Historical Foundations of Mind, Emotion, and Will

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Human beings have long experienced remembering, feeling, wanting, choosing, and acting with intention. Genetic evidence indicates that anatomically modern humans were living hundreds of thousands of years ago. Exactly when the experiences we associate with mind, emotion, and will emerged is lost in time.

What we can know is when some of these experiences began appearing in the surviving written record.

Among the earliest available written accounts are the ancient Greek epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, traditionally attributed to Homer. In these works, psychē was associated primarily with life and with that which departs the body at death. Thinking, feeling, wanting, and deciding were not yet gathered together under a single concept corresponding to our modern idea of mind.

Roughly 300 years later, the concept of psychē had expanded considerably.

In Plato’s account of Socrates, psychē had become morally and intellectually significant. Socrates urged people to care for the condition of their psychē, placing wisdom, truth, and virtue above wealth, reputation, and even concern for the body. Seen through modern eyes, there is something remarkably familiar about Socrates’ perspective. He challenged people to examine how they were living, question what they believed, and attend to the development of their inner lives. Socrates left no writings of his own. However, in Plato’s account, Socrates appears as an ancient precursor to modern ideas about personal development, agency, and flourishing.

In Plato’s subsequent development of the concept, psychē increasingly became a thinking and reasoning inner agent distinguishable from the body—an inner domain whose condition could be examined and cultivated as an important part of living well.

Aristotle approached psychē more functionally. In De Anima (On the Soul), he examined capacities of living organisms that included perception, desire, movement, and thought.

Over the centuries that followed, these broad conceptions were repeatedly divided, reorganized, and renamed. By the time psychology emerged as a scientific discipline in the nineteenth century, thought, feeling, and volition could be treated as distinguishable aspects of mental life. What earlier thinkers had attempted to understand philosophically could increasingly be investigated through observation and experiment.

During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, psychology and neuroscience greatly expanded this investigation. Memory, attention, perception, reasoning, emotion, motivation, decision-making, and voluntary action became subjects of experimental study. Rather than revealing a single structure corresponding to the everyday concept of “mind,” this work has identified interacting processes distributed across the nervous system.

The ancient question therefore remains recognizable, but its terms have changed. What earlier thinkers described through concepts such as psychē can now be approached through the functions and interactions of mind, emotion, and will.

Within this larger history, the distinction among mind, emotion, and will has its own historical roots. Philosophers and theologians long described the soul in terms of distinguishable powers or faculties, particularly intellect and will, while also giving an important place to passions, desires, or affections. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a threefold division of mental life had become increasingly explicit: knowing, feeling, and willing.

In 1790, Immanuel Kant distinguished three fundamental aspects of mental life: cognition, the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, and desire. During the nineteenth century, a closely related division became established in psychology as cognition, feeling, and conation—the capacity for intention and purposeful action.

Modern psychology and neuroscience added new methods and terminology for investigating these functions, while thinking, feeling, and willing remain recognizable dimensions of human activity. Mind, emotion, and will provide a functional way of describing capacities historically associated with the soul.

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© 2026 Gerald Epling. All rights reserved.

References and Further Reading

Cann, Rebecca L., Mark Stoneking, and Allan C. Wilson. Mitochondrial DNA and Human Evolution. Nature 325 (1987): 31-36
A landmark mitochondrial-DNA study tracing the maternal lineages of living humans to a common maternal ancestor in Africa estimated to have lived about 200,000 years ago.
View Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution. Nature.

Homer. The Iliad and The Odyssey.
Among the earliest surviving Greek literary sources relevant to the concept of psychē. In the Homeric poems, psychē is associated particularly with life at risk and with that which departs the body at death, rather than serving as a unified concept for thinking, feeling, wanting, and deciding.
The Iliad and The Odyssey are available in English translation through the MIT Internet Classics Archive. Note, the MIT translations render the Greek word psychē in English, commonly as “soul” or “life”; the word psychē itself therefore does not appear in these English translations.
Read Homer’s Iliad at the MIT Internet Classics Archive.