Human beings have probably always cultivated knowledge about their own cognitive and affective processes, knowledge that might be called, in the broadest sense of the term, “psychological.” Over the longue durée, such knowledge has been stored, accumulated, and reworked within a variety of discursive pigeonholes, among them philosophy, religion, and literature. But only with the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did Western Europeans begin to specify the foundations of their hitherto multiform knowledge of the psyche and to codify it with the special kind of rigor called science. Only later still would they attempt to create for it a new, exclusive pigeonhole bearing the name “psychology.” This chapter treats the early phase of the endeavor to bring cognitive and affective processes into scientific focus; it leaves off around 1850, before the advent of concerted efforts to create and institutionalize the unitary academic discipline of “psychology.”

The history narrated here is necessarily a heterogeneous one, a kind of patchwork. This is true not only because of the predisciplinary and hence somewhat inchoate condition of the particular bodies of knowledge that constitute its subject matter, but also because of the approach that the chapter takes to the category of science. A positivist approach would assume that the criteria of scientific knowledge are clear and universal and hence that the history of psychology can and should be narrated as a teleological progress leading from faulty, methodologically unsound propositions to verifiable scientific ones. Such a history would, in other words, possess a distinctive and forceful plot line.