The history of the development of mental psychology since the 17th century. History of psychology. Representations of the New Time about the world and the soul

• 1. Vygotsky L.S. The historical meaning of the psychological crisis // Sobr. op. M. (1982. Vol. 1.
• 2. Gippenreiter Yu. B. Introduction to general psychology. M., 1999.
• 3. Zinchenko V. P., Morgunov E. B. A developing person. M. (1994.
• 4. Maklakov A. G. General psychology. St. Petersburg: Peter, 2002.
• 5. Nemov R.S. Psychology: In 2 books. M., 1994. Book. 1.
• 6. Petrovsky A.V. Introduction to psychology. M., 1995.
• 7. Ponomarev Ya. A. Methodological introduction to psychology. M., 1983.
• 8. Rubinstein S. L. Basics general psychology. St. Petersburg: Peter, 1999.
• 9. Slobodchikov V.I., Isaev E.I. Human psychology. M., 1995.

HISTORY OF FORMATION OF THE SUBJECT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

The development of psychological knowledge within the framework of the doctrine of the soul (from antiquity to the 17th century)

The appearance of ancient ideas about the world around us is associated with animism (from the Latin ashta - soul). The animistic worldview endows every object with a soul, which acts as a source of movement and development. Dreams, hallucinations, death - all these facts led primitive people to the idea of ​​the existence of the soul as a real object in the body. A complex cult ritual of relations with the souls of the dead, influencing the souls of people and animals, communicating with the spirit - the patron of the tribe - developed.

As the doctrine of the soul, psychology arose more than two thousand years ago as the main part of philosophical teachings. The most famous contribution to psychology ancient Greek philosophers. They believed that the soul is present in nature wherever there is movement and warmth. A revolution in the minds was the transition from animism to hylozoism (from the Greek. yu1e - substance, matter). The hylozoists began to consider the soul (psyche) from the point of view of natural science laws.

The hylozoist Heraclitus (530-470 BC) introduced the idea of ​​development as a law. He believed that everything that exists is subject to eternal change: "Our bodies and souls flow like streams." The cosmos appeared to Heraclitus in the form of "eternally living fire", and the soul - in the form of its spark. Heraclitus considered the knowledge of his own soul to be one of the worthy occupations of a person. His favorite saying is: "Know thyself." The works of Heraclitus were difficult to understand, so even his contemporaries called him the "dark philosopher."

The Athenian philosopher Anaxagoras (500-428 BC) put forward the idea of ​​organization (systemicity). He considered the world to be composed of countless qualitatively different particles and pointed out that the mind (nous) is the beginning that gives the processes of nature and human behavior a regular character.

Hippocrates (460-377 BC) laid the foundation for the scientific typology that has been used by modern teachings about individual differences between people. Hippocrates searched for the source and cause of differences inside the body, spiritual qualities were made dependent on bodily ones. For a physician, it was important to know the structure of a living organism, the causes on which health and disease depend. Hippocrates considered such a reason to be the proportion in which various “juices” (blood, bile, mucus) are mixed in the body. "Proportion in the mixture" was later called temperament. The names of four temperaments that have survived to this day are associated with the name of Hippocrates: sanguine (blood predominates), choleric (yellow bile), melancholic (black bile), phlegmatic (mucus).

Democritus (460-370 BC) believed that the psyche, like all nature, is material. The soul is made up of atoms, only finer than those that make up the physical bodies. The world is known through the senses. The thinnest, invisible casts are separated from things and penetrate into the soul, leaving their imprint on it. Democritus also put forward the idea of ​​causality, later called determinism. He was a materialist and an atheist. He was constantly engaged in the anatomy of animal corpses. At one time he even lived in a cemetery. “Once, when some young men,” says a satirist of the 2nd century A.D. e. Lucian, - they wanted to scare him for the sake of a joke and, dressed up as the dead, wearing black dresses and masks depicting skulls, surrounded him with a dense crowd, he not only was not afraid of their performance, but did not even look at them, but said, continuing to write: “ Stop fooling around." I was so firmly convinced that the souls that were outside the body were nothing.

Three principles discovered by the ancient Greek scientists Heraclitus, Democritus and Anaxagoras (2.5 thousand years ago) became the basis of the scientific way of understanding the world, including the scientific knowledge of mental phenomena.

A new feature of mental phenomena was discovered by the activities of philosophers called sophists - "teachers of wisdom." They were not interested in nature with its laws independent of man, but in man himself, whom the sophist Protagoras called "the measure of all things." Subsequently, sophists began to be called false wise men who, with the help of various tricks, give out imaginary evidence as true. But in the history of psychological knowledge, the activities of the sophists discovered a new object: relationships between people. The study of methods of persuasion, victory in a verbal duel turned the logical and grammatical structure of speech into an object of experimentation.

Socrates (470-399 BC) for the first time considered the soul as the source of human morality. He can be called the ancestor of dialectics - the method of finding truth by asking leading questions. In contrast to the Sophists, whose starting point was the relation of man to people, he took as a basis the relation of man to himself as the bearer of intellectual and moral qualities. Socrates was accused of "worshiping new deities", "corrupting the youth" and sentenced to death. However, for subsequent eras, he became the embodiment of the ideal of the sage. He said that the soul is the mental quality of the individual, characteristic of him as a rational being. Such an approach could not proceed from the idea of ​​the materiality of the soul, and therefore arises and A New Look on it, which was developed by a student of Socrates - Plato, who became the founder of objective idealism.

According to Plato (427-347 BC), the soul has nothing to do with matter. Unlike the material world, it is ideal. Cognition is not the interaction of the psyche with the outside world, but the memory of the soul about what it saw in the ideal world before it entered the human body. The objective world is only a pretext, not an object of knowledge.

Thus, in the philosophy of ancient Greece, two diametrically opposed points of view on the psyche developed: materialistic (the line of Democritus) and idealistic (the line of Plato).

The development of psychological knowledge followed the path of clarifying the subject of psychological research. Aristotle (384-322 BC), the greatest ancient Greek scientist, singled out vegetable, animal And reasonable souls. This division emphasized the specificity of the human psyche, and the mental began to correlate with the inner world: knowledge, experiences, actions. The pinnacle of ancient psychology is Aristotle's work "On the Soul", which became the first systematic study of the soul in world literature. Aristotle presented a picture of the structure, function and development of the soul as a form of the body: the rational soul is ideal, separable from the body, its essence is divine.

Aristotle

After the death of the body, it is not destroyed, but returns to the incorporeal ether of air space.

Lucretius (99-55 BC), a student of Epicurus (follower of Democritus), believed that the spirit is not the same as the soul. The soul, a kind of matter, is active, active, able to subdue the body, which consists of coarser matter. He categorically rejected the idea that all nature is permeated with reason. There are only atoms, he taught, moving according to natural laws, from which the mind itself must be deduced.

