Watson, Sr., R.I. (1978). The great psychologists. (4th
edition). New York: J.B. Lippincott Co.
CHAPTER 12
WUNDT:
INTROSPECTION AND EXPERIMENT
Wilhelm Wundt is the first man who can be called a psychologist
without qualifying the statement by reference to another stronger
interest. In his own self-image he was a psychologist even more
than he was a philosopher. This subjective criterion of a psychologist
will be found to be supported by his life's work. To be sure,
he wrote four major books in philosophy running to perhaps twenty-one
editions, but in psychology he published six books which appeared
in about thirty-six editions.
In founding the modern science of psychology, Wilhelm Wundt was
fully aware of what he was doing. In his preface to the first
edition of his Principles o f Physiological Psychology, dated
1874, he begins with the impressive statement that the work 'was
presented in order to "mark out a new domain of science."1
He states flatly that, as a science, psychology cannot be based
upon any metaphysical assumptions whatsoever.
To Wundt, the use of the experimental method, whenever possible,
was mandatory. Moreover, he sharpened and made more exact and
exacting the age-old method of introspection. Familiarity with
how Wundt interpreted introspection and experiment will help to
clarify the events of his life and the experiments conducted in
his laboratory.
THE MEANING OF INTROSPECTION AND EXPERIMENT
Since Wundt referred explicitly to physiological psychology in
his title,his particular interpretation of its meaning needs clarification.
The alreadyavailable physiological methods were to be used for
psychological studywhenever they appeared appropriate; there was
no a priori way of determining when these should be employed.
This particular contention owesmuch to Helmholtz's view of the
nature of physiological psychology. ToWundt, however, use of physiological
methods depended upon relevanceto the problem in question.
Despite Wundt's calling the new science, physiological psychology,
heinsisted the psychic and the physiological process are separate
andparallel.2 As causality in natural science is a closed system
,3 the phenomena that are studied by natural science cannot affect
the mind or beaffected by it. Conscious phenomena, therefore,
are observable withoutreference to the body in which they occur,
and "physiological psychology"does not imply an attempt
to explain the phenomena of the psychical byexamining the physical
life.4 In short, mind-body interaction was rejected.Instead, Wundt
was a dualist of the psychophysical parallelistic varietywithout
finding it necessary to justify his position.When psychology investigated
the relation between the processes of thephysical and the mental
life, it was called psycho-physics. On this subjectWundt5 explicitly
acknowledged he followed Fechner, but denied Fech-ner's hope that
the psychophysical methods could be used for metaphysical purposes.
These implications, he admitted, may later emerge fromexperimental
research but only as an end result of research.
Although using the psychophysical methods for many problems,
Wundtdisagreed with Fechner on what was being measured.6 Wundt
held thatto put the matter correctly one must state that two sensations
are of equalintensity or one sensation is just noticeably different
from another sensation. Wundt was seeking to study, not the relation
of the body and mind, but, instead, the relation between sensation
on the one hand and theprocess of psychological judgment on the
other. This was a purely psychological interpretation with no
appeal to the relation of stimulus and sensation. To Wundt, the
results obtained from psychological study wereillustrative of
a law of psychological relativity. Sensations differ to a degree
which make possible judgments of their relative magnitude.
Wundt firmly established the method of introspection as psychology's
characteristic task. The use of introspection, in itself, was
not new as even a fragmentary review will show. Socrates had made
an appeal to introspection, and Plotinus and Augustine had sharpened
this method. Descartes and the British empiricists were agreed
on its use. Despite this agreement, a significant difference separated
them. Descartes' method of introspection has been characterized
as contemplative meditation upon problems that interested him.7
Intuitive self-evidence sought about cognition or the passions,
both highly complex states, were Descartes' favorite topics. The
English empiricists shifted introspectionistic interests from
the area of the higher mental processes to that of sensation.
The reduction by Hume of soul or mind to a bundle of sensations
and his doctrine that images are faint copies of sensations are
illustrative of this shift. Wundt continued this tendency toward
simplicity by further refining the conscious elements and by combining
the introspective process with experiment.
