Classics in Psychology

R. H.
Wozniak
Classics in Psychology, 1855–1914
Historical Essays
The emergence and growth of scientific psychology in the period

1855–1914 constituted one of the most important advances in the
history of human understanding. This book of short essays is designed
to introduce the reader to classic contributions to this development.
In addition to the foundational volumes of Bain and Spencer and the
landmark texts of Taine, Ribot, Lotze, Höffding, Ladd, and James, it
focuses on essential works of the emerging experimentalism (Fechner,
Classics in Psychology, 1855–1914: Historical Essays

Helmholtz, Wundt, Mach, Külpe, Titchener), major mind/body treatises
(Maudsley, Carpenter, Ferrier, Lewes, Jackson), significant handbooks of
methodology (Thorndike, Schulze), seminal analyses in social
psychology (McDougall), the psychology of individual differences
(Galton, Binet), animal mind and behaviour (Romanes, Forel, Morgan,
Hobhouse, Thorndike, Washburn), development (Baldwin, Claparède),
and education (Huey, Thorndike), as well as on early scientific
contributions to psychotherapy (Bernheim, Tuckey, Janet, Prince) and
applied psychology (Scott, Münsterberg). Each essay places a given
work in its intellectual context, summarizes its basic content, and
assesses its general significance.
Classics in Psychology, 1855–1914: Historical Essays is the companion

volume to the Classics in Psychology collection. This collection reprints
all of the above texts, chosen for their historical significance and to
highlight the major issues with which the discipline struggled in its
earliest years. What was the proper subject matter for a science of
psychology? By what methods should psychological phenomena be
studied? In what ways should psychology take the biological and social
aspects of human nature into account? How should psychology
conceive of the relationship between mind and reality? How could the
results of psychological analysis be applied to problems in the everyday
life of human beings? With the exception of two works (Fechner,
Wundt) that were never translated into English, each title is reprinted
from the first English edition. Many of the originals are now very scarce
and collectable. The complete fifty-one volume set forms a unique
research archive of interest to all serious academic libraries.
ISBN 1-85006-703-X
Psychology, physiology, philosophy,
sociology, education, psychotherapy
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Historical Essays
Thoemmes / Maruzen
Classics in Psychology,
1855–1914
Historical Essays
ROBERT H. WOZNIAK
Bryn Mawr College
T H O E M M E S P R E S S
M A R U Z E N C O . , L T D
Co-published in 1999 by
THOEMMES PRESS
11 Great George Street
Bristol BS1 5RR, United Kingdom
&
MARUZEN CO., LTD
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Tokyo, 103–8245 Japan
Classics in Psychology, 1855–1914: Historical Essays

HB: ISBN 1 85506 702 1
PB: ISBN 1 85506 703 X
© Robert H. Wozniak, 1999

50 volumes : ISBN 1 85506 602 5
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A CIP record of this title is available from the British Library
Printed in England by Pear Tree Press Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may

be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any way or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the written permission of the copyright holder.
Enquiries should be addressed to the Publisher.
To my father, John Wozniak, who taught me the value of
reflection and a love of old books and the memory of my
mother, Mary Flood Wozniak, who taught me the value of a
cogent sentence and a love of learning.
Acknowledgments
There are many people whose direct and indirect contributions

to this project have been invaluable and to whom I would like to
express my deepest appreciation. First and foremost is Jana
Marie Iverson, whose unfailing love, support, and phone calls
kept me energized at moments when the end of the tunnel seemed
far away indeed. Second is Emily Jane Roberts, whose affec-
tionate friendship provided the relief from work that made the
work seem less like work. Next are all those family members,
friends, colleagues, students, editors, and others whose patience
was sorely tried by my relative unavailability as I worked on this
project over the past year. You all know who you are. To these
most important people I must add those who, in one way or
another, contributed to the provision of the information on
which this project was based, especially the authors of the
remarkable books that form the subject matter of these essays,
William James, Francis Galton, Alexander Bain, Wilhelm Wundt,
James Mark Baldwin, Edward Thorndike, Margaret Washburn
and the others. If this book induces even a single individual to
read these authors in the original, it will have been worth the
effort. Then there are those who helped me put together the
library of materials without which this project would have been
impossible. Chief among these is John Gach, a scholar’s
bookseller and a superb scholar in his own right, from whom I
have learned much about both books and psychology over the
many years of our friendship. Finally there is Rudi Thoemmes,
who suggested the project, recruited me to it, and prodded me
towards its completion, and all those at Thoemmes Press who
have helped make this book a reality. Oops! I almost forgot. No
acknowledgment would be complete without mention of Lennie
and Mac. Thanks guys.
CONTENTS
Introduction xi
Historical Essays
Bain, The Senses and the Intellect 1
Spencer, The Principles of Psychology 6
Bain, The Emotions and the Will 11
Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik 15
Galton, Hereditary Genius 19
Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone 22
Maudsley, Body and Mind 26
Taine, On Intelligence 30
Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology 35
Galton, English Men of Science 39
Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie 42
Ferrier, The Functions of the Brain 46
Lewes, The Physical Basis of Mind 50
Ribot, German Psychology of To-Day 53
Jackson, Evolution and Dissolution of the Nervous
System 56
Lotze, Outlines of Psychology 62
Höffding, Outlines of Psychology 66
Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its
Development 72
Ebbinghaus, Memory 76
Bernheim, Suggestive Therapeutics 79
Binet, The Psychology of Reasoning 83
Mach, Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations 87
Ladd, Elements of Physiological Psychology 91
vii
viii Classics in Psychology, 1855–1914: Historical Essays
Romanes, Mental Evolution in Man 94

Tuckey, Psycho-Therapeutics 100
James, The Principles of Psychology 103
Janet, The Mental State of Hystericals 108
Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology 112
Külpe, Outlines of Psychology 116
Baldwin, Mental Development in the Child and the Race 120
Morgan, Habit and Instinct 124
Titchener, An Outline of Psychology 129
Wundt, Outlines of Psychology 133
Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations in
Mental Development 137
Forel, The Senses of Insects 141
Hobhouse, Mind in Evolution 145
Thorndike, An Introduction to the Theory of
Mental and Social Measurements 148
Prince, The Dissociation of a Personality 151
Pfungst, Clever Hans (The Horse of Mr Von Osten) 155
Huey, The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading 158
McDougall, An Introduction to Social Psychology 162
Scott, The Psychology of Advertising 166
Washburn, The Animal Mind 170
Schulze, Experimental Psychology and Pedagogy 175
Claparède, Experimental Pedagogy and the
Psychology of the Child 179
Thorndike, Animal Intelligence 184
Münsterberg, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency 187
Thorndike, Educational Psychology: Briefer Course 190
INTRODUCTION
The emergence and growth of scientific psychology in the period

1855–1914 constituted one of the most important advances in
the history of human understanding. For centuries issues such as
the characteristics of human and animal mind, the relationship
between mind and body, the relative roles of cognition, emotion,
and volition in the operations of the mind, techniques for the
improvement of memory, variations in character, the psycho-
logical status of the child in relation to education, and the nature
of mental healing had been the subject of philosophical specu-
lation and debate.
Starting in 1855 and building in part upon groundwork
provided by Bain’s sensori-motor associationism and Spencer’s
evolutionism, in part upon a framework of experimentation
developed by Fechner, Galton, Helmholtz, and Wundt, and in
part upon general progress in understanding the structure and
function of the nervous system, a new scientific psychology began
to address these and related topics. At the same time, advances
in the descriptive analysis and psychological explanation of
exceptional mental states contributed to the development of a
scientific approach to psychopathology and psychotherapy and
a growing recognition of the close relationship between healthy
and disordered mental function.
The purpose of these short essays is to introduce the reader to
classic contributions to these developments. The works on which
the essays focus were chosen for their historical significance and
to highlight major issues with which the discipline struggled in
its earliest years. What was the proper subject matter for a
science of psychology? By what methods should psychological
phenomena be studied? In what ways should psychology take the
biological and social aspects of human nature into account?
How should psychology conceive of the relationship between
mind and reality; and how could the results of psychological
analysis be applied to problems of everyday human life?
Each essay places a given work in historical context, summa-
ix
x Classics in Psychology, 1855–1914: Historical Essays
rizes its basic content, and assesses its general significance. With
only a few exceptions the approach to historical context is inter-
nalist and disciplinary rather than externalist or biographical.
Thus most texts are situated in terms of prior contributions that
helped define the issues of interest. Analysis of the role of
ideological, economic, political, and cultural factors and
biographical details that would undoubtedly illuminate the social
and personal contexts within which these works were produced
are for the most part omitted as being far beyond the scope of
these essays.
Discussion of content is, of course, highly selective. To the
extent possible, the essential contributions of each work are
identified. The point of these essays, however, is to stimulate the
reader to visit the original text not to serve as a substitute for that
experience; and in no way are these short summaries intended to
do justice to the conceptual intricacies and range of topics to be
found in the original volumes.
Any attempt to analyze the significance of a work raises two
thorny issues: what constitutes significance and why do we care?
With regard to the nature of significance, the approach taken here
is eclectic and inclusive. Texts qualified as significant for widely
varying reasons. The first broad criterion of significance was
social impact. Did a work influence others? If so, was the
influence exerted on the discipline as a whole, on an individual
or small group of individuals, or on the broader society? And
what constituted this influence? Did it generate controversy and
reaction? Did it provide an especially clear or persuasive artic-
ulation of perspective that converted others to its point of view?
Were its concepts, terminology, or methods taken up by others?
Did it set a standard or define a model that others chose to
follow?
A second broad criterion of significance, overlapping with the
first, was the generation of creative novelty. Did a text introduce
new concepts, terminology, points of view, methods, or appli-
cations? Was it the first to report empirical discoveries? Did it
synthesize available material in new ways (e.g., bringing disparate
ideas or observations together for the first time in one place,
defining or systematizing a new area or discipline)? Did it antic-
ipate later developments (even if, in its day, these anticipations
may have been ignored or born implications not fully understood
even by the authors themselves)?
Introduction xi
The essays in this volume document instances of all of these

modes of significance. Those exerting a major influence on the
discipline as a whole, for example, included Bain, Spencer,
Galton, Wundt, and James. Bain gave psychology a balanced
sensori-motor associationism and a new physiological point of
view. Spencer’s evolutionary thinking helped transform
psychology’s conception of the nature and function of
consciousness, animal and child mind, and even the functional
organization of the brain. Galton taught psychology the impor-
tance of individual variability and statistical thinking. Despite the
extent of his own misgivings with regard to the applicability of
experiment, Wundt made laboratory experimentation the sine
qua non for scientific methodology in psychology; and James
revolutionized the field with the breadth and vigor of his overall
conception.
Prominent among those whose work exerted an especially
important influence on particular individuals were Taine, Mach,
Romanes, and Baldwin. Taine helped define a distinctively
French approach to psychology whose influence was apparent in
the work of Ribot, Binet, and Janet among others. Mach’s
phenomenalism provided Külpe and Titchener with the key to
classifying psychology within the natural sciences. In articulating
a broad theory of mental evolution, Romanes influenced both
Morgan’s conception of comparative and Baldwin’s view of
developmental psychology; and Baldwin’s biosocial theory of
intelligence helped shape the symbolic interactionism of Mead,
the social developmental perspective of Vygotsky, and the genetic
epistemology of Piaget.
Although early psychological science did not, for the most
part, exert much of an influence on the broader society, there
were a few important exceptions. Bernheim’s suggestive thera-
peutics spread techniques of scientific psychotherapy throughout
Europe and North America. Writing about his celebrated case
of multiple personality, Prince helped raise public awareness of
the importance of understanding exceptional mental states.
Münsterberg and Scott brought the principles of psychology to
the marketplace; and Thorndike took them into the schoolroom.
Controversy was common in the early years of scientific
psychology. Three of the most interesting controversies,
especially for the light they shed on the way in which psycho-
logical thinking was shaped during the period, involved Galton,
xii Classics in Psychology, 1855–1914: Historical Essays
Romanes, and Külpe respectively. Galton’s strong position on

the heritability of intelligence was opposed by those, like
Candolle, who found the source of human intellectual variability
in factors of nurture rather than nature. Romanes’s fervent
belief in mental evolution and the continuity of human and
animal mind was opposed by many who wished to preserve
some shred of human uniqueness in the face of evolutionary
thinking; and Külpe’s reductionistic, sensationalistic view of
psychology as a natural science provoked Wundt to write a
countertext in opposition to that of his former student.
Notable among those who mounted especially persuasive
arguments for particular viewpoints were Maudsley, who wrote
effectively of the value of a psychosomatic perspective,
Helmholtz, who argued the case for empiricism against nativism,
and Titchener, whose writings defined the very meaning of struc-
turalism for early scientific psychology. Concepts that gained
wide currency during this period included Carpenter’s “uncon-
scious cerebration,” Galton’s “nature/nurture,” Lotze’s “local
signs,” Janet’s “subconscious,” and Thorndike’s “effect”; and,
among those who set a standard for later work, Fechner,
Helmholtz, Ferrier, and Ebbinghaus provided models of
systematic, quantitative research, and Ribot gave psychology
what would become the received view of its own history.
In addition to the concepts, theories, and methods already
mentioned, there were others that could lay claim to relative
novelty. Among these were Taine’s theory of hallucination,
Galton’s questionnaire method, Jackson’s theory of the functional
architecture of brain systems, Lewes’s argument against reduc-
tionism, Ebbinghaus’s memory methods, Baldwin’s theory of
social adaptation, and James’s theories of emotion, self and
“stream of thought.” Empirical discoveries of particular impor-
tance included Fechner’s psychophysical law, Ferrier’s local-
ization of olfactory and auditory cortex, Morgan’s identification
of instinctive and acquired behaviors in neonatal birds,
Hobhouse’s experimental observation of insightful problem
solution in higher animals, and Pfungst’s discovery of the “Clever
Hans” effect.
Those who brought previously disparate material together in
new syntheses or systematized material for the first time included
Höffding and Ladd, both of whom published extremely influ-
ential textbooks of the new scientific psychology, Schulze, who
Introduction xiii
presented the first fully illustrated text on the use of early psycho-
logical apparatus, Forel, who provided the first compendium of
information on insects’ sensory structures and functions, and
Thorndike, who compiled psychology’s first statistical handbook.
Huey’s synthetic review of the reading literature established the
psychology of reading as a subfield in its own right. McDougall
published the first comprehensive textbook of social psychology
written from a psychological rather than a sociological point of
view. Washburn put together the first systematic handbook of
comparative psychology; and Claparède offered the first extensive
review of the new psychological science of the child.
Finally, as might be expected, the early scientific literature in
psychology was replete with anticipations of later, more modern
concepts. Before James, for example, Höffding spoke of
consciousness as a “stream.” Before Thorndike, Bain articulated
a law of effect; before Piaget, Hobhouse laid out a four stage
theory of the development of intellectual adaptation. And Taine’s
discussion of the role of attention in memory and Tuckey’s
analysis of factors important in psychotherapeutic success would
strike the ears of any modern psychologist as familiar.
But why should we care? Does “significance” make a
difference or is this just an exercise in whiggish history? A
proper answer to this question would require a treatise in itself.
Why does every school child in England know the date of the
Battle of Hastings and every child in America the date of
Columbus’s “discovery” of the new world? Why do psycholo-
gists care that Wundt founded the first laboratory at Leipzig in
1879 (a somewhat debatable fact in itself) or refer to John B.
Watson as the father of behaviorism (and even more debatable
fact)?
One answer is that there is something psychologically
compelling about the use of significant events to parse time in the
narrative of history. One cannot imagine writing a history of
psychology focused entirely on the mundane: the ordinary study,
the routine publication, the minor theoretical idea, the figures that
no one remembers. Most of what takes place in the development
of a field is “normal science” of just this sort and there is no
doubt whatsoever that it is more important in the growth of the
discipline than we suspect (indeed, it is almost surely a major
factor in both the personal and social development and accep-
tance of the more “significant” contributions); but history is a
xiv Classics in Psychology, 1855–1914: Historical Essays
story and it would be difficult to make routine science into a

