Wilhelm Wundt – Psychologist

(extract from “Psychology – the Science of Mental Life” by George A Miller)

This is an interesting insight into the life of an early psychologist. You don’t actually need much of this to
answer a question in the exam, but it makes fascinating reading. Be warned, though, that “History”
questions are seldom worth more than a few marks. If you can condense this in your mind to an answer for
an exam question, then go for it! Remember that an examiner will be interested in his contribution, not the
detail of his life!

Wilhelm Wundt, the son of a Lutheran pastor, was born in 1832 at Neckarau, a suburb of Mannheim, in the
German state of Baden. His childhood was solemn and studious. When he was eight years old, his schooling
became the responsibility of his father's assistant, a vicar whose room Wilhelm shared. The boy formed a deep
attachment to his mentor, who received the affection normally reserved for parents, and, when the vicar was
called to a neighbouring town, Wilhelm went with him. There is no record of any other boyhood friends, no
foolish pranks or young adventures, no boisterous laughter or silly giggles - only study, reading, work, and
more study. So far as one can tell, he was a humourless, indefatigable scholar from the day of his birth.

The Wundts were not a wealthy family, and Wilhelm had to consider how he would support himself. He
decided to become a physician. It would enable him to earn a living and to study science simultaneously. At
Heidelberg, therefore, he studied anatomy, physiology, physics, chemistry, and medicine, and slowly
discovered that the medical profession was not for him. He had instead the luckiest of gifts, a calling,
something he loved to do, and he determined to answer it by becoming an academician. The fact that his
subject was physiology was accidental, and almost incidental. His real goal was to satisfy a lifelong lust for
scholarship. He took his doctorate in medicine at Heidelberg in 1856 and was then habilitated as
Privatdozent in physiology.

In 1858 Hermann Ludwig von Helmholtz, soon to become the greatest physiologist in the world, moved to
Heidelberg. Young Wundt received an appointment as his assistant. But it was dreary work; Wundt was
responsible for drilling the sudden influx of new students in their laboratory fundamentals. After a few years
of this routine he resigned in order to resume his former position. The years spent in the same laboratory with
Helmholtz did not inspire him to novel achievements in physiology. Indeed, it was during this period that he
lost interest in pure physiology and began to question the positivistic philosophy. He was finding himself
intellectually, deciding his position, and laying out the programme of work that would occupy him for the rest
of his life. For six decades, long after he had left Heidelberg to become the famous professor at Leipzig,
Wundt followed this programme with persistence and unremitting energy.

What Wundt did was to look at the psychological problems posed by the British philosophers with the eyes of
a man trained in the traditions of German physiology. The notion that psychology could become a science of
observation and experiment had been stated clearly and explicitly by the British philosopher John Stuart Mill
in his Logic as early as 1843, but it required a person who really knew how observation and experiments are
made to bring it off. Wundt was that person.

It would be wrong, however, to think of Wundtian psychology as a simple union of empiricist British
philosophy and materialist German physiology. Wundt was not willing to reduce the mind to a physical
process in the brain, nor was he willing to abandon metaphysics as empty nonsense. Thus, even though
positivism had created an intellectual atmosphere in which it seemed reasonable to be scientific about
everything, even consciousness, the founder of this new science thought of himself as in revolt against the
positivistic spirit of his day. In this respect Wundt anticipated some aspects of the upheaval of the 1890s
when a great flood of genius - Weber, Durkheim, Sorel, Pareto, Freud, James, Dewey, Croce, Bergson -
broke free at last from the constrictions positivism had placed on social and psychological thought.
The programme to which Wundt devoted his life was first published in the introduction to his book,
Contributions to the Theory of Sensory Perception, in 1862. The body of the book - a summary of the
medical psychology of perception - is of little value a century later. But the introduction is interesting. It sets
forth three projects that the young physiologist invented: to create an experimental psychology, to create a
scientific metaphysics, and to create a social psychology. He then set to work with what may have been the
most tireless pen in the whole history of German scholarship. By 1920, some fifty thousand pages later, his
projects were complete and he could permit himself to die.

The sheer bulk of his writing made Wundt almost immune to criticism. A critic would be outwritten, evaded
by qualifications, and buried under mountains of detail. Wundt's theories were more like classification
schemes than like systems of functional relations; they tended to be loosely knit and almost impossible either
to prove or to disprove. There was no vital centre to his thought where an opponent could slay him with a
single blow. 'Cut him up like a worm,' said William James,' and each fragment crawls.' The same quality
makes it impossible to summarise his work or reduce it to a simple formula.