Thus, in ancient science one can find a variety of views on the essence of the soul:

• the soul is like a spark, a part of the ever-living fire that flows and changes like a stream (Heraclitus);
• the soul as a combination of atoms (Democritus);
• soul as a result of mixing three fluids: blood, bile, mucus (Hippocrates);
• the soul as a holistic formation that arose thanks to the "nus" - the mind (Anaxagoras);
• the soul as part of the universal, immortal world soul, which is connected with the body (Socrates, Plato);
• soul as a form of a living body and the purpose of its existence (Aristotle);
• the soul is a combination of atoms moving both spontaneously and naturally (Epicurus, Lucretius), etc.

Ideas about the soul during the Middle Ages (VI-XVI centuries) are influenced by religious teachings - Christianity and Islam.

At the dawn of the Middle Ages, the Christian thinker Augustine (IV-V centuries) became famous. From his point of view, the soul is an instrument that rules the body, but its basis is the will, in which the divine will is embodied. The brightest representatives of the Arabic-speaking science of the IX-XII centuries. (Avicenna - 980-1037, Algazen - 965-1039, Averroes - 1126-1198) defended the point of view about the conditionality of mental phenomena by a bodily substrate. According to Averroes, called the great commentator of Aristotle, the soul is mortal, like the body, only the mind is immortal, for it has a divine origin.

The ideas of Averroes and Aristotle were reflected in the teachings of the Catholic philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas (1226-1274), which in turn formed the basis of Thomism (from the Latin name of Thomas - Thomas). However, Thomas defended the existence of one truth - divine, and not two, like Averroes, - divine and earthly. The soul is immortal and is a pure form, which in man is united with the body. The soul is the principle and source of the existence of the body.

So, the development of psychological knowledge within the framework of the doctrine of the soul is marked by the following phenomena:

• idealistic and materialistic approaches to understanding the essence of the soul;
• holistic and anatomical approaches to the structure of the psyche;
• static and dynamic approaches to the form of existence of the soul.

3. DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL THOUGHT IN THE XVII CENTURY AND IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT (XVIII CENTURY)

With the approval of simple technical devices in social production, the principle of their operation increasingly attracted scientific thought to explain the functions of the body in their image and likeness. The first great achievement in this aspect was the discovery by Harvey of the circulatory system, in which the heart was presented as a kind of pump pumping fluid, which does not require the participation of the soul.

A new outline of a psychological theory focused on explaining Galileo's principles and Newton's new mechanics belonged to the French naturalist René Descartes (1596-1650). He presented a theoretical model of the organism as a mechanically working automaton. With this understanding, the living body, which was previously considered as controlled by the soul, was freed from its influence and interference; the functions of the "machine of the body", which include "perception, imprinting of ideas, retention of ideas in memory, internal aspirations ... are performed in this machine as the movements of a clock."

Later, Descartes introduced the concept of reflex, which became fundamental to psychology. If Harvey "removed" the soul from the category of regulators of internal organs, then Descartes "did away" with it at the level of the whole organism. The scheme of the reflex was reduced to the following. An external impulse sets in motion light airlike particles, "animal spirits", brought into the brain through the "tubes" that make up the peripheral nervous system, from there the "animal spirits" are reflected to the muscles. Descartes' scheme, having explained the force moving the body, revealed the reflex nature of behavior.

One of Descartes' most important works for psychology is called The Passions of the Soul. In it, the scientist not only "deprived" the soul of the royal role in the Universe, but also "raised" it to the level of a substance equal in rights to other substances of nature. There has been a shift in the concept of the soul. Consciousness became the subject of psychology. Believing that the machine of the body and the consciousness occupied with its own thoughts, ideas and desires are two entities (substances) independent of each other, Descartes was faced with the need to explain how they coexist in man. The explanation he offered was called the psychophysical interaction. It consisted in the following: the body influences the soul, awakening passions in it in the form of sensory perceptions, emotions, etc. The soul, possessing thinking and will, acts on the body, forcing it to work and change its course. The organ where these two incompatible substances communicate is one of the endocrine glands - the "pineal" (pineal gland).

The question of the interaction of soul and body absorbed the intellectual energy of many minds for centuries. Having freed the body from the soul, Descartes "liberated" the soul (psyche) from the body; the body can only move, the soul can only think; the principle of the body's work is a reflex (i.e. the brain reflects external influences); the principle of the soul's work is reflection (from Latin - "turning back", i.e. consciousness reflects its own thoughts, ideas, sensations).

Descartes created new form dualism in the form of the relationship of soul and body, divided feelings into two categories: rooted in the life of the organism and purely intellectual. In his last essay - a letter to the Swedish Queen Christina - he explained the essence of love as a feeling that has two forms - bodily passion without love and intellectual love without passion. In his opinion, only the former lends itself to a causal explanation, since it depends on the organism and biological mechanics; the second can only be understood and described. Descartes believed that science, as the knowledge of the causes of phenomena, is powerless before the highest and most significant manifestations. mental life personality. The result of his similar reasoning was the concept of "two psychologies" - explanatory, appealing to the causes associated with the functions of the body, and descriptive, consisting in the fact that we explain only the body, while we understand the soul.

Attempts to refute the dualism of Descartes, to affirm the unity of the universe, to put an end to the gap between the corporeal and spiritual, nature and consciousness, were undertaken by a number of great thinkers of the 17th century. One of them was the Dutch philosopher Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (1632-1677). He taught that there is a single eternal substance - God, or Nature - with an infinite number of attributes (inherent properties). Of these, the philosopher believed, only two are open to our limited understanding - extension and thinking; from this it is clear that it is senseless to represent a person as a meeting place of two substances: a person is an integral bodily-spiritual being.

An attempt to build a psychological doctrine of man as an integral being is captured in his main work - "Ethics". It sets the task of explaining the whole variety of feelings (affects) as the motivating forces of human behavior with the accuracy and rigor of geometric proofs. It has been argued that there are three motivating forces: attraction, joy, and sadness. It has been argued that the whole variety of emotional states is derived from these fundamental affects; while joy increases the capacity of the body for action, while sadness reduces it.

Spinoza took from the German philosopher and mathematician Leibniz (1646-1716), who discovered the differential and integral calculus, the following idea of ​​the unity of the physical and mental. The basis of this unity is the spiritual principle. The world consists of countless spiritual entities - monads (from gr. monos - one). Each of them is "psychic", i.e. not material (like an atom), but endowed with the ability to perceive everything that happens in the universe. The imperceptible activity of "small perceptions" - unconscious perceptions - is continuously going on in the soul. In those cases when they are realized, this becomes possible due to the fact that a special act, apperception, is added to simple perception (perception). It includes attention and memory. So, Leibniz brought into circulation the concept of the unconscious psyche.

To the question of how spiritual and bodily phenomena relate to each other, Leibniz answered with a formula known as psychophysical parallelism. In his opinion, they cannot influence one another. The dependence of the psyche on bodily influences is an illusion. Soul and body perform their operations independently and automatically. However, divine wisdom is reflected in the fact that between them there is a pre-established harmony. they are like a pair of clocks that always show the same time, because they are started with the greatest accuracy.

At the end of this section of psychology, it is necessary to mention the name

English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Before him, rationalism reigned in psychological teachings (from Latin racio - mind). Hobbes proposed to take experience as the basis of knowledge. They opposed rationalism to empiricism (from Latin empirio - experience). This is how empirical psychology arose.

