Each Science, A Journey
“[…] we don’t need to know where we are going
We just need to go
We don’t want to have what we don’t have
We just want to live
Without reasons, nor objectives
We are alive and that’s everything
Above all, it’s the law
Of this infinite highway”
(Infinite Highway — Land of Giants — Engenheiros do Havaí — 1987)
The evolution as a scientific fact revolutionized the science of the 19th century, established biology as a unified science, and stimulated the development of population studies that favored research in statistics, agronomy, population genetics, anthropology, sociology, and economics (Mayr, 2005). Its impact on psychology was also fundamental in the establishment of a naturalistic branch for scientific studies on human and non-human behavior. All these are facts listed in any good history book on scientific psychology. However, books do not always clearly explain the material conditions that made a scientific idea or practice possible.
Science did not evolve through the rational and uninterrupted development of ideas and theoretical systems (Bourdieu, 1997). Sciences are human practices and evolve from human experiences (Bourdieu, 1997). My goal here is singular: to argue about the role that travels and a culture of discovery had on the organization of psychological practices based on natural sciences. I have relied on some sources of historical relevance, but this is not intended to be a historiographic study, merely an essay on the importance of recognizing the diversity of life, nature, and human culture in the formation of scientists and the development of science.
With the growth of intercontinental trade between Europe, Africa, Asia, and America between the 17th and 19th centuries, there was greater interest in oceanographic, geological, geographical, linguistic, and cultural knowledge, as well as the need to produce and organize this knowledge in a specialized manner (Burke, 2012). In this context, the figure of the naturalist emerged, an intellectual dedicated to cataloging evidence and producing documents that recorded relevant information for future expeditions and to promote cultural exchanges and strategic knowledge about these new territories (Burke, 2012). Alexander Von Humboldt was one of these notable naturalists who did not restrict himself to secretarial work but also dedicated his time to constructing hypotheses about the geological dynamics of continents and the regularity and predictability of air currents across the globe (Wolf, 2015). Humboldt’s works reveal the importance of the naturalist for the scientific development observed at that time. On the one hand, by recording firsthand and with the due scientific rigor the nature around him, and on the other, by producing information that would be reviewed, stored, integrated, and reinterpreted in national libraries and archives, natural history museums, astronomical observatories, and universities in major European cities (Burke, 2012; Wolf, 2015).
Like his grandfather Erasmus before him, Charles Robert Darwin was an enthusiast of naturalistic studies and would later become the greatest name in Natural History in the mid-19th century and the founder of modern biology. This intellectual legacy began with good and vast observations of nature made possible during his voyage aboard the H.M.S. Beagle, whose mission lasted from 1831 to 1836. It was during these experiences on the Beagle that Darwin began to accept evolution as a natural process. In 1832, Darwin identified the basic process that allows living beings to transform over time: descent with modification. Over generations, offspring accumulate individual differences from their progenitors. It would take Darwin at least another eight years (until 1840) to explain how natural selection underpins this descent with modification, but evolution as a natural process was identified by Darwin during the voyages of the H.M.S. Beagle.
Evolutionism spread among the scientific community in the mid-19th century. Among enthusiasts and other skeptics, evolution came to the center stage with Darwinian evolutionists, non-Darwinian evolutionists, and catastrophists of different theoretical shades (Mayr, 2005). The impact of Darwinian theory and the imagery of the Beagle voyages would inspire subsequent generations of naturalists, including an academic who — although not known as an adventurer — had an important experience as a naturalist that would transform his worldview and, as is currently argued (Machado, 2011), his science and philosophy: William James.
James embarked as an assistant on Louis Agassiz’s Thayer Expedition to Brazil in 1865. During his journey through Brazil, he visited Rio de Janeiro, as well as Belém-PA and Manaus-AM. Unlike Agassiz’s discourse on Brazilian social degeneration, which he attributed to miscegenation, James’s impressions of Brazil, and especially of the Amazonian cities, were entirely opposite. From his knowledge of Amazonian cities and traditional peoples, James developed an enthusiasm and appreciation for cultural differences as other possibilities for civilization, morality, and reason. Without pessimism or optimism, William James recognized in the people he encountered in the Brazilian Amazon an alternative to the notion of European civility, and the impact of this on his thinking and work is yet to be fully investigated (Machado, 2011).
