LECTURE No. 5. The development of psychology in the era of enlightenment

1. England. Development of associative psychology

David Hartley (1705-1757) and Joseph Priestley are among the remarkable and brilliant figures in the history of philosophical and psychological thought in England in the XNUMXth century.

Gartley, with his views, begins the associative direction in English empirical psychology. He expresses his credo with sufficient clarity: "Everything is explained by primary sensations and the laws of association." Hartley elevated association into a universal mechanical law of all forms of mental activity, into something similar to the great Newtonian law of universal gravitation.

This means that he extended it to all spheres and levels of mental life.

Associations are established between sensations, between ideas, between movements, and also between all of the mental manifestations listed above. All these associations correspond to associated tremors of nerve fibers or associated vibrations of the medulla. The main conditions for the formation of associations are contiguity in time or space and repetition.

In his work Reflections on Man, His Structure, His Duty and Hopes, Gartley argued that the mental world of a person develops gradually as a result of the complication of primary sensory elements through their associations due to the contiguity of these elements in time and the frequency of repetition of their combinations. As for general concepts, they arise when everything accidental and insignificant falls away from a strong association, which remains unchanged under various conditions. The totality of these permanent connections is held together as a whole thanks to the word, which acts as a factor of generalization.

The installation on a strictly causal explanation of how the mental mechanism arises and works, as well as the subordination of this doctrine to the solution of social and moral problems - all this gave Gartley's scheme wide popularity. Its influence both in England itself and on the continent was exceptionally great, and it extended to various branches of humanitarian knowledge: ethics, aesthetics, logic, and pedagogy.

Joseph Priestley was a follower of Gartley's ideas. Priestley opposed the view that matter is something dead, inert and passive. In addition to extension, matter has such an inalienable property as attraction and repulsion.

Consideration of the properties of attraction and repulsion as a form of matter activity gave Priestley reason to believe that there is no need to resort to God as the source of matter motion. As for mental or spiritual phenomena, they, like repulsion and attraction, are properties of matter, but not of any kind, as was the case with Spinoza, but organized in a special way. Such an organized system of matter, the property of which is psychic abilities, Priestley considers "the nervous system, or rather the brain." Spiritual phenomena are placed by Priestley not only in dependence on the body, but also on the external world.

The instrument of communication of a person with the outside world are the sense organs, nerves and brain. Without them, neither sensations nor ideas can take place. All phenomena of the human spirit are derived by Priestley from sensations. He believed that external senses alone were enough to explain the whole variety of mental phenomena. The manifestations of the spirit are reduced by Priestley to the abilities of memory, judgment, emotions and will. All of them are different types of associations of sensations and ideas. The same goes for the most general concepts. The anatomical and physiological basis of sensations, ideas and their associations are the vibrations of the nervous and brain matter. Strong vibrations are characteristic of sensual images, weakened vibrations are characteristic of ideas. Priestley was alien to the vulgar idea of ​​the psyche, which took place in Toland. He pointed out that in no case should one consider that brain vibrations are the very sensation or idea. The vibration of brain particles is only the cause of sensations and ideas, because vibrations can occur without being accompanied by perceptions.

The complex nature of the phenomena of the spirit was put by Priestley in dependence on the volume of the vibrating system of the brain.

Priestley took an objective position on the question of the will. According to Priestley, the will cannot be understood as a voluntary decision of the spirit to act, one way or another, outside of any real external reason. Will has the same necessity as other manifestations of the spirit. The origins of "free will" must be sought outside of the will itself.

The most difficult question for all the philosophers of the described period was the question of whether animals have a soul, and if so, how does it differ from the human soul. Priestley believed that "animals possess the rudiments of all our abilities without exception, and in such a way that they differ from us only in degree, and not in kind." He attributed to them memory, emotions, will, reason, and even the ability to abstract. By endowing animals with the traits of the human psyche, Priestley took the wrong step towards anthropomorphism.

A qualitative identification of the psyche of animals and humans was allowed by many advanced naturalists and materialist philosophers of the XNUMXth-XNUMXth centuries. (Priestley, La Mettrie, Darwin, Chernyshevsky, Romanee and others). Anthropomorphism played a progressive role at that time, for it was a form of affirmation of the materialistic view of the nature and origin of the psyche of animals and humans.

