INTROSPECTION AND EXPERIMENT

Wilhelm Wundt is the first man who can be called a psychologist without qualifying the statement by reference to another stronger interest. In his own self-image he was a psychologist even more than he was a philosopher. This subjective criterion of a psychologist will be found to be supported by his life's work. To be sure, he wrote four major books in philosophy running to perhaps twenty-one editions, but in psychology he published six books which appeared in about thirty-six editions.

In founding the modern science of psychology, Wilhelm Wundt was fully aware of what he was doing. In his preface to the first edition of his Principles o f Physiological Psychology, dated 1874, he begins with the impressive statement that the work 'was presented in order to "mark out a new domain of science."1 He states flatly that, as a science, psychology cannot be based upon any metaphysical assumptions whatsoever.

To Wundt, the use of the experimental method, whenever possible, was mandatory. Moreover, he sharpened and made more exact and exacting the age-old method of introspection. Familiarity with how Wundt interpreted introspection and experiment will help to clarify the events of his life and the experiments conducted in his laboratory.

THE MEANING OF INTROSPECTION AND EXPERIMENT

Since Wundt referred explicitly to physiological psychology in his title,his particular interpretation of its meaning needs clarification. The alreadyavailable physiological methods were to be used for psychological studywhenever they appeared appropriate; there was no a priori way of determining when these should be employed. This particular contention owesmuch to Helmholtz's view of the nature of physiological psychology. ToWundt, however, use of physiological methods depended upon relevanceto the problem in question.

Despite Wundt's calling the new science, physiological psychology, heinsisted the psychic and the physiological process are separate andparallel.2 As causality in natural science is a closed system ,3 the phenomena that are studied by natural science cannot affect the mind or beaffected by it. Conscious phenomena, therefore, are observable withoutreference to the body in which they occur, and "physiological psychology"does not imply an attempt to explain the phenomena of the psychical byexamining the physical life.4 In short, mind-body interaction was rejected.Instead, Wundt was a dualist of the psychophysical parallelistic varietywithout finding it necessary to justify his position.When psychology investigated the relation between the processes of thephysical and the mental life, it was called psycho-physics. On this subjectWundt5 explicitly acknowledged he followed Fechner, but denied Fech-ner's hope that the psychophysical methods could be used for metaphysical purposes. These implications, he admitted, may later emerge fromexperimental research but only as an end result of research.

Although using the psychophysical methods for many problems, Wundtdisagreed with Fechner on what was being measured.6 Wundt held thatto put the matter correctly one must state that two sensations are of equalintensity or one sensation is just noticeably different from another sensation. Wundt was seeking to study, not the relation of the body and mind, but, instead, the relation between sensation on the one hand and theprocess of psychological judgment on the other. This was a purely psychological interpretation with no appeal to the relation of stimulus and sensation. To Wundt, the results obtained from psychological study wereillustrative of a law of psychological relativity. Sensations differ to a degree which make possible judgments of their relative magnitude.

Wundt firmly established the method of introspection as psychology's characteristic task. The use of introspection, in itself, was not new as even a fragmentary review will show. Socrates had made an appeal to introspection, and Plotinus and Augustine had sharpened this method. Descartes and the British empiricists were agreed on its use. Despite this agreement, a significant difference separated them. Descartes' method of introspection has been characterized as contemplative meditation upon problems that interested him.7 Intuitive self-evidence sought about cognition or the passions, both highly complex states, were Descartes' favorite topics. The English empiricists shifted introspectionistic interests from the area of the higher mental processes to that of sensation. The reduction by Hume of soul or mind to a bundle of sensations and his doctrine that images are faint copies of sensations are illustrative of this shift. Wundt continued this tendency toward simplicity by further refining the conscious elements and by combining the introspective process with experiment.