In the XVIII century in Europe, when the process of strengthening capitalist relations continued, a new movement, the Enlightenment, expanded and strengthened. Its representatives considered ignorance to be the main cause of all human ills. It was assumed that in the fight against it, society would get rid of social disasters and vices, and goodness and justice would reign everywhere in it. These ideas were acquired in various countries different tonality in connection with the originality of their socio-historical development. So, in England, I. Newton (1643-1727) created a new mechanics, perceived as a model and ideal of exact knowledge, as a triumph of reason.

In accordance with the Newtonian understanding of nature, the English physician Gartley (1705-1757) explained the mental world of man. He presented it as a product of the body's work - a "vibrator machine". The following was assumed. Vibration of the external ether through the vibrations of the nerves causes vibrations of the medulla, which pass into the vibrations of the muscles. In parallel with this, psychic "companions" of vibrations arise in the brain, combine and replace each other - from feeling to abstract thinking and arbitrary actions. All this happens on the basis of the law of associations. Gartley considered. that the mental world of a person develops gradually as a result of the complication of primary sensory elements through associations of adjacency of elements in time. For example, the behavior of a child is regulated by two motivational forces - pleasure and pain.

The task of education, in his opinion, is to consolidate in people such ties that would turn away from immoral deeds and give pleasure from moral ones. and the stronger these ties, the more chances for a person to become a morally virtuous person, and for the whole society - more perfect.

Other prominent thinkers of the Enlightenment were K. Helvetius

(1715-1771), P. Holbach (1723-1789) and D. Diderot (1713-1784). Defending the idea of ​​the emergence of the spiritual world from the physical world, they represented a "man-machine" endowed with a psyche as a product external influences and natural history. In the final period of the Enlightenment era, the physician-philosopher P. Kabanis (1757-1808) put forward a position according to which thinking is a function of the brain.

At the same time, he proceeded from observations of the bloody experience of the revolution, the leaders of which instructed him to find out the awareness of the convict, whose head is cut off on the guillotine, of their suffering, evidence of which may be convulsions. Cabanis answered this question in the negative. Only a person with a brain is able to think. The movements of the decapitated body are of a reflex nature and are not conscious. Consciousness is a function of the brain. P. Kabanis attributed the expression of thought in words and gestures to the external products of brain activity. To the external products of brain activity - the expression of thought in words and gestures. Behind the very thought, in his opinion, the unknown is hidden. nervous process, the inseparability of mental phenomena and the nervous substrate. By arguing the need to move from the speculative to the empirical study of this inseparability, he paved the way for the movement of scientific thought in the next century.

The Italian thinker D. Vico (1668-1744) in his treatise "Foundations new science about the common nature of things "(1725) put forward the idea that each society passes successively through three epochs: gods, heroes and people. As for the mental properties of a person, they, according to D. Vico, arise in the course of the history of society. In In particular, he associated the emergence of abstract thinking with the development of trade and political life. The name of D. Viko is associated with the idea of ​​a supra-individual spiritual power, inherent in the people as a whole and constituting the fundamental principle of culture and history.

In Russia, the spiritual atmosphere of the Enlightenment conditioned the philosophical and psychological views of A.N. Radishchev (1749-1802). A.N. Radishchev was looking for the key to the psychology of people in the conditions of their public life("Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow"), for which he was sentenced to death penalty, replaced by a link to Siberia.

So, in the Enlightenment, two directions arose in the development of problems of psychological knowledge: the interpretation of the psyche as a function of highly organized matter - the brain, which contributed to the experimental study of those phenomena that were considered the product of an incorporeal soul; the doctrine according to which the individual psyche is determined social conditions, mores, customs, the spiritual world of people who are driven by their own energy of cultural creativity.

Ancient psychology: the development of knowledge about the soul as an entity and a critical analysis of views

The triumphant Christianity in Europe introduced militant intolerance to all "pagan" knowledge. Destroyed in the 4th century science Center in Alexandria, at the beginning of the VI century, the Athenian school was closed ...

Identification of the relationship between the level of health, lifestyle and direction of the locus of control in adolescents: gender aspect

In the Renaissance, science sought to overcome the sacredness of the Middle Ages. Therefore, we can say that the Renaissance period was the time of the return of the most important principles of ideas about the health of ancient science ...

The idea that something special lives in a person, different from his physical body, developed in ancient times. It is unlikely that they were the result of reflection; rather, it was believed (and therefore seen) and was not questioned ...

History and main trends in the development of psychology in Russia

Russian psychological thought in the nineteenth century. developed in connection with social thought and successes in natural science, in the creative assimilation of the achievements of world philosophy and psychology. The 19th century in Russia was the time of the disintegration of the feudal system...

History of psychology

The first ideas about the psyche were associated with animism (from the Latin "anima" - spirit, soul) - the most ancient views, according to which everything that exists in the world has a soul. The soul was understood as an entity independent of the body...

History of psychology

Since the 17th century a new era begins in the development of psychological knowledge. In connection with the development of the natural sciences, with the help of experimental methods, they began to study the laws of human consciousness. The ability to think...

History of psychology

The term "empirical psychology" was introduced by the 18th-century German philosopher X. Wolf to denote a direction in psychological science, the basic principle of which is to observe specific mental phenomena...

The history of the development of psychology in Russia

Studies in the history of Russian philosophy and culture have shown that psychological ideas developed in Russia as early as the 10th-15th centuries. This contributed to the formation of very holistic concepts in the 18th century ...

The history of the development of psychological views

The 17th century was the era of fundamental changes in social life Western Europe, the century of the scientific revolution and the triumph of a new worldview. Its herald was Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), who taught that everything that happens in the world...

The main stages of the evolution of the subject of psychology

Under the influence of the atmosphere characteristic of the Middle Ages (the strengthening of church influence on all aspects of society, including science), the notion that the soul is a divine, supernatural principle was established ...

Features of the development of psychological knowledge in Russia on turn of XIX century

Exploring in this thesis features of the development of Russian psychological thought at the turn of the 19th century, from the point of view of the actual scientific content ...

The subject and task of modern psychology, its significance in the life of a person

Due to underdevelopment industrial production, arts and crafts, the main goods that Russia could sell were agricultural products, furs, forests were the main raw materials. Russia, on the other hand, needed items for the manufacturing industry ...

Problems, subject and methods social psychology

Big influence the development of socio-psychological thought was influenced by the works of the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882). In accordance with the principle of natural selection, which he formulated ...

