The single most important stimulus to my thought came by chance when I took a course from Robert Redfield entitled "Folk Society." …His approach was … - William Hardy McNeill

The practical basis of the medical profession rested on psychology. Everyone felt better when self-confident, expensive experts could be called in to handle a vital emergency. Doctors relieved others of the responsibility for deciding what to do. As such, their role was strictly comparable to that of the priesthood, whose ministrations to the soul relieved anxieties parallel to those relieved by medical ministrations to the body.

There was a Christian redaction of the historical vision of reality, associated especially with the thought of St. Augustine of Hippo.

John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct...What struck me... was the related idea that human thought is a reaction to frustrated habit— what people often do when the outcome of their action disappoints their expectation. I concluded that unthinking, habitual action is the natural and truly happy way of life; whereas thought is a symptom of dysfunction but conducive to survival all the same since, every so often, new thoughts find ways of escaping the frustration that provoked them by inventing satisfying new ways to get things done.