With all the misconceptions, Priestley played a significant role in strengthening the natural-scientific and objective approach to the phenomena of the spirit. By putting into practice the ideas of Gartley, he contributed to the spread of the basic principle of the English associative school.

As a materialist philosopher, naturalist and brilliant experimenter in the field of chemistry, Priestley considered it possible to apply the experiment to the field of mental phenomena.

The principle of association was interpreted differently by two other English thinkers of this era - D. Berkeley (1685-1753) and D. Hume (1711-1776). Both took for the primary not the physical reality, not the vital activity of the organism, but the phenomena of consciousness. Their main argument was empiricism - the doctrine that the source of knowledge is sensory experience (formed by associations). According to Berkeley, experience is the sensations directly experienced by the subject: visual, muscular, tactile, etc.

In his work "The Experience of a New Theory of Vision" Berkeley analyzed in detail the sensory elements that make up the image of geometric space as a receptacle for all natural bodies.

Physics assumes that this Newtonian space is given objectively. According to Berkeley, it is the product of the interaction of sensations. Some sensations (for example, visual) are connected with others (for example, tactile), and people consider this whole complex of sensations to be a thing given to them independently of consciousness, while "to be means to be in perception."

This conclusion inevitably led to solipsism - to the denial of any being, except for one's own consciousness. To get out of this trap and explain why different subjects have perceptions of the same external objects, Berkeley appealed to a special divine consciousness that all people are endowed with.

In his psychological analysis of visual perception, Berkeley expressed several valuable ideas, pointing out the participation of tactile sensations in the construction of an image of three-dimensional space (with a two-dimensional image on the retina).

As for Hume, he took a different position. The question of whether physical objects exist or do not exist independently of us, he considered theoretically insoluble (such a view is called agnosticism). Meanwhile, the doctrine of causality is nothing more than a product of the belief that one impression (acknowledged as a cause) will be followed by another (accepted as an effect). In fact, there is nothing more than a strong association of representations that has arisen in the experience of the subject. And the subject himself and his soul are just successive bundles or bundles of impressions.

Hume's skepticism awakened many thinkers from their "dogmatic sleep", made them think about their beliefs concerning the soul, causality, etc. After all, these beliefs were accepted by them on faith, without critical analysis.

Hume's opinion that the concept of the subject can be reduced to a bunch of associations was directed by its critical edge against the idea of ​​the soul as a special entity granted by the Almighty, which generates and connects individual mental phenomena.

The assumption of such a spiritual, incorporeal substance was defended, in particular, by Berkeley, who rejected the material substance. According to Hume, what is called the soul is something like a stage, where sensations and ideas intertwined pass in succession.

Hume divides the variety of impressions or perceptions into two categories: perceptions (sensations) and ideas. Their differences are based on the strength and liveliness of the impression. Hume refers to the reflective impressions passions, effects, emotions. Sensations arise from unknown causes, and reflective impressions are associated with bodily pain or pleasure.

In addition to dividing impressions into perceptions and ideas, Hume divides both into simple and complex. Simple perceptions and simple ideas necessarily match, while complex ideas may not always be similar to complex perceptions. Ideas are divided into ideas of memory and ideas of imagination.

Hume saw associations as the only mechanism for linking ideas. He was far from thinking that perceptions and their connections have anything to do with the external world and the body. He openly admits that he has no idea either about the place where the change of some associations by others takes place, or about the material of which the spiritual world consists.

There is not only an object of perception, there is no subject itself, the bearer of them. Personality for Hume is nothing more than "a bundle or bundle of various perceptions, following one after another with incomprehensible speed and being in constant flux, in constant motion."

The presentation of Hume's philosophical and psychological system shows that it is permeated with the spirit of extreme subjectivism.

Having transformed Locke's external experience entirely into internal, he did not find a place in it either for the object or for the subject. Outside the kaleidoscopically changing states of consciousness, it is impossible to reach either God or matter.

Necessarily, the question arose of a way out of the impasse created by Hume. The first attempts were made by E. Condillac; in England itself, the subjective line of Berkeley-Hume is further developed in the writings of James Mill (1773-1836) and his son John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). Their views were a classic example of mechanistic introspective associative psychology.

Mill believed that sensations are the first states of consciousness; derivatives of them - ideas. The nature of consciousness is such that sensory data and the associative mechanism of their connection are already embedded in it.

Associations are not a force or a cause, as Hume understood it, but simply a way of coincidence or contact of ideas. They apply only to ideas, and do not affect sense data.