gripping story.
A second answer is that history is about change and certain
events are more actively involved in the production of change
than others. These events are of just the sort that we label as
“significant.” Psychology was a different field after Bain,
Spencer, and James. Our understanding of perception, cortical
localization of function, memory, and the dynamics of the
subconscious was altered by the work of Helmholtz, Ferrier,
Ebbinghaus, and Janet respectively; and psychological method
was forever changed by Fechner, Galton, and Wundt. If a goal
of studying history is to increase our understanding of sources
and directions of change, the analysis of significant contributions
will be of value. Hopefully these introductory essays will serve
as a starting point for those who wish to pursue this effort.
HISTORICAL ESSAYS
Alexander Bain: The Senses and the Intellect (1855)
The publication of Alexander Bain’s The Senses and the Intellect1

is widely considered to mark the advent of modern psychology.
Together with its companion volume, The Emotions and the
Will,2 The Senses and the Intellect served for more than 30 years
as the leading English language compendium of the discipline.
Until superseded at the end of the 19th century,3 Bain’s texts
were widely read by students and heavily cited by psychologists.
Much that is taken for granted in modern psychology had its point
of origin in these two great treatises.
Bain’s achievement was to combine a thoroughgoing and
consistent associationism with an exhaustive taxonomic catalogue
of the facts of everyday human experience and action (from
coughing and sneezing to artistic creation and scientific discovery)
and a detailed and up to date account of the physiology of
sensation and movement. Heavily focused on the nature and
workings of a disembodied intellect, psychological analysis before
Bain had been curiously out of touch with the realities of both
psychological and corporeal life. After Bain, no serious writer on
psychology could afford to ignore either the world of everyday
1
Bain’s dates are 1818–1903; for biographical information on Bain, see Bain,
A. (1904). Autobiography. London: Longmans, Green. The work under
discussion here was first published as Bain, A. (1855). The Senses and the
Intellect. London: John W. Parker and Son.
2
Bain, A. (1859). The Emotions and the Will. London: John W. Parker and
Son.
3
The most important texts appearing during this period were: Ladd, G.T.
(1887). Elements of Physiological Psychology. A Treatise of the Activities and
Nature of the Mind from the Physical and Experimental Point of View. New
York: Scribner’s; Höffding, H. (1891). Outlines of Psychology. London
Macmillan; Sully, J. (1892). The Human Mind. A Text-Book of Psychology.
London: Longmans, Green; Stout, G.F. (1899). A Manual of Psychology.
London: University Correspondence College Press; and, of course, James, W.
(1890). The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt.
1
2 Classics in Psychology, 1855–1914: Historical Essays
experience and action or the physiological concomitants of

psychological process.
The central message of The Senses and the Intellect was that the
traditional subject matter of psychology could be understood
with reference to the laws of association and that these laws were
reflected in both physiological and psychological processes. To
set up this argument, Bain divided his book into three large
sections. An introductory section consisted of a short chapter on
the definition of mind and a much longer chapter on the nervous
system. A second section focused on movement, sensation, the
appetites, and instinct; and a final section, taking up nearly half
the book, dealt with intellect.
The first section is justly renowned for its inclusion of a chapter
on the nervous system. This established a pattern that has been
adopted by the vast majority of textbook writers following Bain.
It is less well known for its definition of mind; but there is material
of considerable interest here. “Mind, according to my conception
of it,” Bain wrote, “possesses three attributes, or capacities. 1. It
has Feeling, in which term I include what is commonly called
Sensation and Emotion. 2. It can Act according to Feeling. 3 It
can Think.”4
Feeling, for Bain, was what has more often been termed
“consciousness,” ostensively defined as “the warmth felt in
sunshine, the fragrance of flowers, the sweetness of honey, the
bleating of cattle, the beauty of a landscape…”5 “Action
according to feeling” (or what Bain called “mental action”)
consisted of operations such as “eating, drinking, running. flying,
sowing, reaping, building, destroying;”6 and for this category
Bain proposed to use the term “volition.” And thought involved
discrimination and active choice, association of means with ends
“so as to dictate intermediate actions,”7 and, in higher minds, the
storing up, reviving, and combining of impressions.
At first glance, this would appear to be the traditional tripartite
division of mind into intellect, feeling, and will then current
among continental philosophers and popularized in England by
4
Bain (1855), op. cit., p. 1.
5
Ibid., p. 2.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid., p.5
The Senses and the Intellect 3
Sir William Hamilton. Paradoxically, Bain seems to have accepted

this view himself.8 But by broadening the category of feeling
beyond pleasure/pain and emotion to include sensation (which
had traditionally been classified under intellect), by defining
volition as action directed by feeling (i.e., by consciousness), and
by giving intellect as well as feeling a function in the determination
of action, Bain stood the traditional tripartite theory on its head.
Despite his use of the old terminology, his definition of mind
introduced a new classification scheme into psychology: mind as
consciousness, thought, and action.
In the second section of the book, Bain made his most famous
contribution to the revolution in thinking that became modern
psychology. Here he separated movement from feelings of
movement and, on the basis of numerous examples of the
spontaneity of movement, argued that action was independent of
and prior to sensation, available to enter as a unique term into
associational complexes with feeling. “Movement,” he argued,
“precedes sensation, and is at the outset independent of any
stimulus from without…action is a more intimate and inseparable
property of our constitution than any of our sensations, and in
fact enters as a component part into every one of the senses…”9
Bain even tackled the critical problem of the mechanism by
which associations between movement and feeling were acquired.
In psychology’s first clear statement of what later came to be
called the Law of Effect, Bain described the acquisition of specific
associations between spontaneous movement and feeling in terms
of the pleasure and pain consequent upon the movement. “There
is,” he wrote, “a process of acquirement in the establishing of
those links of feeling and action that volition implies…If, at the
moment of some acute pain, there should accidentally occur a
spontaneous movement, and if that movement sensibly alleviates
the pain…the movement…will be sustained through this influence
of the painful emotion.”10 This was a novel addition to the
doctrine of association. For the first time, there was explicit
recognition that the outcome of an action could influence
associative strength.
8
Ibid., p. 7.
9
Ibid., p. 67.
10
Ibid., p. 293–4.
In the last section of the book, Bain focused on intellect and on

the nature of intelligence as an associative mechanism for
governing the acquisition of adaptive action. After exhaustive
discussion of the Laws of Contiguity and Similarity, both couched
in terms of association between Action, Feeling, and Thought, and
an analysis of Compound Associations (multiple links established
through contiguity, similarity, or both), Bain turned to the nature
and role of “constructive” association. Here, in articulating the
concept of “trial and error,” he made still another of his famous
contributions.
For Bain, constructive association involved the creation of “new
combinations…out of elements already in the possession of the
mind.”11 The effects of constructive association were to be seen
not only in great works of mathematical, artistic, and literary
creativity, but in the everyday generativity of language. How, he
asked, do we make use of old verbal forms to construct new
meanings? His answer was that this occurs through a process of
production and selection, trial and error: “When there is not a
sufficiency of [verbal] forms within reach of the present recol-
lection,” he wrote, “the process of intellectual recovery must be
plied to bring up others, until the desired combination is attained.
A voluntary effort is quite equal to the task of cutting down and
making up, choosing and rejecting…; the feeling that possesses the
mind of the end to be served, is the criterion to judge by, and when
this is satisfied the volition ceases…In all difficult operations, for
purposes or ends, the rule of trial and error is the grand and final
resort.”12
Bain’s text brought about a revolution in psychology. By
providing a thorough and systematic collation and taxonomy of
psychological data, he helped move the field along the road from
metaphysical speculation to observational science. By demon-
strating the heuristic relevance of anatomical and physiological
data to explanation in psychology, he contributed to the devel-
opment of a physiological orientation that was to mark the
emergence of scientific psychology. 13 And by introducing
11
Ibid., p. 572.
12
Ibid., p. 575.
13
For a discussion of the likelihood of Wilhelm Wundt’s profiting from a reading
of Bain, see Diamond, S. (1974). The Greatness of Alexander Bain.
Unpublished invited address, Sixth Annual Meeting of Cheiron, University of
New Hampshire.
The Senses and the Intellect 5
movement into psychology as a category of analysis in its own

right and emphasizing the role of consciousness in the direction
of movement, Bain paved the way for the later functionalist
psychology of adaptive mind and behavior.
Herbert Spencer: The Principles of Psychology (1855)
In 1855, the same year in which Bain inaugurated modern

psychology with the publication of The Senses and the Intellect,14
another work appeared in England that was even more revolu-
tionary in conception than that of Bain. This was Herbert
Spencer’s The Principles of Psychology.15 Although Bain and
Spencer shared a fundamental faith in the explanatory power of
the principle of association, a concern with the relationship of
mental to biological phenomena, and a strong interest in the
operations of thought, the two works could hardly have been
more different.
Where Bain was exhaustive in his review of the relevant scien-
tific and philosophical literature, neither research nor prior philo-
sophical analyses contributed very much to Spencer’s thinking.16
His ideas were derived largely from his own contemplation and
conversations with others.17 Where Bain grounded his treatment
of psychological phenomena in the realities of everyday human
experience and action, Spencer’s analyses were often so abstract
as to be nearly incomprehensible.
More importantly, Bain drew sharp and principled distinctions
between thought, feeling, and will, while Spencer argued for
continuity between these processes. And while Bain anchored his
account of mind whenever possible on principles of nervous
physiology, Spencer turned not to physiology but to general
biology for his inspiration, reformulating many of the traditional
problems of psychology in terms of a dynamic, evolutionary point
14
Bain, A. (1855). The Senses and the Intellect. London: John W. Parker and Son.
15
Spencer’s dates are 1820–1903; for biographical information on Spencer, see
Spencer, H. (1904). An Autobiography (2 vols.). New York: D. Appleton; see
also Duncan, D. (1908). Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (2 vols.). London:
Methuen; and Peel, J.D.Y. (1971). Herbert Spencer. The Evolution of a
Sociologist. New York: Basic Books. The work under discussion here was first
published as Spencer, H. (1855). The Principles of Psychology. London:
Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans; a second edition was published in two
volumes in 1870–2, a third edition in 1880 and a fourth edition in 1899.
16
There were, of course, exceptions to this as, for example, in Spencer’s discussion
of the grounds for realism in Spencer, H. (1853). The universal postulate.
Westminster Review, n.s. 3, 513–50, much of which was incorporated into the
Principles.
17
Duncan, op. cit.
The Principles of Psychology 7
of view built around principles of adaptation, development, and

continuity.
Adaptation, for Spencer, was the process by which an
organism’s internal bodily and mental organization comes into
progressively greater coordination with the organization of the
environment. “All those activities, bodily and mental, which
constitute our ordinary idea of life,” he wrote, “… (as well as)
those processes of growth by which the organism is brought into
general fitness for these activities…(involve) the continuous
adjustment of internal relations to external relations.”18 Indeed,
for Spencer, all mental phenomena are adaptations, “incidents of
the correspondence between the organism and its environment.”19
Development was defined as a change from relative unity and
indivisibility to relative differentiation and complexity, or, as
Spencer liked to put it, from relative homogeneity to relative
heterogeneity. The more complex (differentiated and hierarchi-
cally integrated) the entity, in other words, the higher it’s level of
development.
The principle of continuity was Spencer’s way of emphasizing
the fact that the same basic processes of adaptation and devel-
opment can be found in life, mental or physical, at all levels of
organizational complexity. Life, in other words, exists at every
degree of correspondence to the environment; there are no radical
demarcations of function to separate one level of correspondence
from the next.
In working out his evolutionary point of view, Spencer drew on
his principles of adaptation, development, and continuity to
introduce into psychology new ways of thinking about cognition,
the relationship between mind and environment, and the
relationship between mind and brain. This was evident, among
others, in his emphasis on relational cognition and on change as
the constituent element of a relational consciousness, his devel-
opmental conception of variation in adaptive correspondence
between inner and outer relations, and his recognition that the
principle of continuity implied the existence of cortical local-
ization of function.
18
Spencer (1855), op. cit., pp. 374–5.
19
Ibid., p. 584.
For Spencer, the construction of relations lay at the heart of all