Wundt recognized that conscious contents are fleeting and in
continual flux;8 he therefore laid down explicit rules for proper
use of the introspective method:" (1) The observer, if at
all possible, must be in a position to determine when the process
is to be introduced. (2) He must be in a state of "strained
attention." (3) The observation must be capable of being
repeated several times. (4) The conditions of the experiment must
be such as to be capable of variation through introduction or
elimination of certain stimuli and through the variation of strength
and quality of the stimuli. The first rule is necessary so that
the observer is not caught off guard but is set for the task.
According to Wundt's arrangement for introspection, the observer
knew when to expect the introduction of the stimulus and was ready
to observe the state of consciousness. He was, therefore, capable
of isolating the mental processes of that moment. As for the second
rule, the observer must be conscious of every nuance of that which
is presented. Repetition, the third rule, allows for the uncovering
of omissions and distortions of earlier trials. The fourth rule
makes it possible to study the effect of variation, i.e., the
effect of the change resulting from addition or subtraction of
various aspects of stimulating conditions as shown in variations
of the experience. This last rule takes us to his conception of
an experiment.
Insofar as physiological psychology draws upon experiment, Wundt
held we can refer to experimental psychology.10 It is perhaps
from John Stuart Mill that he derived his conception of psychology
as a science of observation and experiment." But Mill only
talked about experiments; Wundt carried them out. Wundt12 asserted
that in psychology pure selfobservation is insufficient. It is
only when additional recourse to experiment is made that exact
quantitative results are possible. The essence of an experiment
is to vary the conditions of a stimulus situation and then observe
the changes in the experience of the observer. In advocating experimental
control of conditions of introspection, Wundt was taking a giant
step forward.
Herbart had urged using mathematics in the study of psychological
problems, although he had denied the possibility of using experiment.
Kant had not only denied the possibility of experiment in psychology,
but also held that the use of mathematics itself was impossible.
He had held that the only dimension of consciousness was time
and that with one dimension one could not carry out experiments,
and, consequently, psychical processes are indeterminate .13 Since
practically all German philosophers of his time were either Kantians
or Herbartians, it is to Wundt's credit that he overcame this
formidable intellectual block and saw that both mathematics and
experiment could be applied in psychology.
Wundt agreed that Kant was correct concerning the uni-dimensional
nature of consciousness when we confine ourselves to internal
experience. But when we turn to external stimuli, not only are
units of measurement supplied, but also one more dimension that
Kant had omitted is added, namely, intensity. 14 With the dimensions
of quality and intensity, experiment became possible. Every simple
sensation has a qualitative determinant, such as blue, warm, or
sweet.15 Qualities are not divisible into simpler units. As for
Herbart, as we have seen, he recognized that these classes of
variables were present, but had not appreciated how they could
be turned to experimental use.
Armed with intensity and quality as the two classes of variables,
Wundt was prepared for the experimental study of psychological
phenomena. In sound, for example, intensity, it is true, is never
separable from some quality of pitch, but it is possible to change
either the intensity alone (loud-soft), or the pitch alone (high-low),
while maintaining the other unchanged. Moreover, we may use two
notes and consequently change the quality of the sound so that
it is different from that of either note alone. Intensity and
quality became subjects for scientific study. On these premises
Wundt was able to launch the experimental study of psychology.
LIFE AND RESEARCH OF WUNDT
Wilhelm was born at the village of Neckarau near Heidelberg in
Baden on August 16, 1832, the son of a Lutheran pastor.".
17, is He was a solitary child, never close to his parents, played
little, and absorbed himself in study. Even as a young child he
stayed in the home of a Lutheran vicar who was his tutor. He had
formed so strong an attachment to this tutor, presumably at first
his father's assistant, that when the vicar was transferred, he
was unconsolable until allowed to board with him and to continue
under his tutelage. At thirteen he entered the gymnasium, where
he also boarded and was ready for the university at nineteen.
His medical studies took him to Tubingen, Heidelberg, and Berlin.
It has been hazarded that Wundt went into medicine without any
special call, but in part it was because he wanted to continue
away from home! There is some doubt whether he ever intended to
practice medicine. As with many others before and after him, the
study of medicine was the means of entering into a scientific
career which even at this age he seems to have had in mind. He
did some work at the Institute of Johannes Muller in physiology,
and a year or two later he shifted to physiology as an academic
field.