Wundt recognized that conscious contents are fleeting and in continual flux;8 he therefore laid down explicit rules for proper use of the introspective method:" (1) The observer, if at all possible, must be in a position to determine when the process is to be introduced. (2) He must be in a state of "strained attention." (3) The observation must be capable of being repeated several times. (4) The conditions of the experiment must be such as to be capable of variation through introduction or elimination of certain stimuli and through the variation of strength and quality of the stimuli. The first rule is necessary so that the observer is not caught off guard but is set for the task. According to Wundt's arrangement for introspection, the observer knew when to expect the introduction of the stimulus and was ready to observe the state of consciousness. He was, therefore, capable of isolating the mental processes of that moment. As for the second rule, the observer must be conscious of every nuance of that which is presented. Repetition, the third rule, allows for the uncovering of omissions and distortions of earlier trials. The fourth rule makes it possible to study the effect of variation, i.e., the effect of the change resulting from addition or subtraction of various aspects of stimulating conditions as shown in variations of the experience. This last rule takes us to his conception of an experiment.

Insofar as physiological psychology draws upon experiment, Wundt held we can refer to experimental psychology.10 It is perhaps from John Stuart Mill that he derived his conception of psychology as a science of observation and experiment." But Mill only talked about experiments; Wundt carried them out. Wundt12 asserted that in psychology pure selfobservation is insufficient. It is only when additional recourse to experiment is made that exact quantitative results are possible. The essence of an experiment is to vary the conditions of a stimulus situation and then observe the changes in the experience of the observer. In advocating experimental control of conditions of introspection, Wundt was taking a giant step forward.

Herbart had urged using mathematics in the study of psychological problems, although he had denied the possibility of using experiment. Kant had not only denied the possibility of experiment in psychology, but also held that the use of mathematics itself was impossible. He had held that the only dimension of consciousness was time and that with one dimension one could not carry out experiments, and, consequently, psychical processes are indeterminate .13 Since practically all German philosophers of his time were either Kantians or Herbartians, it is to Wundt's credit that he overcame this formidable intellectual block and saw that both mathematics and experiment could be applied in psychology.

Wundt agreed that Kant was correct concerning the uni-dimensional nature of consciousness when we confine ourselves to internal experience. But when we turn to external stimuli, not only are units of measurement supplied, but also one more dimension that Kant had omitted is added, namely, intensity. 14 With the dimensions of quality and intensity, experiment became possible. Every simple sensation has a qualitative determinant, such as blue, warm, or sweet.15 Qualities are not divisible into simpler units. As for Herbart, as we have seen, he recognized that these classes of variables were present, but had not appreciated how they could be turned to experimental use.

Armed with intensity and quality as the two classes of variables, Wundt was prepared for the experimental study of psychological phenomena. In sound, for example, intensity, it is true, is never separable from some quality of pitch, but it is possible to change either the intensity alone (loud-soft), or the pitch alone (high-low), while maintaining the other unchanged. Moreover, we may use two notes and consequently change the quality of the sound so that it is different from that of either note alone. Intensity and quality became subjects for scientific study. On these premises Wundt was able to launch the experimental study of psychology.

LIFE AND RESEARCH OF WUNDT

Wilhelm was born at the village of Neckarau near Heidelberg in Baden on August 16, 1832, the son of a Lutheran pastor.". 17, is He was a solitary child, never close to his parents, played little, and absorbed himself in study. Even as a young child he stayed in the home of a Lutheran vicar who was his tutor. He had formed so strong an attachment to this tutor, presumably at first his father's assistant, that when the vicar was transferred, he was unconsolable until allowed to board with him and to continue under his tutelage. At thirteen he entered the gymnasium, where he also boarded and was ready for the university at nineteen.

His medical studies took him to Tubingen, Heidelberg, and Berlin. It has been hazarded that Wundt went into medicine without any special call, but in part it was because he wanted to continue away from home! There is some doubt whether he ever intended to practice medicine. As with many others before and after him, the study of medicine was the means of entering into a scientific career which even at this age he seems to have had in mind. He did some work at the Institute of Johannes Muller in physiology, and a year or two later he shifted to physiology as an academic field.

