17 PSYCHOLOGY OF ABILITIES

Fragmentation of Germany in the XVIII century. interfered with the formation of capitalist relations. This determined the compromise nature of the psychological exercises that were progressive for that time and were determined on German soil. The “psychology of abilities” of scientist and encyclopedist A. Wolf (1679–1754) won the greatest fame among them.

Scholasticism and mysticism dominated the intellectual life of Germany by A. Wolff contrasted with the philosophy of common sense. He has considerable merit in the development of German psychological terminology, replacing the long-standing, Latin. The word “psychology” itself became generally known in Europe after the publication of the books of A. Wolf “Empirical Psychology” (1732) and “Rational Psychology” (1734).

The first was a description of the facts, observations of the phenomena. The expedient psychology was tasked to deductively deduce phenomena from the essence and nature of the soul.

The concept of ability was put forward as an explanatory basis. The idea of ​​spontaneous activity of the soul rallied with him. The main force was considered the ability of representation, acting in the form of knowledge and desire. A. Wolf, who considered himself a follower of the ideas of G. V. Leibniz, tried to eliminate mystical tendencies from his monadology. Having outlined various groups of mental phenomena, he classified them according to a hierarchical principle. But along with them, he eliminated metaphysics. According to A. Wolf, there is only a single monad - the soul, and the position of parallelism applies only to its relationship with a living organism. The psychophysical question was transformed by A. Wolf into a psycho-physiological one.

After some time, the Wolfian doctrine was subjected to crushing criticism by S. Herbert. The idea of ​​psychic motivation was transmitted from G. V. Leibniz through A. Wolf and S. Herbert to V. Wundt.

Another variation of the psychology of abilities offered by the Scottish school. The founder of the school, Thomas Reed (1710–1796), followed in his description of the mental activity of the “common sense” concept of the English bourgeoisie.

According to this concept, any person is born with a reserve of views and truths, allowing him to independently recognize the beautiful and the ugly, the positive and the negative. Based on the theory of the instincts of human nature, T. Reed put forward the thesis that any sensory process compels us to recognize the life of an external object. Sensation is an elementary state that lives only in the brain of the knower.

Perception, in contrast to sensation, embraces the concept of an object and the persistent natural confidence that it lives independently of us. Dugalt Stewart (1753–1828) was a follower of T. Reed, who criticized the teachings of D. Hume and D. Berkeley from the standpoint of the current “common sense”.