �itdiminishes the intensity of our notion of self, as an independent source of power, and

contemplates the mind rather as a passive existence . . .�109 Morell rightly sensed that

the language of passion and affection was language appropriate for the description of

an active soul, while the language of emotion carried connotations of passive recep-

tivity and referred to a state of mind. In the decades immediately after Morell wrote,

Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin indeed clearly tied such states

of mind to the body.This is excellent evidence for a new psychological category, however much mod-

ern psychologists and ordinary people alike think of the emotions as �natural� states.When earlier writers discussed the passions, they too thought they described �natural�states, but for them what was �natural� was what was proper to the activity of the

soul. It is another question, one which Dixon left alone, to ask whether passion is

a �psychological� category at all or whether the coming into existence of emotion

as a category was actually part of a process whereby �the psychological� came into

existence. All the same, he observed: �no one (to my knowledge) ever wrote bookscalled The Psychology of the Passions or The Emotions of the Soul�.110

The earlier literature of the passions (and also affections) made sense in the con-

text of Christian belief in the soul. The passions were not feelings, distinct from cog-

nition and desire, originating separately in the mind or in the body. They were

activities of the soul involving the intellect, which originated in the soul as well as

in the body. As states of the soul, they shared its fallen nature, and Aquinas at least

regarded them as involuntary. The religious context, as Dixon�s study fully brought

out, is not detachable from what the language of passion meant. And, as he sug-gested (while carefully avoiding an over simplified thesis about secularisation), the

107 There were, it may be noted, earlier discussions of �emotion�, for example by Henry Home (Lord

Kames), and it perhaps remains to be judged how far the shift which Dixon has documented followed

eighteenth-century precedents.108 Dixon (2003), p. 124.109 Quoted in Dixon (2003), p. 124.110 Ibid, p. 4.


shift to a language of emotion occurred along with a rejection of that religious con-

text. In my terms, religious belief and passion as a state of the soul, and secular belief

and emotion as a dimension of mind, are reflexively related.

The argument is not that the word �emotion� itself was entirely new, though it was

not particularly common in English before the nineteenth century, since, after all, itcomes from the Latin, �emotia�. This word itself appears not to have had a settled

meaning in the early modern period, and Descartes�s prominent use of it (as was also

the case with his use of �esprit�, translated as �mind�, as opposed to �ame� or �soul�)was, in particular, not straightforward. In her study of the passions in the seven-

teenth century, Susan James described just how extensively philosophers matched ac-

counts of reason with an appreciation of the place of the passions, not just in human

life, but in cognitive activity. Significantly, and perhaps in opposition to the direction

of my discussion, she did not find it necessary to comment specifically on whether thelanguage of the emotions differs from the language of the passions and affections.

She observed only some variations, for example, that the notion of the passions in-

cluded desire, whereas modern philosophers of mind do not hold desire to be an

emotion.111

Descartes referred to les passions de l�ame to denote the soul�s capacity to register

the activity of something outside itself, as opposed to its capacity to initiate. He

moved away from Christian Aristotelian teaching about the soul, in which the pas-

sions are activities of the soul, though involuntary and though often initiated by thebody. He gave definite form to the view that identified the passions with the body

and reason with the soul, thereby distancing himself from the medieval and ancient

view that the soul has powers of both reason and passion. He �radicalises the existingtendency to make the body responsible for the passions�.112 Descartes, as James

noted, favoured the word �emotion�, where the word �passion� was more usual, in

his account of what strongly moves and troubles the soul. He also stressed the role

of �emotions interieures�, which enthuse the soul while it thinks, and he clearly distin-

guished such emotions (originating in the soul) from the passions (originating in thebody).113 However, there still remain questions about what impact, if any, Des-

cartes�s use of the term �emotion� had, and what differences in usage there were in dif-

ferent settings. (Spinoza, for example, also used the word.) Hume, possibly

influenced by Descartes, used the English word �emotion� freely in the mid-eighteenth

century, in a context where, at least in retrospect, it appears that he distinguished

between motive and feeling, and separated the latter from the immediate antecedents

of action. Yet, it is no small matter to clarify Hume�s intentions, since he sometimes

wrote �passions or emotions�, implying that they are equivalent, and sometimes de-scribed such conditions as pride, humility, love of beauty and curiosity as �passions�and reserved �emotion� for the state of feeling or affections. A distinction between