Complex ideas are formed from simple ideas through associations. If Hume put forward three laws of associations, then J. Mill has one: adjacency or closeness in time or space. Simultaneous and successive associations differ in strength, which depends on two conditions - clarity and repetition of ideas.

The result of diverse contacts (associations) of ideas is the essence of a person's mental life. There is no access to it, except for internal observation.

The mechanical view of J. Mill on the structure of consciousness was criticized by his son D. St. Mill. He opposed the position on the atomic composition of the soul and the mechanical connection of the initial elements.

Instead of a mechanical model, as not reflecting the true structure of consciousness, D. St. Mill proposed a chemical one, that is, now consciousness began to be built on the model of chemical processes.

Properties of the soul, D. St. believed. Mill, it is impossible to deduce from the properties of the elements, just as water is characterized by properties that are not inherent in either oxygen or hydrogen separately.

The new chemical approach did not in the least interfere with D. St. Mill to leave in force the basic associative principle of the connection of the elements of consciousness.

For him, the laws of association have the same force in psychology as the law of gravity has in astronomy.

The initial phenomena of consciousness, being associated, give a new mental state, the qualities of which have no similarity among the primary elements.

D. St. Mill singled out the following laws of associations: similarity, contiguity, frequency and intensity.

Subsequently, the law of intensity was replaced by the law of inseparability. All these laws were attracted by D. St. Mill to substantiate the subjective-idealistic theory, according to which matter was understood as "a constant possibility of sensation". It seemed to him that along with a limited part of the available sensations (transitory and changeable), there is always an extensive area of ​​possible (permanent) sensations, which constitute the external world for us.

Associative laws underlie the mutual transitions of available sensations into possible ones, and vice versa.

The dynamics of the states of consciousness in the phenomenological concepts of both Mills occurs out of touch with the objective world and those physiological processes that form the material basis for all mental phenomena.

English associationism of the XNUMXth century, both in its materialistic and idealistic variants, guided the search of many Western psychologists in the next two centuries.

No matter how speculative Gartley's views on the activity of the nervous system, she, in essence, was conceived by him as an organ that transmits external impulses from the sense organs through the brain to the muscles, as a reflex mechanism.

In this regard, Gartley became the recipient of Descartes' discovery of the reflex nature of behavior.

But Descartes, along with the reflex, introduced a second explanatory principle - reflection as a special activity of consciousness.

Hartley, on the other hand, outlined the prospect of an uncompromising explanation based on a single principle and those higher manifestations of mental life, which the dualist Descartes explained by the activity of an immaterial substance.

This Hartlian line later became a resource for the scientific explanation of the psyche in a new era, when the reflex principle was perceived and transformed by Sechenov and his followers.

Found its followers at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. and the line drawn by Berkeley and Hume.

Its successors were not only positivist philosophers, but also psychologists (Wundt, Titchener), who concentrated on the analysis of the elements of the subject's experience as special mental realities that cannot be deduced from anything.

2. French materialism

Philosophically, the decisive step in the orientation of psychology towards objective and experimental study was made by the French materialists of the eighteenth century. French materialism combined two lines of theoretical thought: the objective direction of Descartes in the field of physics and physiology and the sensationalist ideas of Locke.

As for Locke's empiricism and sensationalism, the works of E. Condillac (1715-1780) contributed to their transfer to French soil. These include: "Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge" (1746), which was a summary of Locke's book "An Essay on the Human Mind", and Condillac's independent work "Treatise on Sensations" (1754). Condillac proceeded from the experimental origin of knowledge; he eliminated the reflexive source of knowledge. Condillac took advantage of the image of the statue, which gradually endowed him with various sensations.

With the introduction of each new type of sensation, the mental life of the statue becomes more complicated. Touch is the most important of all senses. It acts as the teacher of all other senses.

The dominant position of touch is determined by the fact that only it teaches the other senses to relate sensations to external objects.

The human soul is a collection of modifications of sensations. Memory, imagination, judgment are varieties of different combinations of sensations. Feelings are the only source of a person's inner world.

The general concept of Condillac was ambivalent. He did not deny, as, for example, Berkeley, the existence of an objective world.

At the same time, Condillac criticized Spinoza for his doctrine of substance, tried to prove that no substance could be seen behind sensations.