In 1857 he was appointed Dozent at Heidelberg and began to lecture in physiology. His first announced course in physiology attracted four students Between 1858 and 1864 he served as assistant to Helmholtz, who had just arrived from Bonn. Relations with the taciturn Helmholtz were non-existent, according to Titchener. In 1864 Wundt was appointed assistant professor. Somewhat surprisingly, in 1866 he was chosen to represent Heidelberg in the Baden Chamber, but he soon resigned. There was a delay of academic advance until 1874 when he was called to Zurich to the chair of Inductive Philosophy. This, it should be noted, is only an apparent shift in field. In academic circles he had come to be viewed as a promising man for appointment to a post in philosophy. After all, psychology was formally still a branch of philosophy.

During these years, Wundt was very active in physiology. In 1858 he published a study of muscular movement and elasticity during action" in which he reported investigating the effect of constant galvanic current and mechanical thermal and chemical stimuli upon muscles. Not only was he working in this field, but a conception of psychology as a distinct science was beginning to emerge. Between 1858 and 1862 various sections of his Beitrage zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung20 appeared. This volume so much anticipated later developments in his thinking that Titchener, one of his greatest students, has argued that it outlined the program of his entire life.

In the introduction of this work Wundt stressed the primacy of method as a means of scientific advance. He also cited apparatus advances, such as the laryngoscope and the ophthalmoscope, as a means of ushering in whole series of discoveries. Psychology, he goes on, has not yet felt the impulse of the new empirical method being used all around it. It has asked metaphysical questions first, such as the essence of the soul, its origin, and its destination. These are questions appropriate to where psychology may end, but not to where it should start. It must take experiences, and the simplest of these experiences at that, for its point of departure. He seems to be saying, psychology should first crawl before it can walk. In that which follows, he marshals evidence primarily from vision and secondarily from touch. One may recognize in this work his struggle to utilize physiological methodology in dealing with psychological problems.
From 1867 onward, he gave a course at Heidelberg entitled, "physiological psychology." This date establishes the formal offering of an academic course of this nature. As he "worked up" his lecture notes over the next few years, a new book, by general agreement his most important book, began to take form. This was his Grundzuge der physiologischen Psychologie.21 The first half was published in 1873 and the second in 1874. It was destined to go through six editions, the last in 1911, and swell in size to three large volumes. (It was characteristic of most of his books that new, amplified, and revised editions would appear from time to time.) The Grundziige changed in detail, sometimes very important detail, but it is remarkable how the expansion and change did not require major shifts in his systematic views. It is the one indispensible source for an account of his system of psychology. Wundt entered on the last, longest, and most important phase of his career in 1875. In that year he became Professor of Philosophy at Leipzig. Here he lived and worked for forty-five years.

At the University of Leipzig in 1875, Wundt established one of the first two experimental laboratories of psychology in the world?2 For many years it has been customary to consider 1879 as the founding year for the first experimental laboratory in the world on the mistaken belief that it was in this year that Wundt's Leipzig Laboratory was given formal recognition by university authorities. Formal recognition to a course in "experimental psychology" did not come from the university until the winter of 1883, as did an appropriation for the laboratory, while an "Institute for Experimental Psychology" as such, was not listed by university authorities until 1894. In this connection 1879 is notable only for appearance of the first student to do publishable psychological research with Wundt, which may be the reason for saying that it was "founded" in that year. Actually, before Wundt's arrival in October, 1875, the Royal Ministry had set aside a room to be used by Wundt for his own experimental work and for demonstrations connected with his Psychologische Ubungen or "Psychological Practicum." A good case can be made for the establishment of the first laboratory in psychology in this year of 1875-or rather of the two first laboratories. William James also equipped a small laboratory in the same year. Probably this year is the single most important one in the history of psychology.

In 1881 Wundt began to publish a journal, Philosophische Studien, containing reports of experimental studies beginning to flow from his laboratory. This was the first journal devoted as much to psychology as to philosophy. Lest the title be puzzling, it should be indicated that Wundt thought philosophy should be psychological .23 He did not support attempts to have psychology a separate department from that of philosophy. Moreover, between 1880 and 1901 he published four books in philosophy -a logic, an ethics, a systematic philosophy, and an introduction to the field.

