THE RENAISSANCE OF PSYCHOLOGY 



economic and political approach because he needed such 

 data to portray social behavior. He recognized the major 

 instincts and their influence on behavior, yet with 

 no further insight into their relations than that the primi- 

 tive baseness of human nature required management in 

 the interests of social worth. 



Locke's (1632-1704) position is of peculiar importance 

 because he brought into prominence the central problem 

 of the senses. Unless we understand where the mind gets 

 its material, the finished product will be unintelligible. 

 He was prompted by just the same empirical interest that 

 later developed the psychological laboratory, in which 

 the functions of eye and ear and the tactile senses formed 

 the first objects of inquiry. There was nothing in the mind 

 that had not been at one time in the senses. Mind worked 

 with an equipment; the products of thought required a 

 knowledge of the sensory instruments. He had equally 

 the educational interest in training the senses to make better 

 minds. Thus he distinguished between the primary sense 

 data and the secondary qualities that developed upon them. 

 We know time and space and all the physical relations 

 first in their sensory phases. These we build up into per- 

 ceptions which make intelligence possible. 



Through all this runs the notion of a simple lowly 

 source of behavior (reflexes) and the recognition that the 

 child, beginning with a blank slate (tabula rasa), slowly 

 grows to the adult mental stature, the route proceeding 

 by way of the perceptions in sensory terms to ideas in 

 abstract form. This empirical correction was the more 

 necessary to keep thinking realistic because of the strong 

 tendency to describe it all in more abstruse, unanalyzed 

 terms. Characteristic of this approach — a favorite one in 

 Teutonic thought — is to proceed at once to posit a set 

 of "faculties" such as memory, reason, will, which in 

 turn constitute the "soul," and to describe the varieties of 



[59] 



