rent schools of psychology developed which included analytical, behavioral, and humanistic (Schultz & Schultz, 1992, pp. 1-4).
Mechanism was the spirit of the seventeenth century. The mechanical clock was referred to as the mother of machines and it impacted scientific and philosophical thought. Rene Descartes (1596-1650) applied mechanism to the human body. His theoretical contribution was the mechanistic conception of the body, the notion of reflex action, the theory of mind-body interaction, the localization of the mind's functions in the brain, and the doctrine of innate ideas. His work inspired opposition for empiricists and associationists. The impact of scientific work is based on the roots of the mind-brain issue; it brings the latest understanding of the earliest recorded expressions of men's and women's minds and their brains (Hunt, 1993; Koch & Leary, 1992, pp. 625, 700-701; & Schultz & Schultz, pp. 23-36).
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was the first of the English empirical psychologists. He concluded that all events are matter in motion and this was applied to psychology. All mental activities were viewed as motions of atoms in the nervous system and brain that react to motions of atoms in the external world. He explained how sense impressions are transformed into higher mental processes. He was the first modern associationist, referring to a train of ideas rather than associations. Associationism includes concepts such as contiguity, similarity, contrast, vividness, frequency, and recency. These are suggested to be laws of association; they appear in discussions of classical behaviorism, and learning and memory today. Classical behaviorism emphasizes associationistic learning with a core assumption that psychology is a natural science. Others question the appropriateness of methods of natural sciences for areas of social, behavioral, or humanistic science (Hunt, 1993; & Koch & Leary, pp. 285, 125-126).
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