Sharia - one system laws, regulations in Islam, regulating the life of a Muslim from the cradle to death, includes customs. Sharia is based on the Koran and the Sunnah, on collections of Muslim law, the codes and codes of which were developed by the schools of orthodox Sunni Islam (Hanifism, Malikism, Shafiism, Hanbalism). The development of Sharia law was completed in the 11th and 12th centuries in the Near and Middle East. The right of the Bashkirs to freedom of religion and observance of traditions and customs, obtained in the process of their acceptance of Russian citizenship, contributed to the strengthening of Sharia courts in the second half of the 16th century and the first half of the 18th century. In the subsequent period, in connection with the establishment of control of local administrative bodies, the competence of Sharia courts was limited. Their rights were narrowed down to solving family-marriage inheritance cases and religious offenses. Since 1788, the OMDS (Orenburg Mohammedan Spiritual Assembly) became the highest instance of the spiritual court, respectively, and the appeal body. In its law enforcement practice, it was guided by a kind of synthesis of Sharia norms and the all-Russian legislation. The Muslim clergy in the implementation of legal proceedings were forbidden to apply the provisions of Sharia, which contradicted the laws of the Russian state. Οʜᴎ concerned mainly the system of corporal punishment for violation of Muslim maral and morality, as well as the prohibition of early marriages.

The range of cases decided by the spiritual assembly and Sharia courts: about the removal of daughters (kidnapping), dowry, non-fulfillment conjugal obligation, division of property, misdeeds of mullahs and other clerics in general, abuse of a wife, departure of a wife, adultery, beating of imams, marriage to a non-believer, etc.

The observance of the provisions of the Shariah by the Muslim population was not consistently treated by the central and local authorities. If in the first half of the 19th century, civil and military authorities repeatedly ordered Muslims to strictly comply with the provisions of Sharia, then from the second half of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, government policy against the growing influence of Islam was declarative.
Hosted on ref.rf
The planned activities - the transfer of family, marriage and property matters to the jurisdiction of civil courts, the restriction of the construction of mosques, the abolition of the OMDS due to fear of extreme Muslim protests were not implemented. Decrees of the Soviet power, adopted after the October Revolution of 1917, liquidated Sharia courts.

The development of psychology in the XVII-XVIII centuries

Lecture plan:

1. Psychology of modern times (XVII century).

2. Psychology in the Age of Enlightenment (XVIII century).

3. The origin and development of associative psychology ( late 18th century to the beginning of the 19th century).

The 17th century is usually called ʼʼNew Timeʼʼ, since it was in this historical period happened particularly strong industrial growth(machine production) and urban planning, and influx of new technologies and colonial goods resulting in increased demand for labor and raw materials. walked colonial wars, active maritime trade developed associated with the fact that the cult of movement, travel and migration has established itself in the mass consciousness, and printing was invented(I. Gutenberg), gunpowder and compass.

Also during this period of history there was the rise of intellectual activity, (splash of scientific discoveries), incl. a new understanding of state-legal problems was developed, and the ideas of democracy, the possibility of realizing universal human rights and national independence began to spread among the masses.

In the New Age, it happened ʼʼliberationʼʼ culture, first of all, the approval of a new system of values ​​and faith, focused on the person. In contrast to the official Catholic Church, it is noted growth of the Protestant movement and free-thinking is spreading - that is, the people begin to consciously relate to religion. In the same period, science, which occupied the lowest place in the medieval hierarchy of academic knowledge, begins to move to the fore, becoming source of faith in the future.

In the 17th century there was a change subject of psychology : if it was previously soul, then in New Time it became consciousness(the unique ability of the human soul not only to think and feel, but also to reflect all its acts and states with irrefutable certainty).

Representations of the New Time about the world and the soul:

Name:	Dualism	Materialism	Idealism
Basic concepts:	Separate two independent substances - soul(possesses thinking) and body(has a length). Soul and consciousness identical concepts. The presence of unconscious processes is denied.	Nature is considered to be a single substance with basic properties: soul and body, possessing thinking and extension. Thinking is the main property of the soul, which is equivalent to consciousness. The presence of unconscious processes is denied.	The foundation of the world monad, which has the property of perception and aspiration. Stand out in the soul perceptions(unconscious) and apperception (conscious). The content of the soul is wider than the content of consciousness.
Representatives:	Rene Descartes	Thomas Hobbes Benedict Spinoza	Wilhelm Leibniz

Representations of the New Time about cognition:

ü Sensationalism (John Locke And Thomas Gobs). This direction equalizes the mind and sensations. Knowledge is considered one the process of ascent from particular knowledge to general concepts, and the data of the sense organs are generalized by the mind. There are no innate ideas, and all concepts are related to learning and sensations are passive. stand out primary And secondary qualities. There is recognition impossibility of complete cognizability of the world.

ü Rationalism. In cognition stand out two steps: first gives knowledge about the world based on a logical generalization of these sensations(incomplete knowledge), and the second is intuitive thinking(rational intuition) and true knowledge peace. Common concepts exist in the form of ideas (Rene Descartes) or in the form of their premises (Wilhelm Leibniz), and the generality of the laws of the world of ideas and things - knowledge base (Benedict Spinoza). The subjectivity of knowledge comes from the subjectivity of knowledge, but this does not contradict their truth (Wilhelm Leibniz).

Representations of the New Time about freedom and regulation of behavior:

ü Emotional regulation(Benedict Spinoza). Followers of this view believe that emotions regulate human activity and behavior. There are different types of emotions associated with the influence of the environment and people depend on them. A reasonable understanding of this influence and an awareness of the causes of the emergence of emotions leads to freedom (of the recognized extreme importance).

ü reflex regulation. Representatives of this trend believe that regulation of the body is carried out with the help of a reflex according to the laws of mechanics. Reflex changes depending on habit and training but the soul is only partly affects behavior through active passions.

The history of the psychology of the New Time in persons:

Francis Bacon(1561-1626). English philosopher and founder modern English empiricism who started a new era in the history of psychology. He considered it essential refuse to study general questions concerning the nature of the soul, exclude the organic functions of its composition and go to experienced(empirical) description of the processes of the soul. According to his concept, there are two types of soul:

ü Rational / divine soul(possesses memory, reason, imagination, desires and will).

ü Irrational/feeling soul(possesses the ability to choose, sensations and desire for favorable circumstances, is able to make arbitrary movements).

Bacon's theory of knowledge:

The work of the sense organs

(there are idols-restrictions)

Rational Processing of Sense Data

Types of restrictions-idols of empirical knowledge (if humanity can get rid of them, it will be able to reflect the world in its mind objectively, accurately and concretely) :

1. ʼʼIdols of the clanʼʼ(inherent in human nature).

2. ʼʼIdols of the caveʼʼ(individual delusions of an individual).

3. ʼʼIdols of the Squareʼʼ(delusions arising from the relationship of people).

4. ʼʼIdols of the Theaterʼʼ(the ideas of various dogmas of philosophy that have instilled in the souls of people).

Significance of F. Bacon's psychological ideas for the history of psychology:

1. Completed the stage of development of psychology where the subject was the soul, and gave rise to a new phase where consciousness has become the subject.

2. Offered concrete ways of practical study of the subject: experience and experiment.

3. Offered unified science of man, of which psychology is a part (philosophy considers a person as such, civil philosophy studies him in interaction with other people, and anthropology is a science that combines knowledge about a person) and laid principle of interdisciplinary approach to the sciences.

4. Contributed division of human sciences into the doctrine of personality and the doctrine of the connection between soul and body, the division of their subjects and tasks, which led to the division of the subject of psychology in accordance with specific tasks.

Rene / Cartesius Descartes.

