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Home>Early Modernity>Introductory Overview
The early Moderns celebrated the insight that human behaviour and human thought were essentially movements, changes in the world, and as such had to be caused by precedent changes. Both action and thought were 'movements', and the question they saw fit to highlight was: What brings such movements about?
The idea of thoughts and bodily movements being 'movements' caused by other changes was not new to modernity, but focussing on it was.
Scholastic thought recognised that the changes undegone by things proceded from causes, but the intellectual energy of the influential thinkers was devoted to things other than establishing patterns of causation.
So the focus of the early modern period, even in thought about human beings, was on the origination of change.
The drive to understand the origination of change applied to the world of thought gave rise to an attempt to discover and set out the laws which were presumed to govern the behaviour of the elementary units of the mental world - 'ideas'.
| The Early Modern conception of the sources of behaviour |
| The account of human action articulated by a representative early Modern thinker, John Locke. |
The early Moderns ascribed a key role in their understanding of human behaviour to reason.
The reconciliation of the operation of reason with the determinism implied by their commitment to, and foregrounding of, the principle of causality was very much on the agenda of philosophers, but coherence aside the common ground was that reason played a role in the determination of a good deal of human behaviour, but that its operation did nothing to compromise its patterning. Behaviour was thought of as the sum of habits, whether reason was considered to be playing a part or not.
The course of thinking, and the course of bodily movements, alike in being thought to be governed by laws (on the model of Newtonian laws), were alike bound on that account to display strict patterning. The patterns they displayed might be complex, but were necessarily strict: a simple consequence of their being, or flowing from, law-governed processes.
The word reached for in referring to these patterns in human behaviour and thought was habit. Human beings were thought of as portfolios of habits
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Created 08:06:05 Prepared by VP Home Page of Web Presentation: Conceptions of the Human Being in the West
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