cognitive activity from the lowest to the highest levels of
complexity: perception (“the establishment of relations, and
groups of relations, among the primitive undecomposable states
of consciousness” 20 ); recognition (“classing of a present
impression with past impressions”21); classification (“recognition
of a particular object as one of a special group of objects”22); and
reasoning (“the establishment of a definite relation between two
definite relations”23). Construction of more complex systems of
inner relations, in other words, was the mechanism underlying the
organismic side of adaptation as the continuous adjustment of
inner to outer relations. A more developed organism, charac-
terized by a more complex relational organization, could adapt to
a more complex environment.
And the purest form of relationship was a simple state of
change, a primitive undecomposable state of consciousness. As
Spencer put it, “consciousness consists of changes combined in
special ways. Successive decompositions of the more complex
phenomena of intelligence into simpler ones…have at length
brought us down to the simplest; which we find to be nothing else
than a change in the state of consciousness. This is the ultimate
element out of which alone are built the most involved cogni-
tions…changes are the constituent elements of every
thought;…every intuition, every conception, every conclusion, is
made up of changes arranged in a particular manner, and is
decomposable into changes.”24
Just as there was development of inner relations, for Spencer,
so too was there development in adaptation itself, in the forms of
adaptive correspondence between inner and outer relations. At
the lowest level of complexity, there was simple sensibility (the
ability to react to change), at progressively higher levels of
complexity could be found first reflexes, then instincts, then
acquired adaptations (habits), and, ultimately, reasoning. Each
of these forms of adaptation represented a higher level of coordi-
nation between mind and environment.
20
Ibid., p. 285
21
Ibid., p. 184
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid., p. 170
24
Ibid., p. 322.
Finally, well before Broca and Fritsch and Hitzig had provided
an empirical basis for the localization of function in the
cerebrum,25 Spencer drew on his concepts of continuity and devel-
opment to argue for the necessity of functional localization. “No
physiologist who calmly considers the question in connection
with the general truths of his science,” he wrote, “can long resist
the conviction that different parts of the cerebrum subserve
different kinds of mental action. Localization of function is the
law of all organization whatever…every bundle of nerve-fibres
and every ganglion, has a special duty…Can it be, then, that in the
great hemispherical ganglia alone, this specialization of duty does
not hold?”26
It would be easy to underestimate Spencer’s influence on the
growth of modern psychology. He was an amateur intellectual
with no students and few avowed disciples. Although he
advocated for a biological view of mind and hence of psychology,
his own work was far more philosophical than scientific. Even in
the 19th century, Spencer could not have been an easy read; and,
in 1855, when the Principles was published, the widespread
acceptance of evolutionary thinking was still years away.
Yet Spencer’s Principles almost defines what it means for a
work to be seminal. It scattered innumerable intellectual seeds
that took root in the work of others. Although Spencer is rarely
if ever mentioned in connection with such developments, there is
no question but that contributions such as William James’s
concept of the “stream of consciousness” (consciousness not only
of substantives but of relations), James Mark Baldwin’s “circular
model” of adaptation (through the mutual adjustment of internal
structures of habit and external structures of the environment),
John Hughlings Jackson’s evolutionary conception of the nervous
system (with attendant possibilities of development and disso-
lution of hierarchical brain systems), and David Ferrier’s recog-
nition of continuity in principles of sensory-motor organization
from lower to higher levels of the brain (with consequent local-
25
Broca, P.P. (1861). Remarques sur le siége de la faculté du langage articulé,
suivies d’une observation d’aphémie (perte de la parole). Bulletins de la société
anatomique de Paris, année 36, 2ème serie, tome 6, 330–57; Fritsch, G. &
Hitzig, E. (1870). Über die elektrische Erregbarkeit des Grosshirns. Archiv für
Anatomie, Physiologie, und wissenschaftliche Medicin, 300–32.
26
Spencer (1855), op. cit., pp. 607–8.
ization of function) owed more than a little to Spencer’s contem-

plations and conversations.27
27
For James, see Perry, R.B. (1935). The Thought and Character of William
James (2 vols.). Boston: Little Brown (James, for example, taught his first
psychology course using Spencer’s Principles; for Baldwin, see the preface to
Baldwin, J.M. (1895). Mental Development in the Child and the Race.
Methods and Processes. New York: Macmillan; for Jackson and Ferrier, see
Young, R.M. (1970). Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century.
Cerebral Localization and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
The Emotions and the Will 11
Alexander Bain: The Emotions and the Will (1859)
The Emotions and the Will is the sequel to Alexander Bain’s

seminal text, The Senses and the Intellect.28 Like its predecessor,
it was for many years the most widely read English language
treatise on the topic. Also like its predecessor, it was thoroughly
associationistic in approach, taxonomic in form, and psychophys-
iological in content. Focusing especially on the latter two divisions
of his tripartite classification of mind into intellect, feeling
(including sensation and emotion), and will (including the link
between feeling and action), Bain presented a much broader
treatment of emotional and volitional phenomena than was
typical for the period. He also conceptualized “belief” in a novel
and influential fashion.
The first section of Bain’s book was devoted to the emotions.
It began with a seminal discussion of the nature of emotion that
not only stressed the importance of the muscular movements,
secretions, and other organic changes that accompany mental
states, but explicitly recognized the necessity of supplementing
introspection with the observation of expression in the study of
emotion. In his emphasis on emotional expression, Bain came
close to the view that would eventually become known as the
James-Lange theory of emotion. In the James-Lange theory, the
subjective character of emotion was held to be identical to the
experience of the bodily changes directly precipitated by an
emotion-producing event.29
Bain’s view, which was more moderate, was that emotional
expression enters as one, albeit a crucial, component of the
subjective experience of emotion. “The fundamental proposition,
respecting Emotion generally,” he wrote, “…(is that) the state of
Feeling, or the subjective consciousness which is known to each
person by his own experience, is associated with a diffusive action
28
Bain’s dates are 1818–1903; for biographical information on Bain, see Bain, A.
(1904). Autobiography. London: Longmans, Green. The work under
discussion here was first published as Bain, A. (1859). The Emotions and the
Will. London: John W. Parker and Son. The first volume in what Bain liked
to call his “Systematic Exposition of the Human Mind” (see Bain, op. cit., p.
iii) was Bain, A. (1855). The Senses and the Intellect. London: John W. Parker
and Son.
29
See, for example, James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology (Vol. 2). New
York: Henry Holt, p. 449.
over the system…a wave of nervous influence…(affecting) the

moving members. Some of these are more readily agitated than
others—for example, the features of the face; which therefore
constitute the principal medium of the expression of feeling. But
observation shows that all parts of the moving system are liable
to be affected by an emotional wave…The emotion of Fear, for
example, would not have its characteristic mental development if
the currents from the brain to the moving organs and viscera were
arrested. What we take merely as signs of the emotion are a part
of its own essential workings, in whose absence it would be
something entirely different.”30
Besides pointing to expression as a central feature of emotion,
Bain identified aspects of subjective experience such as pleasure,
pain, and excitement, differences among the “stimulants” to
emotion, and characteristic actions and consequences as features
that differentiate among emotions. On the basis of this featural
typology, he went on to treat the data on emotion according to
what he liked to call his Natural History Method. Nowhere in
his voluminous writings was his predilection for “botanizing”
clearer than in his taxonomy of the emotions into eleven broad
“families” further subdivided into “species.”
Among the more notable aspects of this discussion were Bain’s
treatment of the emotions of terror and intellect. The common
source of terror, he pointed out, is uncertainty: “Nothing more
readily dissolves the composure of the frame than the sense of the
unstable, or insecure…(such as) the giving way of the bodily
support…any breach of expectation is eminently discomposing.”
In this he anticipated later views typically associated with John B.
Watson (loss of support) and Donald B. Hebb (breach of expec-
tation). His description of the expression of terror, published
thirteen years before Darwin’s treatise on emotional expression,31
was remarkable in its detail. Terror, he wrote, “is seen in the stare
of the eyes, elevation of the eye-brows, and inflation of the
nostril—in the hair standing on end under the increased action of
the muscle of the scalp, and in the contraction or creeping of the
skin…a convulsive clench of the hand…the dropping of the
jaw…the loosening of the sphincters…loss of appetite…the
general convulsive tremor…the cold sweat and the pallor of the
skin…”
30
Bain (1859), op. cit., pp. 5, 9–10.
The Emotions and the Will 13
The emotions of intellect were those accompanying operations

of intelligence such as the contiguous train of associations, recog-
nition of similarity, discovery, or problem solution. Bain’s
treatment of these emotions is most often cited for his emphasis
on the pleasure associated with the first recognition of similarity
(i.e., analogical thinking) and the pain and intellectual revulsion
attendant upon exposure to contradiction. Bain even approached
the modern concept of “cognitive dissonance” in describing the
mind’s tendency to resolve contradiction by “abandonment of one
of the contraries, or…repudiation…of both…”32
After dealing with emotion, Bain turned to will. His theory of
will is perhaps best known, thanks largely to the criticism it
received from William James,33 for ascribing the springs of human
action exclusively to pleasure and to pain. Bain’s approach to will,
however, was far more important for the fact that it not only
conceived of volition in terms of the link between feeling and
action but gave explicit recognition to the circular mechanism by
which this link becomes established in experience. As Bain
described it: “An acute pain is a strong stimulant, under which
every action that we are predisposed to is made more intense. In
the course of these excited spontaneous discharges, a movement
happens that makes the pain to cease…at the beginning of
conscious life, a first coincidence of this nature amounts to very
little. But let the thing happen a second, third, or fourth time, and
important consequences will ensue…the mind is alive to the
coincidence of this with decreasing or vanished pain…”34 Both
Baldwin and Piaget later made fundamental use of this concept.35
31
Darwin, C. (1872). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal.
London: John Murray. Bain had, of course, ready access to Charles Bell’s classic
treatise on expression, Bell, C. (1806). Essays on the Anatomy of Expression
in Painting. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, which he cites; but his
descriptions of emotional expression go well beyond those of Bell. It would be
interesting to know whether he was familiar with the other major work on
emotional expression of the period, Piderit, Th. (1858). Grundsätze der Mimik
und Physiognomik. Braunschweig: Vieweg und Sohn.
32
Bain (1859), op. cit., p. 200, 205.
33
James, op. cit., pp. 549–55.
34
Bain (1859), op. cit., p. 352.
35
Methods and Processes. New York: Macmillan; Piaget, J. (1936). La Naissance
de l’intelligence chez l’enfant. Neuchatel: Delachaux & Niestlé.
Finally, The Emotions and the Will is also well known for
Bain’s statement regarding the nature of belief. “Belief,” he
wrote, “has no meaning, except in reference to our actions…the
primordial form of belief is expectation of some contingent future
about to follow on our action…action is the basis and ultimate
criterion of belief.”36 As has been amply documented, this
conception of belief served a pivotal role in Charles Sanders
Peirce’s formulation of pragmatism.37
36
Bain (1859), op. cit., pp. 569–70.
37
Fisch, M.H. (1954). Alexander Bain and the genealogy of pragmatism. Journal
of the History of Ideas, 15, 413–44.
Elemente der Psychophysik 15
Gustav Theodor Fechner: Elemente der Psychophysik (1860)
The emergence of laboratory psychology in the 19th century

required two types of innovation. One involved the development
of apparatus and methods for the control and systematic variation
of stimuli and the precise registration of response; the other
involved the creation of methods for the quantitative measurement
of mental processes. While early apparatus was the work of
many hands, the first methods, rationale, and systematic use of
mental measurement was essentially the contribution of one
person, Gustav Theodor Fechner.38
Although Fechner was originally trained as a physicist, the
basis of his interest in mental measurement was far more
metaphysical than scientific. Committed to panpsychism, the
notion that all nature is besouled (“beseelt”), and rejecting the
Cartesian dualism of mind and body, Fechner adopted a dual-
aspect monistic view of the relationship between the psychical and
the physical.39
Dual-aspect monism holds that mind and body are two aspects
of one and the same existent. Just as a curved line can be charac-
terized at every point by both concavity and convexity, all nature,
Fechner argued, can be as readily viewed from the psychical as
from the physical perspective. The psychical and the physical, in
other words, are the dual aspects under which nature appears in
experience.
Given nature’s two-sidedness, the question then arises as to the
functional relationship that exists between its psychical and
physical aspects. In addressing this question, Fechner worked out
the program of psychophysics. As he himself described it: “The
task did not at all originally present itself as one of finding a unit
of mental measurement; but rather as one of searching for a
functional relationship between the physical and the psychical that
would accurately express their general interdependence.”40
38
1801–87. For biographical information on Fechner, see Lasswitz, K. (1896).
Gustav Theodor Fechner. Stuttgart: Frommann.
39
The nature and development of Fechner’s rather unusual mind/body position
is nicely described in Woodward, W.R. (1972). Fechner’s panpsychism: A scien-
tific solution to the mind-body problem. Journal of the History of the
Behavioral Sciences, 8, 367–86.
40
Fechner, G.T. (1860). Elemente der Psychophysik. Leipzig: Breitkopf und
Härtel, 2, p. 559.
To achieve this goal, however, Fechner had to find a way to

measure the intensity of mental process; and this presented a very
significant problem. Unlike physical processes, which are external,
public, objective, and open to direct measurement, mental
processes are internal, private, subjective, and cannot be measured
directly. Somehow, an indirect method had to be developed.
According to Fechner’s own account, it was on the 22nd of
October 1850 that he arrived at an insight that would provide the
solution to this problem. Relative increase in mental intensity, he
realized, might be measured in terms of the relative increase in
physical energy required to bring it about. This insight, in effect,
defined the psychophysical program; and for the next ten years
Fechner devoted himself to developing measurement methods,
gathering data on the psychophysics of lifted weights, visual
brightnesses, and tactual and visual distances, and systematizing
the mathematical principles underlying his work. In 1860 he
published the results of his ten-year effort in one of experimental
psychology’s most original monographs, the Elemente der
Psychophysik.41
The Elemente consisted of two volumes. The first volume was
devoted to what Fechner called “outer psychophysics,” the study
of the functional relationship between increase in physical
stimulus magnitude and increase in sensation. Here he described
three probabilistic methods for the collection of psychophysical
data, marshaled a great deal of evidence in support of the
existence of a logarithmic relationship between the intensity of
sensation and the intensity of the stimulus, and spelled out the
basic assumptions of psychophysics.
As with any form of measurement, psychophysical measurement
requires the establishment of a zero point and a basic
measurement unit. To define a zero point, Fechner borrowed the
concept of “limen” from Herbart.42 Below a certain stimulus
intensity, there is no sensation. This is the absolute limen or
threshold of sensation. At the limen, sensation is assumed to be
zero. In arriving at a unit of measurement, Fechner took the
41
Ibid. Only the first volume has been translated into English; it appeared as
Fechner, G.T. (1966). Elements of Psychophysics. Volume I. New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
42
Herbart, J.F. (1824–5). Psychologie als Wissenschaft, neu gegründet auf
Erfahrung, Metaphysik und Mathematik. Königsberg: Unzer.
Elemente der Psychophysik 17
notion of a “just noticeable difference” from Weber’s earlier

experiments on lifted weights.43 A just noticeable difference is the
minimum reportable difference in intensity of sensation brought
about by a minimal change in physical stimulus intensity.
Fechner’s own contribution was to recognize that the just
noticeable difference could be made the basic unit of measurement
of the intensity of sensation. Assuming that sensation is zero at
the limen and that all just noticeable differences are equal
regardless of where on the scale of physical intensity they fall, a
given sensation can be said to be some number of just noticeable
differences above zero or above or below another sensation. The
magnitude of sensation, in other words, can be scaled in relation
to the scale of physical intensity.
The goal of psychophysics was not, of course, the measurement
of specific sensations but the development of a general law for the
functional relationship between the psychical and the physical.
Starting from the empirically derived observation that a just
noticeable difference requires a relatively small change at low
levels of stimulus intensity and relatively larger changes as
intensity increases (or more specifically that the ratio of change in
intensity to level of intensity is a constant for any given just
noticeable difference) and with the help of a few additional
assumptions including the assumption that the intensity of
sensation is zero at the limen, Fechner derived the law that bears
his name, viz., that the intensity of sensation equals a constant
times the logarithm of the intensity of the stimulus. This was
“outer psychophysics.”
In the second volume of the Elemente, Fechner went on to
address “inner psychophysics,” the nature of the functional
relationship between the intensity of sensation and the magnitude
of nervous activity in the brain. In this analysis, of course, he was
seriously restricted by the inaccessibility of nervous process and
the relatively undeveloped state of brain science; but true to his
metaphysic, he concluded that the relationship between physical
brain process and psychical sensation must, like that between
physical stimulus and psychical sensation, be logarithmic in form.
In developing psychophysics, Fechner had succeeded, at least to
his own satisfaction, in specifying the functional relationship
43
Weber, E.H. (1834). De pulsu, resorptione, auditu et tactu. Annotationes
anatomicae et physiologicae. Lipsiae: Koehler.
between the intensity of sensation, the psychophysical unity

