Thus the science of man became an inseparable portion of a vaster science, which included a knowledge of terrestrial and celestial phenomena. With the macrocosm of the universe the microcosm of man had a correspondence. The study of mind, thus involving the study of earth and its constituents, must needs be extended to a research into the influences of the heavens, of the astrological influences which affect the body and the soul of man, the powers of the stars that govern our conditions, and the play of each sign of the Zodiac upon the part of our frame specially related to it, - Aries, for instance, governing the head, Leo the heart, and Pisces the feet. But as, in our own time, if we open such a volume as Professor William James’s Text Book of Psychology we shall find a considerable portion of it occupied with physiological inquiry and exposition, so in the Middle Ages it was felt that the study of the mind could not be separated from the study of the body, nor again could this be separated from a study of the four elements, out of which the whole of our globe, with all that lives and moves upon it, was formed by the Creator. His Book De Proprietatibus Rerum was translated into English by Trevisa, and in the later form, known as Batman upon Bartholomew (1582), it became a popular natural history for readers of the days of Shakespeare. The elder psychology is set forth in a summary by Bartholomew de Glanville, or, as it is safer to call him, Bartholomew Anglicus, who was living and writing, it is believed, in the century which immediately preceded that of Chaucer. A CRUDE and popular psychology of the Middle Ages, itself derived in part from elder sources, from Aristotle and Plato, from Hippocrates and Galen, descended to the time of Shakespeare and Bacon, and much that is found in the literature of the Elizabethan period becomes intelligible only through a reference to the philosophy of an earlier period much also becomes, through such a reference, illuminated with a fuller or more exact meaning.
0 kommentar(er)