One of the results of the founding of the laboratory and the spreading fame of Wundt was the migration of students to Leipzig to study with him and to work in the laboratory. There gathered around him would-be psychologists using introspection and experiment to derive the laws of the human mind. In this way Wundt became the leader of a "school" of psychology. These students were united in their systematic views as well as sharing a common purpose. Instead of each of them working alone, with their labors eventuating in books, the laboratory atmosphere resulted in specific research studies appearing as articles in journals .24 Wundt would then synthesize the results of the various studies in the successive editions of the Grundziige.

The sheer availability of co-workers was important .25 Since the "experimenter" could hardly be the "observer" at one and the same time, the experimenter of one study was available as a subject for another. Lest this point be dismissed as trivial, it is pertinent to indicate that "introspection" as practiced in Wundt's laboratory was not a skill acquired without a period of rigorous apprenticeship. To get at the elements of experience required arduous training. Moreover, even if a corps of assistants could be trained as subjects, the nature of the tasks to which they were put to be illustrated in a moment-would have demanded payment. One does not embark upon introspection as a lark! In later days when simple report, not introspection, was all that was needed, the problem was solved by American ingenuity through the use of a captive population of college students.

The work of the Leipzig Laboratory may illustrate what a major segment of experimental psychology was like before and at the turn of the century. About one hundred experimental studies appeared in the Philosophische Studien during its twenty-odd years, almost all of them carried to other subjects who attend to the response, in favor of the greater speed of the latter. This did much to solve the problem of the personal equation. Those who attend to the response react more quickly than those who must shift attention from stimulus to the reaction to be made.

As interest in the reaction experiment waned, studies first of attention and then of feeling came to take its place, each including about one-tenth of the laboratory's studies. Lange's study, just mentioned, helped to create the interest in attention. To Wundt, attention was that clear perception of a narrow region of the content of consciousness. An example of this is the word or words we are reading on this page relative to the rest of the page, as well as the adjoining page and much of the surrounding environment of the room. Whatever is in the focus of attention becomes distinct and is separated from the rest of the field. Research in the area of attention was performed by means of the complication experiment, i.e., the range of attention and fluctuation of attention were studied. Following the lead of Jacobs, Cattell was responsible for carrying out the classic study of attention span ( meaning that which can be taken in at a glance) finding that four, five or six units ( lines, letters or words) could be apprehended in an exposure which was of too short duration to allow a "movement" of attention.

Studies of feeling, the work of the laboratory in the 1890's, involved the use of the method of expression through which feelings and correlated changes of pulse, breathing, muscular strength, and the like were studied. The method of paired comparisons was also developed. This method requires the subject to compare each particular stimulus with every other stimulus being used in terms of the subjective feeling aroused. Suppose the task was to judge the pleasingness of a variety of colored paper patches: patch A is compared to B, C, D, E, F, then patch B is compared to A, C, D, E, F, and so on. On each trial the observer was to say which was most pleasing of each pair A or B, A or C, and so on.

Studies of association make up another one-tenth of the total output of the laboratory during these years. Under Wundt's direction much was done to refine the method.30 Galton, it will be found in a subsequent chapter, although using single words as stimuli had often allowed his responses to take the form of a connected narrative description of the images. Wundt required each response to be a single word which not only made classification of responses easier to handle, but also the time relations involved to be more susceptible to precise measurement. More exact instruments of measurement such as the lip key and the chronoscope, which measures time in thousandths of seconds, were used. The major categories of association derived by Wundt's students were two in number, "inner" and "outer." Inner associations are those showing intrinsic connections between the words, as in lion-animal, spear-shield, cow-milk, and white-black. Outer associations are those in which there are other purely extrinsic or "accidental" associations, as in curve-accident, or bookconcept, or in speech-habit associations, such as fur-fly, or crash-helmet. Cattell was chiefly responsible for discovering the importance of control in association. Instruction to give reactions which bore a definite relation to the stimulus word-an opposite, or a subordinate, or the like-made for quicker reactions than did free association in which there was freedom to choose any word that one wished. Thus giving the response "dark" to the stimulus word "light" when one had been told in advance to give the opposite of the stimulus word resulted in a more rapid reaction than when no control on the associations to be given was exercised. It would appear that when there are many possible responses more or less equally associated with the stimulus word, then there is a process of interference which delays the reaction. An everyday example is the interference met by one who speaks more than one foreign language in arriving at the correct word, especially if the languages themselves are similar, as in Spanish and French.31 Emil Kraepelin, the great psychiatrist who had studied under Wundt, extended the experimental use of association to problems in psychopathology. He found that under experimentally induced fatigue, alcoholic intoxication, and similar states there is an increase in superficial, extrinsic, or "outer" associations dependent upon habit, an increase at the expense of "inner" associations which depend upon meaning. The former resemble the associations of some psychotic patients, particularly the manics.