In 1857 he was appointed Dozent at Heidelberg and began to lecture
in physiology. His first announced course in physiology attracted
four students Between 1858 and 1864 he served as assistant to
Helmholtz, who had just arrived from Bonn. Relations with the
taciturn Helmholtz were non-existent, according to Titchener.
In 1864 Wundt was appointed assistant professor. Somewhat surprisingly,
in 1866 he was chosen to represent Heidelberg in the Baden Chamber,
but he soon resigned. There was a delay of academic advance until
1874 when he was called to Zurich to the chair of Inductive Philosophy.
This, it should be noted, is only an apparent shift in field.
In academic circles he had come to be viewed as a promising man
for appointment to a post in philosophy. After all, psychology
was formally still a branch of philosophy.
During these years, Wundt was very active in physiology. In 1858
he published a study of muscular movement and elasticity during
action" in which he reported investigating the effect of
constant galvanic current and mechanical thermal and chemical
stimuli upon muscles. Not only was he working in this field, but
a conception of psychology as a distinct science was beginning
to emerge. Between 1858 and 1862 various sections of his Beitrage
zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung20 appeared. This volume so much
anticipated later developments in his thinking that Titchener,
one of his greatest students, has argued that it outlined the
program of his entire life.
In the introduction of this work Wundt stressed the primacy of
method as a means of scientific advance. He also cited apparatus
advances, such as the laryngoscope and the ophthalmoscope, as
a means of ushering in whole series of discoveries. Psychology,
he goes on, has not yet felt the impulse of the new empirical
method being used all around it. It has asked metaphysical questions
first, such as the essence of the soul, its origin, and its destination.
These are questions appropriate to where psychology may end, but
not to where it should start. It must take experiences, and the
simplest of these experiences at that, for its point of departure.
He seems to be saying, psychology should first crawl before it
can walk. In that which follows, he marshals evidence primarily
from vision and secondarily from touch. One may recognize in this
work his struggle to utilize physiological methodology in dealing
with psychological problems.
From 1867 onward, he gave a course at Heidelberg entitled, "physiological
psychology." This date establishes the formal offering of
an academic course of this nature. As he "worked up"
his lecture notes over the next few years, a new book, by general
agreement his most important book, began to take form. This was
his Grundzuge der physiologischen Psychologie.21 The first half
was published in 1873 and the second in 1874. It was destined
to go through six editions, the last in 1911, and swell in size
to three large volumes. (It was characteristic of most of his
books that new, amplified, and revised editions would appear from
time to time.) The Grundziige changed in detail, sometimes very
important detail, but it is remarkable how the expansion and change
did not require major shifts in his systematic views. It is the
one indispensible source for an account of his system of psychology.
Wundt entered on the last, longest, and most important phase of
his career in 1875. In that year he became Professor of Philosophy
at Leipzig. Here he lived and worked for forty-five years.
At the University of Leipzig in 1875, Wundt established one of
the first two experimental laboratories of psychology in the world?2
For many years it has been customary to consider 1879 as the founding
year for the first experimental laboratory in the world on the
mistaken belief that it was in this year that Wundt's Leipzig
Laboratory was given formal recognition by university authorities.
Formal recognition to a course in "experimental psychology"
did not come from the university until the winter of 1883, as
did an appropriation for the laboratory, while an "Institute
for Experimental Psychology" as such, was not listed by university
authorities until 1894. In this connection 1879 is notable only
for appearance of the first student to do publishable psychological
research with Wundt, which may be the reason for saying that it
was "founded" in that year. Actually, before Wundt's
arrival in October, 1875, the Royal Ministry had set aside a room
to be used by Wundt for his own experimental work and for demonstrations
connected with his Psychologische Ubungen or "Psychological
Practicum." A good case can be made for the establishment
of the first laboratory in psychology in this year of 1875-or
rather of the two first laboratories. William James also equipped
a small laboratory in the same year. Probably this year is the
single most important one in the history of psychology.
In 1881 Wundt began to publish a journal, Philosophische Studien,
containing reports of experimental studies beginning to flow from
his laboratory. This was the first journal devoted as much to
psychology as to philosophy. Lest the title be puzzling, it should
be indicated that Wundt thought philosophy should be psychological
.23 He did not support attempts to have psychology a separate
department from that of philosophy. Moreover, between 1880 and
1901 he published four books in philosophy -a logic, an ethics,
a systematic philosophy, and an introduction to the field.
