Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [80]
But 1879 is the year recognized by most authorities, and for good reason. That was when the first experiment was conducted in the room in Konvikt that Wundt thenceforth called his “private institute.”4 (In German universities, a formally organized laboratory is called an institute.) Within a few years the laboratory had become a mecca for would-be psychologists and was considerably enlarged and designated the university’s official Psychologisches Institut.
Largely because of the institute, Wundt is considered not just one of the founders but the principal founder of modern psychology. It was there that he conducted his own psychological research and trained many graduate students in his laboratory methods and theories, and from there that he sent forth cadres of new psychologists—he personally supervised nearly two hundred dissertations—to the universities of Europe and America. In addition, he wrote a number of scholarly articles and massive tomes that established psychology as a field of science with an identity of its own. He himself was the first scientist who can be properly called a psychologist rather than a physiologist, physicist, or philosopher with an interest in psychology.
Perhaps most important, Wundt restored the study of conscious mental processes to psychology. They had been its core from the time of the Greek philosophers, and still were for the English associationists, who, like all their predecessors, explored them through the traditional method of introspection. But the German mechanists, seeking to make psychology scientific, had rejected introspection on the grounds that it was subjective and dealt with unobservable phenomena. A scientific approach to psychological phenomena, they held, dealt only with the physical aspects of neural responses and, in the words of one of them, was a “psychology without a soul.”5
It is true that long before the first experiment in Wundt’s laboratory both Fechner and Donders had used experimental means to measure certain mental responses. But it was Wundt who fully developed the methods that would be used by the next two generations of psychologists, and it was he who became the leading proponent of the view that mental processes could be experimentally studied. He had, in fact, begun espousing this view as early as 1862, in the introduction to his Contributions to the Theory of Sense Perception:
The importance that experimentation will eventually have in psychology can hardly be visualized to its full extent as yet. It has often been held that the area of sensation and perception is the only one in which the use of the experimental method is possible… [but] surely this is a prejudice. As soon as the psyche is viewed as a natural phenomenon, and psychology as a natural science, the experimental methods must also be capable of full application to this science.
He drew an analogy between psychology and chemistry. Just as the chemist learns from experiments not only how a substance is affected by others but also what its own chemical nature is,
in precisely the same way in psychology…it would be quite wrong to say that the experiment determines only the action of [stimuli] on the psyche. The behavior of the psyche in response to the external influences is determined as well, and by varying those external influences we arrive at the laws to which the psychic life as such is subject. The sensory stimuli are, for us, only experimental tools, to put it succinctly. By creating manifold changes in the sensory stimuli while continually studying the psychic phenomena,