It becomes apparent from the survey of the research from his laboratory that Wundt did not occupy himself with developing new kinds of experiments;32 the methods he used are already generally familiar to the reader from the account of psychology before Wundt. Studies of the psychology and physiology of the senses owe much to the work which went before, particularly to Helmholtz, Reaction time studies again owe something, not only to Helmholtz, but also to Donders, while the association study can be attributed to Galton. Even the study of feeling, where Wundt was at his most original in a theoretical fashion, was dependent upon extension of Fechner s method of impression to that of paired comparisons and in studies of expression to the utilization of already existing methods of study of pulse, breathing, and the like. Even for attention there had been antecedent studies, although no occasion to discuss them had arisen Wundt wished further to reduce to quantitative terms the research areas already extant. His view of the scope of experimental psychology consequently was a narrow one, practically confined to the five topics into which the research from his laboratory was classified.

Wundt began sponsoring doctoral dissertations as early as 1875.33 By 1919 the total had reached an impressive 186 of which 70 were on philosophical topics and 116 on psychological problems. Not all of the men whom he sponsored were destined to become leading psychologists. Struck by the number of unfamiliar names, one psychologist34 tried to trace them down and the astonishing number of 86 could not be found. A not inconsiderable number of the students were apparently content, after receiving the precious title of "Herr Doktor," to sink back into the oblivion of the gymnasium.

His students came to him from all over Europe and from the United States. Many were American. The first of these was G. Stanley Hall, fresh from his degree at Harvard. This roving ambassador of American psychology-to-be "dropped in" for a time in the first year of the existence of the new laboratory and studied with Wundt. Although ambivalent as he was toward Wundt, he is careful to state that most of his time was spent with Ludwig, the physiologist.36 But his story is best told in a later chapter. James McKeen Cattell, Wundt's first bona fide American student, studied at Leipzig on two occasions. It was on his second sojourn in 1885 that Cattell made his pronouncement to Herr Professor that he needed an assistant and that he, Cattell, was that assistant. He, too, will be considered later. Among other American students of Wundt's were Edward

W. Scripture, later director of the Yale Psychological Laboratory and a student of hearing; Edward A. Pace for many years head of the Department of Psychology at Catholic University and the leading voice in interpreting the "new psychology" to Catholics; Lightner Witmer, the founder of the first psychological clinic at the University of Pennsylvania, and Charles H. Judd, the pioneer educational psychologist at the University of Chicago. Even this short list shows something of the breadth of activity that these Americans managed to show on their return to the United States after the severely rigorous "pure" training they received. Born in England where there was no suitable post for an experimental psychologist such as he, Edward Bradford Titchener, another of Wundt's students, came to America to direct the psychological work at Cornell University. Among this group he was the most unswervingly faithful to the program of his teacher. The best known continental psychologists who worked in the Leipzig Laboratory, besides Kulpe and Kraepelin already mentioned, were Hugo Munsterberg Alfred Lehmann, Ernst Meumann, Theodore Lipps, and Felix Krueger.