Adhering to this point of view, Condillac practically remained on the introspective positions of Berkeley and Hume. The phenomenological tendencies of Condillac provoked well-deserved criticism from Diderot.

The ideas of Descartes and Condillac were further developed by the materialists of the 1709th century. J. Lametrie (1751-1713), D. Diderot (1784-1723), P. Holbach (1789-1715), C. Helvetius (1771-1757) and P. Cabanis (1808-XNUMX). They are characterized by overcoming the dualism of Descartes, Locke and Condillac both in understanding the entire universe and in understanding the inner world of man.

A significant step towards an objective analysis of the psyche of man and animals from the standpoint of mechanics was made by the founder of French materialism, the physician and naturalist J. La Mettrie. His views were formed under the influence of Descartes' physics and Locke's sensationalism.

Accepting the completely Cartesian thesis about the machine-like nature of the work of a bodily organism, La Mettrie extends the mechanical principle to the field of mental phenomena. He firmly states that man is a complex, vertically crawling machine towards enlightenment, "a living personification of incessant movement."

The driving principle of the animal and human machine is the soul, understood as the ability to feel. La Mettrie was a passionate advocate of the objective method. He begins his work "Man-Machine" by pointing out that his leaders were always only experience and observation.

An objective indicator of the course of mental processes are those bodily changes and the consequences that they cause. He believed that the sole cause of all our representations are impressions from external bodies. Perceptions, judgments, all intellectual abilities grow out of them, which are "modifications of a kind of brain screen, on which, as from a magic lantern, objects imprinted in the eye are reflected." In the doctrine of sensations, La Mettrie draws attention to the relationship between the objective and subjective aspects of the image. To emphasize the critical role of mental components in the formation of the image, La Mettrie called perception "intellectual".

Despite the mechanistic approach in explaining the psyche of animals and humans, anthropomorphic errors, La Mettrie played a prominent role in establishing a materialistic, natural-science view of the nature of mental phenomena, and therefore in determining the scientific method of the future experimental psychology.

One of the most original French thinkers was D. Diderot.

His main ideas in the field of psychology are set forth in three works: "Letter on the blind for the edification of the sighted" (1749), "Thoughts to explain nature" (1754) and "Conversation of d'Alembert and Diderot" (1769) .

In these works, Diderot argues that matter is the only substance in the universe, in man and in the animal. Dividing matter into living and non-living, he believed that the organic form of matter comes from inorganic. All matter has the ability to reflect.

At the level of organic life, this faculty appears in the form of active sensitivity.

At the level of dead matter, the property of reflection is represented as a potential sensitivity.

The whole set of mental phenomena, starting from various kinds of sensations and ending with will and self-consciousness, depends on the activity of the sense organs, nerves and brain.

The problem of sensations is the most developed part of Diderot's psychological views. In his Letter on the Blind for the Edification of the Seeing, he gives a consistently materialistic solution to the question of the nature of sensations and their interaction, rejecting the entire phenomenological "extravagant system" of Berkeley.

Another representative of French materialism, Paul Holbach, pursues the idea of ​​the natural origin of the psyche no less consistently. In his "System of Nature" there is no place for spiritual substance. Man is declared to be the most perfect part of nature. As for the spiritual principle in man, Holbach considers it as the same physical, but "considered only from a certain point of view." Due to the high bodily organization, a person is endowed with the ability to feel, think and act. The first human ability is sensation. All others flow from them. To feel means to experience the effects of external objects on the senses. Any impact of an external agent is accompanied by changes in the sense organs. These changes in the form of concussions are transmitted through the nerves to the brain.

Holbach emphasizes a certain role of needs in human life. Needs are the driving factor of our passions, will, bodily and mental needs. Holbach's position on needs as the main source of human activity is of great importance. Holbach, in his doctrine of needs, argued that external causes alone are sufficient to explain the activity of a person and his consciousness (cognitive, emotional and volitional activity). He completely rejected the traditional idea of ​​idealism about the spontaneous activity of consciousness.

For the knowledge of mental phenomena, Holbach called for turning to nature and searching for truth in it itself, attracting experience as its guide.

The idea of ​​the possibility of an objective study of psychic phenomena opened up a real path to scientific experimentation in the field of mental processes.

