History and Systems of Psychology

History and Systems of Psychology

Historically psychology dates back to the mid 1900's but the foundation really comes from the Greek era and has been known to go back even further. Psychology has developed and has many different fields since the very beginning and continues to develop and change all the time. In this paper I will be discussing the roots in early philosophy leading into the 19th century which influenced the development of modern psychology.

There are several philosophers that relate to the beginnings of psychology as a formal discipline. Here are a few of them; John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume and John Stuart Mills. Each one of these philosophers contributed something to psychology. I am going to be talking about John Locke and George Berkeley.

John Locke was an oxford scholar and one of the great philosophers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. He wrote an essay on human understanding which was about the limits of human understanding. William Chillingworth who was a writer argued John Locke's theory that human understanding was limited. John Locke tries to determine just what those limits are (Goodwin, 2008).

Locke's theory is that at birth our mind is a blank slate just waiting for information to put on it. He claims that ideas are merely materials of knowledge and all of our ideas come from experience. Idea's are the understanding of what a man thinks and experience Is sensation and reflection. Sensation tells us about things and process in the external world and reflection tells us about the operation of our own minds a sort of internal sense that makes us conscious of our mental processes. His theory was that some ideas come from only sensation and some only from reflection and then again sometimes from both (Goodwin, 2008).

The other philosopher that I will be talking about will be George Berkeley.

George Berkeley was one of three British Empiricists and is best known for his early work on vision and metaphysics. Berkeley's theory of vision argues that visual perception of distances is explained by ideas of sight and touch (Ritchie, 1967). He claimed that ideas cannot be formed; they are not needed for communication or knowledge and are inconsistent which makes them not realistic (Ritchie, 1967) Berkeley also defends two metaphysical ideas which are idealism and immaterialism. Berkeley's definition of idealism is that reality is composed of and constructed by the mind. There are no material objects but physical objects exist. His idea of immaterialism is that one's mind is the only thing capable of independent existence. This basically means material things do not exist. His arguments were these; we perceive ordinary objects like trees, mountains and houses. We perceive only ideas. Therefore ordinary objects are ideas (Ritchie, 1967)

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