According to Titchener,36 Wundt was a quiet, unassuming, pleasant person whose life followed a totally regulated pattern. He worked on his current book or article in the morning, then had a consultation hour. In the afternoon he paid a formal visit to the laboratory, following this with a walk during which he cast his lecture into rough farm, then the delivery of the lecture without notes, and a second informal return to the laboratory. He was a very popular lecturer, apparently simplifying his material somewhat to suit his audience. As Hall37 puts it, Wundt's style of writing is as lusterless as lead-but as solid. To perhaps a surprising extent, concerts and interests in current affairs occupied many of his evenings. He was a man of simple tastes, who avoided public functions and virtually never travelled.

It is not surprising that from this background would emerge the serious hard-working, hard-driving writer of so many books in so many editions that no single person would be so humorless as to read every work in every edition. If he did try to do so, what would he face? Assuming the figures which had been calculated by Boring38 with tongue in cheek as to his productivity of 53,735 pages ( averaging out to 2.2 pages per day for every day from 1853 to 1920 ) as a base, the consumer-reader, reading at the rate of sixty pages per day, would need nearly two-and-a-half years to go through the entire output.

In 1902, only twenty-eight years after the preface to the first edition of the Principles in which he had expressed his intent of presenting a new science, he could say in the fifth edition that the material now is pouring in from all sides.39 No longer was there any doubt as to the legitimacy of his endeavors. Instead, divergent trends within the field itself were becoming a cause of concern to him. European psychology was beginning to have centers of influence other than Wundt and Leipzig. The climate of the times was producing other psychologists independent of Wundt who had drawn on their common cultural heritage and arrived at an experimental psychology by the end of the century. Some of them will be considered in the next chapter. At the moment concern is with Wundt's reaction to work which deviated from his own.

He was unalterably opposed to the application of psychology.40 When Meumann, a gifted pupil, turned to educational psychology, Wundt treated it as if this were desertion in the face of the enemy. Kraepelin, another student who applied psychology to psychiatry and was advised by Wundt to leave psychology for psychiatry,41 came off somewhat better. Work outside of that of his own students came in for even more severe criticism. He was especially critical of the work of the so-called Wurzburg School. After securing the immediate response to stimulation, the workers at Wurzburg went on to question their subjects about all that went on in their minds. Wundt considered this nothing more than a blatant violation of the rules of introspection.

Despite the admission that child ( and animal) psychology were supplementary branches42 of the field, he rejected categorically the beginning of child psychology in the work of Preyer and Baldwin. Their work was not psychology since the conditions of study could not be controlled adequately 43 In his own laboratory, Wundt neither sponsored nor worked with animals.

He was also very critical of French psychology, claiming that the work done in that country was reduced to studies of suggestion and hypnotism.44 Somewhat petulantly he argued that one cannot give the name, "experimental psychology" to each and every operation that brings about a change in consciousness. Those studies lack exact introspection, so they are not true psychological experiments.

The idea of a social psychology was part of the Zeitgeist 45 Steinthal and Lazarus had published the first issue of their journal devoted to the topic in 1859-1860. At first social psychology was seen by Wundt as only an auxiliary science. It was not until 1893 that he was convinced that social psychology deserved to be considered a coordinate branch along with experimental psychology. Experiment is not feasible when more complex problems than those of perception and memory are considered. Beyond this point, experiment fails us and we must have recourse to folk psychology. In making this division of labor, Wundt was also saying that the higher mental processes, incapable of direct experimental attack, should, perforce, be studied through the chief products of common mental life, that is to say, studied through language, myth, and custom 46 Language, for example, he held to be the major key to understanding thought. In order to consider the problems of the higher mental processes, he began writing the Volkerpsychologie or Folk Psychology,47 the first volume appearing in 1900 with nine more volumes between then and 1920.

Folk psychology was conceived to be the investigation of the various, still existing stages of mental development in mankind.48 In this sense it can and has been called "genetic" psychology. To Wundt, mankind shows development through a series of successive levels with primitive man as the lowest grade of culture, moving on to the totemic age, thence to the age of heroes and gods, and, finally, the age in which we are now living, that of the advance toward humanity. Folk psychology is differentiated from ethnology by Wundt because the latter is concerned primarily with the external cultures and only in a very incidental fashion with the psychological characteristics that are at the core of folk psychology.