viewed from the mental side, and the intensity of the stimulus, the
psychophysical unity viewed from the material side. In the course
of pursuing this effort, however, he had incidentally introduced
mental measurement into psychology, recognized the inherently
probabilistic nature of that measurement in the development of
his three measurement methods, and carried out psychology’s
first extensive, fully programmatic experimental research effort.
It is perhaps little wonder, therefore, that historians have been
known to date the birth of scientific psychology from the
appearance of Fechner’s Elemente.44
44
See, for example, Boring, E.G. (1950). A History of Experimental Psychology
(2nd ed.). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, p. 275.
Hereditary Genius 19
Francis Galton: Hereditary Genius (1869)
Around the middle of the 19th century, two publications of great

importance provided Francis Galton45 with the motivation to
pursue a line of research that led to the appearance of his most
famous book, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and
Consequences. The first of these was Downes’ translation of
Adolphe Quetelet’s Letters on the Theory of Probabilities.46 From
Quetelet, Galton learned of the Laplace-Gauss distribution or, as
it is often called, the “normal curve of variation from an average”
and of the fact (at least as claimed by Quetelet) that physical
characteristics of human beings such as height and chest size are
normally distributed.
The second was Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.47
Darwin’s claim that evolution takes place through natural
selection operating on variation in characteristics influencing the
probability of survival (and hence procreation) led to Galton’s
developing a passionate interest in human variability. While this
interest extended to human variation in all of its forms, Galton
was particularly intrigued by individual differences in mental
traits and most especially by variation in mental ability or, as he
called it, “genius”.
In the 1860s Galton set out to examine the extent to which
genius is hereditary. This research led in 1869 to the publication
of Hereditary Genius, the aim of which was “to show…that a
man’s natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly
the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the
whole organic world.”48
45
1822–1911. For biographical information on Galton, see Galton, F. (1908).
Memories of My Life. London: Methuen; Pearson, K. (1914–30). The Life,
Letters and Labours of Francis Galton (3 vols. in 4). Cambridge: At the
University Press; Forrest, D. W. (1974). Francis Galton: The Life and Work
of a Victorian Genius. New York: Taplinger; and Fancher, R. E. (1979).
Pioneers of Psychology (Chapter 7: The measurement of mind: Francis Galton
and the psychology of individual differences). New York: Norton, pp. 250–94.
46
Quetelet, A. (1849). Letters Addressed to H.R.H. the Grand Duke of Saxe
Coburg and Gotha, on the Theory of Probabilities, as Applied to the Moral and
Political Sciences. London: Layton.
47
Darwin, C. (1859). On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,
or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John
Murray.
48
Galton, F. (1869). Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and
Consequences. London: Macmillan, p. 1.
In pursuing this analysis, Galton’s first problem was to develop

a method for assessing high levels of mental ability. The approach
that he took was to assume that mental ability is closely correlated
with eminence (reputation) in a given profession. As he described
it, “I feel convinced that no man can achieve a very high
reputation without being gifted with very high abilities; and…few
who possess these very high abilities can fail in achieving
eminence.”49
Galton then attempted to marshal evidence in favor of the
proposition that mental ability is inherited. First he examined the
shape of the distribution of mental ability. Analyzing the scores
of 200 candidates who had taken the Mathematical Tripos at
Cambridge as well as those that had been obtained by 72 candi-
dates for civil service positions, Galton showed that these scores
(and hence presumably the psychological characteristics under-
lying the scores) were distributed in much the same way as inher-
itable physical traits, that is to say, normally.
While this similarity in the shape of the distribution of mental
and physical characteristics did not in itself imply the inheri-
tability of mental traits, it was consistent with Galton’s claim.
More importantly, it also allowed him to estimate the percentages
of men that would be expected at each of a series of “levels” of
mental ability ranging from the highest to the lowest. This, in
turn, provided a standard against which the hypothesis of inher-
itability of mental ability could be evaluated.
The evaluation of this hypothesis was at the heart of Hereditary
Genius and the results of this analysis provided Galton with his
best evidence for the claim that mental abilities are inherited.
Since he had no way of measuring inheritability directly, Galton
decided to focus on the family backgrounds of those at the highest
levels of eminence and assess the extent to which eminence
appeared to run within their families. In successive chapters of
Hereditary Genius, he presented these data for judges, statesmen,
the aristocracy, commanders, literary men, men of science, poets,
musicians, painters, divines, and academics among others.
Measuring the frequencies with which eminence was to be
found among first (fathers, brothers, sons), second (grandfathers,
grandsons, uncles, nephews), and third degree relations (great-
grandfathers, great-grandsons, great-uncles, great-nephews, first
49
Ibid., p. 49.
Hereditary Genius 21
cousins) of members of the target sample, Galton compared these

frequencies to those that would be expected from the frequency
of eminence within the general population. Finding the relations
of eminent men to exhibit a much greater frequency of eminence
than expected on this basis and noting that the frequency of
eminence declined from first to second to third degree relations,
Galton concluded that it could only be because mental ability runs
in families.
For the period this was an extremely provocative conclusion.
More importantly, however, it was a conclusion bolstered by
data and statistical analysis (especially the comparison of an
obtained sample distribution to that expected on the basis of
known population characteristics). In this regard it was ground-
breaking. As Galton himself described it: “The theory of hered-
itary genius…has been advocated by a few writers in past as in
modern times. But I may claim to be the first to treat the subject
in a statistical manner, to arrive at numerical results, and to
introduce the ‘law of deviation from an average’ into discussions
of heredity.”50 The publication of Hereditary Genius thus marked
the birth of quantitative differential psychology.
50
Ibid., p. vi.
Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz: On the Sensations

of Tone (1870; English 1875)
The earliest systematic applications of experimental laboratory

procedure to problems of sensation and perception appeared in
the first half of the 19th century. In 1825, Jan Evangelista
Purkyne51 published groundbreaking explorations of the effect on
visual experience of experimental manipulations that included
application to the eyeball of pressure and electric current, alter-
ation in point of light exposure relative to the fovea, degree of eye
movement, and variation in the intensity of light.52 Nine years
later, in 1834, Ernst Heinrich Weber53 completed an extensive
investigation of the sensory phenomenology of tactile experience
that laid the groundwork for Fechner’s eventual development of
psychophysics.54
By the 1860s, research on sensation and perception had come
into its own as concepts and techniques from a number of
different disciplines were brought together to create the first
systematic science of sensory physiology and psychology. Of all
those who contributed to this development, none was more
important than Hermann Helmholtz55 and no work more broadly
influential than his On the Sensation of Tone as a Physiological
Basis for a Theory of Music.56
51
1787–1869. For biographical information on Purkyne, see Kruta, V. (1962).
J.E. Purkyne – A creative scientist. In Jan Evangelista Purkyne. Prague: State
Medical Publishing House, pp. 13–116.
52
Purkyne, J.E. (1825). Beobachtungen und Versuche zur Physiologie der Sinne.
Berlin: G. Reimer.
53
1795–1878. Biographical information on Weber is not readily available. For
a short biographical sketch compiled from various sources, see Weber, E.H.
(1978). The Sense of Touch. Edited by H.E. Ross & D.J. Murray. London:
Academic Press, pp. 1–4.
54
Weber, E.H. (1834). De pulsu, resorptione, auditu et tactu. Annotationes
anatomicae et physiologicae. Lipsiae: C.F. Koehler; Fechner, G.T. (1860).
Elemente der Psychophysik. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel; for a discussion of
the content and significance of Fechner’s Psychophysik, see the essay on Fechner
in this volume.
55
1821–94. For biographical information on Helmholtz, see Koenigsberger, L.
(1906): Hermann von Helmholtz. Translated by F.A. Welby. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
56
First published as Helmholtz, H.L.F.v. (1863). Die Lehre von dem
Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik.
Braunschweig: F. Vieweg; the 3rd edition appeared as Helmholtz, H.L.F.v.
On the Sensations of Tone 23
The characteristic feature of Helmholtz’s approach to the study

of sensory processes was his exceptional ability to unite elements
from different intellectual disciplines into an integrated, consistent,
and innovative structure that served to explain and relate
numerous previously unexplained or poorly explained
phenomena. In the Sensation of Tone, Helmholtz brought
together mathematical concepts, physical theory, anatomical and
physiological studies of the ear, the psychology of auditory
experience, epistemological analysis of the relation between
perception, sensation, nervous impulse, and the external world,
and the theory of music to address the nature and causes of
auditory phenomena such as tone quality, tonal discrimination,
combination tones, beats, consonance and dissonance, musical
keys and modes.
In the process, Helmholtz devised new instruments for the
generation of highly controlled stimuli, performed experiments
that were models of proper scientific method, and formulated
theories that were to remain influential for generations to come.
When he began his work, sound generating devices (e.g., the
siren) were few in number, poorly controlled, and not fully under-
stood. Helmholtz not only developed new instrumentation such
as his tuning-fork apparatus and the spherical resonator, he
integrated these and earlier instruments into an overall
hypothetico-deductive framework that related instrument to
theory and theory to phenomenon as mediated by instrumen-
tation.
Helmholtz’s experimental investigations of combination tones
and vowel harmonics, among other topics, produced results many
of which are still generally accepted by acousticians. And in the
Sensation of Tone, he articulated theories that became the basis
for much of the modern psychology of auditory sensation and
perception. These included his beat theory of consonance and
dissonance (i.e., dissonance between two tones is due to the beats
(1870). Die Lehre von dem Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für
die Theorie der Musik. Braunschweig: F. Vieweg; the first English edition was
translated from the 3rd German edition with additional notes and an additional
appendix by A.J. Ellis as Helmholtz, H.L.F.v. (1875). On the Sensations of
Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music. London: Longmans,
Green. It must, of course, be noted that Helmholtz’s other major work –
Helmholtz, H.L.F.v. (1867). Handbuch der physiologischen Optik. Leipzig:
Leopold Voss – was also of great influence, achieving for the physiology and
psychology of vision what the Sensation of Tone achieved for audition.
of their higher harmonics), his theory of tone and vowel quality

as dependent on the position of higher harmonics (i.e., on the
resonance characteristics of the sound production device) and
his resonance theory of hearing (i.e., different resonators in the ear
decompose complex sound waves in a Fourier-like fashion).
Indeed, it is in Sensation of Tone that Helmholtz first developed
the resonance hypothesis into a full-fledged theory. Noting that
the strings on a piano can be put into sympathetic resonance by
a complex sound and comparing the inner ear as a resonating
system to a set of piano strings, Helmholtz concluded that “there
must be different parts of the ear which are set in vibration by
tones of different pitch and which receive the sensation of these
tones.”57 Combining the concept of resonance with the recog-
nition that a complex sound can be decomposed into a series of
harmonics, Helmholtz arrived at a theory of hearing that he
believed could explain all that was then known about the
perception of tone qualities and discrimination of pitch.
Finally, the Sensation of Tone provided one of the clearest,
albeit briefest, descriptions of the empiricist epistemological
framework within which Helmholtz had constructed his
approach to sensation and perception. Starting from the recog-
nition that the specific properties of nerve energies mediate
between the perceiver and the world perceived58 and inferring
from this that sensations cannot therefore provide direct access to
objects and events but only serve the mind as signs of reality,
Helmholtz distinguished three stages in the perceptual process,
each with its own distinctive methodological approach.
“First,” he wrote, “we have to discover how the agent reaches
the nerves to be excited, as…sound for the ear. This may be called
the physical part of the corresponding physiological investigation.
Secondly we have to investigate the various modes in which the
nerves themselves are excited, giving rise to their various sensa-
tions, and finally the laws according to which these sensations
result in mental images of determinate external objects, that is, in
perceptions. Hence we have secondly a specially physiological
57
Helmholtz (1875), op. cit., p. 215.
58
This was based on Johannes Müller’s doctrine of specific nerve energies, see, for
example, Müller, J. (1834–40). Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen für
Vorlesungen. Coblenz: J. Hölscher; translated into English as Müller, J.
(1838–42). Elements of Physiology. London: Taylor and Walton.
On the Sensations of Tone 25
investigation for sensations, and thirdly, a specially psychological

investigation for perceptions.”59
Although Helmholtz’s epistemological approach has come
under attack in recent years, most notably in the work of James
J. Gibson60 and his students, it would not be too strong to say that
it has been and continues to be scientific psychology’s standard
epistemological perspective.
59
Helmholtz (1875), op. cit., p. 5
60
Gibson, J.J. (1966). The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Henry Maudsley: Body and Mind (1870)
The problem of the relationship of mind to body and body to

mind has a long and distinguished history in philosophy and
psychology. First formulated by Descartes in 1641, in his
Meditationes de prima philosophia,61 the mind/body problem
bedeviled 17th and 18th century thinkers from Spinoza and
Leibniz to La Mettrie and Cabanis.62
During the 19th century, one aspect of this problem,63 that of
the relationship between mind and brain, grew especially pressing.
Interest in mind/brain relations during this period became so
great that it is difficult to find a systematic text written after 1870
that does not contain a discussion of this issue. To a large extent,
this reflected the convergence of two major developments:
progress in understanding the localization of cerebral function and
growing familiarity with the facts of functional neurosis. Evidence
for cortical localization of function—correlation between specific
mental processes and discrete regions of the brain—suggested a
clear dependence of mind on brain process.64 Data on functional
neuroses—radical alterations in the body brought about by
psychic trauma, mental suggestion, mesmeric trance and the like—
suggested a clear dependence of brain process on the mind.65
61
Des-Cartes, R. (1641). Meditationes de prima philosophiae, in qua
Deiexistentia et animae immo talitas demonstratur. Paris: Michaelem Soly.
62
Spinoza, B. (1677). Opera posthuma, quorum series post praefationem
exhibetur. Amsterdam: J. Rieuwert; Leibniz, G.W. (1695). Système nouveau
de la nature et de la communication des substances, aussi bien que de l’union
qu’il y a entre l’âme et le corps. Journal des Sçavans, 27 Juin, 294–300; et 4
Juillet, 301–6; La Mettrie, J. O. de. (1748). L’Homme machine. Leyde: Elie
Luzac, Fils; and Cabanis, P.J.G. (1802). Rapports du physique et du moral de
l’homme. Paris: Crapart, Caille et Ravier.
63
Note that there are really two related but distinguishable aspects of the
mind/body problem, one, which has been the traditional subject matter of
epistemology, has to do with the relationship between mind and the external
bodies of the material world, between thoughts and things; the second, which
is the aspect under discussion here, has to do with the relationship between mind
and brain as a material substance.
64
See, for example, Broca, P.P. (1861). Remarques sur le siége de la faculté du
langage articulé, suivies d’une observation d’aphémie (perte de la parole).
Bulletins de la société anatomique de Paris, année 36, 2ème serie, tome 6,
330–57.
65
See, for example, the work of Jean-Martin Charcot His research and that of
his students, published over a number of years, was summarized in: Charcot,
Body and Mind 27
In response to these developments, a variety of mind/body views