What is certain is that from his naturalistic work cataloging documents and specimens during the expedition to his illness with smallpox, James recognized that the profession of a naturalist was not for him and, at the same time, that evolution was a legitimate and universal natural fact (Machado, 2011). His psychological system would be based on evolutionary premises, and this would be the gateway for the incorporation of naturalistic methods for studying human and non-human behavior, for comparative and developmental studies, and for formulating neuropsychological theories on the evolution of the mind² (Kinouchi, 2006). From experimental psychology to applied psychology, from ethology to cognitive neuroscience (including behavior analysis), James’s work is seminal for scientific psychology by offering a naturalistic interpretation of the origin and evolution of the mind, not only among humans but among the diversity of living groups.
William James was one of the pioneers of psychology in the United States, he opened a psychology laboratory at Harvard University, which he co-directed with Hugo Münsterberg (who received his doctorate with Wundt in Leipzig), and participated in the training of eminent names in American psychology such as Mary Calkins, Granville Stanley Hall, James Rowland Angell, Edward Lee Thorndike, Edwin Bissel Holt, among others. Besides perhaps publishing the most important introductory text to Psychology until the mid-1950s, his Principles of Psychology (James, 1890; 1892), James was also the author of important texts for American philosophy, such as his book Pragmatism and his Essays in Radical Empiricism.
William James was a 19th-century figure, a traveler indeed, but a cisgender man, white, belonging to the economic elite of the United States immersed in racial and ethnic segregation policies. James’s life and work bear traces, ideas, and arguments that reflect this state of affairs. It is always worth remembering the perspectives we are taking. It is important to make clear that it is not suggested that the 19th century was an oasis in human history or an experience of pure rationalism. European nationalism and imperialism reached their peak in this same century, the mercantile slavery of Africans and colonialism were largely naturalized and justified by doctrines that we would today call pseudoscientific, but what today bears the prefix “pseudo” once represented paradigms with great power inside and outside science. Science is a human practice and is subject to the biases of a historical moment and a social, cultural, and geographical context.
Still, it is important to recognize that this globalization of Western science expanded the scope of theories and seems to have served as an invitation for large scientific and theoretical-philosophical projects like that of William James. Given the limitations of this text, it is only possible to imagine or speculate on how much these great ambitions helped foster the grand theoretical systems that would emerge in psychology throughout the first half of the 20th century.
On the one hand, we do not have such a historical narrative among the creators of these 20th-century systems; on the other hand, we can be sure that 20th-century psychology developed in a way that increasingly addressed diversity, in the scope of the organisms it studied, in the ethnic and racial diversity of its scientists and professionals, and in the social reach of its theoretical and technological tools. The challenge remains to expand this diversity and ensure that it comes with respect and recognition of the biases history has bequeathed to us. Who knows how much there is still to discover on the journeys we have yet to undertake?
Notes
¹ This work was presented in the form of a lecture during the Darwin Day 2019 event, promoted by the Museum of Zoology of the University of São Paulo for the promotion and scientific dissemination of evolution.
² Remembering that James primarily used the term “mind” to define the object of psychology. The terms behavior and cognition are mentioned as measures or attributes of mental properties (James, 1890; 1892).
References
Bourdieau, P. (1997). Os usos sociais da ciência. São Paulo: Editora Unesp.
Burke, P. (2012). Uma história social do conhecimento: II: da Enciclopédia à Wikipédia. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar.
Burke, P. (2016). O que é história do conhecimento? São Paulo: Unesp.
Darwin, C. R. (1876). On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 6th Edition. London: John Murray. First Published in 1859.
James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 01. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
James, W. (1892). The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 02. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Kinouchi, R. (2006). Darwinismo em James: A Função da Consciência na Evolução. Psicologia: Teoria e Pesquisa, 22(3), 355–362.
Machado, M. H. P. T. (2011). O Brasil no olhar de William James: cartas, diários e desenhos de 1865–1866. São Paulo: EdUsp.
Mayr, E. (2005). Biologia, ciência única: reflexões sobre a autonomia de uma disciplina científica. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
Wolf, A. (2015). A Invenção da natureza. São Paulo: Planeta de Livros.
