ABSTRACT
No discipline calling itself Psychology existed prior to the mid-nineteenth century. What we might clumsily call ‘reflexive discourse’ – discourse about human nature, ‘Mind’ and the Soul – has always existed but, barring a number of scattered exceptions, before 1800 this was not ‘scientific’ in any modern sense, let alone experimental. But most importantly these exceptions, however many remain to be unearthed by historians, did not inaugurate a continuous disciplinary project like modern Psychology. This is, on the face of it, surprising. In The Advancement of Learning (1605) and Novum Organum (1620), Francis Bacon had advocated a ‘general science concerning the Nature and State of Man’ at the outset of the ‘Scientific Revolution’. Yet few experiments of a recognisably ‘Psychological’ kind are on record before 1850, and even non-experimental empirical research was sparse. In Britain the very word ‘Psychology’ was rare prior to the early 1800s, when the poet-philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge imported it from Germany (where philosophers had long used Psychologie). The significance of this absence must be stressed since, as previously mentioned, Psychology was traditionally depicted as emerging seamlessly from earlier ‘reflexive discourse’, often starting with the ancient Greeks.
