Rhetoric) also con

II. 4* b. L E C T U R E T H R E E(4) The various practical treatises (Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric) also contain classifications of types of men, descriptions of types of characters, and ac­counts of human biography in terms of the aeti­ology of character. None of this material is scien­tific in the sense of being the result of deliberate,special investigations or researches.5. This Aristotelian distinction between theoretical and prac­tical psychology (the application of psychology in ethics and politics) is significant in the history of psychology.a. In the Hellenistic period and in the Renaissance, men wrote books about the classification of characters and about the types of lives (biographies). Theophrastus’s Book of Characters and Plutarch’s Comparative Lives are examples of such taxonomic and physionomic knowl­edge of men.7 This knowledge was not thought to be part of theoretical psychology. The subject-matter of human psychology was rather, according to the De Anima, the powers and acts of man. Furthermore, such knowledge was not the result of what we would call scientific research.b. This interest in the types of men and the types of fives was predominantly practical, that is, moral, even when the author was merely a biographer or a classifier of characters.c. This separation of the theoretical and the practical in psychology did not deny the dependence of the practical upon the theoretical.6. The mediaeval development in psychology was primarily Platonic from St. Augustine to the beginning of the 13th century.8 In the 13th century, the works of Aristotle were in the possession of Jews, Moors and Christians, and the issue between Plato and Aristotle was finally resolved by St. Thomas, who purified the Jewish and Arabic, as well as earlier Christian, Aristotelians of their Platonic misreading of the Aristotelian texts. Aquinas’s work was an enlargement and a perfection of Aristotle’s analysis [38a.] 7 V d . La Bruyere, Les Caracteres, 1688; and also the contemporaneous w ork of Sir Thom as O verbury and Bishop Earle. ®Cf. A . Pegis, St. Thomas and the Problem of the Soul in the Thirteenth Cen­ tury, Toronto, 1934; E. Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, N e w York, 1936; Ch. IX, X II-X V ; D . E. Sharp, Franciscan Philosophy at Oxford in the Thirteenth Century, London, 1930.