In addition to the assertion of natural determinism, when considering the inner world of a person, his consciousness and behavior, the French materialists took the first step towards the idea of ​​social determinism. Special merit here belongs to K. Helvetius, who showed that man is not only a product of nature, but also a product of the social environment and education. Circumstances create a person - this is the general conclusion of the philosophy and psychology of Helvetius. Both books by Helvetius "On the Mind" and "On Man" are devoted to the development and substantiation of the original thesis, which proclaimed that man is a product of education. Helvetius saw the main task in proving that the difference in mental abilities, the spiritual appearance of people is due not so much to the natural properties of a person as to upbringing. It includes the subject environment, and the circumstances of life, and social phenomena.

Helvetius came to underestimate the role of a person's physical potentials in the development of his mental abilities.

The first form of mental activity, according to Helvetius, are sensations. The faculty of sensation is considered by the philosopher to be the same natural property as density, extension, and others, but only it refers only to the "organized bodies of animals." Everything in Helvetius comes down to sensation: memory, judgment, mind, imagination, passions, desires. At the same time, the extreme sensationalism of Helvetius played a positive role in the struggle against Descartes' reduction of the mental to consciousness and thinking. Helvetius pointed out that the human soul is not only the mind, it is something more than the mind, because, in addition to the mind, there is the ability to sense. The mind is formed mainly during life; in life it can be lost. But the soul as the faculty of sensation remains. It is born and dies along with the birth and death of the organism. Therefore, thinking alone cannot express the essence of the soul. The sphere of the psychic is not limited to the area of ​​thought and consciousness, since outside it there is a large number of weak sensations that "without attracting attention to themselves, cannot evoke either consciousness or memories in us," but behind which there are physical causes.

Man in Helvetius is not a passive being, but, on the contrary, an active one. The source of his activity are passions. They enliven the spiritual world of a person and set it in motion. Passions are divided into two kinds, some of which are given by nature, others are acquired during life. They are known by external expressions and bodily changes.

As a true materialist, Helvetius, in relation to the method of cognition of the human psyche, could not but stand on the positions of an objective and experimental approach. The science of the spiritual world of man, in his opinion, should be interpreted and created in the same way as experimental physics is interpreted and created.

3. Germany. The development of German psychology in the XVIII-XIX centuries

After Leibniz, empirical tendencies began to penetrate German psychology. They became especially noticeable in the works of X. Wolf (1679-1754). In psychology, Wolf is known for dividing psychology into empirical and rational parts, which is reflected in the titles of his books: Empirical Psychology (1732) and Rational Psychology (1734). In addition, Wolf assigned the name "psychology" to science. According to Wolf, real science is ideally designed to solve three main problems:

1) derivation of facts and phenomena from essential foundations;

2) description of these facts and phenomena;

3) establishment of quantitative relations.

Since psychology cannot realize the third task, it remains to solve the first two, one of which must become the subject of rational psychology, the other - the subject of empirical psychology.

The basis of all mental manifestations is, according to Wolff, the soul. Its essence lies in the ability to represent. This leading force manifests itself in the form of cognitive and anesthetic abilities. Anetative faculties, or desire faculties, are dependent on cognitive ones. With Wolf, it all comes down to a fundamental cognitive essence, which is the cause of various manifestations, which empirical psychology should deal with. Wolf's advocacy of empiricism in psychology, for the creation of psychometry as a science similar to experimental physics, is the positive side of Wolf's teaching in psychology. But, solving the psychophysical problem in the form of psychophysiological parallelism, Wolf still separated, instead of linking, mental and physiological processes into two independent series of phenomena.

A strong tilt of German psychology towards empiricism was carried out by I. Kant (1724-1804). Kant's psychological views stemmed from his general theory of knowledge. He admitted that outside of us there are real objects - "things in themselves." However, nothing can be said about them, since "things in themselves" are unknowable. We are given only the phenomena of consciousness, which are produced by "things in themselves", but do not express their essence. What is presented to us in consciousness is a world of phenomena, completely different from the world of things. By itself, sensory experience does not carry any knowledge of objects. Reasonable categories are not derived from sensory data, they are given initially. Since the essence of things is incomprehensible, and the world can be given to man only in phenomena (“things for us”), then all sciences deal only with phenomena, and therefore can only be empirical sciences. The exceptions are mathematics and mechanics.

