Chapter 5 Volume 2 The Founders of the New Science Chapter 4 The Physicalist-1

While the philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were sitting in their studies speculating about psychic phenomena, some doctors and physicists chose a very different path to the same end of mastering psychological knowledge.Ambitious scientists, such as Harvey, Newton, and Priestley, collected information with their own hands and instruments, especially concerning the physical causes of neural and mental processes.These pioneers of physicalist psychology have become the originators of today's neurophysiologists; their worldview has led to the molecular transformation of neurons, the basic components of mental phenomena.

However, some physicalists are at best quasi-scientists, and others are pseudo-scientists.However, even the latter must be counted as our research object, because although their theories on certain spiritual phenomena were denied by later generations, they led others to search for and discover effective explanations for these phenomena at that time. This was the case with Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815).In the 1770s, when the German nativists and British associationists were still relying on meditation to understand psychology, Mesmer, as a doctor, was already using magnets to treat diseases. When the magnetic force field of the human body is corrected, diseases of mind and body can be healed.

This theory is pure nonsense, but at that time, the treatment method based on this theory had a dramatic effect. For a while, Dr. Mesmer was very popular in Vienna, and then in Paris before the Revolution. Stealth.Let's take a look today at how he was in Paris.This is 1778. In a hall of the Vendome Palace, the lights are dim, mirrors hang high, and the room is full of baroque grotesques.A dozen or so newly-dressed and elegantly dressed ladies and gentlemen sat around a large oak barrel, each holding an iron rod protruding from the barrel, which was filled with magnet shavings and some chemicals. Taste.From the next room came the low humming of glass percussion instruments. After a while, the music faded away, the door opened wider, and out came a formidable figure with heavy and heavy steps. Majestic, wearing a purple robe fluttering in the wind, holding an iron rod like a scepter in his hand.This is Dr. Mesmer who works miracles.

Mesmer's face was stern and menacing, with a broad jaw, a long mouth, and high, prominent eyebrows.As soon as he appeared, the patients were stunned and trembling.Dr. Mesmer stared at one of the men, and then gave an order: "Go to sleep!" The man's eyes closed, his head fell limply on his chest, and the other patients gasped. .Now Dr. Mesmer fixed his eyes on a woman, pointing slowly with the iron rod, and she trembled and cried out as a tingling sensation went through her whole body.As Mesmer continued along the circle, the patient's reactions became more and more violent.Eventually, some of them would scream, flap their arms, and faint.Assistants will take them to the emergency room where they will be calmed until recovery.Afterwards, many of the patients present, suffering from various ailments, ranging from depression to paralysis, felt their symptoms disappear and were even cured on the spot.No wonder Mesmer still flocks to seek medical treatment despite the high fees.

Although it seems to me today that Mesmer's practice of medicine seems to be a nonsense, a trick to deceive people, and he himself did not get good rewards in the end, but most scholars believe that Mesmer did believe in himself at the time. What he did and the reason for it, he used this reason to explain the medical results.Mesmer was born into a poor family in Konstanz — his father was a forest expander and his mother was the daughter of a locksmith — but he carved his way through the Bavarian and Austrian education systems.He originally hoped to be a pastor, but later he wanted to be a lawyer, and finally he decided to be a doctor. At the age of 32, he took his medical degree in Vienna. Fortunately, his professors did not know that his doctoral thesis, "On the Influence of the Planets", had been plagiarized from the work of a colleague of Newton.Despite the title of the dissertation, the content was not about astrology.The paper proposes that there is a certain connection between Newton's "universal gravitation" and the body and mind of the human body.In the part of the treatise that belongs to Mesmer himself, he takes this theory a step further, following a casual remark of Newton, and proposes the existence of an invisible humor within the human body, capable of Corresponding behavior occurs.Both health and disease, Mesmer says, depend on the harmony between the body's "animal gravity" and planetary gravity.

Two years after receiving his doctorate, Mesmer married a much older, wealthy Viennese widow, thus gaining admission into Viennese society.No longer required to practice medicine full time, he focused most of his attention on cultural and scientific developments.When Benjamin Franklin invented the glass percussion instrument, Mesmer, a rather gifted amateur musician, purchased one and quickly became a pro at it, playing it like a fly.Both he and his wife are avid music lovers and often see Leopold Mozart and his family, while the 12-year-old Wolfgang made his first opera, The Bastians, at the Mesmer home The first performance in the garden.