were espoused. These included interactionism (brain influences
mind, mind influences brain),66 epiphenomenalism (brain influ-
ences mind, but mind exerts no influence on brain), 6 7
psychophysical parallelism (neither mind nor brain influences the
other, but mind and brain run a parallel course),68 dual-aspect
theory (mind and brain are simply two different aspects of one and
the same psychophysical process),69 and idealist monism (what
appears, like brain, to be material substance is only a property of
mind).70
Several authors even devoted entire volumes to the topic of
mind and body. One of these, Henry Maudsley,71 championed a
mind/body view that might best be called “materialist function-
alism,” a view that is probably still the predominant position
among modern psychologists and psychiatrists. The essence of
this perspective is an unwavering belief in the functional depen-
dence of mind on body and brain. Mind is, in essence, a product
of bodily and brain process. A healthy mind depends on a healthy
brain in a healthy body. Disorders of body and brain will be
reflected in disorders of mind.
Maudsley’s defence of this thesis, Body and Mind, was
published in 1870.72 It consisted primarily of the three Gulstonian
J-M. (1872–73). Leçons sur les maladies du système nerveux faites à la
Salpêtrière. Paris: Adrien Delahaye.
66
Carpenter, W.B. (1874). Principles of Mental Physiology, with their
Applications to the Training and Discipline of the Mind, and the Study of Its
Morbid Conditions. London: Henry S. King; for a discussion of Carpenter’s
interactionism, see the essay on Carpenter in this volume.
67
Hodgson, S.H. (1870). The Theory of Practice. An Ethical Enquiry in Two
Books. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer.
68
Bain, A. (1855). The Senses and the Intellect. London: John W. Parker and Son.
69
Lewes, G.H. (1877). The Physical Basis of Mind. With Illustrations. Being
the Second Series of Problems of Life and Mind. London: Trübner; for a
discussion of Lewes’s dual-aspect monism, see the essay on Lewes in this
volume.
70
Prince, M. (1885). The Nature of Mind and Human Automatism. Philadelphia:
J.B. Lippincott.
71
1835–1918. For biographical information on Maudsley, see Collie, M. (1988).
Henry Maudsley: Victorian Psychiatrist. A Bibliographical Study. Winchester:
St. Paul’s Bibliographies.
72
Maudsley, H. (1870). Body and Mind: An Inquiry into their Connection and
Mutual Influence, Specially in Reference to Mental Disorders. London:
Macmillan.
lectures that he had given earlier that year before the Royal
College of Physicians.73 In the first lecture, Maudsley began by
reiterating two points fundamental to his perspective. First, physi-
ology and pathology of mind are two branches of one science.
Study of the healthy mind helps to clarify the nature of morbid
phenomena and vice versa. Second, mind is a function of the
nervous system; nervous disorder underlies mental disorder. He
then devoted the remainder of this lecture to an analysis of the
physiology of normal mind defined not only in terms of higher
mental functions such as intelligence, will, and emotion but also
in terms of lower sensorimotor automatisms, the relationship
between higher and lower functions, and the relationship between
these mental functions and internal organs such as the heart,
liver, and genitals.
In the second and third lectures, Maudsley described aspects of
mental pathology designed to illustrate the dependence of insanity
on physical causes to be found in morbid states of the body.
Here he argued that “mental disorders are neither more nor less
than nervous diseases in which mental symptoms predominate,”74
emphasized hereditary constitutional factors (the “insane
temperament”75) in predisposing to disorder, and provided a
lengthy analysis of the particular effects of various internal organs
(“organic sympathies”76) on the specific characteristics of different
forms of insanity.
If there was one major point that emerged from the three
lectures taken as a whole, it was a view of mind not as a single
function but as a federation of functions dependent not only
upon processes at different levels of nervous organization but
even upon internal organs. Correlative to this view was a
conception of insanity as multiply determined, caused not only by
degeneration of higher nervous processes, but by disorders of
lower nervous function and even by morbid conditions of the
internal organs. For Maudsley, in short, the body was an organic
whole and healthy mental process was dependent upon the proper
functioning of that totality. In clearly and persuasively articu-
73
In an Appendix to this work, Maudsley also reprinted two earlier papers, one
on “the limits of philosophical inquiry,” one on “the theory of vitality.”
74
Maudsley, op. cit., p. 41.
75
Ibid., p. 64.
76
Ibid., p. 81.
Body and Mind 29
lating this view and emphasizing the relevance of pathological

phenomena for an understanding of normal mind and the
relevance of normal phenomena for an understanding of
pathology, Maudsley placed himself among the earliest propo-
nents of what eventually came to called the “psychosomatic”
perspective.
Hippolyte Adolphe Taine: On Intelligence (1870; English 1871)
Hippolyte Taine’s On Intelligence77 played much the same role in

relation to the emergence of modern psychology in France that
Alexander Bain’s Senses and Intellect had earlier played in
Britain.78 It was positivistic in orientation, analytic in method,
systematic in scope, and physiological in its foundations. It served
to turn French psychology away from metaphysics, in particular
that of Victor Cousin and his successors79, and toward science. It
was Taine who paved the way in French thought for the work of
men such as Théodule Ribot, Alfred Binet, and Pierre Janet.80
The book was divided into two parts. Part One contained
Taine’s psychology proper. It focused first on the analysis of
cognitions (names, general ideas, images, and sensations),
touching in the course of this analysis on topics such as the deter-
minants of memory and the nature of hallucination. It then
passed to a description of the physiology of the nervous system
and to the problem of mind and body, concluding with a
discussion of personal identity.
77
Taine’s dates are 1828–93; for biographical information on Taine, see Giraud,
V. (1901). Essai sur Taine, son oeuvre et son influence, d’après des documents
inédits, avec des extraits de quarante articles de Taine non recueillis dans ses
oeuvres (2. ed.). Paris: Hachette; Taine, H. (1902–8). Life and Letters of H.
Taine (3 vols.). Translated from the French. Westminster: Constable. The
work under discussion here was first published as: Taine, H. (1870). De l’intel-
ligence (2 vols.). Paris: Hachette; it was translated into English by T.D. Haye,
with revisions by the author, as Taine, H. (1871). On Intelligence. London:
L. Reeve.
78
Bain, A. (1855). The Senses and the Intellect. London: John W. Parker and Son;
for a discussion of the content and significance of Bain’s work, see essays on Bain
in this volume.
79
For a survey of the views of Cousin and his followers, see Lévy-Bruhl, L.
(1899). History of Modern Philosophy in France. Chicago: Open Court.
80
See, for example, Ribot, Th. (1881). Les Maladies de la mémoire. Paris:
Baillière; translated into English as Ribot, Th. (1882). Diseases of Memory: An
Essay in the Positive Psychology. New York: D. Appleton; Binet, A. (1886). La
Psychologie du raisonnement. Recherches expérimentales par l’hypnotisme.
Paris: Baillière; translated into English as Binet, A. (1899). The Psychology of
Reasoning. Based on Experimental Researches in Hypnotism. Chicago: Open
Court; and Janet, P. (1894). État mental des hystériques. Les Accidents
mentaux. Paris: Rueff; translated into English as part two of Janet, P. (1901).
The Mental State of Hystericals. A Study of Mental Stigmata and Mental
Accidents. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
On Intelligence 31
Part Two, primarily epistemological in orientation, “examined

the elements, formation, certitude, and range of the principal
kinds of our knowledge, from that of individual things to that of
general things, from the most special perceptions, previsions, and
recollections, up to the most universal judgments and axioms.”81
Elaborating on a mechanism for the differentiation of internal
from external experience (illusion and rectification),Taine gener-
alized this analysis to the explanation of our knowledge of
external bodies, minds, and general truths.
Although there is much in the second part of On Intelligence
that repays study, including a critical synthesis of inductivist and
constructivist ideas concerning the logic of understanding that led
Taine to a view of scientific explanation remarkably modern in
form, it is Part One that is of greatest interest to the historian of
psychology. Of particular importance for future directions taken
by French scientific psychology were Taine’s positivism, reductive
sensationalism, theory of hallucination, analysis of memory, and
recognition of the existence of unconscious mentality.
Taine’s positivism was evident from the outset. “I here intend
to examine…our cognitions, and nothing else. The words faculty,
capacity, power, which have played so great a part in psychology,
are only, as we shall see, convenient names by means of which we
put together, in distinct compartments, all facts of a distinct kind;
these names indicate a character common to all the facts under a
distinct heading; they do not indicate a mysterious and profound
essence, remaining constant and hidden under the flow of transient
facts….if I have mentioned faculties, it has been to show that in
themselves and as distinct entities, they do not exist.”82
His sensationalism, derived from a close reading of Condillac,83
was analytic in the extreme. “Our main business,” he wrote, “is
to know…(the) elements, how they arise, in what manner and
under what conditions they combine, and what are the constant
effects of combinations so produced.”84 Starting with the most
abstract cognitions, general ideas, Taine proceeded through a
systematic series of successive reductions yielding sensation as the
basic element from which all cognitions arise.
81
Taine (1871), op. cit., p. x.
82
Ibid., p. ix.
83
Condillac, E.B. de (1754). Traité des sensations. Londres, Paris: De Bure l’ainé.
84
Taine (1871), op. cit., p. ix–x.
First general ideas were reduced to names, “We do not perceive

qualities or the general characters of things; we only experience
in their presence…a distinct tendency, which…results…in a
certain name. We have, strictly speaking, no general ideas; we
have tendencies to name and names.”85 Names were then reduced
to past images that have passed through a gradual “series of
degradations, rubbings out, and loses, which strip by degrees the
complete and puissant image, till they leave us nothing but a
simple word.”86 The signification of the word derives from “its
long association with the experience and image of the
object…however briefly we retain the word, the image to which
it corresponds commences to form; the image accompanies the
word in a nascent state, and, though not actually formed, acts on
us as if it were.”87
Images, in turn, revive and replace sensations: “after a sensation
excited by the outer world, and not spontaneous, we find within
us a second event corresponding to it, which is spontaneous and
is not excited by the outer world, which resembles the sensation,
and is accompanied, though not so forcibly, with the same
emotions…and is followed by some, but not all, the same mental
conclusions.”88 And it is sensations that correspond to external
reality: “every normal sensation corresponds to some external fact
which it transcribes with greater or less approximation, and
whose internal substitute it is.”89
Taine’s theory of hallucination (also applied to the hypnagogic
state, dreams, and insanity) was articulated in the context of
accounting for our ability to distinguish between images and our
perceptions of the external world. The mechanism by which the
illusory reality of the image is rectified was the antagonistic
activity of a corrective sensation present during and conflicting
with the image. “The ordinary image,” Taine wrote, “…is not a
simple, but a double fact. It is a spontaneous consecutive
sensation, which, by conflicting with another sensation, primitive
and not spontaneous, undergoes lessening, restriction, and
correction. It comprises two momentary stages, a first in which
85
Ibid., p. 13.
86
Ibid., p. 3
87
Ibid., pp. 3–4.
88
Ibid., p. 36.
89
Ibid., pp. 149.
On Intelligence 33
it seems localized and external, and a second in which this exter-

nality and situation are lost.”90 Hallucinations were simply
images in which the second stage was lacking, either because the
contradictory sensation had been annulled or because it was too
feeble to mark internality.
In discussing memory, Taine anticipated modern analyses by
going beyond the traditional principles of association (repetition,
similarity, and contiguity) to emphasize the central role played by
the degree of attention to the original event. Describing examples
of memories that “reappear entire and intense, without having lost
a particle of their detail, or any degree of their force,”91 Taine
argued that we “may distinguish in them a common character.
The primitive impression has been accompanied by an extraor-
dinary degree of attention, either as being horrible or delightful,
or as being new, surprising, and out of proportion to the ordinary
run of our life…Whatever may be the kind of attention, voluntary
or involuntary, it always acts alike; the image of an object or event
is capable of revival, and of complete revival, in proportion to the
degree of attention with which we have considered the object or
event.”92
Finally, arguing from a dual aspect mind/body view asserting a
correspondence between mind and body as precise “as the
convexity and concavity of the same curve,”93 Taine recognized
the logical necessity of the existence of unconscious mental events
corresponding to nervous activities simpler than those resulting in
sensations. As he put it: “besides the mental events perceptible to
consciousness, the molecular movements of the nervous centres
also arouse mental events imperceptible to consciousness. These
are far more numerous than the others, and of the world which
makes up our being, we only perceive the highest points, the
lighted-up peaks of a continent whose lower levels remain in the
shade….latent images and ideas, which must take their turn of
preponderance and ascendancy in order to reach consciousness.”94
90
Ibid., p. 52.
91
Ibid., p. 78.
92
Ibid., p. 79.
93
Ibid., pp. 185–6; this metaphor was borrowed from Fechner, see the essay on
Fechner in this volume.
94
Ibid., pp. 180–1.
As is evident, Taine not only brought the available data in

psychology and physiology together and presented them in a
systematic and positivistic manner that appealed to those in search
of a scientific psychology, he contributed valuable analyses in his
own right. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, in drawing
as much upon the data of psychopathology and exceptional
mental states as upon his own experience and results from the
laboratory and in emphasizing the importance of unconscious
mental processes, Taine also brought the study of
psychopathology within the ambit of the new science as it emerged
in France; and in so doing, he helped impart to French psychology
its distinctive character.
Principles of Mental Physiology 35
William Benjamin Carpenter: Principles of Mental Physiology

(1874)
Scientific psychology has historical roots in both mental

philosophy and physiology. When it first appeared, it was even
commonly referred to as the “new physiological psychology.”
While this undoubtedly reflected the influence of Wilhelm Wundt’s
great compendium of the new science, the Grundzüge der physi-
ologischen Psychologie;95 Wundt was by no means the first to talk
in terms of a “physiological psychology.”96 Nor was he the first
to focus on the border between physiological and philosophical
analysis or to eschew (or in Wundt’s case postpone) purely
metaphysical for empirical analysis and observation.
In England, in the period between 1850 and 1875, a small
group of physicians developed what was, in effect, a school of
physiological psychology built around just these principles.97 The
primary assumptions of the group were that biology and medicine,
not metaphysics, would provide the necessary foundation for
psychology, that mind must be understood in its relationship to
nervous function, and that mind and body exist in mutual inter-
action. At the same time, however, there was also recognition that
mind and body are not identical and that mind plays an active,
determining role in human affairs.
The intellectual leader of this group was a physician/physiologist
by the name of William B. Carpenter.98 In 1852, Carpenter
incorporated a large section on physiological psychology into the
fourth edition of what was, at the time, the leading English
language text on human physiology.99 Rewritten, expanded, and
95
Wundt, W. (1874). Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie. Leipzig:
Wilhelm Engelmann; for a discussion of the content and significance of Wundt’s
work, see the essay on Wundt’s Grundzüge in this volume.
96
Although there may have been still earlier uses of this term, the earliest that I
have been able to identify is that of Chardel. C. (1831). Essai de psychologie
physiologique. Paris: Au Bureau de l’Encyclopédie Portative.
97
Included in this group were Benjamin Collins Brodie (1783–1862), William
Benjamin Carpenter (1813–85), Robert Dunn (1799–1877), Henry Holland
(1788–1873), Thomas Laycock (1812–76), John Daniel Morell (1816–91),
and Daniel Noble (1810–85).
98
1813–85. For biographical information on Carpenter, see Carpenter, J.E.
(1888). Memorial sketch. In W.B. Carpenter. Nature and Man. Essays
Scientific and Philosophical. London: Kegan Paul, Trench.
99
Carpenter, W.B. (1852). Principles of Human Physiology (4th edition).
London: Churchill.
published in 1874 as a separate volume entitled Principles of