According to this provision, for psychology, the object of study of which is the inner world of a person, the essence of the soul is inaccessible. The subject of psychology can only be the phenomena of consciousness that are revealed through the inner sense. Thus, psychology is the science of the phenomena of consciousness, to which he attributed cognitive, emotional and volitional acts. Kant replaced the dichotomous principle of dividing the soul with a three-term classification of mental phenomena. The main method by which these types of phenomena are detected is internal observation. According to Kant, the phenomena received from the inner sense proceed in one dimension - a temporal sequence. Spatial measurement is not characteristic of the phenomena of consciousness. Therefore, psychology is deprived of the ability to apply mathematics, the use of which requires a minimum of two dimensions. Experimental techniques are completely inapplicable to a thinking subject. Hence the conclusion is drawn that psychology is never destined to become an "experimental doctrine".

Meanwhile, they believe that with his critical attitude to psychology, I. Kant stimulated the search for new approaches and means in the field of psychology at subsequent stages of its development (Yaroshevsky, Boring, Murphy, and others).

Among other provisions of Kant that influenced psychology, one should point out his doctrine of transcendental apperception as a special ability of the mind to generalize, synthesize and integrate sensory intuitions.

Kant's general doctrine of a priori conditions, or forms of sensory experience, will form the basis of Müller's theory of the specific energy of feelings, which had a significant impact on foreign psychophysiology.

Along with the ideas of Kant at the beginning of the XIX century. in Germany, the views of J. Herbart (1776-1841) are widely known and disseminated.

The influence of his philosophical and psychological-pedagogical ideas affected in different directions.

One of them concerns the definition of psychology as a special explanatory science, in which he saw the basis for the construction of scientific pedagogy.

Another position of Herbart is connected with the assertion of psychology as a field of empirical empirical knowledge.

The call for the transformation of psychology into an experimental science had no real prerequisites for Herbart, because it deprived mental processes of a physiological basis. He did not allow that the physiological approach could in any way contribute to the acquisition of scientific knowledge about the mental.

The experiment, according to Herbart, cannot take place in psychology due to its analytical nature.

All the richness of mental life is made up of static and dynamic representations endowed with spontaneous activity. All representations have temporal and power characteristics.

Changes in representations in intensity constitute the statics of the soul.

The change of ideas in time constitutes the dynamics of the soul. Any representation that does not change in quality can change in strength (or intensity), which is experienced by the subject as the clarity of representations. Each representation has a desire for self-preservation. When there is a difference in intensity, weak representations are suppressed, while strong ones remain.

The sum of all delayed, or inhibited, representations was Herbart's subject of careful calculations. Suppressed ideas take on the character of motivating forces.

From this struggle of different ideas for a place in consciousness follows Herbart's position on the thresholds of consciousness. Those ideas were considered conscious, which in their strength and tendency to self-preservation are above the threshold. Weak representations below the threshold do not give the subjective experience of clarity.

Representations that have fallen into the sphere of consciousness have the opportunity to assimilate into the general mass of clear representations, which Herbart called "apperceptive".

Of the most valuable propositions put forward by Herbart for the fate of experimental psychology are:

1) the idea of ​​using mathematics in psychology;

2) the idea of ​​the thresholds of consciousness.

Herbart's laws of representations (fusions, complications, apperceptions, etc.) will become working concepts used by psychologists in the early stages of the development of experimental psychology.

As for philosophical methodology, here he discarded the most valuable and living thing and adopted the original principles of Leibniz and Wolff.

This is what prevented him from accomplishing the task that he set himself - to build an "experimental physics of the soul."

4. Philosophical stage in the development of psychology

The philosophical stage in the development of psychology in the XNUMXth-XNUMXth centuries is the most important period in the formation of the theoretical prerequisites for the transformation of psychology into an independent science. There are two main factors contributing to the emergence and formation of psychology as a science. One of them is the penetration into psychology of the empirical approach.

The essence of the empirical principle proclaimed by Bacon was a single requirement for all specific sciences in the knowledge of the laws of nature, the study of individual facts and phenomena obtained through observation and experiment.

The transition of psychology from reasoning about the essence of the soul to the analysis of specific mental phenomena obtained on the basis of experience was the positive result of the implementation of Bacon's ideas in the field of psychology.

However, empiricism itself, which replaced the idea of ​​the soul as a special indivisible entity with the idea of ​​it as a set of mental phenomena, did not unambiguously resolve the question of the method and ways of their knowledge. The concept of experience in empirical psychology was interpreted in close connection with the question of the relationship of mental phenomena with the physical world and the material substratum. Hence, in determining the method of psychology, this or that solution of a psychophysical, and psychophysiological, problem acquired cardinal significance.