While appreciating these pleasing things, Mesmer also became a medical and psychological pioneer. In 1773, a 27-year-old young woman came to visit him because she was suffering from a disease that other doctors could not cure.Mesmer could not cure her, but he suddenly remembered a conversation he had with a Jesuit named Max Millen Hale. The priest told him that the use of magnets might affect the human body.Mesmer bought a set of magnets, and when the woman came for the second time, he carefully manipulated the magnets, sticking one by one to different parts of her body.She began to shake, then convulsed after a while—what Mesmer called a “crisis”—and when she awoke, she said her symptoms were much less severe.After a series of further treatments, all her symptoms disappeared. (Today, her illness would be diagnosed as hysterical neurosis, and the reason for her recovery is the result of suggestion.)

Mesmer now saw a connection between magnetism and gravity in his own animals.He believed that the human body was filled with this magnetic rather than gravitational humor, and he believed that the resulting force field could be misaligned, causing disease, and that realignment through therapy might restore health.What he used to call "animal gravity" he now called "animal magnetism."The patient's crisis, he interpreted as a breakthrough of an obstacle to the flow of magnetic fluid in the body, and the subsequent restoration of "harmony". Mesmer began treating other patients, telling them to prepare for some of the reactions, including the crisis itself.They all responded involuntarily, as expected.Soon, the Vienna newspapers were full of Dr. Mesmer's medical deeds.For a while, Maximilian Hale publicly claimed that the cure was his, not Mesmer's, and a scandal broke out.Mesmer boldly claimed that he had proposed this theory (a distortion of truth) in his doctoral dissertation several years earlier, thus winning the dispute and establishing himself as the discoverer of this phenomenon .

Mesmer gave well-attended lectures and performances in many cities for his radio fame.In Vienna, however, he angered some of the city's leading doctors by publicly showing off his treatments.The doctors' reputations were again tarnished in 1777 when Mesmer claimed to have cured a patient named Maria Theresa von Paradis.Maria is a blind pianist, and Mozart composed K. 456 Piano Concerto in B flat.She lost her sight at the age of 3 and visited Mesmer when she was 18.He claimed that under his treatment she had regained some vision, but only in his presence and not by other witnesses.Perhaps her blindness was the result of a psychological influence, and he did, but in 1778 her parents discontinued the treatment, and Viennese doctors called Mesmer a quack.Mesmer suddenly abandoned his family, wanted nothing, including his elderly wife, and fled to Paris.

In this volatile, trendy city, Mesmer's self-promoting genius quickly achieved great fame, and soon ruined it.At the beginning, he saw a doctor for a single patient, but as the business grew, he found that it was easier to make money handling patients collectively.The method he uses is the barrel method invented by himself, that is, oak barrels, which contain ferromagnetic fluid prepared with iron rods.Since he could also influence patients by touch, gesture, or staring at them for a long time, he began to think that magnets and iron filings were not the most basic things, and that his own body must be an unusually large magnet. Has the power to directly transfer invisible ferrofluid.

This approach soon became known as "Mesmel therapy", and it became the last hope of salvation.People flocked to Mesmer's clinic, and his assistants studied and studied under his guidance. His disciples wrote at least two hundred pamphlets and books in less than 10 years, specifically introducing this therapy.However, the professors of medicine at the University of Paris and people in other formal medical institutions thought he was a charlatan and expressed their opinions publicly.However, if Mesmer knew that he was a liar, he would not fight back as hard as he did then. In 1784, through his connections with officials, he induced the king to appoint a special commission, composed of eminent