The development of psychology in the XVII-XVIII centuries - the concept and types. Classification and features of the category "Development of psychology in the XVII-XVIII centuries" 2017, 2018.

The 17th century was the era of fundamental changes in the social life of Western Europe, the century of the scientific revolution and the triumph of a new worldview.

Its forerunner was Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), who taught that nature is a system of moving bodies that do not have any properties other than geometric and mechanical. Everything that happens in the world should be explained only by these material properties, only by the laws of mechanics. The belief, prevailing for centuries, that the movements of natural bodies are governed by incorporeal souls, was overthrown. This new view of the universe made a complete revolution in explaining the reasons for the behavior of living beings.

Rene Descartes: reflexes and "passions of the soul". The first draft of a psychological theory, using the achievements of geometry and new mechanics, belonged to the French mathematician, naturalist and philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650). He came from an old French family and received an excellent education. At the College De la Fleche, which was one of the best religious educational centers, he studied Greek and Latin, mathematics and philosophy. At this time, he also became acquainted with the teachings of Augustine, whose idea of ​​introspection was subsequently revised by him: Augustine's religious reflection Descartes transformed into a purely secular reflection aimed at the knowledge of objective truths.

After graduating from college, Descartes studied law, then entered the military service. During his service in the army, he managed to visit many cities in Holland, Germany and other countries and establish personal contacts with outstanding European scientists of that time. At the same time, he comes to the conclusion that the most favorable conditions for his scientific research not in France, but in the Netherlands, where he moved in 1629. It is in this country that he creates his famous compositions.

In his studies, Descartes focused on the model of the organism as a mechanically working system. Thus, the living body, which in the entire previous history of knowledge was considered as animate, i.e. gifted and controlled by the soul, freed from its influence and interference. From now on, the difference between inorganic and organic bodies was explained according to the criterion of the latter being related to objects that act like simple technical devices. In an age when these devices were more and more definitely established in social production, scientific thought, far from production, explained the functions of the body in their image and likeness.

The first great achievement in this regard was the discovery by William Harvey (1578-1657) of blood circulation: the heart appeared as a kind of pump pumping fluid. The participation of the soul in this was not required.

Another achievement belonged to Descartes. He introduced the concept of a reflex (the term itself appeared later), which became fundamental for physiology and psychology. If Harvey eliminated the soul from the circle of regulators of internal organs, then Descartes dared to do away with it at the level of the external, environmentally oriented work of the whole organism. Three centuries later, IP Pavlov, following this strategy, ordered to place a bust of Descartes at the door of his laboratory.

Here we are again faced with the question of the relationship between theory and experience (empiricism), which is fundamental for understanding the progress of scientific knowledge. Reliable knowledge of the device nervous system and its functions were negligible in those days. De Cartes saw this system in the form of "tubes" through which light airlike particles are carried (he called them "animal spirits"). According to the Cartesian scheme, an external impulse sets these "spirits" in motion and brings them to the brain, from where they are automatically reflected to the muscles. When a hot object burns the hand, it prompts the person to withdraw it: a reaction occurs, similar to the reflection of a light beam from the surface. The term "reflex" meant reflection.

Muscle response is an essential component of behavior. Therefore, the Cartesian scheme, despite its speculative nature, has become a great discovery in psychology. She explained the reflex nature of behavior without referring to the soul as the driving force of the body.

Descartes hoped that over time, not only simple movements (such as the defensive reaction of the hand to fire or the pupil to light), but also the most complex ones, could be explained by the physiological mechanics he had discovered. “When a dog sees a partridge, it naturally rushes towards it, and when it hears a gun shot, the sound of it naturally prompts it to run away. But, nevertheless, pointing dogs are usually taught that the sight of a partridge makes them stop, and the sound of a shot running up to a partridge." Descartes provided for such a restructuring of behavior in his diagram of the bodily mechanism, which, unlike conventional automata, acted as a learning system.

It acts according to its own laws and "mechanical" causes; their knowledge allows people to dominate themselves. “Since with some effort it is possible to change the movements of the brain in animals devoid of reason, it is obvious that this can be done even better in people and that people, even with a weak soul, could acquire exceptionally unlimited power over their passions,” wrote Descartes. Not the effort of the spirit, but the restructuring of the body on the basis of the strictly causal laws of its mechanics will provide man with power over his own nature, just as these laws can make him the master of external nature.

One of the important works of Descartes for psychology was called "The Passions of the Soul". This name should be explained, since both the word "passion" and the word "soul" are endowed with a special meaning by Descartes. By "passions" was meant not strong and lasting feelings, but "suffering states of the soul" - everything that it experiences when the brain is shaken by "animal spirits" (the prototype of nerve impulses), which are brought there through the nerve "tubes". In other words, not only muscular reactions (reflexes), but also various mental states are produced by the body, and not by the soul. Descartes sketched out a project for a “body machine”, the functions of which include “perception, imprinting of ideas, retention of ideas in memory, internal aspirations ...” “I wish,” he wrote, “that you reason in such a way that these functions occur in this machine by virtue of the location of its organs: they are performed no more and no less than the movements of a clock or another automaton.

For centuries, before Descartes, all activity in the perception and processing of mental "material" was considered to be produced by the soul, a special agent that draws its energy outside the material, earthly world. Descartes argued that a bodily device without a soul is capable of successfully coping with this task. Did the soul not become "unemployable" in such a case?

Descartes not only does not deprive it of its former royal role in the Universe, but raises it to the level of a substance (an essence that does not depend on anything else), equal in rights with the great substance of nature. The soul is destined to have the most direct and reliable knowledge that the subject can have of his own acts and states, not visible to anyone else; it is defined the only sign- direct awareness of one's own manifestations, which, unlike natural phenomena, are devoid of extension.

This is a significant turn in the understanding of the soul, which opened a new chapter in the history of the construction of the subject of psychology. From now on, this subject becomes consciousness.

Consciousness, according to Descartes, is the beginning of all beginnings in philosophy and science. Everything, natural and supernatural, should be questioned. However, no skepticism can resist the judgment: "I think." And from this it inexorably follows that there is also a bearer of this judgment - a thinking subject. Hence the famous Descartes aphorism "Cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"). Since thinking is the only attribute of the soul, it always thinks, always knows about its mental content, visible from within; the unconscious mind does not exist.

Later, this "inner vision" was called introspection (seeing intrapsychic objects-images, mental actions, volitional acts, etc.), and the Cartesian concept of consciousness - introspective. However, just like the ideas about the soul, which underwent the most complex evolution, the concept of consciousness, as we will see, also changed its appearance. However, it had to appear first.

Studying the content of consciousness, Descartes comes to the conclusion that there are three types of ideas: ideas generated by the person himself, ideas acquired and innate ideas. The ideas generated by a person are connected with his sensory experience, being a generalization of the data of our sense organs. These ideas provide knowledge about individual objects or phenomena, but cannot help in understanding the objective laws of the surrounding world. The acquired ideas cannot help in this either, since they are also knowledge only about certain aspects of the surrounding reality. The acquired ideas are not based on the experience of one person, but are a generalization of the experience of different people, but only innate ideas give a person knowledge about the essence of the surrounding world, about the basic laws of its development. These general concepts are revealed only to the mind and do not need additional information received from the senses.