Mental Physiology,100 Carpenter’s work provided the definitive
statement of the mid-19th century British “physiological
psychology” point of view. It was also the first English language
text of its type to employ systematic discussion of abnormal
mental phenomena in the service of furthering an understanding
of the nature of the mind and its relationship to physiological
mechanism.101
The basic premise of Carpenter’s analysis was that the mind is
composite in nature, consisting of both “unconscious cerebration”
and conscious process. By “unconscious cerebration,” Carpenter
meant the automatic, reflex activity of the cerebrum that yields
properly intellectual results (e.g., reasoning processes or even the
exercise of the imagination) without the processes themselves
being accessible to consciousness. Although Carpenter was antic-
ipated in this doctrine by Laycock among others,102 it was through
his clear and forceful articulation of this view in the Principles of
Mental Physiology103 and his use of the term “unconscious
cerebration” to physiologize the concept that the doctrine became
widely accepted.
Recognition of the composite nature of mind led Carpenter to
two other highly characteristic views, one having to do with the
nature of the causal determination of mental process, the other
with the nature of the mind/body relation. With regard to mental
causality, Carpenter argued that in terms of its unconscious,
automatic, reflex activity, mind was clearly determined by physical
circumstance. In its conscious activity, however, it was influenced
by the intervention of an active mental force of Will. Although
he recognized the inherent contradiction between these points of
100
Carpenter, W.B. (1874). Principles of Mental Physiology, with Their
Applications to the Training and Discipline of the Mind, and the Study of its
Morbid Conditions. London: Henry S. King.
101
Taine had done much the same thing in French, see essay on Taine in this
volume; Maudsley had also argued for the relevance of psychopathological
phenomena to general psychology but had yet to treat these phenomena
systematically in this regard, see essay on Maudsley in this volume.
102
Laycock, T. (1860). Mind and Brain; Or, The Correlations of Consciousness
and Organisation; with Their Applications to Philosophy, Zoology,
Physiology, Mental Pathology, and the Practice of Medicine. Edinburgh:
Sutherland and Knox.
103
Carpenter (1874), op. cit., Chapter 13, pp. 515–43.
Principles of Mental Physiology 37
view, he was unable to abandon either. As he put it: “It will, I

doubt not, be considered by many, that there is a palpable incon-
sistency between the two fundamental doctrines which are here
upheld;—that of the dependence of the Automatic activity of the
Mind upon conditions that bring it within the nexus of Physical
Causation; and that of the existence of an independent Power,
controlling and directing that activity, which we call Will. I can
only say that both are equally true to my own consciousness.”104
This same adherence to common sense observation at the
expense of logical coherence also characterized Carpenter’s
discussion of the relationship between mind and body. In
common with others in his group, he held a strict mind/body inter-
actionism. Indeed, his discussion of interactionism is possibly the
clearest and most unambiguous in all of the 19th century
mind/body literature.
“Nothing,” Carpenter wrote, “can be more certain, than that
the primary form of mental activity, —Sensational consciousness,
—is excited through physiological instrumentality. A certain
Physical impression is made, for example, by the formation of a
luminous image upon the Retina of the Eye…Light excites Nerve-
force, and the transmission of this Nerve-force excites the activity
of that part of the Brain which is the instrument of our Visual
Consciousness. Now in what way the physical change thus
excited in the Sensorium is translated (so to speak) into that
psychical change which we call seeing the object whose image was
formed upon our Retina, we know nothing whatever; but we are
equally ignorant of the way in which Light produces Chemical
change…And all we can say is, that there is just as close a
succession of sequences—as intimate a causal relation between
antecedent and consequent—in the one case, as there is in the
other.”105
Conversely, “the like Correlation may be shown to exist
between Mental states and the form of Nerve-force which calls
forth Motion through the Muscular apparatus…each kind of
Mental activity, —Sensational, Instinctive, Emotional, Ideational,
and Volitional, —may express itself in Bodily movement…Just as
a perfectly constructed Galvanic battery is inactive while the
circuit is ‘interrupted,’ but becomes active the instant that the
104
Ibid., pp. ix–x.
105
Ibid., pp. 12–13.
circuit is ‘closed,’ so does a Sensation, an Instinctive tendency, an

Emotion, an Idea, or a Volition, which attains an intensity
adequate to ‘close’ the circuit, liberate the Nerve-force with which
a certain part of the Brain…is always charged.”106
Thoroughgoing interactionism of this sort, coupled with the
notion of “unconscious cerebration” and a belief in unconscious
psychic determinism led Carpenter to emphasize the relevance of
abnormal mental states to his analysis of mind. Thus most of the
second half of the Principles of Mental Physiology was devoted
to topics such as reverie and abstraction, sleep, dreaming, and
somnambulism, mesmerism and spiritualism, intoxication and
delerium, and insanity, with each analyzed in terms of the
relationship between unconscious cerebration and conscious
mental process. Through this discussion, as well as through his
emphasis on unconscious process, Carpenter helped legitimize
the study of exceptional mental states within general psychology.
106
Ibid., pp. 13–14.
English Men of Science 39
Francis Galton: English Men of Science (1874)
In 1869, Francis Galton107 had published the groundbreaking

Hereditary Genius.108 For the first time quantitative data and
statistical analysis had been brought to bear on the problem of
mental ability. Galton’s major finding was that the blood relatives
of famous men exhibited a much greater frequency of eminence
themselves than would have been expected from the frequency of
eminence within the general population. As a descriptive fact, this
was neither particularly surprising, given the stratified society of
Victorian England, nor especially provocative. Galton’s inter-
pretation of his findings, however, was both.
From Galton’s perspective, the tendency for eminence to run in
families was a direct reflection of heredity. Mental ability, in other
words, was inherited. Not surprisingly, this interpretation of the
data was not universally accepted. One of the most important
critics of Galton’s view was the well-known Swiss botanist,
Alphonse de Candolle. As a botanist, Candolle was well aware
of the importance of environmental factors in the development of
living organisms; and in 1872, he published a book, entitled
Histoire des sciences et des savants depuis deux siècles,109 in
which he made a strong case for environmental influences on the
achievement of eminence among scientists.
Candolle based his argument on the statistical treatment of
biographical data obtained from a large sample. Although he
acknowledged a role for heredity in the transmission of mental
ability, Candolle provided statistical evidence implicating a
number of environmental factors in the production of eminence.
Great scientists, he demonstrated, were more likely to come from
107
108
Galton, F. (1869). Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and
Consequences. London: Macmillan; for a discussion of the content and signif-
icance of Galton’s earlier work, see the essay on Galton’s Hereditary Genius
in this volume.
109
Candolle, A. de (1872). Histoire des sciences et des savants depuis deux siècles.
Geneve: Georg.
countries with more moderate climatic conditions, more democ-

ratic governments, more tolerant religions, and more well
developed commercial interests.
In his biography of Galton, Karl Pearson110 reprinted an
exchange of correspondence between Galton and Candolle that
followed the appearance of Candolle’s book. This correspon-
dence documents the influence of Candolle’s work on the direction
taken by Galton’s next major contribution.111 This work
appeared in 1874 under the title English Men of Science: Their
Nature and Nurture. In Pearson’s view, it was regarded by
Galton as justifying “the utmost claims he had ever made for the
recognition of the importance of hereditary influence.”112
The research for English Men of Science extended the approach
taken in the chapter on scientists in Hereditary Genius. To gather
data, Galton devised a lengthy questionnaire focusing not only on
eminence in ancestry, but on qualities considered to be important
for success such as energy, health, perseverance, practical business
habits, memory, independence of character, and mechanical
aptitude. It also asked about origins of interest in science, and
about education. When the questionnaire was ready, it was then
circulated to a select group of 180 members of the Royal Society.
The text itself presented the results of this research. The first
chapter was devoted to the question of ancestral eminence.
Examining the number of distinguished individuals to be found
among the grandparents, uncles, brothers, and male cousins of his
sample, Galton reported it to be much greater than would be
expected from the number of eminent men to be found among
those with similar education and opportunity in the community
at large.
The second chapter focused on the qualities that members of the
sample deemed important for their success. For each, Galton
reviewed the relevant familial data and made a case for the
quality’s overrepresentation in relation to the more general
population. The third chapter, entitled “The origins of taste for
science,” showed new recognition of a role for environmental
110
Pearson, K. (1914–30). The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton (3
vols. in 4). Cambridge: At the University Press, Vol. 2, pp. 135–44.
111
Candolle, of course, had himself benefited from Galton’s still earlier Hereditary
Genius.
112
Pearson, op. cit., p. 145
English Men of Science 41
factors. Thus, for example, chance, opportunity, encouragement

within the home or from a teacher, and travel are listed as
secondary factors that could influence an individual’s love of
science. For Galton, however, the primary source of scientific
interest was once again innate aptitude, possibly arising from a
predisposing combination of inherited mental traits.
Finally, the book concluded with a lengthy analysis of
education. Here Galton showed the clearest evidence of the
impact that Candolle’s work had had on his thought.
Acknowledging that a larger than expected share of his sample
had been educated in Scotland and recognizing that the Scottish
educational system was more progressive than that to be found in
England, Galton admitted that hereditary genius might not always
manifest itself. While inherited mental ability predisposes toward
eminence, in other words, an individual’s ultimate level of
achievement could, in principle, be supported or hindered by
environmental factors such as education.
English Men of Science is not Galton’s greatest work; but its
place in the history of psychology has been assured by its role in
clearly articulating the issues involved in and the terms employed
for the “nature/nurture” debate. Even more importantly, this is
the text that introduced the questionnaire method into psychology
and demonstrated that the statistical treatment of questionnaire
data could yield results of value for psychological analysis.
Wilhelm Wundt: Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie

(1874)
The birth of experimental psychology as a discipline in its own

right is often dated from the appearance of Wilhelm Wundt’s great
handbook, the Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie.113
The Grundzüge had its immediate origin in lectures on physio-
logical psychology that Wundt gave at the University of
Heidelberg, once in the winter of 1867–1868 and again in
1872–1873. The book itself appeared in two parts, the first half
in 1873 following the conclusion of the second set of lectures, the
second half in 1874.114
In the 30 years following its initial publication, the Grundzüge
was revised, expanded, and rewritten no fewer than four times.
When the fifth edition appeared in 1902–3, the work had grown
from a single volume of 876 pages to four volumes containing a
total of 2035 pages plus an index.115 The only portion of the
Grundzüge to appear in English was the first volume of the fifth
edition.116 This fact, together with the scope of later revisions, led
to a certain amount of misinterpretation regarding Wundt’s early
views on the nature of physiological psychology.
This misinterpretation was compounded by references to the
Grundzüge that appeared in psychology’s most influential disci-
plinary history, A History of Experimental Psychology by Edwin
G. Boring. Referring to the Grundzüge as “the most important
book in the history of modern psychology,” Boring suggested that
it represented Wundt’s “metamorphosis from physiologist to
psychologist, stressed the relative systematicity of the work and
113
1832–1920. For biographical information on Wundt, see Wundt, W. (1920).
Erlebtes und Erkanntes. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner; Wundt’s handbook is
Wilhelm Engelmann.
114
The second part was issued with a titlepage listing date of publication as
1874. This is the standard form of reference and we will follow it here.
115
Wundt, W. (1902–3). Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (Fünfte
völlig umgearbeitete auflage) Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann; a sixth edition
appeared in 1908–11 but was not textually revised.
116
Wundt, W. (1904). Principles of Physiological Psychology. Translated from
the Fifth German Edition (1902) by Edward Bradford Titchener. London:
Swan Sonnenschein.
Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie 43
its sophistication in comparison to Wundt’s two earlier contri-

butions to psychology, his Beiträge zur Theorie der
Sinneswahrnehmung and his Vorlesungen über die Menschen
und Thierseele,117 and suggested that “it attempted systemati-
cally to cover the range of psychological fact.”118
While it would be difficult to argue with Boring’s assertion that
the Grundzüge was more systematic and sophisticated than the
Beiträge or the Vorlesungen, there was something fundamentally
misleading in his overall characterization of the work as a break
with Wundt’s earlier contributions to psychology, a reflection of
his new identity as a psychologist, and an attempt to cover “the
range of psychological fact.” On the contrary, there was a strong
thread of continuity running from the Beiträge through the
Vorlesungen to the Grundzüge. And that thread had to do with
Wundt’s conception of the nature, scope, and content of
psychology, his characterization of psychological methodology,
and the relatively circumscribed goal of the Grundzüge as a
handbook of physiological rather than general psychology.
In the methodological preface to the Beiträge, published in
1862, Wundt had made it clear that he conceived of psychology
in the widest possible fashion. At the lowest levels, it consisted
of the study of sensory phenomena in relation to physical stimuli,
or psychophysics; at the highest levels it included the investi-
gation of cultural history, morality, and language, or “folk
psychology”. In keeping with this broad perspective, he had
argued that a variety of methods—developmental, comparative,
introspective, deductive, statistical, and experimental—could and
should be brought to bear on the analysis of psychological
phenomena. And he made it clear that experimental methods,
though of great potential importance, were of relatively limited
applicability. While “experiments can find application in the
purely psychological domain,” he wrote, “it must nevertheless be
admitted that it is primarily the sensory side of psychic life which
117
Wundt, W. (1862). Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung. Leipzig und
Heidelberg: C.F. Winter; Wundt, W. (1863). Vorlesungen über die Menschen-
und Thierseele. Leipzig: Leopold Voss.
118
Boring, E.G. (1929). A History of Experimental Psychology. New York:
Century. All quotations can be found on p. 317; it is of interest that Boring
saw no reason to alter any of these statements in 1950 when he published the
second, revised edition of his history.
accords the widest prospect for experimental investigation.”119