physicians and scholars, including the chemist Lavacher and the American ambassador Benjamin Franklin, to investigate whether his treatments true. The committee conducted careful research, including an experiment that is common in contemporary psychology.Some subjects were told that they would be given magnetic therapy through a closed door, however, they were not actually given the magnets.The tricked subjects reported feeling the magnetic therapy as accurately as they did when they were actually being treated.After analyzing the evidence, the committee correctly reported that Mesmer's magnetic fluid did not exist, but they also incorrectly reported that the effects of magnetic therapy were only "imagined".Since then, Mesmer's reputation has declined, and the medical movement has splintered into competing sects.Mesmer finally left a sad place of lost fame, spending the last 30 years of his life in relative seclusion in Switzerland. For more than half a century, mesmel therapy remained a quasi-magical and thoroughly misunderstood phenomenon, eclipsed by pure charlatans such as Alasandro Di Cagliostro (a Giuseppe Balsamo, a charlatan), jugglers, adventurous laymen, and informal doctors in France, England, and America all tried the trick.Most practitioners of Mesmer's therapy have slowly moved away from the use of magnets - Mesmer himself has worked in this direction - and say that through rituals and invocations, eye contact and other The steps realize the transfer of the magnetic fluid.In fact, these methods can indeed cause trance and "crisis" and can alleviate some symptoms. In England in the 1840s, Mesmer's therapy also gained some respect, as a physician, John Elisdon, used it to treat neuroses, and surgeon W. S. Ward also adopted Mesmer's. The therapy put the patient into a hypnotic state, in which his thigh was amputated.James Brad, a Scottish physician, who made some experiments with the mesmel therapy, said that its main effect was not due to the magnetic flow, but rather to the emotional susceptibility of the patient, in fact, He sees the therapy as a psychological process.Brad called it "neuro-hypnosis" (drawing out the Greek word neuron for "nerve" and hypnos for "sleep"), and the word soon became "hypmosis" in everyday usage, and it has been used ever since. So used. In medieval France, a country doctor named Saint-Auguste Rieport discarded all trappings that bordered on magic and occult rituals in hypnotism.He made the patient look into his eyes, while he kept suggesting that the patient was about to fall asleep.When the patient went into a trance, the doctor told him that his symptoms would disappear, and in many cases they did.By the 1860s, Rieporte's fame had spread far beyond his native France, and he had written a book devoted to his methods of hypnosis and its results.Although hypnosis was a subject of skepticism and even hot debate at the time, it has been a part of medical treatment ever since. The most famous practitioner of this form of hypnosis was later in the century Jean-Martin Charcot, director of a hospital in Paris called Salbertriere.Known as the "Napoleon of the Cure for Neurosis," he believed that the phenomenon of hypnosis had much in common with the hysterical state, and, indeed, that only hysterical patients could be hypnotized.He hypnotized many hysterical patients in front of his students to demonstrate hysterical symptoms, but did not consider the medical value of hypnosis and did not use it for treatment. Charcot also mistakenly believed that the trance state could only be entered after the patient had passed through two preceding stages, drowsiness and catalepsy, each of which had specific symptoms and involved major nervous system functions Variety.His views were refuted by Rieporte's later disciples, because Rieporte demonstrated that trance states can be induced directly and that non-hysterical patients can also be hypnotized.Also, because of Charcot's status and his technique of inducing patients into a trance state, in 1882, the French Academy of Sciences accepted hypnosis as a neurophysiological phenomenon independent of magnetism. Several of Charcot's disciples, among them Alfred Binet, Pierre Jeannet, and Sigmund Freud, went on to search for a