This approach to knowledge is called rationalism, and the way in which a person discovers the content of innate ideas is called rational intuition. Descartes wrote: "By intuition I do not mean faith in the shaky evidence of the senses, but the concept of a clear and attentive mind, so simple and distinct that it leaves no doubt about what we think."

Recognizing that the machine of the body and the consciousness occupied with its own thoughts (ideas) and "desires" are entities (substances) independent of each other, Descartes was faced with the need to explain how they coexist in an integral person. The solution he proposed was called psychophysical interaction. The body affects the soul, awakening in it "passive states" (passions) in the form of sensory perceptions, emotions, etc. The soul, possessing thinking and will, acts on the body, forcing this "machine" to work and change its course. Descartes was looking for an organ in the body through which these incompatible substances could still communicate. He suggested that such an organ be considered one of the endocrine glands - the pineal gland (pineal gland). Nobody took this empirical "discovery" seriously. However, the solution of the theoretical question of the interaction between the soul and the body in the Cartesian formulation absorbed the energy of many minds.

Understanding the subject matter of psychology depends, as was said, on explanatory principles, such as causality (determinism), consistency, regularity. Since ancient times, all of them have undergone fundamental changes. The decisive role in this was played by the introduction into psychological thinking of the image of a machine - a structure created by human hands. All previous attempts to master explanatory principles were associated with the observation and study of non-man-made nature, including the human body. Now the intermediary between nature and the subject cognizing it was an artificial structure independent of this subject, external in relation to him and natural bodies. It is obvious that it is, firstly, a system device, secondly, it works inevitably (naturally) according to the rigid scheme laid down in it, thirdly, the effect of its work is the final link in the chain, the components of which replace each other with an iron sequence .

Creation artificial objects, whose activity is causally explicable from their own organization, introduced a special form of determinism into theoretical thinking - a mechanical (automaton-like) scheme of causality, or mechano-determinism. The liberation of the living body from the soul was a turning point in the scientific search for the real causes of everything that happens in living systems, including the mental effects that arise in them (sensations, perceptions, emotions). At the same time, Descartes not only freed the body from the soul, but also the soul (psyche) in its highest manifestations became free from the body. The body can only move, the soul can only think. The principle of the body is a reflex. The principle of the soul's work is reflection (from Lat, "turning back"). In the first case, the brain reflects external shocks; in the second - consciousness reflects its own thoughts, ideas.

Throughout the history of psychology there is a controversy between the soul and the body. Descartes, like many of his predecessors (from the ancient animists, Pythagoras, Plato), opposed them. But he also created a new form of dualism. Both the body and the soul acquired a content unknown to former researchers.

Benedict Spinoza: God is Nature. Attempts to refute the dualism of Descartes were undertaken by a cohort of great thinkers of the 17th century. Their search was aimed at affirming the unity of the universe, putting an end to the gap between the physical and spiritual, nature and consciousness. One of the first opponents of Descartes was the Dutch thinker Baruch (Venedict) Spinoza (1632-1677).

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam with a theological education. His parents trained him to become a rabbi, but already at school he developed a critical attitude towards the dogmatic interpretation of the Bible and the Talmud. After graduating from school, Spinoza turned to the study of the exact sciences, medicine and philosophy. The writings of Descartes had a great influence on him. Criticism of religious postulates, as well as non-compliance with many religious rites, led to a break with the Jewish community of Amsterdam: the council of rabbis applied an extreme measure to Spinoza - a curse and excommunication from the community. After that, Spinoza taught for a while at a Latin school, and then settled in a village near Leiden, earning his livelihood by making optical glasses. During these years, he wrote "Principles of the Philosophy of Descartes" (1663), developed the main content of his main work "Ethics", which was published after his death, in 1677.

Spinoza taught that there is a single, eternal substance - Nature - with an infinite number of attributes (inherent properties). Of these, only two are open to our limited mind - extension and thinking. Therefore, it is meaningless to represent a person as a meeting place of bodily and spiritual substances, as Descartes did. Man is an integral bodily and spiritual being. The belief that the body moves or rests at the will of the soul has developed because of ignorance of what it is capable of in itself, "by virtue of the laws of nature alone, considered exclusively as bodily."

The integrity of a person not only binds his spiritual and bodily essence, but is also the basis for the knowledge of the surrounding world - Spinoza argued. Like Descartes, he was convinced that it is intuitive knowledge that is leading, because intuition makes it possible to penetrate into the essence of things, to know not individual properties of objects or situations, but general concepts. Intuition opens up limitless possibilities of self-knowledge. However, knowing himself, a person knows and the world because the laws of soul and body are the same. Proving the cognizability of the world, Spinoza emphasized that the order and connection of ideas are the same as the order and connection of things, since both the idea and the thing are different sides of the same substance - Nature.

None of the thinkers realized as sharply as Spinoza that Descartes' dualism is rooted not so much in the focus on the priority of the soul (this served as the basis for countless religious-philosophical doctrines for centuries), but in the view of the body as a machine-like device. Thus, mechanical determinism, which soon determined the major successes of psychology, turned into a principle that limits the possibilities of the body in the causal explanation of mental phenomena.

All subsequent concepts were absorbed by the revision of the Cartesian version of consciousness as a substance that is the cause of itself (causa sui), about the identity of the psyche and consciousness. From the searches of Spinoza, it was clear that the version of the body (organism) should also be revised in order to give it a worthy role in human existence.

An attempt to build a psychological doctrine of man as an integral being was captured by Spinoza's main work, Ethics. In it, he set the task of explaining all the great variety of feelings (affects) as the motivating forces of human behavior, moreover, explaining it in a "geometrical way", that is, with the same inexorable accuracy and rigor with which geometry draws its conclusions about lines and surfaces. It is necessary, he wrote, not to laugh and cry (this is how people react to their experiences), but to understand. For the geometer is completely impassive in his reasoning; the same should be applied to human passions, explaining how they arise and disappear.

Thus, Spinoza's rationalism does not lead to a denial of emotions, but to an attempt to explain them. At the same time, he connects emotions with will, saying that preoccupation with passions does not give a person the opportunity to understand the reasons for his behavior, and therefore he is not free. At the same time, the renunciation of emotions opens up the boundaries of a person's possibilities, showing what depends on his will, and what he is not free in depends on the circumstances. It is this understanding that is true freedom, since a person cannot be freed from the action of the laws of nature. Contrasting freedom with coercion, Spinoza gave his definition of freedom as a recognized necessity, opening new page in psychological studies of the limits of human volitional activity.

Spinoza identified three main forces that govern people and from which all the variety of feelings can be derived: attraction (it is "nothing but the very essence of man"), joy and sadness. He argued that from these fundamental affects any emotional states, and joy increases the capacity of the body for action, while sadness reduces it.

This conclusion opposed the Cartesian idea of ​​dividing feelings into those rooted in the life of the organism and purely intellectual. As an example, Descartes, in his last work - a letter to the Swedish Queen Christina - explained the essence of love as a feeling that has two forms: bodily passion without love and intellectual love without passion. Only the former lends itself to a causal explanation, since it depends on the organism and biological mechanics. The second can only be understood and described.

