Wundt Quotes

The degradation of most civilizations, contain a common thread. The 'synagogue of Satan' is behind all weaponized ignorance and hate.

49 Wilhelm Wundt Principles of Physiological Psychology (1873–74) The book that made Wundt the dominant figure in the new science of psychology. Translated into English by Edward Titchener in 1904.

But psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods, asking of course every moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncertainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical means. This method taxes patience to the utmost, and could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored. Such Germans as Weber, Fechner, Vierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot ; and their success has brought into the field an array of younger experimental psychologists, bent on studying the elements of the mental life, dissecting them out from the gross results in which they are embedded, and as far as possible reducing them to quantitative scales. The simple and open method of attack having done what it can, the method of patience, starving out, and harassing to death is tried ; the Mind must submit to a regular siege, in which minute advantages gained night and day by the forces that hem her in must sum themselves up at last into her overthrow. There is little of the grand style about these new prism, pendulum, and chronograph-philosophers. They mean business, not chivalry. What generous divination, and that superiority in virtue which was thought by Cicero to give a man the best insight into nature, have failed to do, their spying and scraping, their deadly tenacity and almost diabolic cunning, will doubtless some day bring about. No general description of the methods of experimental psychology would be instructive to one unfamiliar with the instances of their application, so we will waste no words upon the attempt.

It emerged from two other disciplines, physiology and philosophy. German Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) is seen as the father of psychology because he insisted it should be a separate discipline, more empirical than philosophy and more focused on the mind than physiology. In the 1870s he created the first experimental psychology laboratory, and wrote his huge work Principles of Physiological Psychology.

Wundt said that affective reactions are so tightly integrated with perception that we find ourselves liking or disliking something the instant we notice it, sometimes even before we know what it is.8 These flashes occur so rapidly that they precede all other thoughts about the thing we’re looking at. You can feel affective primacy in action the next time you run into someone you haven’t seen in many years. You’ll usually know within a second or two whether you liked or disliked the person, but it can take much longer to remember who the person is or how you know each other.

As Wundt is read today only by those with a specialized interest, he is not included in the list of classics. American philosopher William James (1842–1910), however, also considered a “founding father” of modern psychology, is still widely read. The brother of novelist Henry James, he trained in medicine and then transferred to philosophy, but like Wundt felt that the workings of the mind deserved to be a separate field of study. Building on a theory by German neuroanatomist Franz Gall that all thoughts and mental processes were biological, James helped to spread the remarkable idea that one’s self—with all its hopes, loves, desires, and fears—was contained in the soft gray matter within the walls of the skull.

In the 1890s Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology, formulated the doctrine of “affective primacy.”7 Affect refers to small flashes of positive or negative feeling that prepare us to approach or avoid something. Every emotion (such as happiness or disgust) includes an affective reaction, but most of our affective reactions are too fleeting to be called emotions (for example, the subtle feelings you get just from reading the words happiness and disgust).

IN SUM The first principle of moral psychology is Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. In support of this principle, I reviewed six areas of experimental research demonstrating that: • Brains evaluate instantly and constantly (as Wundt and Zajonc said). • Social and political judgments depend heavily on quick intuitive flashes (as Todorov and work with the IAT have shown). • Our bodily states sometimes influence our moral judgments. Bad smells and tastes can make people more judgmental (as can anything that makes people think about purity and cleanliness). • Psychopaths reason but don’t feel (and are severely deficient morally). • Babies feel but don’t reason (and have the beginnings of morality). • Affective reactions are in the right place at the right time in the brain (as shown by Damasio, Greene, and a wave of more recent studies).

Our conscious autobiographical memories are notoriously unreliable. Freud called this instability Nachträglichkeit. Memories are not fixed but mutable. The present alters the past. Imagination and fantasy play an important role in remembering. Memories are creative and active, not passive. In his Outlines of Psychology (1897), Wilhelm Wundt writes, “It is obvious that practically no sharp line of demarcation can be drawn between images of imagination and those of memory . . . All our memories are therefore made of ‘fancy and truth’ [Wahrheit und Dichtung]. Memory-images change under the influence of our feelings and volition to images of imagination, and we generally deceive ourselves with their resemblance to real experiences.

Psychology was officially born in 1879, when Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) opened the first recognized laboratory for the study of human behaviour in Leipzig, Germany. Wundt

Wilhelm Wundt

The second half of the nineteenth century brought two new forms of historical theory which are methodologically oriented toward positivism but undoubtedly include also elements of the absolutistic ideology of Hegel. The so-called materialistic conception of history conceived by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels regards as the cause of all historical events the defects of the social conditions in which men live and which they strive to improve. In contrast to this, a more naturalistic movement, which is based upon Darwin and founded upon the modern theory of heredity, asserts that all history consists of the struggle and interplay of the different, essentially unchanging human races. A favorite antithesis in connection with these ideas is whether single "great men" or national groups "make" history, i.e., are the actual bearers of the historical development. In the same way one could ask in physics whether physical phenomena depend more upon electric or upon magnetic forces, or one could build up a theory according to which, e.g., the causes of all events are mechanical (as the philosopher Wilhelm Wundt did in 1866).