This was a theme echoed in the two volumes of the Vorlesungen
in 1863. After reprising the methodological argument of the
Beiträge, Wundt devoted one volume to experimental work in
psychophysics, sensory psychology, reflex movement, reaction
time, and space perception, and a second volume to historical,
ethnopsychological, and comparative analyses of topics such as
the aesthetic, intellectual, and religious feelings, morality, custom,
the history of society, the family, state, and religion, and the
nature and origin of language.
How, then, did Wundt conceive of the Grundzüge in 1874?
The answer, clear in the opening lines of the first edition, is that
far from considering it as covering “the range of psychological
fact,” he thought of it as establishing a new borderline science, a
“physiological psychology,” standing midway between physi-
ology, on the one hand, and psychology on the other.
“The present work,” Wundt wrote, “shows by its very title that
it seeks to establish an alliance between two sciences that,
although they both deal with almost the same subject, that is,
preeminently with human life, nevertheless have long followed
different paths. Physiology informs us about those life
phenomena that we perceive by our external senses. In
psychology, the person looks upon himself as from within and
tries to explain the interrelations of those processes that this
internal observation discloses…[In addition,] there exists a wide
range of life processes that are simultaneously accessible to
external and internal observation, a border region that…may
usefully be assigned to a special science standing between
them…A science that has as its subject matter the points of contact
between internal and external life…Physiology and psychology
each by itself can easily evade this question, but physiological
psychology cannot sidestep it.”120
119
Wundt (1862), op. cit., pp. xxviii–xxix; the English translation is taken from
Wundt, W. (1961). Contributions to the theory of sensory perception. In T.
Shipley (Ed.). Classics in Psychology. New York: Philosophical Library,
pp. 51–78, p. 72.
120
Wundt (1874), op. cit., pp. 1–2; the English translation is taken from Wundt,
W. (1980). Selected texts from writings of Wilhelm Wundt. Translated with
commentary notes by S. Diamond. In R.W. Rieber (Ed.). Wilhelm Wundt and
the Making of a Scientific Psychology. New York: Plenum, pp. 155–77, p. 157.
Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie 45
The methods of this new science were to be experimental. As

Wundt described it, “Psychological introspection goes hand in
hand with the methods of experimental physiology, and the appli-
cation of the latter to the former has given rise to the
psychophysical methods as a separate branch of experimental
research. If one wishes to place major emphasis on method-
ological characteristics, our science might be called experimental
psychology in distinction from the usual science of mind based
purely on introspection.”121
The Grundzüge, then, was not, by any means, designed to be a
handbook of psychology. It was, on the contrary, offered by
Wundt as the handbook of a new science, a “physiological
psychology” bridging the gap between physiology, on the one
hand, and psychology on the other. Drawing on the content and
methods of both of the older disciplines, the Grundzüge pulled
together everything that was then known of relevance to this
borderland, it laid out the broad outlines of a program of exper-
imental research that promised to extend this knowledge far
beyond its previous limits, and it provided detailed examples of
how this new science might be developed.
Taken together with the fact that Wundt then went on to
establish not only an experimental laboratory but an entire
institute devoted to working out the program of the Grundzüge
and that this institute became a Mecca for students from around
the world who wished to discover for themselves what the new
science of experimental, physiological psychology was all about,
it is not surprising that the Grundzüge exerted the influence that
it did. Nor is it surprising that Wundt, despite his clear interest
in psychological topics far beyond the range of physiological
psychology and his clear recognition of the limits of the experi-
mental method, should have become known as the founder of
experimental, physiological psychology.
121
Ibid., pp. 2–3; the English translation is taken from Wundt (1980), op. cit.,
p. 158.
David Ferrier: The Functions of the Brain (1876)
The doctrine of functional localization—the notion that specific

mental processes are correlated with discrete regions of the
brain—and the attempt to establish localization by means of
empirical observation were essentially 19th century achieve-
ments.122 The first critical steps toward these ends were taken by
Franz Josef Gall whose attempt to marshal detailed evidence of
correlation between variation in function and presumed variation
in the brain, first fully established the view that brain serves as the
organ of mind.123
This was followed by the work of Marie-Jean-Pierre Flourens,
who provided the first experimental demonstration of localization
of function in the brain.124 While previous researchers had
lesioned the brain through a trephined aperture that made it
impossible to localize damage or to track hemorrhage with any
accuracy, Flourens completely uncovered and isolated that
portion of the brain to be removed. Taking care to minimize
operative trauma and post-operative complications, he employed
ablation to localize a motor center in the medulla oblongata and
stability and motor coordination in the cerebellum.
With respect to the cerebrum, however, his results were quite
different. Successive slicing through the hemispheres produced
diffuse damage to higher mental functions such as perception,
volition, and intellect, with the amount of damage varying only
with the extent and not the location of the lesion. From these
results, Flourens concluded that while sensorimotor functions
are differentiated and localized sub-cortically, higher mental
functions operate together, spread throughout the entire
cerebrum.
122
It is important to note, however, that in a diffuse and general way, the idea of
functional localization had been available since antiquity. Thus, for example,
a notion of “soul” globally related to the brain can be found in the work of
Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Plato, Erisistratus, and Galen, among others.
123
Gall, F.J. & Spurzheim, J.G. (1810–19). Anatomie et physiologie du système
nerveux en général, et du cerveau en particulier, avec des observations sur la
possibilité re reconnoître plusieurs dispositions intellectuelles et morales de
l’homme et des animaux, par la configuration de leurs têtes. Paris: F. Schoell.
124
Flourens, M-J-P. (1824). Recherches expérimentales sur les propriétés et les
fonctions du système nerveux, dans les animaux vertébrés. Paris: Crevot.
The Functions of the Brain 47
For more than 30 years this was the established view. Then in
1861 the first of a series of studies appeared that would lead to
the rejection of this idea and to the establishment of patterns of
functional localization in the cortex. The author of this study,
Pierre Paul Broca, reported finding a superficial left frontal lobe
lesion during post-mortem examination of the brain of an aphasic
patient.125 The detail of Broca’s account and the fact that he had
gone specifically in search of evidence for the patients’ speech
deficit impressed the scientific community. Suddenly it appeared
that evidence might, in fact, favor a cortical localization
hypothesis. What was needed was a technique for the experi-
mental exploration of the surface of the hemispheres and a
systematic research program designed to achieve this end.
The technique was contributed in 1870 by Gustav Theodor
Fritsch and Eduard Hitzig.126 Employing galvanic stimulation of
the cerebrum in the dog, Fritsch and Hitzig provided conclusive
evidence that circumscribed areas of the cortex are involved in
movements of the contralateral limbs and that ablation of these
same areas leads to weakness in these limbs. Their findings estab-
lished electrophysiology as a preferred method for the experi-
mental exploration of cortical localization of function and demon-
strated the participation of the hemispheres in motor function.
The research program was the work of David Ferrier. 127
Ferrier’s goal was to employ carefully controlled ablation exper-
iments and electrical stimulation to map localization of function
across a variety of species. In 1873, he published the first of a
series of papers oriented toward this goal;128 and in 1876 he
brought his own work together with that of others in the classic
125
Broca, P. (1861). Remarques sur le siége de la faculté du langage articulé,
suivies d’une observation d’aphemie (perte de la parole). Bulletins de la société
anatomique de Paris, année 36, 2ème serie, tome 6, 330–57.
126
Fritsch, G. & Hitzig, E. (1870). Über die elektrische Erregbarkeit des
Grosshirns. Archiv für Anatomie, Physiologie, und wissenschaftliche Medicin,
300–32.
127
1843–1928. For biographical information on Ferrier, see Clarke, E. (1971).
David Ferrier. In C.C. Gillispie (Ed.). Dictionary of Scientific Biography (Vol.
4). New York: Scribner’s, pp. 593–5.
128
Ferrier, D. (1873). Experimental researches in cerebral physiology and
pathology. West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports, 3, 30–96.
19th century monograph on cortical localization of function, The

Functions of the Brain.129
After an introductory sketch of the structure of the nervous
system, Ferrier examined the functions of the spinal cord, the
medulla, the corpora quadrigemina, and the cerebellum. Among
the more interesting and important passages in this section of the
book were those relating to spinal cord function in complex
sensorimotor integration and activity, implications of decere-
bration experiments for the distinction between voluntary and
reflexive movement, and experiments on the control of eye
movements through electrical stimulation of the cerebellum.
Ferrier then turned to the motor and sensory functions of the
cerebral hemispheres. Using faradic rather than galvanic current
to elicit movements approximating real actions (e.g., walking,
grasping, scratching),130 he replicated and extended the results of
Fritsch and Hitzig, producing detailed maps relating type of
movement to locus of stimulation in the brains of monkeys, dogs,
jackals, cats, and rodents. With regard to sensory function,
Ferrier localized a center for smell in the uncate region of the
temporal lobe, auditory cortex in the superior temporo-sphenoidal
convolution, and primate vision in the angular gyrus of the
posterior parietal lobe—a conclusion eventually modified by
Hermann Munk’s later discovery of visual cortex in the occipital
lobe.131
Toward the end of the monograph, Ferrier even addressed the
functions of the frontal lobes. Observing apparently purposeless
and impulsive behavior in monkeys and dogs with lesions of the
anterior frontal cortex, he noted that these animals, “while not
actually deprived of intelligence…had lost, to all appearance, the
faculty of attentive and intelligent observation.”132 Although he
was loathe to attribute any clear physiological function to frontal
cortex, Ferrier suggested that the frontal lobes might subserve the
psychological function of selection among and inhibition of
competing ideas characteristic of attention and intelligence.
129
Ferrier, D. (1876). The Functions of the Brain. London: Smith, Elder.
130
Galvanic current produced only brief muscular contractions.
131
Munk, H. (1878). Weitere Mittheilungen zur Physiologie der Grosshirnrinde.
Verhandlungen der Physiologischen Gesellschaft zu Berlin, 162–78.
132
Ferrier (1876), op. cit., p. 232.
The Functions of the Brain 49
The importance of Functions of the Brain cannot be overesti-

mated. It served as a model of careful, thoughtful, and program-
matic research on the nervous system and solidified acceptance of
the principle of cortical localization of function. It provided a
physiological basis for sensorimotor analysis of the sort that was
to become the dominant paradigm for explanation in functional
psychology; and, in many ways, it inaugurated the modern era in
neurosurgery, an era in which surgeons are guided in their work
by functional maps of the brain.
George Henry Lewes: The Physical Basis of Mind (1877)
In psychology, as in every field, there are forgotten treasures,

authors and works that have passed, for one reason or another,
into oblivion, absent from the standard histories, lost to posterity.
Such is George Henry Lewes133 and his book, The Physical Basis
of Mind.134 Published in 1877, The Physical Basis of Mind was
the third in a series of five volumes, entitled Problems of Life and
Mind, in which Lewes presented a biosocial theory of mind of
extraordinary reach and sophistication.
As Lewes put it: “The Human Mind…has a twofold root, man
being not only an animal organism but an unit in the social
organism; and hence the complete theory of its functions and
faculties must be sought in this twofold direction.”135 The
Physical Basis of Mind, written to provide an account of the
“group of material conditions which constitute the organism in
relation to the physical world,”136 was Lewes’s attempt to describe
one of these roots.
The standpoint from which Lewes approached this task was
that of the biologist rather than that of the analytic physiologist.
“We have to recognise,” Lewes wrote, “that this procedure of
Analysis is artificial and preparatory, that none of its results
…represent the synthetic reality of vital facts. Hence one leading
object of the following pages has been everywhere to substitute the
biological point of view…for the mechanical.”137 And for Lewes
the biological point of view was holistic and dynamic. Mind, like
the organism, exists as a system.
Indeed, the Physical Basis of Mind was one of the first and quite
possibly the best early critiques of the mechanistic approach to
mind from the organismic point of view. This point of view was
set out in the first of the volume’s four sections, the Nature of Life,
which characterized the distinction between organic and inorganic
133
1817–78. For biographical information on Lewes, see Ockenden, R.E. (1940).
George Henry Lewes (1817–1878). Isis, 32, 70–86.
134
Lewes, G.H. (1877). The Physical Basis of Mind. With Illustrations. Being
the Second Series of Problems of Life and Mind. London: Trübner.
135
Ibid., p. v.
136
Ibid.
137
Ibid., p. vi.
The Physical Basis of Mind 51
phenomena and “set…forth the physiological principles which

Psychology must incessantly invoke.”138
In the second section of the book, The Nervous Mechanism,
Lewes focused on what was then known regarding the structure
and function of the nervous system. Although his discussion was
dated even before the end of the century, his treatment is still of
interest for its healthy scepticism with regard to what were then
considered “established truths.” As he put it, “few are aware how
much of what passes for observation is in reality sheer
hypothesis.”139
The third section of the book, Animal Automatism, was in
many respects the most important. It contained the major thrust
of Lewes’s attack on mechanistic theories, in particular the mecha-
nistic account of animal movement inherent in the hypothesis of
animal automatism; and it included Lewes’s revolutionary contri-
bution to the problem of the relation of mind to body—his classic
justification for the modern version of double aspect theory, dual-
aspect monism.
Dual-aspect monism involves the claim that there is only one
kind of existent and that mind and body differ only in the
perspective from which existence is apprehended. Just as a curve
maintains its identity as a single line even though characterized at
every point by both concavity and convexity, the psychophysical
process is one and the same process even though it is both mental
and physical. When seen from the subjective point of view (e.g.,
when someone is thinking), the psychophysical series is mental;
when seen from the objective point of view (e.g., when someone
observes what is going on in the thinking person’s brain), it is
physical. Mental and physical are simply two aspects of one
existent.140
But Lewes did not stop there. He went on, in The Physical Basis
of Mind, to provide a justification for dual-aspect monism that
effectively transferred the domain of mind/body discourse from
metaphysics to language, thereby anticipating later thinking by
138
Ibid., p. vii.
139
Ibid., p. viii.
140
The metaphor of a convex/concave curve was borrowed from Fechner, see the
essay on Fechner in this volume; it had also been previously employed by Taine,
see the essay on Taine in this volume. Lewes, of course, shared his dual-aspect
monist mind/body view with both Fechner and Taine.
well over half a century. Mental and physical descriptions, Lewes

argued, employ terms that are not intertranslatable. Just as
optical and neural processes cannot be adequately described in
mental terms, visual experience (e.g., of a large elephant) cannot
be adequately described through statements that characterize
either the laws of light or the mechanisms of the nervous system.
Mental terms, in other words, cannot in principle be replaced by
physical terms any more than physical terms can be replaced by
mental terms. In making this claim, Lewes offered what is still the
best argument against extreme reductionism and the replacement
of psychology by physiology.
In the final section of the book, The Reflex Theory, Lewes
turned to an analysis of reflex activity. Again the main burden of
argument was to dispute the adequacy of the purely mechanistic
view of reflexes. Suggesting that sensibility was present at the
reflex level, he distinguished reflex from purely mechanical action,
extended the properties of mind to the reflex level, and, in a way
that nicely summarizes his overall point of view, protested against
the too restrictive correlation of mind with brain process: “It is
the man, and not the brain, that thinks: it is the organism as a
whole, and not one organ, that feels and acts.”141
141
Ibid., p. 441.
German Psychology of To-Day 53
Théodule Armand Ribot: German Psychology of To-Day (1879;

