33 NATURAL AND SCIENTIFIC PRECONDITIONS FOR THE TRANSFORMATION OF PSYCHOLOGY IN INDEPENDENT SCIENCE

Natural science is a combination of the sciences of nature (biology, physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, etc.), which determine the comprehension of its laws through human labor and the application of objective natural laws in the interests of social evolutionary development.

The central question of the prescientific period of psychology was the question of the relationship of the soul as an independent or dependent principle from matter. Mainly, the philosophical thoughts about the soul and the world were not in the scientific sense the subject of research until the end of the XIX century.

The founder of scientific psychology was the German scientist V. Wundt (1832–1920), who opened the world's first experimental psychological laboratory in Leipzig in 1879.

Following the ideas of associativism, he considered the main task of psychology as a discipline to study such parts of consciousness as feelings, positive and negative physical disturbances for a person, as well as patterns of interconnections between these parts. Theory V. Wundt received the name "Theory of Elements of Consciousness". His study, he determined the introduction to the study of the activity of the central nervous system empirically, based on the natural method of predecessors in the study of the functioning of the psyche.

Previous historical studies in the natural sciences belonged to

The activities of M. V. Lomonosov as one of the pioneers of natural science, whose works were universally known only from the middle of the 19th century, are underway. His research in the fields of chemistry, physics, astronomy and other sciences determined the field of the formation of psychology as a science of not only humanitarian but also natural science content.

Prerequisites of scientifically reasoned psychological research were also:

1) the worldview of the Russian revolutionary democrats, which influenced the emergence of scientific approaches (I. M. Sechenov, V. Vund-ta, M. V. Bekhtereva, I. P. Pavlova), empirically studying the activity of the psyche from physiological points of view;

2) initial efforts to interpret brain function;

3) pre-scientific theoretical ideologies on the materiality of the role of interaction of chemical elements in the process of vital activity of an organism with the prevailing regulation of a rational basis;

4) Charles Darwin's work on the theory of evolution and survival of species, which was developed in the Marxist trend, supporting materialistic, metaphysical views on the relationship between natural laws and subjective forms of mental reflection.

The beginning of the emergence of the scientific direction of the study of the psyche was the materialistic world outlook on the nature and role of the brain as its main carrier of knowledge.