by Morton Hunt
Wundt went to Leipzig in 1875, wangled the use of the room in Konvikt for storage and demonstrations, and four years later began using it as his private institute. His lectures became so popular, and his reputation and that of his laboratory drew so many acolytes to Leipzig that in 1883 the university increased his salary, granted his institute official status, and gave him additional space to turn the laboratory into a seven-room suite.10
He himself spent relatively little of his time in the laboratory and most of it in lecturing, running the institute, and writing and revising weighty books on psychological subjects and, later, on logic, ethics, and philosophy. His day was as rigidly structured as Immanuel Kant’s. He wrote during much of the morning and then had a consultation hour, visited the laboratory in the afternoon, went for a walk during which he thought over his next lecture, delivered it, and then briefly dropped in again at the laboratory. His evenings were quiet; he avoided public functions except for concerts and almost never traveled, but he and his wife often entertained his senior students, and on most Sundays they had his assistants in to dinner.
At home he was genial, if formal, but at the university dogmatic and pedantic; he acted like, and saw himself as, an eminence. At his lectures—the most popular in the university—he waited until everyone was seated and his assistants had filed in and taken front seats. Then the door swung open and in he strode, impressive in his black academic robe, looking neither to right nor left as he marched down the aisle and up the steps of the platform, where he took his time arranging his chalk and papers, and at last faced his expectant audience, leaned on the lectern, and began talking.
He spoke fluently and fervently, without looking at his notes, and although on paper he was often turgid, ponderous, and obscure, when lecturing he could be entertaining in a heavy-footed academic way, as in his lecture on the mental powers of dogs:
I spent a great deal of time trying to discover some positive indication in the actions of my own poodle of the presence or absence of general experiential concepts. I taught the dog to close an open door in the usual way by pressing with the forefeet when the command “Shut the door” was given. He learned the trick first of all on a particular door in my study. One day I wished him to repeat it on another door in the same room, but he looked at me in astonishment and did nothing. It was with considerable trouble that I persuaded him to repeat his trick under the altered circumstances. But after that he obeyed the word of command without hesitation at any other door which was like these two…[However, although] the association of particular ideas had developed into a true similarity-association, there was not the slightest indication of the presence in his mind of the principal characteristic of the formation of concepts—the consciousness that the particular object vicariously represents a whole category of objects. When I ordered him to shut a door which opened from the outside, he made just the same movement—opened the door, that is, instead of closing it, and though I impatiently repeated the command, he could not be brought to do anything else, although he was obviously very unhappy at the ill success of his efforts.11
That is as far as Wundt ever unbent; even the admiring Edward Titchener, one of Wundt’s most devoted disciples, found him usually “humorless, indefatigable, and aggressive.”12 Being possessed of encyclopedic erudition, he saw himself as the Authority. As William James caustically wrote to a friend,
Since there must be professors in the world, Wundt is the most praiseworthy and never-too-much-to-be-respected type of the species. He isn’t a genius, he’s a professor—a being whose duty is to know everything, and have his own opinion about everything, connected with his [specialty].13
With his graduate students, Wundt was helpful, concerned, kindly— and authoritarian. At the beginning of the academic year, he would order the students in his graduate research seminar to assemble at the institute; they would stand before him in a row and he would read a list of the research projects he wanted to see carried out that year, assigning the first topic to the first student in the row, the second to the second, and so on. According to Raymond Fancher,
No one dared to question these assignments, and the students went dutifully off to conduct their research—which in most cases became their doctoral theses…[Wundt] supervised the writing of the report[s] for publication. Though he occasionally permitted students to express their own views in their reports, he often exercised his blue pencil. One of his last American students reported that “Wundt exhibited the well-known German trait of guarding zealously the fundamental principles of his standpoint. About one-third of my thesis failed to support the Wundtian doctrine of assimilation, and so received elimination.”14
It is only fair to add that in his later years Wundt became relatively mellow and grandfatherly. He enjoyed playing host, in his study, to younger people after his lectures and reminiscing about his early experiences. He taught, wrote, and supervised psychological research until his retirement at eighty-five in 1917, and thereafter was busy at his writing until eight days before his death, at eighty-eight, in 1920.
The Curious Goings-on at Konvikt
If we visit Wundt’s laboratory in imagination, either in its one-room or later embodiments, and watch experiments being conducted, we will think them curiously trivial, or at least limited to what look like trivial mental phenomena; they explore none of what we usually consider the more intriguing areas of human psychology—learning, thinking, language skills, the emotions, and interpersonal relations.