psychological rather than a neurophysiological explanation of hypnotic phenomena. explained, and used hypnosis in their own way.However, only in relatively recent years has it been given sufficient attention as a term in motivational psychology; Upon post-hypnotic suggestion, some subjects' will and others' abilities were absent, including the disappearance of symptoms.Dr. Mesmer, had he known all this, would have been outraged that his theory had been completely rejected, and probably elated that his treatment had proved to be completely effective. Other physicalists took an entirely different approach, touching and measuring the skull, because they believed that the details of the skull's distribution were directly related to a person's character traits and psychic energy. The idea that external physical traits are linked to psychological traits has a long history.Physiognomy, the interpretation of facial features and psychic energy, that is, the analysis of the shape and size of facial features, has been around since ancient Greece.Physiognomy became extremely popular in the late 18th century through the writings of Swiss theologian and mystic Joan Caspar Ravatel.The purpose of Ravatel's 4-volume "On the Use of Physiognomy to Promote the Knowledge of People and the Love of Human Beings" is to promote the "science of physiognomy". It was published in 55 editions between 1775 and 1810.Darwin later said that he almost missed his historic voyage on the Beacon because the captain was a disciple of Ravatel, and he wondered: "Would a man with a nose like mine have enough strength and determination Finish the voyage." Phrenology had little impact on psychology, but it paved the way for a related theory, phrenology, which did have an impact on psychology.According to phrenology, the outline of the skull is determined by the development of specific areas of the brain, and therefore can indicate a person's character and mental strength. The leading proponent of this theory was Franz Joseph Gall (1758 -1828), a physician and neurophysiologist born in Germany and trained in Vienna, where he received his medical degree in 1785 .Cal was a rat-headed man, with features hanging low on his face, and he was hard to please—many of his prestigious patients apparently didn't believe in physiognomy.Gal was a habitual rebel, at odds with authority, vehement in arguments, obsessed with womanizing, and greedy, and it was against the norm to charge admission fees for his scientific presentations. Nevertheless, he was still a first-class anatomist of the brain. Through his own dissection method, he showed for the first time that the two hemispheres of the brain are connected by a stem (brain connection) composed of some white matter; fibers in the lower brain are cross-connected (as a result, sensations on one side of the body reach the brain on the other); The higher the level. These contributions by Gall were great contributions to neuroscience, and still are today, but these discoveries, which offended church authorities and Francis I, attributed higher intellectual processes to a more developed brain, Rather than the immaterial soul or consciousness. In 1802, the emperor banned Gall from further lectures on the grounds that they would lead to materialism, immorality and atheism.He asked the emperor several times to cancel the ban, but repeated applications were invalid. Therefore, in 1807, he gave up Vienna and came to Paris. Here, although Napoleon wanted to limit his influence, and his thoughts were also influenced by the French Academy. Rejection, but he persisted, and never changed his life. Gall's contributions to the knowledge of the structure of the brain and its relation to intelligence should have earned him a respected place in the history of psychology, but he is best known for what he himself calls the The theory of "phrenology" is usually judged according to this theory, which later became famous as phrenology. When Gall first realized that human intelligence surpassed that of animals because the human cortex was more developed, it occurred to him that some of the measurable differences in human intelligence and personality might also be due to differences between individuals. The cortical layer is