One of the results of the founding of the laboratory and the
spreading fame of Wundt was the migration of students to Leipzig
to study with him and to work in the laboratory. There gathered
around him would-be psychologists using introspection and experiment
to derive the laws of the human mind. In this way Wundt became
the leader of a "school" of psychology. These students
were united in their systematic views as well as sharing a common
purpose. Instead of each of them working alone, with their labors
eventuating in books, the laboratory atmosphere resulted in specific
research studies appearing as articles in journals .24 Wundt would
then synthesize the results of the various studies in the successive
editions of the Grundziige.
The sheer availability of co-workers was important .25 Since
the "experimenter" could hardly be the "observer"
at one and the same time, the experimenter of one study was available
as a subject for another. Lest this point be dismissed as trivial,
it is pertinent to indicate that "introspection" as
practiced in Wundt's laboratory was not a skill acquired without
a period of rigorous apprenticeship. To get at the elements of
experience required arduous training. Moreover, even if a corps
of assistants could be trained as subjects, the nature of the
tasks to which they were put to be illustrated in a moment-would
have demanded payment. One does not embark upon introspection
as a lark! In later days when simple report, not introspection,
was all that was needed, the problem was solved by American ingenuity
through the use of a captive population of college students.
The work of the Leipzig Laboratory may illustrate what a major
segment of experimental psychology was like before and at the
turn of the century. About one hundred experimental studies appeared
in the Philosophische Studien during its twenty-odd years, almost
all of them carried to other subjects who attend to the response,
in favor of the greater speed of the latter. This did much to
solve the problem of the personal equation. Those who attend to
the response react more quickly than those who must shift attention
from stimulus to the reaction to be made.
As interest in the reaction experiment waned, studies first of
attention and then of feeling came to take its place, each including
about one-tenth of the laboratory's studies. Lange's study, just
mentioned, helped to create the interest in attention. To Wundt,
attention was that clear perception of a narrow region of the
content of consciousness. An example of this is the word or words
we are reading on this page relative to the rest of the page,
as well as the adjoining page and much of the surrounding environment
of the room. Whatever is in the focus of attention becomes distinct
and is separated from the rest of the field. Research in the area
of attention was performed by means of the complication experiment,
i.e., the range of attention and fluctuation of attention were
studied. Following the lead of Jacobs, Cattell was responsible
for carrying out the classic study of attention span ( meaning
that which can be taken in at a glance) finding that four, five
or six units ( lines, letters or words) could be apprehended in
an exposure which was of too short duration to allow a "movement"
of attention.
Studies of feeling, the work of the laboratory in the 1890's,
involved the use of the method of expression through which feelings
and correlated changes of pulse, breathing, muscular strength,
and the like were studied. The method of paired comparisons was
also developed. This method requires the subject to compare each
particular stimulus with every other stimulus being used in terms
of the subjective feeling aroused. Suppose the task was to judge
the pleasingness of a variety of colored paper patches: patch
A is compared to B, C, D, E, F, then patch B is compared to A,
C, D, E, F, and so on. On each trial the observer was to say which
was most pleasing of each pair A or B, A or C, and so on.
Studies of association make up another one-tenth of the total
output of the laboratory during these years. Under Wundt's direction
much was done to refine the method.30 Galton, it will be found
in a subsequent chapter, although using single words as stimuli
had often allowed his responses to take the form of a connected
narrative description of the images. Wundt required each response
to be a single word which not only made classification of responses
easier to handle, but also the time relations involved to be more
susceptible to precise measurement. More exact instruments of
measurement such as the lip key and the chronoscope, which measures
time in thousandths of seconds, were used. The major categories
of association derived by Wundt's students were two in number,
"inner" and "outer." Inner associations are
those showing intrinsic connections between the words, as in lion-animal,
spear-shield, cow-milk, and white-black. Outer associations are
those in which there are other purely extrinsic or "accidental"
associations, as in curve-accident, or bookconcept, or in speech-habit
associations, such as fur-fly, or crash-helmet. Cattell was chiefly
responsible for discovering the importance of control in association.
