ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the summary of the first part of the book. Although the origins of many of the trends culminating in the experimental psychology of 1860 and beyond can be seen in Greek and pre-Renaissance thought, it is primarily the history of ideas since the Renaissance that casts light on the academic and intellectual Ortgeist and Zeitgeist of mid-19th-century Europe, where experimental psychology was born. Three major trends in philosophy influenced the newly developing science of psychology. Critical empiricism, with roots in Greek and Renaissance thought and carried on by the new philosophers, examined the important question of how one can acquire knowledge. Associationism, begun by Aristotle and taken over particularly by the British philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries, attempted to explain how ideas hang together. Scientific materialism had its modern origins in Descartes, was picked up in particular by French philosophers, but was also contributed to by British and German thinkers.
