VIVES, JUAN LUIS (1492-1540), Spanish scholar, was born at Valencia on March 6, 1492. He studied at Paris from 1509 to 1512, and in 1519 was appointed professor of humanities at Louvain. At the instance of his friend Erasmus he published in 1522 an elaborate commentary on Augustine's De Civitate Dei with a dedication to Henry VIII. Soon afterwards he was in vited to England, and is said to have acted as tutor to the prin. cess Mary, for whom he wrote De ratione studii puerilis epistolae duae (1523). He resided at Corpus Christi college, Oxford, where he was made doctor of laws and lectured on philosophy. Having declared himself against the king's divorce from Catherine of Aragon, he lost the royal favour and was confined to his house for six weeks. On his release he withdrew to Bruges, where he wrote numerous works, chiefly directed against scholasticism and the preponderant authority of Aristotle. His chief work is the De Causis corruptarum artium, which has been ranked with Bacon's Organon. In 1538 Vives published the De anima et vita, one of the first modern works on psychology. Neither Descartes (1596-165o), nor Francis Bacon (1561-1626), were the first Renaissance writers to give their attention to psychological the ory, as is commonly supposed. Bacon, it is true, was the most influential advocate of the empirical scientific method of the 17th century, but Vives preceded him in emphasizing induction as a method of philosophical and psychological discovery. In his pref ace to the De anima, Vives accuses the ancients of having in volved themselves in great absurdities ; and in the first book he abjures the traditional manner of asking the metaphysical ques tion, "What is the soul?" by saying, "What the soul is, is of no concern for us to know. What its manifestations are, is of great
importance." And in his discussion of the mind he continued his point of view ; he did not refer to the essence of mind but con cerned himself with the actions of the mind. His central idea is that knowledge is of value only when it is put to use. He then discusses association of ideas, the nature of memory, a proposed law of forgetfulness, the method of recall of an idea ; he explained the principle of mnemonics, and even touched on animal psy chology. In the second book he describes in detail the functions of the simplex intelligentia (simple apprehension) ; and in the third book, he examines the emotions or passions. The De disci plinis (1531), and the Linguae latinae exercitatio (1539), are the great pedagogical works of Vives, the former probably the greatest Renaissance book on education. Juan Luis Vives died at Bruges on May 6, 154o.
A complete edition of his works was published by Gregorio Mayans y Siscar (Valencia, 1782). Adolfo Bonilla y San Martin's Luis Vives y la filosofia del renacimiento (Madrid, i9o3) is a valuable study with an exhaustive bibliography. See also G. Hoppe, Die Psychologie von Juan Luis Vives (Igoi).