Instruction to give reactions which bore a definite relation to
the stimulus word-an opposite, or a subordinate, or the like-made
for quicker reactions than did free association in which there
was freedom to choose any word that one wished. Thus giving the
response "dark" to the stimulus word "light"
when one had been told in advance to give the opposite of the
stimulus word resulted in a more rapid reaction than when no control
on the associations to be given was exercised. It would appear
that when there are many possible responses more or less equally
associated with the stimulus word, then there is a process of
interference which delays the reaction. An everyday example is
the interference met by one who speaks more than one foreign language
in arriving at the correct word, especially if the languages themselves
are similar, as in Spanish and French.31 Emil Kraepelin, the great
psychiatrist who had studied under Wundt, extended the experimental
use of association to problems in psychopathology. He found that
under experimentally induced fatigue, alcoholic intoxication,
and similar states there is an increase in superficial, extrinsic,
or "outer" associations dependent upon habit, an increase
at the expense of "inner" associations which depend
upon meaning. The former resemble the associations of some psychotic
patients, particularly the manics.
It becomes apparent from the survey of the research from his
laboratory that Wundt did not occupy himself with developing new
kinds of experiments;32 the methods he used are already generally
familiar to the reader from the account of psychology before Wundt.
Studies of the psychology and physiology of the senses owe much
to the work which went before, particularly to Helmholtz, Reaction
time studies again owe something, not only to Helmholtz, but also
to Donders, while the association study can be attributed to Galton.
Even the study of feeling, where Wundt was at his most original
in a theoretical fashion, was dependent upon extension of Fechner
s method of impression to that of paired comparisons and in studies
of expression to the utilization of already existing methods of
study of pulse, breathing, and the like. Even for attention there
had been antecedent studies, although no occasion to discuss them
had arisen Wundt wished further to reduce to quantitative terms
the research areas already extant. His view of the scope of experimental
psychology consequently was a narrow one, practically confined
to the five topics into which the research from his laboratory
was classified.
Wundt began sponsoring doctoral dissertations as early as 1875.33
By 1919 the total had reached an impressive 186 of which 70 were
on philosophical topics and 116 on psychological problems. Not
all of the men whom he sponsored were destined to become leading
psychologists. Struck by the number of unfamiliar names, one psychologist34
tried to trace them down and the astonishing number of 86 could
not be found. A not inconsiderable number of the students were
apparently content, after receiving the precious title of "Herr
Doktor," to sink back into the oblivion of the gymnasium.
His students came to him from all over Europe and from the United
States. Many were American. The first of these was G. Stanley
Hall, fresh from his degree at Harvard. This roving ambassador
of American psychology-to-be "dropped in" for a time
in the first year of the existence of the new laboratory and studied
with Wundt. Although ambivalent as he was toward Wundt, he is
careful to state that most of his time was spent with Ludwig,
the physiologist.36 But his story is best told in a later chapter.
James McKeen Cattell, Wundt's first bona fide American student,
studied at Leipzig on two occasions. It was on his second sojourn
in 1885 that Cattell made his pronouncement to Herr Professor
that he needed an assistant and that he, Cattell, was that assistant.
He, too, will be considered later. Among other American students
of Wundt's were Edward
W. Scripture, later director of the Yale Psychological Laboratory
and a student of hearing; Edward A. Pace for many years head of
the Department of Psychology at Catholic University and the leading
voice in interpreting the "new psychology" to Catholics;
Lightner Witmer, the founder of the first psychological clinic
at the University of Pennsylvania, and Charles H. Judd, the pioneer
educational psychologist at the University of Chicago. Even this
short list shows something of the breadth of activity that these
Americans managed to show on their return to the United States
after the severely rigorous "pure" training they received.
Born in England where there was no suitable post for an experimental
psychologist such as he, Edward Bradford Titchener, another of
Wundt's students, came to America to direct the psychological
work at Cornell University. Among this group he was the most unswervingly
faithful to the program of his teacher. The best known continental
psychologists who worked in the Leipzig Laboratory, besides Kulpe
and Kraepelin already mentioned, were Hugo Munsterberg Alfred
Lehmann, Ernst Meumann, Theodore Lipps, and Felix Krueger.
