226 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE MOVEMENT TOWAEDS "PHYSIOLOGICAL" 

 PSYCHOLOGY. IV 



By Professor R M. WENLEY 



UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 



VI 



"XT OW that Herbert Spencer and Eduard von Hartmann have passed 

 -LN away, Wundt stands almost alone among living thinkers. The 

 importance of his philosophical contribution ranks second only to his 

 epoch-making career in psychology. Time forbids more than this 

 reference to it; but I may add that, very likely, his philosophical atti- 

 tude possesses a future. For he heads a rising school which holds that 

 a main business of philosophy in present circumstances is to unify and 

 systematize the manifold results garnered piecemeal by the positive 

 sciences. 



Born in 1832, Wundt began his academic career as a medical 

 student at Heidelberg in 1851, and continued the same studies later at 

 Tubingen and Berlin, where he resided at the close of Johannes 

 Midler's professorship. In 1856 he worked for a year in the physi- 

 ological laboratory at Heidelberg under Helmholtz. On the scientific 

 side he came under the influence of M tiller, Fr. Arnold (in anatomy), 

 Hasse (in pathology), E. H. and W. Weber, Helmholtz, Lotze, Bain 

 and Fechner. Early in life he also made acquaintance with the philo- 

 sophical work of Leibniz, Kant, Herbart and Lotze. As stated above, 1 

 he records that, in psychology, he owes the largest debt to Kant and 

 Herbart ; this explains not a few of his later positions, especially those 

 to which younger men, of purely experimental training, have taken 

 exception, without over-much appreciation sometimes, I fear, of what 

 exactly they opposed. His life-work as a teacher and investigator has 

 lain at Zurich, and Leipzig, whither he was called in 1876, and where, 

 in 1879, he set up the first purely psychological laboratory, 2 an example 

 followed since by many of the great universities in all civilized lands. 

 Unlike his predecessors, especially Weber, Helmholtz, Lotze and 

 Fechner, he has not concentrated his attention upon this or that re- 

 stricted group of psycho-physiological phenomena, but has ranged over 

 the entire field, with the result that psychology owes to him at once 

 that ever enters high school. 



1 Article I. 



2 1 am not forgetting James's laboratory at Harvard in 1875, which was 

 physiological. 



