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Four strands of psychological argument can be identified in the period 1850–80 that display the different discursive fields in which Victorian psychologists operated. The four strands are: the discourse of the soul, the discourse of philosophy, the discourse of physiology in general biology, and the discourse of medicine. This chapter focuses on the discourse of the soul. The word psychology is derived from the Greek for ‘soul discourse’. If the discourse of the soul had been faculty psychology's only sustenance, it would have perished much earlier as scientific naturalism started to take the ground from beneath it. But it had a more intellectually robust constitution and diverse feeding habits, which kept it going.

The first part deals with the twelfth‐century reception and discussion of ancient themes in theology, logic and medical theory. Among the most significant theological contexts for treating emotions were the doctrine of first movements toward sin (Sect. 1) and the question of the nature of spiritual experiences (Sect. 2). Section 3 involves a general account of the early development of the logic of the will and its relations to the discussion of emotions. The medical theories of emotions and their impact on twelfth‐century philosophy and theology are discussed in Sect. 4. Section 5 contains an analysis of Avicenna's theory of emotions. Avicennian faculty psychology influenced early thirteenth‐century Latin discussions of the nature and taxonomy of emotions (Sect. 6). Section 7 deals with Albert the Great and Sect. 8 with Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas’ theory, which combines Avicennian and Aristotelian themes, is the most extensive medieval contribution to the subject.

Ancient Greek thinkers commonly understood the soul as a cause of life. Aristotle's notion of a capacity (dunamis) of the soul was such a cause. Aristotle plays a founding role in the history of faculty psychology. The introduction raises the question of how he thinks the soul is to be defined through its capacities and sketch their role within the composition of the soul. Two standard objections to faculty psychology are mentioned, the ‘homunculus’ and the ‘virtus dormitiva’ objections, and the Introduction indicates how Aristotle would address them. The Introduction offers a rough comparison with modern faculty psychology, suggesting that both modular and holistic approaches to the explanation of life activities can be distinguished in Aristotle. Finally, the Introduction characterizes the project of this book in the context of current literature.

Chapter 1 foregrounds the following chapters by offering a comprehensive examination of the Puritan Reformed concept and morphology of conversion and its expression within Puritanism’s preparatory theology, specifically as the minister Thomas Shepard and his congregants adapted it to the New World context after the migration to the Massachusetts Bay colony. It argues that the rhetorical pattern associated with the conversion narratives collected by Shepard is a communal response to the crisis in belief caused by the migration to New England and the disappointment the saints felt when New England failed as a means to grace. Through an examination of Shepard’s sermons and the discursive nuances of the testimonies expressing his preparatory theology and its reliance on Ramist logic, faculty psychology, and the method of technologia, it sets forth the theory that the “formulaic” aspect of the narratives represents a powerfully modern expression of the provisional nature of the idea of New England, that its meaning is contextual – grounded in experience and history. Although the testimonies don’t actually contain confessions of “closing with Christ,” they perform Shepard’s ministerial imperative of converting the idea of New England back into a means to grace, an urgent necessity for establishing a covenantal community.

In the early modern period, reason was considered to be one of the higher cognitive faculties, and could be considered to function independently of the other cognitive faculties, such as the senses, the imagination, and memory. The faculty psychology of the period centrally involved ideas, rejected scholastic formalism, and was both psychologically descriptive and logically normative. The primary function of reason was to account for inference. Hume's account must be understood against this background, as he uses its vocabulary and shares many of its perspectives. He departs from the tradition in rejecting faculty psychology, at least to the extent of treating reason as an independently functioning faculty. The inferential activities of reason, both demonstrative and probable, are given a distinctively new treatment in terms of the properties of the imagination.