We see Wundt’s students and occasionally Wundt himself spending hours listening to a metronome; they run it at speeds ranging from the very slow to the very fast, sometimes stopping it after only a few beats, sometimes letting it run for many minutes. Each time, the listeners examine their sensations closely and then report their conscious reactions. They find that some conditions are pleasant and some unpleasant, that rapid beats create a touch of excitement and slow beats a mood of relaxation, and that they experience a faint sense of tension before each click and a faint sense of relief afterward.15
This seemingly insignificant exercise is serious business; it is training in what Wundt calls introspection. He means by it something very different from the introspection practiced by philosophers from Socrates to Hume, which consisted of thinking about their thoughts and feelings. Wundtian introspection is precise, circumscribed, and controlled; it is confined to what Wundt calls the “elements” of psychic life—the immediate, simple perceptions and feelings aroused by sounds, lights, colors,and other stimuli. The experimenter provides these stimuli and observes the subject’s visible reactions, while the subject focuses his attention on the perceptions and feelings the stimuli generate in him.*
Such introspection is a crucial part of many experiments in Wundt’s laboratory, the most common being reaction-time research. Like Donders, Wundt and his students often measure the time needed to respond to different kinds of stimuli, in the effort to discern the components of psychic processes and the connections among them.
Many of the experiments we see taking place are somewhat like the very first one in that laboratory, Max Friedrich’s. Hour after hour, day after day, an observer causes the ball to drop to the platform, making a sharp noise and closing a contact that starts the chronoscope. As soon as the subject hears the noise, he presses the telegrapher’s key, stopping the chronoscope. Such experiments usually come in at least two forms. In one, the subject is told to press the key as soon as he is clearly aware of his perception of the sound; in a second form, he is told to press the key as soon as possible when the sound occurs. In the first case, the instructions focus his attention on his own perception; in the second case, on the sound itself.
The casual onlooker might see little difference between the two cases, but the researchers, after a great many trials and chronoscope readings, find that the first kind of reaction, involving awareness of one’s perception of the sound followed by a conscious voluntary response, usually takes about two tenths of a second; the seco
nd kind, involving a purely muscular or reflexive response, takes only about one tenth of a second.16
These findings seem like mere crumbs of psychology, but there are other differences, more revealing than duration, between the two forms of the experiment. The subjects, having been trained in introspection, report that when their attention is focused on their awareness of hearing the sound, they experience a clear, though fluctuating, mental image of what they expect to hear, a minor, wavering sense of strain, mild surprise when they hear the sound, and a strong motivation to press the key. In the reflexive form of the experiment, on the other hand, they experience a feeble mental image of the expected sound, a considerable sense of strain, strong surprise when the ball drops, and an impulse to press the key almost without consciously willing to. Thus the experiment measures not only the different times taken by conscious volition and reflexive volition but identifies the conscious processes that take place in the self-aware version of this simple act.17
Despite the focus on conscious mental processes, the researchers look only at the basic components of those processes. Wundt had boldly proclaimed years earlier that experiments could explore the psyche, but now he feels that they can do so only for sensations or perceptions and feelings—the elemental materials of consciousness—and the connections among them. He says that higher mental processes, including complex thoughts, are “of too variable a character to be the subjects of objective observation.”18 He argues that language, concept formation, and other high-level cognitive functions can be studied only by observation, particularly of general trends among groups of people.19
Wundt defines a scientific psychological experiment as one in which a known, controlled physiological stimulus—the “antecedent variable,” he calls it—is applied and the individual’s responses observed and measured. Helmholtz and others had already done that but confined their observations to the individual’s visible reactions; Wundt’s great contribution is the use of his kind of introspection to gain quantitative information about the subject’s conscious inner reactions, though he limits these to the simplest feeling states.
During the laboratory’s first two decades, about a hundred major experimental research studies and numerous minor ones were conducted there. Many dealt with sensation and perception, and were generally along the same lines as the work of Weber, Helmholtz, and Fechner. But the laboratory’s most original and important findings came from its studies of “mental chronometry,” the measuring of the time required by particular mental processes and the interactions among them.
Still others introduced a number of complications in order to invoke and measure a variety of mental processes. For instance, by having several possible stimuli and responses—a stimulus might come in any of four different colors, each calling for a different kind of response—the experimenter could extend the inquiry to include discrimination and choice.20
Other studies concerned the boundary between perception and apperception. In a notable one, the experimenter flashed a group of letters or words very briefly through a slit in a revolving drum; the subject “perceived” them (saw them at the periphery of awareness, without having time to recognize them) but in the next instant “apperceived” (consciously remembered and recognized) some of what he had seen. The major finding was the size of the attention span: most subjects could apperceive and name four to six letters or words after having seen them too briefly to identify them.
