A history of psychology / by Otto Klemm ; authorized translation with annotations by Emil Carl Wilm ; and Rudolf Pintner.

  • Otto Klemm
Date:
[1914], [©1914]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A history of psychology / by Otto Klemm ; authorized translation with annotations by Emil Carl Wilm ; and Rudolf Pintner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    forts to rid a given system of empirical psychology of con- tradictions and thus to bring it to a definitive conclusion. Within the science of psychology itself the principle of so- called psychophysical parallelism has been reduced to a heuristic principle, a process which has been repeated in the case of metaphysical principles of a number of other sciences, the principle of finalism, for example, in biology. I. Spiritualism Spiritualism in psychology is the result of the gradual development of the concept of spirit and of the sharpening of the contrast between spirit and matter. A number of spiritualistic features are found as early in the history of psychology as Anaxagoras, who describes spirit as something simple and unmixed; but his definitions are not free from materialistic implications.^ It is not until Aristotle (384- 322), the thinker who might be said to have originated psychology as an independent science with definitely fixed boundaries, that the magic word expressing the really inex- pressible nature of the soul was spoken. The soul is to the body what form is to matter; it is that which makes of the body a living being, and which through its activity completes the body, by leading it to its true goal. This is the meaning of that noteworthy definition of the soul as the entelechy of the living body: ecmv ovv '^vxv ^z^TeXe^eta rj 7rp(OT7] (Tci>/j,aTo<; ^vaL/cov ^(orjv e')(QVTo<; Bwd/jLei. In this conception of the soul are contained the initial suggestions which psychology has not availed itself of until the most recent times. In Aristotle's psychology the soul is no longer a substance, but an activity, a formative principle. The most important conception of spiritualistic psychology comes here to its full- est expression, although Aristotle, influenced by his meta- 1 Cf. above, p. 16,