While psychology did not emerge as a separate discipline until the late 1800s, its earliest history can be traced back to the time of the early Greeks. During the 17th-century, the French philosopher Rene Descartes introduced the idea of dualism, which asserted that the mind and body were two separate entities that interact to form the human experience. Many other issues still debated by psychologists today, such as the relative contributions of nature vs. nurture, are rooted in these early philosophical traditions.
So what makes psychology different from philosophy? While early philosophers relied on methods such as observation and logic, today’s psychologists utilize scientific methodologies to study and draw conclusions about human thought and behavior. Physiology also contributed to psychology’s eventual emergence as a scientific discipline. Early physiology research on the brain and behavior had a dramatic impact on psychology, ultimately contributing to the application of scientific methodologies to the study of human thought and behavior.
German experimentalist Hermann Ebbinghaus, suggests a key idea about the history of psychology: though psychology is relatively new as a formal academic discipline, scholars have pondered the questions that psychologists ask for thousands of years. According to psychology historian Morton Hunt, an experiment performed by the King of Egypt, as far back as the seventh century B.C., can be considered the first psychology experiment (Hunt, 1993, p. 1).
The king wanted to test whether or not Egyptian was the oldest civilization on earth. His idea was that, if children were raised in isolation from infancy and were given no instruction in language of any kind, then the language they spontaneously spoke would be of the original civilization of man -- hopefully, Egyptian. The experiment, itself, was flawed, but the king deserves credit for his idea that thoughts and language come from the mind and his ambition to test such an idea.
Typically, historians point to the writings of ancient Greek philosophers, such Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, as the first significant work to be rich in psychology-related thought. They considered important questions like what is free will, how does the mind work, and what is the relationship of people to their society. For hundreds of years, philosophers continued to wrestle with these and related questions, and psychology eventually sprouted from the roots of philosophy. Psychology also derived its origins from physiology, another subject that had been studied for thousands of years. In fact, the father of psychology, William Wundt, was originally a professor of physiology
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