A smaller group of studies explored association—not the high-level kind discussed by the English associationists, but the elemental building blocks of association. In a typical study the assistant would call out single-syllable words and the subject would press a key the instant he identified each; this measured “apperception time.” Then the assistant would utter similar words and the subject would press the key as soon as each word awakened an associated idea. This took longer. Subtracting the apperception time from the total time yielded a measure of what Wundt called “association time”—how long it took the mind to locate a word associated with a heard and recognized word—which, for the average person, is about three quarters of a second.21
As the British physicist Lord Kelvin, a contemporary of Wundt’s, used to say, “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.” The data generated in Wundt’s laboratory definitely met this criterion of knowledge, at least concerning the elementary components of mental processes.
Wundtian Psychology
Wundt saw himself as much more than an experimentalist. In his books and articles he assumed the role of the systematist of psychology and architect of its master plan. But his system has proven difficult to explicate, and summaries of it differ widely as to its main features.
One reason, according to Boring, is that Wundt’s system is a classification scheme that cannot be experimentally proved or disproved.22 Rather than being the outgrowth of a testable grand theory, it is an orderly pedagogical arrangement of topics based on middle-range theories, many of which could not be explored by the methods used in the Leipzig laboratory.
An even greater obstacle to summarizing Wundt’s system is that he constantly revised it and added to it, so that it is not one thing but many. Indeed, in his time critics could hardly find fault with any part of the system before he either changed it in a new edition of one of his works or moved on to some other topic. William James, though he admired Wundt’s laboratory work, complained that his profusion of writings and viewpoints made him unassailable as a theorist:
Whilst [other psychologists] make mincemeat of some of his views by their criticisms, he is meanwhile writing another book on an entirely different subject. Cut him up like a worm, and each fragment crawls; there is no noeud vital in his mental medulla oblongata, so that you can’t kill him all at once.23
Yet if no central theme is visible in Wundt’s psychology, it is possible to name some of its recurring themes.
One is psychic parallelism. Although Wundt has often been labeled a dualist, he did not believe that anything called mind existed apart from the body. He did say that the phenomena of consciousness parallel the processes of the nervous system, but he considered the former to be based on combinations of actual neural events.24
Another theme is his view of psychology as a science. At first he proclaimed that it was, or could be, a Naturwissenschaft (natural science), but later said that it was largely a Geisteswissenschaft (science of the spirit—spirit not in the sense of incorporeal soul but of higher mental activity). He said that only the experimental study of immediate experience was a Naturwissenschaft; the rest was Geisteswissenschaft. He wrote at length about individual and social psychology and related social sciences, but descriptively and without admitting or even recognizing that rigorous experimental methods could be developed in these fields.25
The most nearly central doctrine of Wundtian psychology is that conscious mental processes are composed of basic elements—the sensations and feelings of immediate experience.26 In his early writings Wundt says that these elements automatically combine to become mental processes, somewhat as chemical elements form chemical compounds. But later he says that the chemical analogy is inaccurate and that the compounding takes place not as in chemistry but by means of attention, volition, and creativity.
Although immediate experience has its rules of causality—particular stimuli cause particular elemental experiences—mental life has its own kind of causality: The mind develops, and ideas follow each other, according to specific laws. Wundt had special names for these laws, but essentially they were his reformulations of association, judgment, creativity, and memory.27
Another major theme in his psychology, especially in his later writings, is that “volitional activities” are central to all conscious actions and mental processes; those processes are products of an apperceiving agent that actively choo
ses to think, speak, and act in certain ways. Even simple, unthinking acts are volitional, in his view, although he calls them impulsive. Acts resulting from more complex mental processes are volitional and voluntary. 28 Although this theory did not survive in psychology, it was an effort on Wundt’s part to move beyond the automatism of mechanist psychology and toward a more holistic model.
In sum, Wundt had a broader and more inclusive view of psychology than he is often given credit for. Nonetheless, on balance he was restrictive and confining, leaving out or proscribing many areas that today are commonly accepted as essential parts of the field:29
—He was unalterably opposed to practical applications of psychology; when one of his gifted students, Ernst Meumann, turned to educational psychology, Wundt looked at it as desertion to the enemy.
—He was equally opposed to the use of introspection in any way but his own. He scathingly criticized the work of certain researchers— members of the Würzburg School, of whom we will hear more in a moment—who asked their subjects about everything that had gone on in their minds during an experiment. Such procedures, Wundt said, were “mock” experiments, neither experimental nor introspective.
—He rejected out of hand the beginnings of child psychology on the grounds that the conditions of study could not be adequately controlled, so the results were not real psychology.
—He considered animal psychology a fit subject for ruminations, philosophizing, and informal experiments (such as those with his poodle) but allowed no work with animals to be performed in his laboratory because no data based on introspection could be obtained. —He dismissed contemporaneous French work in psychology that relied largely on hypnotism and suggestion. Since this research lacked exact introspection, he said it was not true psychological experimentation.