underdeveloped.This would explain something that had troubled him for many years.As a schoolboy, he was troubled as a college student that some of his classmates, while not as bright as he, got better grades because they were better at remembering—and, mysteriously, They all had huge heads with bulging eyes.Gall now speculates that this must mean that the area of ​​the cortex just behind the eyes is the basis of the brain's memory, and that in some people with very good memories, this area develops so specially that it tends to crowd out the eyes . If so, why couldn't each of the higher energies also depend on a particular area or "organ" of the cerebral cortex?For example, why couldn't there be an organ dedicated to bellicoseness, another to benevolence, and so on?Gall was familiar with the dozens of "brain functional areas" proposed by the Scottish associationist Thomas Reid, each of which may be located in a specific cortical area, and these usually have supernormal development of certain functions. It is possible that people develop very specifically in this respect. He had a hard time opening people's heads to test his theory, and X-rays hadn't been there yet, but Gall slowly came up with a convenient hypothesis.Just as the eyes often protrude in people with good memories, so the skull may protrude near any particularly developed area.And, strange to say, when he started looking for evidence, he found evidence everywhere.Here is an explanation, you can see how he found the "greedy organ": In the past, I had many servant boys and such servants in my house, and they often blamed each other for stealing so-and-so.Some of them were so disgusted with stealing that they would rather starve than accept bread or fruit stolen from their friends, while those who stole laughed at such behavior and thought them stupid.Examining their skulls, I was surprised to find that most of the habitual thieves had a long cranial protrusion extending almost from the cunning area to the root of the eyelids (that is, above and in front of the ears), and this area Very flat people hate stealing. Together, Gall and his colleague, a young doctor named Joan Christopher Spotsheim, examined the heads of hundreds of patients, friends, inmates, psychiatric patients, and others, and gave The head draws a skull map with 27 regions (later expanded to 37 regions by Spotsheim), each region represents an organ or cortex supporting it, and a certain special function is located in these In those places where a certain characteristic is prominent, the function of that part will be improved. (Gal has a portrait of him with his hands outstretched, touching a mannequin's head, his fingers deftly twirling lumps.) Gall and Spotsheim identified the horny zone (just below the head), the benevolent Zones (middle above the forehead), Aggressive Zones (behind each ear), Majestic Zones (on the top of the head), Pleasant Zones (the middle of the forehead on either side), and so on. Gall published a series of voluminous works between 1810 and 1819 describing his discoveries.Spotsheim contributed to the first two volumes, but then went about his own business.Handsome, driven, and charming, he became a highly successful speaker and advocate of phrenology in Europe and the United States.Through Gall's book and self-promotion, and Spotsheim's public relations campaign, phrenology took off instantly and continued for almost a century.For a while there were twenty-nine phrenological societies and several phrenological journals in England alone.In New York City, phrenology "clinics" have sprung up along Broadway, and phrenology masters tour the country.At its peak, phrenology became the gossip of ordinary people looking for answers to life's dilemmas.Even more astonishing, many luminaries and serious scholars believed it too: Hegel, Marx, Balzac, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, Walt Whitman, and a few others It's all like this. However, phrenology has encountered a firm counterattack from the scientific community from the beginning, and it is not without reason.Gall, though a great deal of evidence has been collected and presented, is some evidence taken in order to fit his theory; he should have taken samples at random and shown that