According to Titchener,36 Wundt was a quiet, unassuming, pleasant
person whose life followed a totally regulated pattern. He worked
on his current book or article in the morning, then had a consultation
hour. In the afternoon he paid a formal visit to the laboratory,
following this with a walk during which he cast his lecture into
rough farm, then the delivery of the lecture without notes, and
a second informal return to the laboratory. He was a very popular
lecturer, apparently simplifying his material somewhat to suit
his audience. As Hall37 puts it, Wundt's style of writing is as
lusterless as lead-but as solid. To perhaps a surprising extent,
concerts and interests in current affairs occupied many of his
evenings. He was a man of simple tastes, who avoided public functions
and virtually never travelled.
It is not surprising that from this background would emerge the
serious hard-working, hard-driving writer of so many books in
so many editions that no single person would be so humorless as
to read every work in every edition. If he did try to do so, what
would he face? Assuming the figures which had been calculated
by Boring38 with tongue in cheek as to his productivity of 53,735
pages ( averaging out to 2.2 pages per day for every day from
1853 to 1920 ) as a base, the consumer-reader, reading at the
rate of sixty pages per day, would need nearly two-and-a-half
years to go through the entire output.
In 1902, only twenty-eight years after the preface to the first
edition of the Principles in which he had expressed his intent
of presenting a new science, he could say in the fifth edition
that the material now is pouring in from all sides.39 No longer
was there any doubt as to the legitimacy of his endeavors. Instead,
divergent trends within the field itself were becoming a cause
of concern to him. European psychology was beginning to have centers
of influence other than Wundt and Leipzig. The climate of the
times was producing other psychologists independent of Wundt who
had drawn on their common cultural heritage and arrived at an
experimental psychology by the end of the century. Some of them
will be considered in the next chapter. At the moment concern
is with Wundt's reaction to work which deviated from his own.
He was unalterably opposed to the application of psychology.40
When Meumann, a gifted pupil, turned to educational psychology,
Wundt treated it as if this were desertion in the face of the
enemy. Kraepelin, another student who applied psychology to psychiatry
and was advised by Wundt to leave psychology for psychiatry,41
came off somewhat better. Work outside of that of his own students
came in for even more severe criticism. He was especially critical
of the work of the so-called Wurzburg School. After securing the
immediate response to stimulation, the workers at Wurzburg went
on to question their subjects about all that went on in their
minds. Wundt considered this nothing more than a blatant violation
of the rules of introspection.
Despite the admission that child ( and animal) psychology were
supplementary branches42 of the field, he rejected categorically
the beginning of child psychology in the work of Preyer and Baldwin.
Their work was not psychology since the conditions of study could
not be controlled adequately 43 In his own laboratory, Wundt neither
sponsored nor worked with animals.
He was also very critical of French psychology, claiming that
the work done in that country was reduced to studies of suggestion
and hypnotism.44 Somewhat petulantly he argued that one cannot
give the name, "experimental psychology" to each and
every operation that brings about a change in consciousness. Those
studies lack exact introspection, so they are not true psychological
experiments.
The idea of a social psychology was part of the Zeitgeist 45
Steinthal and Lazarus had published the first issue of their journal
devoted to the topic in 1859-1860. At first social psychology
was seen by Wundt as only an auxiliary science. It was not until
1893 that he was convinced that social psychology deserved to
be considered a coordinate branch along with experimental psychology.
Experiment is not feasible when more complex problems than those
of perception and memory are considered. Beyond this point, experiment
fails us and we must have recourse to folk psychology. In making
this division of labor, Wundt was also saying that the higher
mental processes, incapable of direct experimental attack, should,
perforce, be studied through the chief products of common mental
life, that is to say, studied through language, myth, and custom
46 Language, for example, he held to be the major key to understanding
thought. In order to consider the problems of the higher mental
processes, he began writing the Volkerpsychologie or Folk Psychology,47
the first volume appearing in 1900 with nine more volumes between
then and 1920.
Folk psychology was conceived to be the investigation of the
various, still existing stages of mental development in mankind.48
In this sense it can and has been called "genetic" psychology.
To Wundt, mankind shows development through a series of successive
levels with primitive man as the lowest grade of culture, moving
on to the totemic age, thence to the age of heroes and gods, and,
finally, the age in which we are now living, that of the advance
toward humanity. Folk psychology is differentiated from ethnology
by Wundt because the latter is concerned primarily with the external
cultures and only in a very incidental fashion with the psychological
characteristics that are at the core of folk psychology.
