19 MATERIALIST PSYCHOLOGY IN FRANCE

The flowering of materialistic thought in France was prepared by the Newtonian picture of nature and Locke's picture of consciousness. Propaganda of experimental knowledge, sharp critics of dialectics and scholastics in France were J. Voltaire and E. B. Condillac.

In Treatise on Sensations (1754), E. B. Condillac defined the task of combining reflection and sensation. He proposed a scheme of the statue, which at first had nothing but pure ability to comprehend feelings. The statue of E. B. Condillac differed from the “animal machine” of R. Descartes in that its body was independent of its mental functions. The sensationalism of E. B. Condillac had a phenomenal character.

French physician J. O. Lametrie combined sensationalism with Descartes's teaching on the machine-difference behavior of living bodies. He believed that R. Descartes' differentiation of two substances appeared as a “stylistic cunning” composed for the deception of theologians. The soul is actually there, but it cannot be separated from the body. Since the body is a machine, man as a whole, with all its inner abilities, is only a feeling, thinking and seeking pleasure machine. The word "machine" was understood to be a real deterministic system.

By the middle of the XVIII century. neuromuscular physiology argued the involvement of primitive psychic phenomena in the general mechanics of the body, prepared the inclusion in this mechanics of higher forms of mental activity that emerge from simple ones. The pupil of the “Jansenist school” J. O. Lametri is made an atheist. In 1745, he published The Natural History of the Soul, in which he argued that physical identity between people and animals speaks of the unity of their mental activity. The ability of feeling was interpreted by J. O. Lametri as a function of the physical body. Matter is capable of thinking because of its organization. The idea of ​​the dependence of the psyche on the organization was accepted by all French materialists (T. Robins, D. Diderot) and came to the recognition of the eternity of impressionability.

The theory of "natural man" gave the extreme relevance of the relationship between the natural characteristics of the individual and external conditions. J.J. Rousseau believed that man is naturally kind-hearted, but he was spiritually crippled by modern culture. K. Helvetius defended the position that the intellectual and moral qualities of a person are shaped by the conditions of his life. Unlike J.Z. Rousseau, he reaffirmed the irrefutable advantage of culture and social education.

The concept of the diverse degrees of the union of the organs of the "human machine" was formed by P. Kabanis. He believed that consciousness is not a spiritual principle of substantial or exceptional character concentrated in the brain, but a function of this physical organ, which is not inferior in its level of reality and physical physiology to other functions of the body.