This chapter offers a reading of the most famous Shakespearean lines on imagination, a speech by Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, arguing that this speech presents not a unified but a pluralistic idea of what imagination is—a story; a section of the brain; a shape; a substance. To account for this variegation, the chapter summarizes the long intellectual history of imagination, emphasizing the cognitive or psychological tradition founded by Aristotle. The chapter then examines the complex and often confused early modern discourse of imagination, arguing that these confusions indicate the ways in which proto-scientific fields were destabilizing faculty psychology. To understand Theseus’ polysemic idea of imagination, and Shakespeare’s more generally, we must explore the various contexts in which imagination’s earlier philosophy was tested or recast by the early modern history of science; these contexts will be explored in subsequent chapters.

This chapter examines the post-Ptolemaic tradition of visual theory within the Late Platonist, or Neoplatonic, tradition between roughly 250 and 550. Marked by an effort to reconcile Platonic and Aristotelian thought on a variety of subjects, including perception and cognition, this tradition gave rise to a model of cognition that appealed strongly to eternal Forms, representative mental images, and intellectual illumination, which rendered those images cognitively “visible.” After looking at how this model evolved and how it affected the thought of St. Augustine, the chapter traces its influence on certain Arabic thinkers, such as al-Kindī, Ḥunayn ibn ʾIsḥāq, and al-Fārābī. Among these thinkers, Avicenna assumes pre-eminence for his faculty psychology based on the five internal senses in the brain. The chapter concludes with an examination of the ninth- and tenth-century revival of classical geometrical optics at the hands of al-Kindī, Aḥmad ibn ʿĪsā, and Qusṭā ibn Lūqā.

This chapter takes the Aristotelian tradition of faculty psychology to be the basic, fullest, and most important one in the early modern period, although it is also one that mixes with others, the medical and Neoplatonic traditions being cases in point. In Aristotle’s system, imagination is an affection, or motion-a stimulating or agitating-of the passible (sensitive) soul. Aristotle’s non-committal skepticism about the reliability of the images that imagination processes touches the foundation of his system for knowledge with doubt, a fact that the chapter connects to developments in early modern optics. Invoking the Aristotelian tradition and instances of intensely imaginative work in Shakespeare’s plays (Hamlet, Macbeth, Leontes) and Donne’s secular and religious lyrics (“The Canonization,” “A Nocturnal,” “Good Friday, 1613”; the Holy Sonnet “At the round earth’s imagined corners,” “The Dream,” and “Image of her whom I love”), it brings into sharp relief an urgent attention to the mind’s operations in their writings. The cognitive, formal, and cultural concerns of this chapter also underlie the whole volume.

Spenser and Shakespeare also diverge in portraying intellect. Alma’s stately tour strikingly contrasts Lear’s impassioned self-stripping, shedding housing, clothing, and sanity with a shivering fool and demon-haunted beggar on a stormy waste. Alma shows the hierarchic harmony of belly, heart, and brain. Lear distraughtly reacts to raw nature, wounded self-love, anguished severance of bonds. The contrary depiction of intellect is evident in temptings. Spenser’s patterned sinning recaps Eden’s triple tempting, a doctrinal trope so awkwardly used by Shakespeare in Macbeth 4.3 that the scene is often cut. Spenser’s temptings(the Sansboys, Despair, Mammon, Acrasia) learnedly allude to most epic temptings. In striking contrast is theexperientialsubjectivity and psychic complexity of Shakespeare’s temptations.Divergent use of intellect also appears in moral counsel. Spenserian heroesareeducated to achieve virtue, but in books 1-6 moral advice schematically shrinks in scope–intellective authorities in 1 and 2, equivocal passional advisors in 3 and 4, problematic sensatecounsel in 5 and 6. (Would this development reverse in books 7-12?) Shakespeare’s moral authorities show a contrary development: early farces of parents and friars (notably Polonius), counselors who grow by suffering in the tragedies, artfully effective counselors in the romances.

Edwards's lifelong obsession with the nature of true religion invariably involved what he called the “affections,” which he defined as the strong inclinations that determine nearly everything that a person feels, thinks, and does. Many scholars have wrongly assumed that for Edwards affections were the same as emotions. But he rejected the threefold distinction of mind, will, and emotions, and declared that the will and affections are not two faculties but different expressions of the inclination that already has intellectual judgment contained within it. Furthermore, he insisted that godly affections are all rooted in the basic affection of love. Edwards was ambivalent on the role of the imagination in religious experience, but was surprisingly open to biological and psychological factors in the operation of the affections.