As if according to plan, Wundt wrote his psychological reminiscences,
Erlebtes and Erkanntes49 in 1920. Shortly afterward, he died near
Leipzig on August 31, two weeks after his eighty-eighth birthday.
SOME SYSTEMATIC VIEWS
Wundt's claim to greatness rests much more upon what has been
said of him earlier than it does upon his systematic views of
psychology. His system amounted primarily to a classificatory
scheme, and, as Boring50 observes, this itself was not capable
of direct or indirect experimental proof or disproof. Wundt was
constantly revising his position on various issues from one edition
of his books to the next as new evidence appeared. It would be
impossible to do justice to these changes in a short space, so
only his mature theoretical guide lines, as established in the
fifth edition of Grundzuge published in 190251 and in the second
edition of his Introduction -12 published in German in 1911 and
in English in 1912, will be examined. The effort to offer a rather
tightly compressed account of his schema for psychology is rendered
easier by his dependence upon already familiar formulations.
To Wundt, psychology is the science that investigates the facts
of consciousness. Mind is a process, and yet it has elements,
a somewhat confusing ambiguous view of the matter. Consciousness
supplies us the total of its immediate experience. The more specific
immediate experiences involved, to name only the most important,
are sensations, feelings, ideas, volitions and, apperceptions.
None of these is given in an uncompounded state; they must be
abstracted from the compound by introspective analysis. In fact,
all of our experiences are complex and must be analysed introspectively.
The elements of the mind, or the basic states of consciousness,
are sensations and feelings.53 When abstracted by introspection,
pure sensations are found to possess only intensity and quality
and are with" t spatial or temporal aspects. Sensation;
u are objective in the sense that they have reference to "external"
things. Experiences directly aroused by external stimuli often
were referred to by earlier systematists as sensations while those
dependent upon internal conditions were called ideas. Wundt held
this to be an error. The sources for touch and organic sensations
of our body are just as much part of our outer world as are stimulation
from external objects.54 Hence, the sensations, too; were "external."
Feelings that accompany sensations are the subjective complements
referring to states of consciousness itself. Sensations and feelings
are simultaneous aspects of immediate experience. Sometimes the
aspect of feeling is apparently negligible, but it is always present.
If intensity be increased, it becomes apparent in, say, a light
increased in intensity to the point it becomes dazzling. Wundt,
nevertheless, considered feeling an experience that was distinct
from that other conscious element, sensation.
Feelings cannot be described in terms of pleasantness-unpleasantness
alone, as Wundt had held earlier. Two additional dimensions-tensionrelaxation
and excitement-depression-must also be used to account for the
range of the experiences of feeling. Wundt had found that a given
feeling experience shows three dimensions but in different combinations,
say pleasant, tense, and excited in one case or unpleasant, relaxed,
and depressed in another. Feeling experience is not a matter of
simultaneity alone. The dimensions in the experience change through
time: tickling at first might move along the dimension of pleasantness;
but then tension and excitement would become apparent, and unpleasantness
would come to predominate over pleasantness.
This tridimensional theory of feeling, as it was called, stimulated
a tremendous amount of research both in his own and rival laboratories,
but the theory was not borne out by post-Wundtian research. However,
the results of these studies were found to be applicable in other
situations. It is in this way that psychology, having become an
experimental science, advances. A theory may stand or fall; the
experiments persist, either interpreted as isolated facts or worked
into a modified or different system when they are congruent with
it.
When sensation and feeling are compounded, they form ideas. To
Wundt, the term, "idea," included within its scope such
"complexes" as both "memory images" and "perceptions."55
Ideas, including both sensations and feelings in composite, are
representative of objects either in perception or in memory.
Association is not enough to account for compounding. Consciousness
shows various degrees of apperception, of contexts, and of connections
-the unification of the conscious contents. Children may run together
words in something they recite without understanding what it is
they are saying. Adults may parrot a difficult concept but not
understand what is meant by what they are saying. To bring about
unification requires apperception, a combination of a complex
into a unity. This doctrine of apperception is already familiar,
but Wundt stressed its cognitive aspects more than did his predecessors.
