The Story of Psychology Read Online Free PDF

belief systems or lead to new conclusions in such formal systems as mathematics, cannot discover new facts. Until Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723 A.D. ) first saw red corpuscles and bacteria under his lens, no Socratic teacher could have led his pupils or himself to “remember” that such things existed; until astronomers saw evidence of the “red shift” in distant galaxies, no philosopher could, through logical searching, have discovered that he already knew the universe to be expanding at a measurable rate.
    Yet Socrates’ teachings greatly affected the development of psychology. His view that knowledge exists within us and needs only to be recovered through correct reasoning became part of the psychological theories of persons as diverse as Plato, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Kant, and even, in a sense, those present-day psychologists who maintain that personality and behavior are largely determined by genetics, linguists who say that our minds come equipped with language-comprehending structures, and parapsychologists who believe that each of us has lived before and can be “regressed” to recall our previous lives.
    The notion that we have lived before is related to Socrates’ other major impact on psychology. He held that the existence of innate knowledge, revealed by the dialectic method of instruction, proves that we possess an immortal soul, an entity that can exist apart from the brain and body. With this, the vague mythical notions of soul that had long existed in Greek and related cultures assumed a new significance and specificity. Soul is mind but is separable from the body; mind does not cease to be at death.
    On this ground would be built Platonic and, later, Christian dualism: the division of the world into mind and matter, reality and appearance, ideas and objects, reason and sense perception, the first half of each pair regarded not only as more real than but as morally superior to the second. Although these distinctions may seem chiefly philosophic and religious, they would pervade and affect humankind’s search for self-understanding throughout the centuries.
The Idealist: Plato
    He was named Aristocles, but the world knows him as Plato—in Greek,
platon
, or “broad”—the nickname he was given as a young wrestler because of the width of his shoulders. He was born in Athens in 427 to well-to-do aristocratic parents, and in his youth was an accomplished student, a handsome charmer of men and women, and a would-be poet. At twenty, about to submit a poetic drama in a competition, he listened to Socrates speaking in a public place, after which he burned his poetry and became the philosopher’s pupil. Perhaps it was the gamelike quality of Socrates’ dialectic that captivated the former wrestler; perhaps the subtlety of Socrates’ ideas entranced the serious student; perhaps the quiet and serenity of Socrates’ philosophy appealed to the son of ancient lineage in that era of political upheaval and betrayal, war and defeat, revolution and terror.
    Plato studied with Socrates for eight years. He was a dedicated student and something of a sobersides; one ancient author says that he was never seen to laugh out loud. A few scraps of love poetry attributed to him exist, some of them addressed to men, some to women, all of doubtful authenticity, and there is almost no gossip about his love life and no evidence that he ever married. Still, from the wealth of detail in his dialogues, it is evident that he was an active participant in Athenian social life and a keen observer of behavior and the human condition.
    In 404, an oligarchic political faction that included some of his own aristocratic relatives urged him to enter public life under its auspices. The young Plato wisely held back, waiting to see what the group’s policy would be, and was repelled by the violence and terror it used as its tools of government. But when democratic forces regained power, he was even more repelled by their trial and