The Mechanicism of the 17th Century - History of Psychology

The XVII century starts with a scientific revolution and it ends with a political revolution in England (1688) from which the modern liberal state was born. Theocratic monarchy is replaced by the constitutional monarchy. Locke it will philosophically justify the revolution, which places reason above tradition and faith.

The Mechanism of the 17th century: Locke and Discards

The baroque dominates the century. The painting is filled with darkness, with shadows, with contrasts. In architecture, the pure and straight lines of the Renaissance break, twist, balance yields to movement, to passion. The baroque and the body. Presence of death, double. The difference between reality and dream. The great theater of the world, the world as representation (Calderón de la Barca). The genre of the novel is consolidated (The Quijote appears in 1605; during the seventeenth century the picaresque novel triumphs). In painting, Velázquez (1599-1660).

The conception of the world becomes scientific, mathematical and mechanistic. Scientists demonstrated the mechanical nature of celestial and terrestrial phenomena and, even, of the bodies of animals (End of

Animism).

A scientific and intellectual revolution

The scientific revolution involved displacing the earth from the center of the universe. It is possible to date the beginning of the revolution in 1453, with the publication of the Revolution of the celestial orbits, of Copernicus, who proposed that the Sun, and not the Earth, was the center of the solar system. Copernicus's physics, however, was Aristotelian, and his system lacked empirical proof. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was the most effective defender of the new system, underpinning it with his new physics (the dynamics), and providing telescopic evidence that the moon and other celestial bodies were no more "heavenly" than the Land. However, Galileo believed, like the Greeks, that the motion of the planets was circular, even though his friend Kepler showed that the planetary orbits were elliptical. The definitive unification of celestial and terrestrial physics occurred in 1687 with the publication of the Newton's Principia Mathematica.

The laws of motion of Isaac Newton they reaffirmed the idea that the universe was a great machine. This analogy had been proposed by Galileo and also by René Descartes, and it became the popular conception at the end of this century.

As a consequence the idea of ​​an active and vigilant God, by whose express intention fell to the last leaf of a tree, was reduced to that of an engineer who had created, and maintained, the machine perfect.

From the very birth of modern science, two conflicting conceptions are present: one old Platonic tradition supported a pure and abstract science, not subjected to a criterion of utility (Henry More: “science should not be measured by the help it can provide to your back, bed and table”). Wundt and Titchener will be supporters of this point of view for Psychology. In this century, on the other hand, an idea of ​​utilitarian, practical, applied science develops, whose most vigorous defender is Francis Bacon. In the following century this tradition became firmly established in England and North America, turning towards anti-intellectualism.

The scientific revolution, in either of the two conceptions, reissues an old atomistic idea according to which some sensory qualities of objects are easily measurable: their number, weight, size, shape and movement. Others, however, are not, such as temperature, color, texture, smell, taste or sound. Since science must be of the quantifiable, it can only deal with the first type of qualities, called primary qualities, which the atomists had attributed to the atoms themselves. The secondary qualities are opposed to the primary ones because they exist only in human perception, resulting from the impact of atoms on the senses.

Psychology would be founded, two centuries later, as a study of consciousness and, therefore, included in its object all sensory properties. Behaviorists, later, will consider that the object of psychology is the movement of the organism in space, rejecting the rest. Movement is, of course, a primary quality.

Two philosophers represent in this century the two classic tendencies of scientific thought: Discards by the rationalist vision, with a conception of pure science, and Locke by the empiricist, with a conception of utilitarian or applied science.