Thus, Descartes believed that science is powerless in the face of the highest and most significant manifestations of the mental life of the individual. This Cartesian dichotomy (dividing in two) led in the 20th century to the concept of "two psychologies" - explanatory, appealing to causes associated with the functions of the body, and descriptive, considering that we explain the body, while we understand the soul. Therefore, in the dispute between Spinoza and Descartes one should not see only a historical episode that has long lost its relevance.

L.S. Vygotsky turned to a detailed study of this dispute in the 20th century, proving that the future belongs to Spinoza. “The teaching of Spinoza,” he wrote, “contains, forming its deepest and inner core, exactly what is not in any of the two parts into which the modern psychology of emotions has disintegrated: the unity of causal explanation and the problem of the vital significance of human passions, the unity "Descriptive and explanatory psychology of feelings. Spinoza is therefore connected with the most urgent, most acute topic of the day in modern psychology of emotions. Spinoza's problems await their solution, without which the tomorrow of our psychology is impossible."

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: the problem of the unconscious. Father G.-V. Leibniz (1646-1716) was a professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig. While still at school, Leibniz decided that his life would be devoted to science. Leibniz had an encyclopedic knowledge. Along with mathematical research (he discovered differential and integral calculus), he participated in activities to improve the mining industry, was interested in the theory of money and the monetary system, as well as the history of the Brunswick dynasty. He organized the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. It was to him that Peter 1 turned with a request to head the Russian Academy of Sciences. Significant place in scientific interests Leibniz was also occupied with philosophical questions, primarily the theory of knowledge.

Like Spinoza, he advocated a holistic approach to man. However, he had a different opinion about the unity of the bodily and mental.

This unity, according to Leibniz, is based on a spiritual principle. The world consists of countless monads (from the Greek "monos" - one). Each of them is "psychic" and endowed with the ability to perceive everything that happens in the universe.

This assumption crossed out the Cartesian idea of ​​the equality of the psyche and consciousness. According to Leibniz, "the belief that the soul has only such perceptions as it is conscious of is the source of the greatest delusions." The imperceptible activity of "small perceptions," or unconscious perceptions, goes on unceasingly in the soul. In those cases when they are realized, this becomes possible due to a special mental act - apperception, which includes attention and memory.

Thus, Leibniz identifies several areas in the soul that differ in the degree of awareness of the knowledge that is located in them. These are the realm of distinct knowledge, the realm of vague knowledge, and the realm of the unconscious. Rational intuition reveals the content of ideas that are in apperception, so this knowledge is clear and generalized. Proving the existence of unconscious images, Leibniz nevertheless did not reveal their role in human activity, since he believed that it was associated mainly with conscious ideas. At the same time, he drew attention to the subjectivity of human knowledge, linking it with cognitive activity. Leibniz argued that there are no primary or secondary qualities of objects, since even at the initial stage of cognition, a person cannot passively perceive the signals of the surrounding reality. He necessarily introduces his own ideas, his own experience into the images of new objects, and therefore it is impossible to distinguish between those properties that are in the object itself, from those that are introduced by the subject. However, this subjectivity does not contradict the cognizability of the world, since all our ideas, although they differ from each other, nevertheless fundamentally coincide with each other, reflecting the main properties of the surrounding world.

To the question of how spiritual and bodily phenomena correlate with each other, Leibniz answered with a formula called psychophysical parallelism: the dependence of the psyche on bodily influences is an illusion. Soul and body perform their operations independently and automatically. At the same time, there is a harmony predetermined from above between them; they are like a pair of clocks that always show the same time, because they are started with the greatest accuracy.

The doctrine of psychophysical parallelism found many supporters in the years of the formation of psychology as an independent science. Leibniz's ideas changed and expanded the concept of the mental. His ideas about the unconscious psyche, "small perceptions" and apperception firmly entered the content of the subject of psychology.

Thomas Hobbes: association of ideas. Another direction in the criticism of Descartes' dualism is connected with the philosophy of the English thinker Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). He completely rejected the soul as a separate entity. There is nothing in the world, Hobbes argued, except for material bodies that move according to the laws of mechanics discovered by Galileo. Accordingly, all mental phenomena are subject to these global laws. Material things, acting on the body, cause sensations. According to the law of inertia, perceptions arise from sensations (in the form of their weakened trace), forming chains of thoughts that follow one another in the same order in which the sensations were replaced.

Such a connection was later called an association. Association as a factor explaining why a given mental image leaves such and not another trace in a person has been known since the time of Plato and Aristotle. Looking at the lyre, one remembers the lover who played it, Plato said. This is an example of an association by contiguity: both objects were once perceived simultaneously, and then the appearance of one entailed the image of the other. Aristotle added two other types of associations - similarity and contrast. But for Hobbes, a determinist of the Galilean hardening, only one law of mechanical coupling of mental elements by contiguity operated in the structure of a person.

Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz accepted associations as one of the main mental phenomena, but they considered them a lower form of knowledge in comparison with the higher ones, which included thinking and will. Hobbes was the first to give association the force of a universal law of psychology. He is irresistibly subordinated as an abstract rational knowledge, and arbitrary action. Arbitrariness is an illusion that is generated by not knowing the reasons for an act (Spinoza held the same opinion). So a spinning top, set in motion by a blow of a whip, could consider its movements to be spontaneous.

In Hobbes, mechanical determinism received an extremely complete expression in relation to the explanation of the psyche. Hobbes's ruthless criticism of Descartes' version of the "innate ideas" with which the human soul is endowed before any experience and independently of it became very important for future psychology.

Before Hobbes, the ideas of rationalism reigned in psychological teachings (from the Latin "ratio" - reason): the source of knowledge and inherent in people way of behavior was considered the mind as the highest form of activity of the soul. Hobbes proclaimed the mind to be the product of association, which has as its source a direct sensual communication of the organism with the material world, i.e. experience. Rationalism was opposed by empiricism (from the Latin "empirio" - experience), the provisions of which became the basis of empirical psychology.

John Locke: Two Kinds of Experience. In the development of this direction, a prominent role belonged to Hobbes' compatriot John Locke (1632-1704).

D. Locke was born near the city of Bristol in the family of a provincial lawyer. On the recommendation of his father's friends, he was enrolled at Windsor School, after which he entered Oxford University. At Oxford he studied philosophy, natural sciences and medicine, at the same time he became acquainted with the writings of Descartes. Acquaintance with Lord A. Ashley, which soon grew into a close friendship, changed Locke's life. As a doctor and caregiver for Ashley's son, he becomes a member of his family and shares with him all the vicissitudes of his life. Lord Ashley, who was the head of the Whigs - the political opposition of the English king James II, twice held high positions in the government, making Locke his secretary. After Ashley's resignation, Locke was forced to flee with him to Holland, where he remained after Ashley's death. Only when William of Orange came to the throne, he was able to return to his homeland. At this time, Locke is finishing his general ledger"Experiments on the Human Mind", publishes many articles and treatises, including "On Government" and "On Education", without leaving political activity.