For Wundt, psychology involved the analysis of consciousness into elements, the determination of the manner
in which these elements are connected, and the determination of the laws of connection. This conception he
borrowed from the British empiricists. Just as chemists had analysed matter into atoms and anatomists had
analysed living systems into cells, psychologists, he decided, must analyse mind into the elementary sensations
and feelings that make it up. Wundt once summarised this thesis in a ponderous, German way:

All the contents of psychical experience are of a composite character. It follows, therefore, that psychical elements, or
the absolutely simple and irreducible components of psychical phenomena, are the products of analysis and
abstraction.... As a result of psychical analysis, we find that there are psychical elements of two kinds.... The elements of
the objective contents we call sensational elements, or simply sensations: such are a tone, or a particular sensation of
heat, cold, or light, if in each case we neglect for the moment all the connections of these sensations with others, and
also their spatial and temporal relations. The subjective elements, on the other hand, are designed as affective elements,
or simple feelings.... The actual contents of psychical experience always consist of various combinations of sensational
and affective elements, so that the specific character of a given psychical process depends for the most part, not on the
nature of its elements, so much as on the union of these elements into a composite psychical compound.'

Since the contents of psychical experience at any given instant are likely to be rather complex, the variety of
ways to analyse them into elements, to classify and relate those elements to one another provided material for
almost endless subtleties and fine distinctions - a realm in which the patient, scholarly, encyclopaedic Wundt
was grand master.

Yet his purpose was as straightforward as his arguments were complicated, His first goal was to establish
psychology as a science. By 1874, the year he moved to Leipzig as professor of philosophy, the hard-working
Wundt was well along towards his goal. That year the first edition of his Physiological Psychology was
published. In the preface he said: 'The work which I here present to the public is an attempt to mark out a
new domain of science.' This book, which he rewrote and expanded five times, was Wundt's masterpiece. It
firmly established psychology as a laboratory science with its own problems and its own experimental
methods. This scientific version became known as 'the new psychology', in order to distinguish it from 'the old
psychology' that had been produced in the philosopher's armchair.

When a living system is studied from the outside, it is physiology. According to Wundt, when we study a
living system from the inside, it is psychology. The only way we can study a living system from within is by
self-observation, or introspection. Of course, the most remarkable thing about introspection is that we can
do it at all - but Wundt could shed no more light on that accomplishment than we can today. So he accepted
it as given and went on to ask what could be learned from it.
We learn little about our minds from casual, haphazard self observation, just as we learned little about
mechanics from centuries of casual, uncontrolled observation of falling bodies. It is essential that observations
be made by trained observers under carefully specified conditions for the purpose of answering well defined
questions. To Wundt, 'scientific' meant 'experimental'; if psychology was to become a science, it would have
to use its introspective approach in an experimental situation in a laboratory where all conditions could be
precisely controlled and repeated. Only in the special environment of a laboratory could the elusive elements
of conscious experience be analysed accurately.

At Leipzig Wundt presented the odd spectacle of a professor of philosophy who gave scientific
demonstrations during his lectures. How else could an ex-physiologist make his point? These demonstrations
became such an important part of his thinking that in 1879 he started his own laboratory - the world's first
formal laboratory of psychology. And as he began to train young philosophers to use the scientific method, it
became necessary to find some place to publish their results. In 1881 he started a magazine called the
Philosophische Studlen, the first effective journal for experimental psychology. With a handbook, a
laboratory, and a scholarly journal, the new psychology was well under way. In his prime, Herr Geheimrat
Professor Doctor Wilhelm Wundt was tall, thin, slightly stooped, with a large head, a pleasant face, and a full
beard. He wore thick, dark glasses and could use only part of the vision of one eye during the last half of his
life. In spite of this handicap, he worked with unflagging zeal. He seems to have had no capacity for boredom.
In the morning he worked at home on the many books that remain his monument, read student theses, and
edited his journal. In the afternoon he took a walk, and attended examinations or visited his laboratory. On his
arrival at the laboratory, he went directly to his private room, where he held conferences. Some days he
toured the laboratory and inspected the experiments. His lectures were given at four o'clock, well after dark
during the winter months. As a professor he enjoyed a high social standing and easy financial circumstances, a
position of privilege granted all German professors before World War I. His security and his family made life
seem both cheerful and productive.