To define it more fully, clearness of comprehension of conscious
content, occurring by combining of sensory experiences with pre-existing
ideas and accompanied by feelings, gives apperception. Feeling
enters into the process and the particular quality of the experience
of the feeling of a compound is dependent upon apperception. Easy,
smooth flowing reactions give rise to pleasure, conflictual ones
to pain.
Wundt made a distinction between the whole range of consciousness
and the so-called fixation point of apperception. Only processes
in the fixation point of apperception are apperceived. This does
not mean that apperception cannot range over the complex of ideas,
referred to as the apperceptive mass, but at a given moment the
matter in the fixation of apperception is a selection from this
mass. When apperceptions refer to any given content, Wundt says
they are customarily called "states of attention."56
Wundt preferred to discuss the phenomena in terms of apperception,
possibly to bring out its active character in contradistinction
to states of attention as a more passive process, but knew, of
course, that others could and did discuss this problem in terms
of attention, a rather more familiar way of handling the issue.
Combinations of feelings along with ideational processes give
the emotions. In some emotions, such as joy and delight, pleasure
predominates; in others, such as anger and fear, displeasure is
the stronger.
Closely related to the emotions are the volitional processes.57
To Wundt, volitions, instead of being ideational, are primarily
affective. The feelings were the "determining factors"
of volition. Sometimes feelings are not so strong as to produce
volition, but volition is not operative unless they are present.
Volition culminates in an action as when the angry person strikes
the object of his anger. Without the striking it would have been
an emotion alone.
In dealing with volition Wundt was considering action as differentiated
from reception. The distinction between sensory and motor nerves
arising from the work of the physiologists carried over into Wundt's
psychology at this point. Sensations are the psychological phenomena
associated with the former, movements, called reflexes, are the
psychological phenomena associated with the latter.58 There was
a natural coherence between a sensation and a movement which was
modified through experience.
That the mind was reducible to elements and the fashion in which
its elements cohere is obviously a heritage from the empiricist-associationist
tradition. But Wundt went beyond this level; the experiences we
have are more than the sum of their parts-there is a creative
synthesis of immediate experience (the principle of mental chemistry
in Thomas Brown). Once the systematic analysis into elements had
been accomplished, their manner of synthesis could be carried-out.
It was as if the elements once accounted for went a long way toward
explaining the total reality. There was still something left over,
a fact which Wundt recognized but did not work out fully. Seeing
a landscape did not add up to thirteen specified visual sensations
of variant hues and the accompanying feelings of mild excitement,
high pleasure, and low tension, meaningfully perceived. That which
remained, however, did not interest him very much. Although synthesis,
as differentiated from analysis, was relatively neglected by Wundt,
that he did make it part of his formal system and thereby called
attention to it, was to have later important repercussions.
OVERVIEW
Wundt was the first modern psychologist-he conceived of experimental
psychology as a science. He founded the first laboratory, and
he edited the first journal. In addition to these pioneering efforts,
Wundt was the great synthesizer of research findings, both of
the work that preceded him and of that carried on by his students.
Wundt's forte was not luminous ideas lighting upon the dark corners
or giving us a new dazzling perspective on the old picture. Rather,
he worked over a thousand details, cleaning here, repairing there;
filling a crack here, so that psychology leaving his hands was
an improved, more coherent picture, but still a familiar one.
The areas of investigation worked out by Wundt-sensation and perception,
reaction, attention, feeling, association-were such as to become
firmly fixed as the very chapters in the textbooks that were to
come, making this work a not inconsiderable portion of psychology.
And yet there were other areas of psychology where his treatment
was either nonexistent or, at best, woefully inadequate. The problem
areas of learning ( as differentiated from association), motivation,
emotion, intelligence, thought, and personality were to be systematically
brought within psychology by men who had other points of view.
Whatever one may think of the narrowness of Wundt's conception
of psychology, it must be admitted that the course he chose to
follow had the effect of solidifying an independent field of psychology.
If he had struck out on uncharted paths it is quite conceivable
that psychology as a separate discipline would not have been forthcoming
until later. It does not detract from his achievement to add that
much of the history of psychology following Wundt consisted of
rebelling against the limitations he had placed upon the field.
In fact, forward movement is most sure when it has something to
push against.