Like Hobbes, he professed the experiential origin of all knowledge. Locke's postulate stated that "there is nothing in the mind that would not be in the sensations." Based on this, he argued that the child's psyche is formed only in the process of his life. Speaking against Descartes, who justified his theory of knowledge by the presence of innate ideas in man, Locke proved the fallacy of this position. If ideas were innate, Locke wrote, they would be known to both the adult and the child, and the normal person, and the fool. However, in this case, it would not be difficult to form a child's knowledge of mathematics, language, moral standards. But all educators know that it is very difficult to teach a child to write and count, and different children learn material at different speeds. In the same way, no one will compare the mind of a normal person and an idiot and teach the latter philosophy or logic. There is, according to Locke, another proof of the absence of innate ideas: if ideas were innate, then all people in a given society would adhere to the same moral and political beliefs, and this is not observed anywhere. Moreover, Locke wrote, we know that different peoples different languages, different laws, different concepts of God. The difference in religion was especially important, from Locke's point of view, since Descartes considered the idea of ​​God to be one of the basic innate ideas.

Having thus proved that there are no innate ideas, Locke further argued that the child's psyche is a "blank slate" (tabula rasa) on which life writes its writing. Thus, both knowledge and ideals are not given to us in finished form, but are the result of upbringing, which forms a conscious adult from a child.

It is therefore natural that Locke attached great importance to education. He wrote that in moral education it is necessary to rely not so much on understanding as on the feelings of children, educating them in a positive attitude towards good deeds and aversion to the wicked. In cognitive development, one must skillfully use the natural curiosity of children - it is that valuable mechanism that nature has endowed us with and it is from it that the desire for knowledge grows. Locke noted that it is directly the task of the educator to take into account the individual characteristics of children. This is also important in order to maintain good mood child in the learning process, which contributes to a faster assimilation of knowledge.

In the experience itself, Locke identified two sources: sensation and reflection. Along with the ideas that "deliver" the senses, there are ideas generated by reflection as "internal perception of the activity of our mind." Both those and others appear before the court of consciousness. "Consciousness is the perception of what is happening in a person in his own mind." This definition has become the cornerstone of introspective psychology.

It was believed that the object of consciousness is not external objects, but ideas (images, representations, feelings, etc.), as they are to the "inner eye" of the subject observing them. From this postulate most clearly and popularly explained by Locke, an understanding of the subject of psychology arose. From now on, in its place began to claim the phenomena of consciousness generated by external experience, which comes from the senses, and internal, accumulated by the individual's own mind. The elements of this experience, the "threads" of which consciousness is woven, were considered ideas, which are ruled by the laws of association.

This understanding of consciousness determined the formation of subsequent psychological concepts. They were imbued with the spirit of dualism, behind which stood the realities of social life and social practice. On the one hand, this is scientific and technological progress, associated with great theoretical discoveries in the sciences of physical nature and the introduction of mechanical devices; on the other hand, self-awareness of a person as a person, which, although consistent with the providence of the Almighty, is able to have support in his own mind, consciousness, and understanding.

These non-psychological factors determined both the emergence of mechano-determinism and the appeal to the inner experience of consciousness. It was these trends in their inseparability that determined the difference between the psychological thought of the New Age and all its previous turns. As before, the explanation of psychic phenomena depended on knowledge of how physical world and what forces govern a living organism. We are talking about an explanation that is adequate to the norms of scientific knowledge, because in the practice of communication people are guided by everyday ideas about the motives of behavior, mental qualities, the influence of weather on the mood, the dependence of character on the location of the planets, etc.

XVII rivers radically raised the bar of scientific criteria. He transformed the explanatory principles inherited from earlier centuries. Initially, mechanistic ideas about reflex, sensation, association, affect, motive entered the main fund of scientific knowledge. They arose from the deterministic interpretation of the body as a "body machine". The purely speculative scheme of this machine could not pass the test of experience. Meanwhile, experience and its rational explanation determined the success of the new natural science.

For the great scientists XVII century scientific knowledge psyche as the knowledge of the causes of its phenomena had as an indispensable prerequisite an appeal to the bodily structure. But the empirical knowledge about him was, as time showed, so fantastic that the previous evidence had to be ignored. Adherents of empirical psychology took this path, understanding by experience the processing by the subject of the content of his consciousness. They used the concepts of sensations, associations, etc. as facts of inner experience. The genealogy of these concepts went back to an explanation of psychic reality discovered by free thought, discovered due to the fact that the belief that reigned for centuries was rejected for centuries, that this reality is produced by a special entity - the soul. From now on, the activity of the soul was derived from the laws and causes operating in the corporeal, earthly world. Knowledge of the laws of nature was born not from the inner experience of the consciousness observing itself, but from the socio-historical experience generalized in the scientific theories of modern times.



the interdependence of such abilities as movement in space, desire. Movement as an initial ability was emphasized even in ancient anatomical psychology (Democritus and others). Desire as a train in motion has a similarly long history of exploration. Yavorsky proves the unity of the soul through the idea of ​​functional interaction. One vital function may help or hinder the other. The intense action of the intellect interferes with digestion, excessive sensation leads to a disorder of intellectual action - a sign that all these abilities come from one soul. Yavorsky carries out a critical reflection on the theories of Aristotle on the basis of scientific achievements of the 17th century. A new meaning is being put into the traditional structure of psychology.
More weighty proof of the unity of the human soul, for Yavorsky, are genetic grounds. Types of the soul - vegetative, sensual, intelligent - arise as organs of a single soul, consistently improved, specializing for sending various actions. Some of them appear in childhood, others - in youth or old age. In Yavorsky, we are not talking about different souls, but about the peculiar tools and means of nature that the body uses in its life. Nature goes from less perfect to more perfect actions. The matter that makes up a human being gradually improves in its organization and first carries out vegetative impulses, then sensual ones, then the mind. Having established the divisions of the soul on the basis of its specific abilities, Yavorsky raises the question of the ideal or material nature of these souls.
Having made a fundamental statement that the mental soul does not depend on matter, Yavorsky nevertheless recognizes the empirical facts of the dependence of spiritual actions on the bodily, on the objective world, from which the soul takes on forms (eydals) and on which, in turn, the process of understanding depends. The use of the mind depends on bodily dispositions (inclinations), although not directly, but through the actions of the imagination.
The vegetable and animal souls are defined as material. These souls, dividing as parts of a whole, depend on material existence. They do not perceive anything non-material, they do not form universal, abstract concepts. They perceive only that which has color, taste, and other material qualities.
If the soul were divisible, one part of it would sin, the other would repent; one would hate the other. The soul is in the whole body, and at the same time, it is independent of the body. Separated body parts of the soul are not. Yavorsky connects these thoughts with the idea of ​​localization of mental functions. It is the brain that has the "disposition" (tendency) to be the substratum of the soul.
Reflecting major trends in psychology XVII V. , Yavorsky not only connects all levels of the soul with bodily acts, but also focuses on the reflex mechanism of these acts.
Reflex action Yavorsky calls "necessary sensual action", which becomes possible by the integrity of the nervous system, the brain.