there is a connection between these masses and the overdevelopment of the character in question, There was no such interaction with the bumps on the heads of normal or less-characteristically overdeveloped people.Another reason is that when a person with cranial prominence does not have the predicted features, Gall justifies it in terms of "balancing actions" of other brain parts that skew the problem.Gal had so many functions to define that he could "prove" whichever function he chose, although most scientists would, of course, consider his proofs to be worthless. However, the definitive denial of phrenology comes from the laboratory.Pierre Frouron (1794-1867), a very clever French physiologist, was so horrified by Gall's crude methodology that he decided to use experimental methods to prove whether a particular physiological function was located in a specific place. within the brain region.He was a skilled surgeon, operating on the skulls of birds, rabbits, and dogs, cutting out small areas, and then carefully raising the animals, restoring them to health, and seeing whether their behavior Affected by lack of these regions. Of course, he can't test human functions like word memory, but he can test functions that are located in parts that Gal himself said can be similar to those parts of the human brain.One of these functions is the "erotic organ," which is supposed to be located in the cerebellum (the most primitive part of the brain, the base of the skull at the back.) Frouron removed the dog's brain in a series of operations With more and more cerebellum in the dog, the dog slowly loses the ability to move sequentially, until it turns left when it wants to turn right, starts to back up when it is going forward, and so on.The function of the cerebellum, clearly, is to move with purpose, not to be lustful or not. By the same token, Floren found that repeatedly removing the cortex from animals reduced their ability to respond to sensory stimuli and initiate actions.A small injury has no special consequences, as the theory of phrenology, if correct, should have here, but it only reduces the animal's general responsiveness to visual stimuli and its general level of activity .The more cortex was removed, the more sluggish the animal appeared, until all reflexes and self-priming abilities were gone; a bird that had its cortex completely removed could no longer fly unless it was thrown into the air.Floren concluded that sensation, judgment, will, and memory are all distributed in the cerebral cortex.Although he found a large number of functions in the brain—the cortex and the cerebellum did serve different purposes—the specific functions of each part were not evenly distributed among them. Gall's pseudoscientific theory thus led to experimental studies of functional divisions of the brain.In addition, his theory, although wrong in all the details, escaped Florent's attacks, because subsequent neurophysiologists followed Florent's lead.They identified specific areas of the brain that they believe control visual perception, auditory perception, and motor control.Frouron is correct that memory and thinking are distributed throughout the cortex, but some lower mental activities, and even some higher mental activities, are indeed distributed in different areas. Higher functions are performed in certain parts of the brain, the most typical example being language. In 1861, Leborgne, a 51-year-old patient at the Pisses Asylum in Paris, was transferred to the operating room because of gangrene in his right leg.The surgeon, a young man named Paul Bullock, inquired about the patient's condition, but the patient was unable to utter anything but murmured a meaningless sound, "tan."He can only communicate by gestures and "tan, tan", and if they can't figure out his gestures, people can do nothing but shout to the sky.Bullock finally figured out that Tan was his name at the psychiatric institution where he had been, 21 years ago, after he had lost the ability to speak.He remained mentally normal, but after a few years his right leg and arm became paralyzed. Tan passed away six days after entering the operating room.Bullock performed an autopsy and found that an egg-sized area in the middle of the left side of