Sir John Bennett (1553-1627): and the Earliest Identified English Model of Causal Cognition

While historians of psychology have generally traced the articulation of causal models of mind to the mid-seventeenth-century mechanistic turn associated with René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes, the devotional treatise The Psalme of Mercy or, A Meditation vpon the 51. Psalme, by a true Penitent by Sir John Bennett (one of Oxford University’s ‘Three Worthies’ and a figure of notable scholarly repute), indicates that such sequential conceptions of cognition and action were already being articulated within the introspective theological literature of early-Stuart England. In this short paper, I examine Bennet’s formulation of the inward progression: “to engender and produce from imagination, to assent; from assent, to delectation; from delectation, to resolution; from resolution, to execution,”arguing that this appears to constitute the earliest currently identified English expression of a causal-psychological model linking thought to behaviour, thereby reframing the origins of modern cognitive theory in a devotional, rather than philosophical, context.