Wundt was the most popular lecturer at Leipzig; the largest lecture hall was never large enough to hold all
those who wanted to hear him. One of his most famous students, E. B. Titchener - who later disseminated
Wundtian psychology to America from his professorial chair at Cornell University - recalled vividly the great
man's classroom manner. Wundt would appear at exactly the correct minute - punctuality was essential
-dressed all in black and carrying a small sheaf of lecture notes. He clattered up the side aisle to the platform
with an awkward shuffle and a sound as if his soles were made of wood. On the platform was a long desk
where demonstrations were performed. He made a few gestures - a forefinger across his forehead, a
rearrangement of his chalk ~ then faced the audience and placed his elbows on the bookrest. His voice was
weak at first, then gained in strength and emphasis. As he talked his arms and hands moved up and down,
pointing and waving, in some mysterious way illustrative. His head and body were rigid, and only the hands
played back and forth. He seldom referred to the few jotted notes. As the clock struck the end of the hour he
stopped and, stooping a little, clattered out as he had clattered in.

The work done in his new laboratory and published in his new journal extended in several directions. Most of
it, of course, concerned sensation and perception, particularly vision and hearing; perception was the problem
considered fundamental in Wundt's empirical philosophy. In these experiments Wundt was able to exploit the
methods of measurement devised by that eccentric genius, Gustav Theodor Fechner, and he had the famous
Fechner Law to guide him. In every respect, the analysis of perceptual processes into their elements was the
simplest and most profitable line to follow in the new psychology. Next most popular were the studies of
reaction time, for these seemed to provide a way to measure the speed of thought.

Psychology cannot be constructed entirely in terms of elementary sensations and their modes and levels of
integration. The field of consciousness, said Wundt, has a small, bright area at its centre; he directed some of
his students into research on the problems of attention. Other students attempted to study association and
memory. Still others introspected on their feelings and emotions. The six rooms of his little laboratory buzzed
with the discoveries and arguments of the students as they applied analytic introspection to one problem after
another.

One series of experiments on attention used a metronome, an instrument for marking exact time in music. As
all music students know, a metronome produces clearly audible clicks at regular intervals; the rate of the
clicks can be adjusted to suit the tempo of the music. Wundt's listeners were asked to form rhythmic
groupings of the clicks and to report their conscious experiences. The introspective method used in such
experiments is simple to describe, but it requires considerable training and self-discipline to use. Stimuli - in
this case the sequence of clicks - are presented while the subject pays careful attention to all that he notices.
When stimulation ends, the subject gives a full verbal report. In an experiment on attention, the subject may
be interested in whether a particular pattern of clicks can be held in consciousness as a unitary whole.
However, exactly the same source of stimulation can be used to investigate other aspects of conscious
experience.

Consider how he worked: Wundt reported from his own introspections that at the end of a rhythmic row of
beats he had the impression of an agreeable whole. That is, some rhythmic patterns are more pleasant, more
agreeable than others. He concluded from this self-observation that part of the experience of any pattern of
beats is a subjective feeling of pleasure or displeasure, a feeling that can be located somewhere along a
continuum ranging from the agreeable to the disagreeable. While he listened to the clicks, however, he
detected another kind of feeling about them. As he expectantly awaited each successive click he felt a slight
tension; after the anticipated click occurred he felt relief. This alternation between tension and relief was
clearest when the clicks came at a slow rate. In addition to a pleasure-displeasure continuum, therefore, his
feelings seemed to have a tension-relief dimension. But that was not all. When the rate of the clicks was
increased, he said, he felt mildly excited; when the rate slowed, he had a quieting feeling. In this way, by
patiently varying the speed of the metronome and carefully noting his subjective experience -his sensations
and feelings -Wundt teased out three distinct and independent dimensions: agreeableness-disagreeableness,
strain-relaxation, excitement-calm. Every conscious feeling, he said, can be located somewhere in
three-dimensional space [Figure 1].

This was the kind of introspective evidence on which he based

FIGURE 1. Wundt's tri-dimensional theory of feeling. Every feeling is supposed to be located

somewhere in this space.

his hotly disputed tri-dimensional theory of feeling. Emotions, he argued, are complex combinations or
patterns of these elementary conscious feelings, and each elementary feeling can be completely described by
stating its position along each one of three dimensions. History has dealt harshly with his effort to reduce
emotions to conscious contents of the mind: emotions may involve feelings, people maybe able to make
judgements based on those, feelings, but it is not possible to say that emotions are nothing but feelings.
Wundt's analysis ignored the meaning of the situation in which the emotion is experienced.
Nevertheless, Wundt's introspections held a great fascination for his students. Who would have guessed that
anything as familiar as one's own mind could harbour all these shadowy and unexpected elements? Who could
guess what other pumpkins might turn into coaches when examined with the marvellous inner eye? Wundt's
talent for making the perfectly familiar seem completely novel and mysterious - by stripping off its meaning
and cutting it up in pieces - was the source of both his strength and his weakness as a psychologist.