As if according to plan, Wundt wrote his psychological reminiscences, Erlebtes and Erkanntes49 in 1920. Shortly afterward, he died near Leipzig on August 31, two weeks after his eighty-eighth birthday.

SOME SYSTEMATIC VIEWS

Wundt's claim to greatness rests much more upon what has been said of him earlier than it does upon his systematic views of psychology. His system amounted primarily to a classificatory scheme, and, as Boring50 observes, this itself was not capable of direct or indirect experimental proof or disproof. Wundt was constantly revising his position on various issues from one edition of his books to the next as new evidence appeared. It would be impossible to do justice to these changes in a short space, so only his mature theoretical guide lines, as established in the fifth edition of Grundzuge published in 190251 and in the second edition of his Introduction -12 published in German in 1911 and in English in 1912, will be examined. The effort to offer a rather tightly compressed account of his schema for psychology is rendered easier by his dependence upon already familiar formulations.

To Wundt, psychology is the science that investigates the facts of consciousness. Mind is a process, and yet it has elements, a somewhat confusing ambiguous view of the matter. Consciousness supplies us the total of its immediate experience. The more specific immediate experiences involved, to name only the most important, are sensations, feelings, ideas, volitions and, apperceptions. None of these is given in an uncompounded state; they must be abstracted from the compound by introspective analysis. In fact, all of our experiences are complex and must be analysed introspectively.

The elements of the mind, or the basic states of consciousness, are sensations and feelings.53 When abstracted by introspection, pure sensations are found to possess only intensity and quality and are with" t spatial or temporal aspects. Sensation;

u are objective in the sense that they have reference to "external" things. Experiences directly aroused by external stimuli often were referred to by earlier systematists as sensations while those dependent upon internal conditions were called ideas. Wundt held this to be an error. The sources for touch and organic sensations of our body are just as much part of our outer world as are stimulation from external objects.54 Hence, the sensations, too; were "external."

Feelings that accompany sensations are the subjective complements referring to states of consciousness itself. Sensations and feelings are simultaneous aspects of immediate experience. Sometimes the aspect of feeling is apparently negligible, but it is always present. If intensity be increased, it becomes apparent in, say, a light increased in intensity to the point it becomes dazzling. Wundt, nevertheless, considered feeling an experience that was distinct from that other conscious element, sensation.

Feelings cannot be described in terms of pleasantness-unpleasantness alone, as Wundt had held earlier. Two additional dimensions-tensionrelaxation and excitement-depression-must also be used to account for the range of the experiences of feeling. Wundt had found that a given feeling experience shows three dimensions but in different combinations, say pleasant, tense, and excited in one case or unpleasant, relaxed, and depressed in another. Feeling experience is not a matter of simultaneity alone. The dimensions in the experience change through time: tickling at first might move along the dimension of pleasantness; but then tension and excitement would become apparent, and unpleasantness would come to predominate over pleasantness.

This tridimensional theory of feeling, as it was called, stimulated a tremendous amount of research both in his own and rival laboratories, but the theory was not borne out by post-Wundtian research. However, the results of these studies were found to be applicable in other situations. It is in this way that psychology, having become an experimental science, advances. A theory may stand or fall; the experiments persist, either interpreted as isolated facts or worked into a modified or different system when they are congruent with it.

When sensation and feeling are compounded, they form ideas. To Wundt, the term, "idea," included within its scope such "complexes" as both "memory images" and "perceptions."55 Ideas, including both sensations and feelings in composite, are representative of objects either in perception or in memory.

Association is not enough to account for compounding. Consciousness shows various degrees of apperception, of contexts, and of connections -the unification of the conscious contents. Children may run together words in something they recite without understanding what it is they are saying. Adults may parrot a difficult concept but not understand what is meant by what they are saying. To bring about unification requires apperception, a combination of a complex into a unity. This doctrine of apperception is already familiar, but Wundt stressed its cognitive aspects more than did his predecessors. To define it more fully, clearness of comprehension of conscious content, occurring by combining of sensory experiences with pre-existing ideas and accompanied by feelings, gives apperception. Feeling enters into the process and the particular quality of the experience of the feeling of a compound is dependent upon apperception. Easy, smooth flowing reactions give rise to pleasure, conflictual ones to pain.