111 James (1997), p. 7.112 Danziger (1997), p. 33. Dixon (2003), passim, also develops this point, referring to its Christian

significance.113 James (1997), pp. 95, 196–200.


passion and emotion also played a part in his distinction between �calm� and �violent�passions.114

While many modern readers have examined Les passions de l�ame (published in

French in 1649) for its account of the mind–body problem, contemporaries under-

stood the book to be first and foremost a contribution to the literature, as much prac-tical as theoretical, on the control of the passions and on the disorders of the passions

in illness. Descartes contributed to a well established genre about what Pascal called

the �civil war in man between reason and passions�.115 However, Descartes�s positionwas distinctive because he held that the soul, as rational being, cannot be divided

against itself, and this went against common understanding of the fallen nature of

the soul. He relocated the problems which people have in acting rightly from the soul

to the body, and to support this view, he pictured in detail the close relations which the

soul has to the body and, hence, how disturbances in the body upset the soul.116 Hisargument was also practical: he offered guidance on how to regulate the body and thus

free the soul to do what is good. Thus, Descartes�s text was not about �the psychologyof the emotions� in any recognisable modern sense. He wrote to correct views of the

soul and of the passions, and his discourse was embedded in a literature of theology,

logic, metaphysics, medicine and practical moral philosophy. Descartes himself no-

where represented his own interests as �psychology�.Even if we limit the historical search to the �first-person standpoint� in relation to the

feelings and the origins of modern �emotions�, the potential field appears almost limit-less.With the eighteenth century inmind,Dixon observed, �affective discourses and ter-minologies . . .were too complex for it to be possible to discern in them any single

attitude to human passions . . . �117 The relevant histories are a matter of ways of life

and not only texts, concerning the world of subjectivity, the affective life, fiction, the

arts, religious sensibility, self-discipline and much else besides. I have already referred

to scholarship which has looked to the literary context for the creation of early eigh-

teenth psychology. Taking such work further, Marina Frasca-Spada claimed impor-

tance for what she called a �conversation� between moral philosophy and the novel inbuilding up a discourse about human nature and personal identity. This conversation

was concrete and empirical—it drew on specific representations of human nature, as

well as �sentimental�—it aroused the participants� feelings. In her studies of the closing

decades of the eighteenth century which took a very broad look at notions of self and

the representation of sex and gender, Ludmilla Jordanova turned to visual sources,

notably the portrait, and linked notions of the mind, and hence modern psychological

descriptions, to demographic, geographic, medical and economic circumstances. The

French historian of psychology in the nineteenth century, Jacqueline Carroy, wroteabout the overlap between the stage, the seance and the clinical demonstration in the

formation of the psychological person.118 Literature and art in all their forms were

114 Hume (1888), Book II, �Of the passions�. Also Danziger (1997), pp. 40–42.115 Pascal (1995), Sect. 621.116 Descartes (1985). See Shapin (2000).117 Dixon (2003), p. 66.118 See n. 43; Frasca-Spada (1999); Jordanova (1999); Carroy (1993).


of decisive importance for the self-formation of modern psychological subjects, and to

what we now refer as the emotions.

These arguments, and the historical writings in which they are embedded, amount

to a substantial challenge to those who claim that psychological categories are �nat-ural� or describe �real� human nature. Even the category �psychology� itself has a his-tory. Historical knowledge supports the view that our categories are constituted,

reflexively, in human life, and that the hugely varied forms of this life and the knowl-

edge we have of it change together. The �being� in being human is constructive, and

from this have come even the very terms in which we understand the constructive

process. There is no one thing which we can call �psychology� in either the present

or the past, not an institutionalised discipline, not a body of knowledge and not a

way of being human in the world. The history �of psychology� cannot conform to

one plot. In order to understand the plots that historians use, we must understandfor what they are writing.

Acknowledgements

Research for this paper was carried out as part of EU INTAS project 97–30631. I

enlarge on ideas presented at the annual conference of the European Society for the

History of the Human Sciences, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, 2002. I grate-fully acknowledge comments on the paper from Graham Richards and Irina

Sirotkina.

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