Psychology emerged in the nineteenth century out of a combination of earlier developments in philosophy and biology. Empiricist philosophers (Locke, Berkeley, Hume) had argued strongly that the human mind starts as a blank slate (‘tabula rasa’) on which experience of the world is alone responsible for creating our knowledge.
To realise just how radical a theory this was, consider that in the seventeenth century Galileo Galilei, at risk of death, had removed the Earth from the centre of the universe. Now these philosophers were suggesting, contrary to scripture, that we are not born with innate knowledge of God and goodness. This revolution in thinking was pretty well completed in the nineteenth century when Charles Darwin convinced us that we were one with animals. Whereas previously humans were considered to be the only creatures with a soul, and heaven was no place for animals, Darwin took heaven from both and his thinking led to ‘the brutalisation of Man’ and the ‘humanisation of animals’ (Peters 1953).
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