The psychophysical and psychophysiological problem was solved in the history of psychology either in the spirit of dualism (Descartes' theory of external interaction, Leibniz's theory of parallelism), or in the spirit of monism in its materialistic (Spinoza, French and Russian materialists) or in a subjective-idealistic form (Berkeley, Hume). All varieties of idealism in solving psychophysical and psychophysiological problems are characterized by the separation of the mental from the physical and physiological, by reducing the world of mental phenomena to a closed system of facts of consciousness that are not accessible to objective observation. Only internal experience, introspection, self-observation were proclaimed to be the only method of penetrating into consciousness.

In the XNUMXth century in Western European philosophy and psychology, the most common form of resolving the issue of the relationship between soul and body was the theory of parallelism, according to which the mental and physiological were considered as two independent series of phenomena, but which had a functional correspondence with each other. This way of considering the psychophysiological problem made it possible to judge mental states by the accompanying bodily changes and acted as a theoretical prerequisite for the introduction of natural science methods into psychology within the framework of idealism. It was the concept of psychophysiological parallelism that became the philosophical basis for the construction of experimental psychology in the West, the initiator of which was W. Wundt. Remaining on the positions of subjective psychology, Wundt and his followers could not recognize the objective method of decisive importance in the knowledge of the psyche. The leading role was still assigned to introspection, and the use of physiological methods was considered by them only as a means of its control. For many centuries, introspective theories of consciousness were opposed by the materialistic line in psychology, which in the XVIII-XIX centuries. were represented in England by Toland, Priestley, in France by La Mettrie, Diderot, Holbach, Helvetius, in Russia by Lomonosov, Radishchev, Herzen, Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky. Considering the mental as a natural property, materialist philosophers argued that mental phenomena can and should be studied by the same means and methods used by the natural sciences, that is, by observation and experiment. These ideas of philosophical materialism found their expression in the materialist program for the transfer of psychology to natural scientific foundations and methods, which was developed from the standpoint of reflex teaching by the great Russian scientist I. M. Sechenov.

Author: Luchinin A.S.

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Producing solar energy in space is becoming more feasible with the advent of new technologies and the development of space programs. The head of the startup Virtus Solis shared his vision of using SpaceX's Starship to create orbital power plants capable of powering the Earth. Startup Virtus Solis has unveiled an ambitious project to create orbital power plants using SpaceX's Starship. This idea could significantly change the field of solar energy production, making it more accessible and cheaper. The core of the startup's plan is to reduce the cost of launching satellites into space using Starship. This technological breakthrough is expected to make solar energy production in space more competitive with traditional energy sources. Virtual Solis plans to build large photovoltaic panels in orbit, using Starship to deliver the necessary equipment. However, one of the key challenges ... >>

Random news from the Archive Stress suppresses fear 22.05.2020 It hardly needs to be argued that stress and fear are interconnected, but usually it seems to us that they mutually reinforce each other: we are scared and stressed, and because of stress, we become even more afraid. Researchers from the University of Konstanz found that there are nuances in the relationship between stress and fear. Participants in a psychological experiment were given to read an article about some dubious substance. Before and after the article, they were asked their opinion about this substance - how much they fear to encounter it, whether they will avoid it, and, most importantly, whether they are going to warn other people. Half of the subjects were stressed before talking about the suspect substance and reading the article: they were asked to give a speech in front of an audience or solve a complex arithmetic problem in their head, again in front of a large audience. If a person does not regularly give speeches and does not solve arithmetic problems in public, then both should cause him serious stress. The level of stress was assessed by the stress hormone cortisol, the level of which rises in stressful situations. The stressed participants in the experiment did not perceive the article about the dangerous substance too sharply and were not going to share the information received with anyone. Translated to more current realities: if a stressed person learns something about new mutations in the coronavirus that make him even more infectious, then this news will scare him to a lesser extent than if he was not stressed, and share news about the coronavirus he will also not be very active. This decrease in fear corresponded precisely to the hormonal response to stress. In fact, not always, when we feel stress, the body responds to it with physiological changes. And those participants in the experiment who, according to them, felt stressed (but they did not have stress hormones), were more frightened of new information about a dangerous substance and were more ready to spread it among other people.

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