Wundt made a distinction between the whole range of consciousness and the so-called fixation point of apperception. Only processes in the fixation point of apperception are apperceived. This does not mean that apperception cannot range over the complex of ideas, referred to as the apperceptive mass, but at a given moment the matter in the fixation of apperception is a selection from this mass. When apperceptions refer to any given content, Wundt says they are customarily called "states of attention."56 Wundt preferred to discuss the phenomena in terms of apperception, possibly to bring out its active character in contradistinction to states of attention as a more passive process, but knew, of course, that others could and did discuss this problem in terms of attention, a rather more familiar way of handling the issue.

Combinations of feelings along with ideational processes give the emotions. In some emotions, such as joy and delight, pleasure predominates; in others, such as anger and fear, displeasure is the stronger.

Closely related to the emotions are the volitional processes.57 To Wundt, volitions, instead of being ideational, are primarily affective. The feelings were the "determining factors" of volition. Sometimes feelings are not so strong as to produce volition, but volition is not operative unless they are present. Volition culminates in an action as when the angry person strikes the object of his anger. Without the striking it would have been an emotion alone.

In dealing with volition Wundt was considering action as differentiated from reception. The distinction between sensory and motor nerves arising from the work of the physiologists carried over into Wundt's psychology at this point. Sensations are the psychological phenomena associated with the former, movements, called reflexes, are the psychological phenomena associated with the latter.58 There was a natural coherence between a sensation and a movement which was modified through experience.

That the mind was reducible to elements and the fashion in which its elements cohere is obviously a heritage from the empiricist-associationist tradition. But Wundt went beyond this level; the experiences we have are more than the sum of their parts-there is a creative synthesis of immediate experience (the principle of mental chemistry in Thomas Brown). Once the systematic analysis into elements had been accomplished, their manner of synthesis could be carried-out. It was as if the elements once accounted for went a long way toward explaining the total reality. There was still something left over, a fact which Wundt recognized but did not work out fully. Seeing a landscape did not add up to thirteen specified visual sensations of variant hues and the accompanying feelings of mild excitement, high pleasure, and low tension, meaningfully perceived. That which remained, however, did not interest him very much. Although synthesis, as differentiated from analysis, was relatively neglected by Wundt, that he did make it part of his formal system and thereby called attention to it, was to have later important repercussions.

OVERVIEW

Wundt was the first modern psychologist-he conceived of experimental psychology as a science. He founded the first laboratory, and he edited the first journal. In addition to these pioneering efforts, Wundt was the great synthesizer of research findings, both of the work that preceded him and of that carried on by his students. Wundt's forte was not luminous ideas lighting upon the dark corners or giving us a new dazzling perspective on the old picture. Rather, he worked over a thousand details, cleaning here, repairing there; filling a crack here, so that psychology leaving his hands was an improved, more coherent picture, but still a familiar one. The areas of investigation worked out by Wundt-sensation and perception, reaction, attention, feeling, association-were such as to become firmly fixed as the very chapters in the textbooks that were to come, making this work a not inconsiderable portion of psychology. And yet there were other areas of psychology where his treatment was either nonexistent or, at best, woefully inadequate. The problem areas of learning ( as differentiated from association), motivation, emotion, intelligence, thought, and personality were to be systematically brought within psychology by men who had other points of view. Whatever one may think of the narrowness of Wundt's conception of psychology, it must be admitted that the course he chose to follow had the effect of solidifying an independent field of psychology. If he had struck out on uncharted paths it is quite conceivable that psychology as a separate discipline would not have been forthcoming until later. It does not detract from his achievement to add that much of the history of psychology following Wundt consisted of rebelling against the limitations he had placed upon the field. In fact, forward movement is most sure when it has something to push against.