Note how hard it is to disprove his claims. If your own introspections give you a different result, how can you
decide who is right? Perhaps you misunderstand his description of his experience; perhaps you paid attention
to the wrong things; perhaps you do not know how to introspect properly; perhaps you and Wundt are not
made the same way; and so on. His experiments, unlike experiments elsewhere in science, do not insure
agreement among all those who witness them. Introspective observation is essentially private, and
disagreements cannot be settled by repeated observations.

But scientific psychology had to start somewhere. It was not obvious in advance that a direct attack on the
mind would not be the best approach. And there was always the hope that introspective reports would
parallel the physiological indicators.

In spite of his eccentric experimentalism, however, Wundt was a professor of philosophy. With scientific
psychology flourishing, therefore, he began next to record his philosophical convictions. In 1880 he produced
a Logic, in 1886 an Ethic, and in 1889 the crown of his work, a System of Philosophy. Today these massive
monuments to Wundt's tireless scholarship hold little interest for psychologists and even less for philosophers.
But that he could argue against the prevailing positivism and in favour of a greater emphasis on metaphysical
problems in philosophy shows how far he had outgrown his student days. His conception of scientific
metaphysics was simply a contradiction in terms to any good positivist.

It was during this time - his 'philosophical decade' - that the first of a long string of students from America
began to appear in Leipzig. Upon arrival they found themselves apprenticed to the perfect model of a German
professor. At their first conference he would appear holding a list of research topics. Taking the students in
the order in which they stood -there was no question of their being seated - he assigned one topic to each. He
supervised their work on these topics most carefully; when the thesis was completed he held complete power
of acceptance or rejection. If part of the work failed to support his theories, it might be instantly deleted.
German scientific dogmatism was no myth, and it flourished undisguised in the little laboratory at Leipzig.

The last of Wundt's three lifetime projects was to create social psychology. This he did with characteristic
industry in the ten volumes of his Elements of Folk Psychology which appeared during the last twenty years
of his life. The concept of Volk which had gradually emerged during Germany's struggle for political
unification now seemed ripe for psychological exploitation. Thus he moved even further away from
positivism; in his view, the collective, social, folk mind transcended the individual minds that composed it.
The folk mind manifested itself in languages, art, myths, social customs, law, and morals - cultural works that
an individual never makes in isolation.

This opinion had an important implication, for it divided his science of psychology into two parts, the
experimental and the social. According to Wundt, the simpler mental functions sensation, perception,
memory, simple feelings - can be studied by laboratory experiments on the minds of individuals. But the
higher mental processes involved in human thinking are so strongly conditioned by linguistic habits, moral
ideas, and ideological convictions that scientific experiments are impossible. Human thinking, he said, can be
explored only by the nonexperimental methods of anthropology, sociology, and social psychology. Thinking
cannot be understood through the analysis of logic, for it is too often illogical; and it is too complicated to be
studied by simple introspection on the mental events that accompany it. Only by studying the products of
thought as these have accumulated during man's history can we hope to understand thinking.
Wundt's observation that social products, especially language, play a central role in all of the more
complicated mental processes of an educated, adult human being is both true and important. But the
conclusion he based on this observation - that complicated mental processes cannot be studied experimentally
- has not stood the test of time. Other psychologists have proved that experiments can be done on the
so-called higher mental processes. The proof is the experiments themselves. It was necessary to burst through
the rigid, introspective limits that Wundt had set for his new science, to devise new methods and invent new
theories; this was done. Almost before it was properly born, therefore, scientific psychology began to evolve
and to expand.

Wundt's genius was the kind Thomas Edison described - one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent
perspiration. One cannot help marvelling at Wundt's energy and endurance over a period of sixty years. Yet it
is his first achievement - the creation of a scientific, experimental psychology - that must command our
greatest respect. His later work is now largely forgotten. His philosophy was undistinguished, and his social
psychology came too late.

It was his experimental psychology, and his enormous scholarship, exhibited in three fat volumes, that made
Wundt's influence felt. Where Mill only talked about doing psychological experiments, Wundt did them. He
conducted them in a laboratory that he designed for the purpose, published them in his own journal, and tried
to incorporate them into a systematic theory of the human mind. And he trained his students well; they
founded more laboratories and continued to experiment. As a direct result of his labours, psychology was
provided with all the trappings of a modern science. For that service, all psychologists, even those who
bitterly opposed his theories, are permanently indebted to the indefatigable Wilhelm Wundt.

(These final two paragraphs sum up the real contribution of Wundt to Psychology! - J S)