Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [79]
It would be terrible if even such a dear old man as this could saddle our science forever with his patient whimsies, and, in a world so full of more nutritious objects of attention, compel all future students to plough through the difficulties, not only of his own works, but of the still drier ones written in his refutation.41
But many others did not share this view. Even though debate raged over the validity of Fechner’s assumption that all j.n.d.’s are equal, his methods were generally considered a genuine breakthrough. The time was ripe for quantitative research on the relation between stimulus and response; almost at once many psychologists began using Fechner’s three methods, which firmly linked the body’s physical mechanisms to the subjective experiences they aroused.42 (Fechner himself, though he continued to write in defense of psychophysics, devoted most of the rest of his long life to aesthetics, paranormal phenomena, statistics, and panpsychic philosophy.)
Later psychologists have found fault with or even disproven every one of his findings, yet his methods are not only still useful but fundamental to sensory measurement. Boring sums up Fechner’s paradoxical achievement:
Without Fechner… there might still have been an experimental psychology… There would, however, have been little of the breath of science in the experimental body, for we hardly recognize a subject as scientific if measurement is not one of its tools. Fechner, because of what he did and the time at which he did it, set experimental quantitative psychology off upon the course which it has followed. One may call him the “founder” of experimental psychology, or one may assign that title to Wundt. It does not matter. Fechner had a fertile idea which grew and brought forth fruit abundantly.43
* That is, just above and forward of the ears.
* The term Professor Extraordinarius referred to an unsalaried or low-salaried appointment, valued largely for its prestige. Sometimes, students attending lectures by a Professor Extraordinarius would pay him fees.
* The so-called primary colors of pigments are red, blue, and yellow (or, more precisely, magenta, cyan, and yellow). Pigments absorb as well as reflect light, and the results of mixing them are therefore different from those of mixing lights.
FIVE
First Among Equals:
Wundt
As Good a Birth Date as Any
According to most authorities, psychology was born on a December day in 1879. All that had gone before, from Thales to Fechner, had been the evolution of its ancestors.
The birth, a quiet affair, went unheralded. At the University of Leipzig that day, in a small room on the third floor of a shabby building called Konvikt (“hostel” or “retreat”), a middle-aged professor and two younger men were setting up apparatus for an experiment. On a table they positioned a chronoscope (a brass clocklike mechanism with a hanging weight and two dials), a “sounder” (a metal stand with an elevated arm from which a ball would fall onto a platform), and a telegrapher’s key, battery, and rheostat. They then wired together the five pieces of apparatus, the circuitry being no more complicated than that of a present-day beginning electric train set.1
The three were Professor Wilhelm Wundt, a long-faced, austere, densely bearded man of forty-seven, and two young students of his, Max Friedrich, a German, and G. Stanley Hall, an American. The set-up was for Friedrich’s benefit; with it he was going to collect data for a Ph.D. dissertation on “the duration of apperception”—the time lag between the subject’s recognition that he has heard the ball hit the platform and his pressing of the telegraph key.2 It is not on record who made the ball drop that day and who sat at the key, but with the first clack of the ball on the platform, the click of the key, and the registration of elapsed time on the chronoscope, the modern era of psychology had begun.
One could argue, of course, that it began in the