It is worth a moment's delay among the antecedents of psychology to gain a truer sense of the recency and significance of its establishment. If we go back to Descartes (1596-1650) - that great mind of a great period, who devised analytical geometry, hailed Harvey's discovery of the circulation, and had a high place among the philosophers - we find bodily behavior explained by "animal spirits,"animals reacting as machines, but human animals behaving by a totally different "rational" nature, in that man has a soul. For that entity he had to find a local habitation and a name. He was advanced enough to look for it in the brain, which, unfortunately for his notion of unity, was divided into two hemispheres and symmetrical throughout; so he selected the pineal gland, which is single and near the center of the brain, for the place of honor as the seat of the soul. Descartes, as psychologist, likewise considered the "passions" or emotions, conceiving them in similar mechanistic fashion, analyzing them as intellectual calculations in terms of pleasure forces, or as actions and reactions of attraction and repulsion. What the gland actually was, he could not know. What is pertinent is that he did not think it necessary to inquire. He actually "proved" his own existence by the fact that he could think about it: cogito, ergo sum. He thought he could get at the bottom truth about things, and particularly how we can have knowledge of them, by emptying his mind of all presuppositions, then examining them critically, and demonstrating their validity. It has been neatly said that he took all his mental furniture out of its house, examined it, and put it back again. To us this seems learnedly futile; yet it represents the level and procedure of the "psychology" of three centuries ago.

Leibnitz (1646-1716), the leading philosopher of the following generation, regarded the relations of mind and body as regulated by a "pre-established harmony," with neither as cause or effect of the other; the two clocks, body and mind, were set once for all to keep the same time. In grading mental processes he came upon the fact that some were obscure and unconscious, coming from within the body, others clear perceptions directed outward - a discerning observation but not followed to its rich possibilities.

Hobbes (1588-1679) was mainly a pleasure-and-pain, profit-and-loss psychologist entering the field from the economic and political approach because he needed such data to portray social behavior. He recognized the major instincts and their influence on behavior, yet with no further insight into their relations than that the primitive baseness of human nature required management in the interests of social worth.

Locke's (1632-1704) position is of peculiar importance because he brought into prominence the central problem of the senses. Unless we understand where the mind gets its material, the finished product will be unintelligible. He was prompted by just the same empirical interest that later developed the psychological laboratory, in which the functions of eye and ear and the tactile senses formed the first objects of inquiry. There was nothing in the mind that had not been at one time in the senses. Mind worked with an equipment; the products of thought required a knowledge of the sensory instruments. He had equally the educational interest in training the senses to make better minds. Thus he distinguished between the primary sense data and the secondary qualities that developed upon them. We know time and space and all the physical relations first in their sensory phases. These we build up into perceptions which make intelligence possible.

Through all this runs the notion of a simple lowly source of behavior (reflexes) and the recognition that the child, beginning with a blank slate (tabula rasa), slowly grows to the adult mental stature, the route proceeding by way of the perceptions in sensory terms to ideas in abstract form. This empirical correction was the more necessary to keep thinking realistic because of the strong tendency to describe it all in more abstruse, unanalyzed terms. Characteristic of this approach - a favorite one in Teutonic thought - is to proceed at once to posit a set of "faculties" such as memory, reason, will, which in turn constitute the"soul," and to describe the varieties of experience and endowment in these naive terms, not yet realizing that memory must have an organic counterpart, and that reason is but a name for a reaction toward perceived relations. Of like import was the "associationism" that flourished in Great Britain, which explained, far too abstractly, how the world of ideas was composed and directed - forgetting how closely it was modeled on the world of things as organized in words.

"Faculty" psychology had a strange sequel when Gall (1758-1828), a distinguished anatomist, was led to conclude that he could judge from the shape of the head what "faculties" the owner possessed in marked degree. By this completely fallacious method he discovered an impressive array of "faculties,"from philoprogenitiveness to tune and number, and located each on the cranial surface. The unscientific phrenology which he founded had a flourishing career, but disappeared when the true nature of cortical functions was established.

All this is a mere sample of scattered observations - an eclectic array of the piecemeal, mosaic fragments of psychological knowledge filtering through a variety of philosophical and scientific pursuits, unassembled, unrelated, and unorganized. The relationing of it all into one scheme of mental life, with an origin and a growth and a mutual illumination - all so obvious to our insight - did not enter upon the horizon of these forerunners of psychology. For this the general intellectual advancement was as yet insufficient, the interpretation of nature lacking in profitable clues.