The embodied mind and interactionism constituting cognitive architecture in the Anatomy can be disengaged from the black bile and its metaphors. By contrast with its humoral framing, and also by contrast with Cartesian traditions that influenced much modern philosophy and psychology, the Anatomy’s faculty psychology, and the classical and renaissance ideas Burton follows in describing how bodily states affect and are affected by thoughts, imaginings, and feelings, have direct parallels in today’s sciences of mind. Some aspects of this interactionism mark it off from the dualism that came to dominate modern philosophy and psychology until the recent emergence of cognitivist models of mind. The work of the neuroscientists Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux illustrates the similarities between Burton’s account and contemporary models, particularly as they stress the involvement of affective states in all cognition and the complex interactions between felt states and brain activities. If these contemporary models have currency, then Burton’s very similar system deserves our attention.

This chapter champions the erotic sonnets of the Caelica cycle, often ignored in favour of the philosophical and religious poems of the middle, and final section of the sequence; highlighting both their playful eroticism and philosophical depth. The love poetry which scrutinizes the relationship between the mistress and the lover in terms of projection and fetishization, on closer inspection turns out to share the same philosophical grounds as the poems which examine the mechanisms of spiritual slavery later in the cycle. While certain poems, such as Caelica 39, 43, and 56 explicate the link between courtly love and idolatry, this chapter argues how Greville’s poetry contributes to the debates on the status of the imagination in Renaissance poetics, faculty psychology, and religious controversy, by exploring its affective investment in the act of poetic fiction-making.

In this section, it is argued that the church proves itself to be both visible and accountable insofar as its members demonstrate the reality of their regeneration through the fruit of the Spirit in their lives. Edwards’s investigation of religious psychology in the context of revival spirituality gives priority to the long-term displays of ethical living built on a new sense of spiritual perception rather than on short-term appeals to emotion or coincidence. Affections for Edwards represent the deepest cluster of the interpenetrating parts of human identity, thereby distancing himself from the hierarchical faculty psychology of Puritan forebears that prioritized rationality or volition over emotions. The ecclesiological intent of this treatise is to provoke the church at Northampton to more devoted lives.

Although she had earlier shown interest in aspects of health reform, Ellen White became an advocate after an 1863 vision, which reflected the ideas of contemporary reformers. Until about 1870, she emphasized sexual behavior, particularly masturbation, afterward turning her attention to vegetarianism, which gained ascendency in her Adventist community in the 1890s, and other subjects. As a teenager she had rejected the notion of a separate soul and as an adult wrote of a highly relational definition of mind and body, incorporating faculty psychology and elements of phrenology. She rejected Mesmerism, Christian Science, and other spiritual/mental movements of the time. She also responded to evolutionary theory, endorsing a seven-day creation and Noah’s flood, unintentionally providing inspiration for late twentieth-century “creationism.” The chapter concludes that Ellen White was among the most influential health reformers.

The imagination is elevated to a position of centrality within Burtonian psychology, manifesting its influence on every aspect of affective life, thought, action, and bodily functioning. Because of the power of the imagination to effect changes in the person for better and for worse, practices around regulating the imagination are key. The Burtonian imagination is examined in light of our contemporary models and findings, including the so-called default attentional system, which many of the functions of the imagination described by Burton closely resemble. Anticipating the contemporary concept of simulation, the Burtonian Imagination is suited to cognitivist hypotheses and speculations. The plethora of studies, conjectures, and findings about the imagination (or simulation) today with antecedents in the Anatomy include hypotheses about the default system activity of “mind wandering,” that is anticipated by Burton as a dangerous habit inviting entrenched melancholy; they also include the science of expectation as it concerns healing (in placebo and nocebo effects, for example).