Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [83]
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