Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [81]
As many as a dozen years before the first experiment in his laboratory, Wundt was known as a bridge builder who sought to link physiology and mental processes. Word of his views had even reached America, where in 1867 the young William James wrote to a friend:
It seems to me that perhaps the time has come for psychology to begin to be a science—some measurements have already been made in the region lying between the physical changes in the nerves and the appearance of consciousness (in the shape of sense perceptions)… Helmholtz and a man named Wundt at Heidelberg are working on it, and I hope…to go to them in the summer.7
(James did not manage to meet Wundt that summer but did so many years later, by which time he himself was a leading figure in psychology.)
Some contemporary historians, critical of the Great Man approach to history, would say that the new science of psychology was created not by Wundt but by the general social and intellectual milieu of the mid-nineteenth century and by the state of development of the behavioral and social sciences. The animal psychology included in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (and later in his Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals), the sociological studies of Auguste Comte, the growing number of reports by anthropologists on the life, language, and ideas of preliterate peoples, and other related factors had created an atmosphere in which it was possible to think that human nature could be scientifically studied.
It is true that no Wundt could have arisen to launch experimental psychology in Tertullian’s time or Aquinas’s or even Descartes’; there were no batteries, telegraph keys, and chronoscopes, much less a view of human behavior as a set of phenomena that could be investigated by experiment. Yet in any field of knowledge, even at the right time and place there spring up not a thousand great men, and not a hundred, but a very few. Or even one: one Galileo, one Newton, one Darwin, inspiring thousands of lesser men (and, later, women) who learn from them and are able to push farther on. And one Wundt, who had the genius and drive to become the guiding light of the new psychology in Europe and the United States.
Yet today he seems a strange and paradoxical figure. Despite the immense reputation and influence he long had, his name is now all but unknown except to psychologists and scholars; most laypersons who can easily identify Freud, Pavlov, and Piaget have no idea who Wundt was. Even people who do know his place in history cannot agree on what his main ideas were; summaries of his system by various scholars seem to summarize different Wundts. And while for some time most psychologists have felt that Wundt’s psychology was narrow in scope, a few historians of the field have recently re-evaluated his work and pronounced him a psychologist of great vision and breadth.8 (It may be indicative that his Outlines of Psychology was still being republished as late as 1998.) To some degree, what makes him an enigma is that he was the epitome of the nineteenth-century German scholar: encyclopedic, dogged, authoritarian, and, in his own eyes, all but infallible—an ideal and a personality hard to comprehend today.
The Making of the First Psychologist
As puzzling as anything about Wundt is how the child could have become the man. In his boyhood and youth he seemed utterly lacking in the drive or intellectual capacity to become even modestly successful, let alone an outstanding figure in science and the world of higher education. He appeared, in fact, to be a dolt.
Born in 1832 in Neckarau, near Mannheim, in southwestern Germany, Wundt came from a family of intellectual achievers. His father was a village Lutheran pastor, but among his forebears were university presidents, physicians, and scholars.9 For many years Wundt showed no trace of intellectual gifts and had no interest in learning; when he was a child, his