the brain had been damaged. There was almost no tissue in the center of the damaged area, and at its edge, some remaining tissue had shrunk.From Leborgne's medical records, Bloch concluded that the manipulation first occurred in what is now called the center, and that when this trauma was not extensive it had completely destroyed Leborgne's speech abilities; , it spreads until it becomes paralyzed.Apparently, this small anterior circular area in the left hemisphere of the brain is the base of language.Since then, this area has been called the Block area. About ten years later, a German doctor named Karl Wernicke found in a similar way that some patients who spoke very fluently, but used strange words, and did not understand what was said to him, There was damage in another cell in the left hemisphere a few feet behind Bullock's zone.It soon became clear that Bloch's area was responsible for grammar (the structure of language), while a second area, now known as Vinicke's area, was responsible for semantics (the meaning of words).Both areas are necessary for normal verbal communication; damage to Bullock impairs the ability to utter words but not comprehension, and damage to Vinicke's area allows patients to speak fluently, but both are speechless. meaning, and the understanding of language is also a problem. Still later, two German physiologists, Gustav Fritsch and Edua Hickig, identified a special area of ​​the cortex: the motor locus, which stretches from the left midbrain to the right midbrain. A long strip of tissue above the brain.Other investigators have pinpointed areas responsible for vision, touch, and hearing, respectively.By the end of the century, while Floren had proved wrong that there was no compartmentalization of functions, Gall was quite right, though completely wrong in the details.In the 20th century, however, further research will show that both theories are correct.Many functions are located in specific areas of the human brain, however, learning, intelligence, memory, reasoning, decision making and other higher mental activities all take place in the frontal lobes of the brain. Floren himself once summed up the repeated negation process of every kind of science in pursuit of truth: "La sciencen'est pas elle devient." Part of the reason psychology has slowly become what it is today is because of Gal.His discoveries about the structure of the brain have stood the test of time, his absurd theories of phrenology have led to experimental studies in the compartmentalization of brain functions, and his emphasis on the cortex as the basis of intelligence has brought psychology forward even further. progress, far beyond metaphysics, and closer than ever to experimental science.He should be remembered, not just for his venture into fake science. Using physiological methods to explain psychological phenomena is a new and larger movement, and mapping brain partitions is only a part of this movement.Democritus, and certainly others, have ventured to speculate that there are some physical phenomena that support sensations and thoughts, but for centuries most physio-psychologists have used visible higher Thought processes such as association, intellect, and will describe mental phenomena.Knowing nothing about the physiology of the nervous system and brain, they ignored the question of whether these processes consisted of physiological phenomena. However, as we have seen, with the advent of physics and chemistry in the seventeenth century some bold archetypal psychologists began to propose mechanistic explanations for mental processes.Lacking actual observational data, they could only speculate that "animal spirits" flowed in empty nerves (Descartes), that atoms flowed in these nerves (Hobbes), and that nerves vibrated with "vibrators" (Hart profit).A French philosopher, Julian de la Métesi, even had a monograph entitled Man as Machine (1748). However, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, physiologists made several discoveries about the nervous system that led them to explain low-level psychological processes such as Sensation, reflexes, and volitional movements.Some of the discoveries that made this new physiological psychology possible are: — Around 1730, English botanist and chemist Stephen Hales beheaded a frog, then pinched the frog; the frog's legs bounced a few times.He cut off the frog's spine, and this time, the frog didn't move its legs.Hales thus establishes the distinction between reflexes and conscious action, and centers reflexes on the spine rather than the brain. ——In 1791, Italian physiologist Ruig Galvani hooked a frog's leg with a copper hook, so that a part of the spine was still hanging on it; Down.Galvani concluded that the "animal current" generated in the muscles and brain was conducted through the nerves and was responsible for movement. —It was not until the early 19th century that physiologists proposed that the nervous system was like a continuous network.可是，在这个世纪的早些年，当植物组织由细胞构成这个观点已经确立后，德国生理学家西奥多·施万把这个想法推进了一步。他说，动物组织也是由细胞构成的。他区分出了一种神经细胞，很快，其它一些人也演示，大脑细胞同细胞核和长长的分支组成，它们伸出并与其它大脑细胞的分支相连接。 ——按照笛卡儿的动物精神理论，冲动可以在任何方向上在神经里面流动。而按照神经活动的电流模式，电流却只能顺着一个方向流动。1811年到1822年之间，为了支持后者的思想，英国解剖学家查尔斯·贝尔和法国生理学家弗兰索瓦·马让迪各自切断了不同的动物神经，以观察哪些功能会受到影响。两人都能够显示，神经系统由感觉神经构成，电流会向里面传导，向脊椎和大脑的方向流动；神经系统还由运动神经构成，电流从里向外流动，即从大脑和脊椎向肌肉和器官方向流动。 这些发现，以及其它的一些发现与我们今天已经掌握的、有关光和色彩的物理学原理结合起来，产生了19世纪在感觉器官和感知生理学研究方面的大爆炸。这种新的心理学与贝克莱的神学幻想和休谟的怀疑主义在对思维如何感知周围世界这个问题的解决方法上完全不同。而且，尽管在一开始的时候，它还只能解释低层次的心理学过程，可是，大部分新心理学家们都希望，最终，较高层次的心理过程会以类似的方法解释清楚。德国生理学家艾米尔·杜·波瓦雷蒙1842年给一位朋友的信中说，他和一位同事已经庄严宣誓，要演示下列教条中的真理所在： 除了活跃在有机体中的一些常见的物理及化学力量之外，并不存在别的任何力量。如出现此时不能以这些力量解释的一些情形，人们必须要么通过物理和数学方式寻找具体的办法或者采取他们自己的行动方式，要么就假设存在新的力量，这种力量与物质当中天生具有的化学-物理力量同样尊严，还能根据吸引和排斥的力量还原回去。 尽管“新心理学”出现在好几个国家，可发展最快的还是在德国，按照著名的英国心理学史学家莱斯理·斯宾塞·赫恩肖的说法，在德国的大学，“科学心理学诞生了”。 他说，这算不得奇怪。直到1870年，德国是由许多小王国、公国和自治城市构成的联合体，这里已经建立了超过欧洲任何国家的大学。另外，19世纪早期进行过好多教育及社会改革之后，德国大学可以为科学家和学者们提供非常精良的实验室装备，供进行物理、化学、生理学和其它科学研究之用。 在这种氛围之中，甚至康德传统中的哲学家和心理学家们也抛弃了康德说心理学不可能成为一门实验科学的断言。其他一些人慢慢相信，甚至不可见的、高级水平上的精神功能，尽管只能通过受试者对刺激的反应观察到，也是可以通过实验很生动地调查清楚的。 可首先，我们先看看这些机械主义者——或者不如说，因为他们为数众多，我们先看看一些其作品非常重要，也能够代表这个运动的一些机械论者。 乔安·穆勒（1801-1858）是从哲学传统中出道的，可后来半路杀出，成了第一位伟大的现代生理学家，然后又回到哲学中去，以期回答有关游离于他的生理学之外的一些问题。可是，哲学心理学的时代已然过去，他的生量学作品对心理学产生了相当大的影响，而他的哲学著作却随风而散了。 穆勒出生于科尔布伦茨的一个中产阶级家庭，极富天才，精力充沛，雄心勃勃。他生就一幅拜伦式的面孔——一头乱发，敏感的嘴巴和一双有穿透力的眼睛。21岁在柏林拿到医学学位后，他把年轻人对谢林准神秘自然哲学的狂热搁置一边，转而在生理学和解剖学方面做一些惊天动地的事情，使得波恩大学在24岁时就授予他自助教授的头衔，29岁时又授予他全日制教授职位。 穆勒二十出头时狂热地迷恋于活体解剖和动物实验，到25岁时，他已经完成了两大本视觉生理学方面的著作。可是，他已经受到狂郁病倾向的折磨了，26岁他成为教授并娶了恋爱许久的情人后不久，他患了严重的忧郁症，有5个月的时间既不能工作也无法进行研究。39岁时，其它的人在生理学研究中又冲到他前面去了，他又一次受到忧郁症的打击；47岁时，他与1848年的大革命理想政见不合，又受到第三次病魔打击；1858年57岁时，第四次打击使他以自杀结束了自己的生命。 穆勒在生理心理学方面的几乎所有的重要成就都是在他早年取得的；32岁时，他转入柏林大学，这时候，他已经无意于再干那些被他自己称作“切割快乐”的动物实验术，转而研究起动物学和比较解剖学了。他不再相信实验术可以解决生命的终极问题了，他里程牌式的著作《生理学手册》尽管满是他自己和其它人的实验发现，但里面却已经包含了许多有关灵魂的哲学讨论，而这个话题是应该在一个世纪以前谈论的。在这部著作中，他瞎扯了一些话，说什么灵魂就是行动中的大脑和神经系统，或者是临时寄存于人体的某种“生命活力”。 在穆勒有关神经系统的大量发现中，许多都极有利于生理心理学的确立，其中有一项还产生了特别的影响。早期的生理心理学家认为，任何感觉神经都可以传导任何种类的感觉数据到大脑里面，正如一根管子可以传送任何泵入里面的物质一样，可是，他们无法解释，比如说，为什么光学神经只传递视觉图象到大脑里面，而听觉神经也只传导声音。穆勒提出了一套令人信服的理论。每种感觉系统的神经只传递一种数据，或者，如他所言，“一种特别能量或者品质”：光学神经总是，而且也只传递光线感觉，听觉神经总是，也只传递声音感觉，其它的感觉神经总是，也只传递各自的感觉。 穆勒是在对动物进行了一系列的解剖学研究后作出这个结论的——甚至还包括在他自己身上做的一些很小但能起决定作用的实验。当他按压自己紧闭的双眼时，压力不会引起声音、味觉或者口感，但会闪出光线来。他是这么表达自己的理论的： 声音的感觉是听觉神经的特别“能量”或者“特质”；光线或色彩的感觉是光神经的能量；其它各神经亦是如此。每种感觉的神经好像都只能够产生某种决定性的感觉，而不能产生符合其它感觉器官的感觉。根据生理学的许多经过检验的事实来说，没有哪一种可以支持这样一个想法，即一种感觉神经可以承担起另一种感觉神经的功能。对盲人触觉的夸张在今天不能够被称作用手指观察；手指和腹部产生视觉能力只能是个寓言，而举出的一些例子说的确有这样的事情发生，那不过是些骗人的把戏。 换了威廉·詹姆斯，八成会说得更刺耳：“若把视神经的外端末梢接到耳朵上，再把听神经接到眼睛上，我们就该能听到闪电，看见雷声了。” 穆勒虽说口头上十分肯定这一点，可他扪心自问，感觉神经具有的这种专业性是每套神经独特的品质所致呢，还是这些神经所经过的大脑某个区域所为？视觉脉冲传递到大脑某个区域时可能是以视觉形式翻译它们的，而听觉神经有可能是作为声音传递过去的。“现在尚不清楚，”他在《手册》里说，“每根感觉神经的独特'能量'基本的起因，倒底是位于神经本身呢，抑或是在它与之连接的大脑或者脊椎的某些部件里？”可是，弗楼伦认为大脑各处一致的观点仍然主宰着生理学思想，而穆勒却选择了“特定神经能量”的理论。 然而，他自己的学生当中，有些人在本世纪末继续抱住他产生的怀疑思想，因为他本人也曾诚实地承认了自己的不确定性，并显示，所有的神经传递都具有同样的特征，而且，是大脑末梢的位置决定着由传递创造的经验类型。 不过，穆勒的生理学开始为长期以来一直深感困惑的生理学家和原型心理学家们提供答案了：我们周围世界里的现实是如何成为我们意识中的感觉的？感觉如何工作的详细图景开始显露出来了。这个过程从眼球的光学特性或者耳朵的听觉机制开始（在这两个方面，穆勒曾进行过详细的研究），继而研究传递来自感觉器官的刺激的那些神经，最后研究接受并解释这些神经脉冲的大脑区。古代人认为，任何感知到的东西的最小复制品都会通过空气和神经传递到大脑里面去，而穆勒显示，传递到大脑里面去的东西都是神经脉冲；我们的感觉不是我们周围一些事物的复制品，而是与它们相类似或者同形的东西。如他所言： 感官感觉的直接对象只不过是由神经诱导出来的特殊状态，我们感觉到它们是一些感受，要么是由神经本身产生的，要么是由与感觉有关的大脑某些部件引起的。神经通过外部原因在它们自身产生的一些变化，如外体条件的改变，而让大脑感知到它们自己的存在。 可是，我们如何知道，大脑对传递进来的刺激所产生的反应就一定对应于现实呢？这个问题一直以来就折磨着哲学家和生理学家们，可对于穆勒来说就是易如破竹，迎刃而解了。我们的神经状态以合适和规则的方式对应于物体，比如，虹膜上的图像理所当然就是对外部世界那些东西的忠实反映，而这就是视觉神经传递到大脑中去的刺激。其它感觉器官和它们所传递的信息也是如此。这样，穆勒就解开了由贝克莱和休谟提出来的认识论之迷，并将不可检测的康德认定的范围转变成了可检测和可观察的现实。虽然他的理论在细节上有错误，可是，他的特别能量理论及其最为深刻的含义都是正确的。