English 1886)
According to the received history of scientific psychology, as

reflected in E.G. Boring’s widely read A History of Experimental
Psychology, development of the “new” psychology took place in
part as a reaction to arguments against the possibility of a scien-
tific psychology leveled by the great philosopher Immanuel
Kant.142 Kant had pointed out that adequate natural scientific
method requires the use of both mathematics and experiment.
Mathematics, he suggested, is inapplicable to the description of
mental phenomena because the phenomena of the internal sense
vary in only a single dimension—time. Experimentation is
similarly inapplicable to psychology because mental phenomena
are internal, inaccessible to systematic manipulation.
Herbart,143 the story goes, reacted against the first of Kant’s
assertions—that mental phenomena vary in only a single
dimension. For Herbart, ideas were construed as varying not only
in time but in quality and “intensity or force (Kraft)…an attribute
which is equivalent to clearness.”144 Mathematics could therefore
be applied to the analysis of mind, yielding both a mental statics
(the mathematics of qualitatively separate ideas varying in
intensity) and a mental dynamics (the mathematics of ideas
varying in time and intensity).
Fechner145 then reacted against Kant’s second assertion—that
mental phenomena cannot be systematically manipulated.
Psychophysics, the story continues, involved both the systematic
manipulation of mental events as a function of variation in a
physical stimulus and the identification of the just noticeable
difference as a unit of mental measurement. As Boring put it:
“Fechner’s originality lies in his combination of Herbart’s use of
mathematics with Weber’s use of experiment.”146
142
Boring, E.G. (1950). A History of Experimental Psychology (2nd ed.). New
York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, pp. 253–4.
143
Herbart, J.F. (1824–5). Psychologie als Wissenschaft, neu gegründet auf
Erfahrung, Metaphysik und Mathematik. Königsberg: A.W. Unzer.
144
Boring, op. cit., p. 255.
145
Fechner, G. Th. (1860). Elemente der Psychophysik. Leipzig: Breitkopf und
Härtel; for a discussion of the content and significance of Fechner’s work, see
the essay on Fechner in this volume.
146
Ibid., p. 253.
Finally, the story concludes with Wundt. From the preface to

the 1862 Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung,147 in
which Wundt provides psychology’s first self-reflective discussion
of scientific methodology, through the 1874 Grundzüge der physi-
ologischen Psychologie, 148 which Boring called “the most
important book in the history of modern psychology,”149 to the
1879 founding of psychology’s first experimental laboratory,
Wundt is credited with being the principal representative of exper-
imental psychology in Germany, the successor to Herbart and
Fechner, and the first to bring the new scientific psychology to real
fruition.
Where did this story originate? And is it really history in any
important sense? The answer to the first question is that the
received view appears to have had its original source in the very
first published history of modern experimental psychology.
This history, written by Théodule Ribot150, appeared in 1876
as La Psychologie allemande contemporaine. Translated into
English by James Mark Baldwin and published in 1886 as
German Psychology of To-Day,151 Ribot’s text focused almost
exclusively on Herbart, Fechner, and Wundt (the only excep-
tions being a chapter on Lotze and chapters on nativism and
empiricism in space perception and the time duration of mental
acts); but more to the point, it contextualized discussion of
Herbart and Fechner in relation to Kant’s objections.
“Kant,” Ribot wrote, “ventures to predict ‘that psychology
could never be raised to the rank of an exact natural science’; and
he gave two principle reasons for this assertion: 1st. Mathematics
is not applicable to internal phenomena…referred to one
147
Wundt, W. (1862). Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung. Leipzig und
Heidelberg: C.F. Winter.
148
Wilhelm Engelmann; for a discussion of the content and significance of
Wundt’s work, see the essay on Wundt’s Grundzüge in this volume.
149
Boring, op. cit., p. 322.
150
1839–1916. For a few biographical details regarding Ribot, see Baird, J.W.
(1917). Théodule Armand Ribot, 1839–1916. American Journal of
Psychology, 28, 312–13.
151
Ribot, Th. (1886). German Psychology of To-Day. The Empirical School.
New York: Scribner’s; the original French edition is Ribot, Th. (1879). La
Psychologie allemande contemporaine (École expérimentale). Paris: Baillière.
Baldwin’s translation was from the second French edition.
German Psychology of To-Day 55
condition only, time…2nd. Internal phenomena are not accessible

to experiment…To the first of the observations of Kant…it has
been answered that…our sensations, perceptions, feelings, are
subject not only to the condition of time, but to variations of
intensity…As to the second point, although Herbart seems never
to have conceived the possibility of experiment, it is sufficient to
recall the work done later in psychophysics by Fechner…”152
The answer to the second question is that the received view is
more rational reconstruction than history. Progress in the devel-
opment of scientific psychology during this period was slow and
irregular, and involved ideas and eventually empirical research
contributed in numerous areas by numerous figures. The notion
that scientific psychology derived from Herbart’s and then
Fechner’s rejection of Kant’s argument against the possibility of
a scientific psychology may have had more to do with Ribot’s need
to organize his text than with the actual historical facts of the case.
Nowhere does Ribot provide evidence that either Herbart or
Fechner were even aware of Kant’s objections; and the original
text in which Kant articulated these objections is one of his more
neglected works.153
Nonetheless, Ribot’s view, passed along by Boring, has exerted
a powerful influence on scientific psychology’s conception of
itself. Kant to Herbart to Fechner to Wundt—philosophy to
mathematics to experimental measurement to the laboratory—has
become, for many psychologists, the standard account of the
development of psychology as a science.
152
Ibid., pp. 43–4.
153
Kant, I. (1786). Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft. Riga:
Hartknoch; translated into English as: Kant, I. (1985). Metaphysical
Foundations of Natural Science. Indianapolis: Hackett. See Kant (1985), op.
cit., p. 8 for the relevant passage.
John Hughlings Jackson: Evolution and Dissolution of the

Nervous System (1881–7; Collected 1932)
In 1824, Marie-Jean-Pierre Flourens provided the first experi-

mental demonstration of localization of function in the brain: a
motor center in the medulla oblongata and stability and motor
coordination in the cerebellum. By 1842, he had articulated a
clear distinction between sensation and perception and localized
sensory function in several related sub-cortical structures. For a
combination of empirical and philosophical reasons, however,
Flourens was firmly opposed to cortical localization of function
and committed to a view of the cortex as the unitary, undiffer-
entiated seat of higher mental processes.154 This was a position
that was widely shared.
It was not until the 1870s that views concerning the nature of
cortical function began to change. For this change to occur, the
intellectual ground had to be prepared. This involved the
abandonment of a fixed faculty approach to mind in favor of a
balanced sensori-motor, evolutionary associationism. These
advances came through the respective contributions of Alexander
Bain and Herbert Spencer.155 Prior to Bain, associationism’s
commitment to experience as the source of knowledge led to the
neglect of movement in favor of the analysis of sensation.
Drawing heavily on the work of physiologists such as Johannes
Müller,156 Bain brought the new physiology of movement into
conjunction with an associationist account of mind. “Action,” he
wrote, “is a more intimate and inseparable property of our consti-
tution than any of our sensations, and in fact enters as a
154
Flourens, M-J-P. (1824). Recherches expérimentales sur les propriétés et les
fonctions du système nerveux, dans les animaux vertébrés. Paris: Crevot; the
second edition was published in 1842.
155
Bain, A. (1855). The Senses and the Intellect. London: John W. Parker and
Son; Spencer, H. (1855). The Principles of Psychology. London: Longman,
Brown, Green, and Longmans. For a superb analysis of these advances and
of their relationship to the work of Jackson among others, see Young, R.M.
(1970). Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century. Cerebral
Localization and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1970; for a general discussion of the work of Bain and
Spencer, see the essays on these authors in this volume.
156
Müller, J. (1834–40). Handbuch der Physiologie für Vorlesungen. Coblenz:
Hölscher.
Evolution and Dissolution of the Nervous System 57
component part into every one of the senses, giving them the
character of compounds….”157
Herbert Spencer offered students of the brain an evolutionary
view to which sensori-motor and hierarchical organization in the
brain as a whole were simple corollaries. For Spencer, evolution
consisted of gradual and continuous change from homogeneity to
heterogeneity, from relative unity and indivisibility to differenti-
ation and complexity, from relative rigidity of organization to
relative flexibility. Nowhere in the process of evolution were
there radical discontinuities; principles describing lower levels of
an evolving system were also characteristic of higher levels. And
just as evolution was an increase in differentiation, complexity,
and flexibility, dissolution involved return to relative lack of
differentiation, simplicity, and stereotypy.
The broad implications of these evolutionary conceptions for
the theory of brain function were clear. The brain was the most
highly developed physical system known and the cortex the most
developed level of the brain. As such, it must be heterogeneous,
differentiated, complex, and flexibly organized. Furthermore, if
the cortex was a continuous evolutionary development from sub-
cortical structures, the sensori-motor principles that governed
sub-cortical localization must hold for the cortex as well. Finally,
if higher mental processes were the end product of a continuous
process of development, pathology in higher brain centers could
lead to dissolution of function.
In the late 1870s and 1880s, these implications were elaborated
in striking fashion in a series of papers published by John
Hughlings Jackson.158 The most famous of these, including
Jackson’s Croonian Lectures on Evolution and Dissolution of the
Nervous System, appeared between 1881 and 1887 and were
collected together for the first time in 1932 in the second volume
of Jackson’s Selected Writings.159
157
Bain, op. cit., p. 67.
158
1835–1911. For biographical information on Jackson, see Clarke, E. (1973).
John Hughlings Jackson. In C.C. Gillispie (Ed.). Dictionary of Scientific
Biography (Vol. 7). New York: Scribner’s, pp. 46–50.
159
Jackson, J.H. (1932). Selected Writings of John Hughlings Jackson (2 Vols.).
Edited by J. Taylor. London: Hodder and Stoughton; all page references to
quotations from Jackson are keyed to the Selected Writings.
As Jackson put it in the introduction to the first of these papers,

he had “long thought that Herbert Spencer’s hypothesis of disso-
lution…(would) enable us to develop a science of disease of the
nervous system.” 160 His goal, therefore, was to illustrate
“Spencer’s doctrines of nervous evolution, by the reverse process
of nervous dissolution, as this is effected by pathological
processes….”161
And for Jackson, “pathology” was very broadly construed to
include exceptional mental states of any kind, “not only cases
specially described by alienists, but delirium in acute non-cerebral
disease, degrees of drunkenness, and even sleep with dreaming.”162
Indeed, it was a hallmark of Jackson’s work that his general
theory of the functional architecture of brain systems could be
used to elucidate not only exceptional mental states of the sort just
listed but even the effects of nervous diseases as varied as muscular
atrophy, hemiplegia, paralysis agitans, epilepsy, chorea, and
aphasia.
Unfortunately, Jackson never published a systematic account of
his theory. The historian of psychology who goes in search of
Jackson’s views will find bits and pieces of the theory scattered
about among his writings. For the sake of exposition, the major
principles will be laid out here with some systematicity; but this
was not characteristic of Jackson’s own work.
The first principle of Jackson’s theory was continuity of sensori-
motor function at all levels of the nervous system. As Jackson put
it, “the cerebral centres are, like all lower centres, ‘reflex.’ The
more recent doctrines of evolution of necessity imply that all
nervous centres, even the highest—the substrata of
consciousness—are (also) sensori-motor.”163
The second principle was that of the evolution and dissolution
of brain systems. One of the best statements of this principle
appeared in Jackson’s Croonian Lectures: “Evolution,” he wrote,
“is a passage from the most to the least organised; that is to say,
from the lowest, well organised, centres up to the highest, least
organised, centres…from centres comparatively well organised at
160
Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 3.
161
162
163
birth…to those…which are continually organising through

life…Evolution is a passage from the most simple to the most
complex…a passage from the most automatic to the most
voluntary…the highest centres…are the least organised, the most
complex, and the most voluntary…Dissolution…is a process of
undevelopment…from the least organised, from the most complex
and most voluntary, towards the most organised, most simple,
and most automatic.”164
According to the third principle, “the nervous system is a repre-
senting system.”165 Parts of the body were represented by
different centers. In keeping with the sensori-motor hypothesis,
Jackson argued that “Even the centres ‘for mind’ represent parts
of the body…The whole nervous system is a sensori-motor
mechanism, a coordinating system from top to bottom.”166
The fourth principle, which followed directly from the second
and third, was that of the hierarchy of cerebral centers, divided
into “lowest, middle, and highest…to indicate different evolu-
tionary levels.”167 “A lowest centre,” in Jackson’s view, “is one
which represents some limited part of the body most nearly
directly…A middle centre represents over again in…more
complex…combinations what many or all of the lowest have
represented in comparatively simple combinations…The middle
centres are re-representative…The highest centres…represent over
again in more complex…combinations, the parts which all the
middle centres have re-represented, and thus they represent the
whole organism; they are re-re-representative.”168 A corollary of
this principle was that the depth of dissolution in pathology
would reflect the hierarchical level of the affected center.
How this effect was manifested, however, would depend not
only on depth of dissolution (severity of the pathology) but on
whether the symptomatology was viewed in terms of its negative
or positive aspect. And here we have the last of Jackson’s major
principles, that of the fundamental duality of all pathological
states. Each such state, in Jackson’s view, was characterized by
164
Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 46.
165
Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 41.
166
Ibid.
167
Ibid.
168
Ibid.
both negative and positive symptoms. Negative symptoms were

those directly caused by the pathological condition as it worked
its effect in higher centers; positive symptoms were those indirectly
caused by “removal of the influence of the higher centres.”169
The source of this duality, of course, was the nature of patho-
logical dissolution itself. When the influence of higher brain
centers was removed (through disease, injury, exhaustion,
temporary inhibition), the activity of the next lower centers,
normally under the control of the higher centers, was liberated.
This led, in Jackson’s phrase, to a “reduction to a more automatic
condition”170 frequently characterized by overactivity of the lower
centers.
Jackson’s most famous application of his evolutionary theory of
brain systems was to the analysis of the post-seizure disorders of
epilepsy; and for the purpose of illustrating his theory, this appli-
cation will be briefly described. For Jackson, the epileptic
discharge (“a sudden and excessive discharge of certain nervous
arrangements, the cells of which are abnormally highly
unstable”171) led to temporary exhaustion of associated nerve
fibers in the highest centers of the brain. Depending on the
strength and rapidity of the epileptic discharge and the consequent
“exhaustion” of the relevant higher centers, three degrees of
depth of nervous dissolution might be observed.
In the least severe condition, the positive symptom was epileptic
ideation, a somewhat dream-like state of reverie. The negative
symptom, attending the ideation, was a certain mental confusion
and removal of consciousness from reality. The patient as Jackson
put it, “tells us that he ‘becomes dim to his surroundings’”172. In
moderately severe dissolution, the positive symptom was action
“of different kinds and of different degrees of elaborateness;”173
the negative symptom was loss of consciousness. The patient in
this condition exhibited a behavior pattern somewhat akin to
somnambulism. Finally, in the most severe cases of dissolution,
the patient continued to exhibit the operation of vital processes
169
170
171
Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 21.
172
Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 13.
173
Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 11.
such as respiration and circulation (the positive symptom) but

persisted in a coma (the negative symptom). While the patho-
logical discharge of epilepsy directly produced the negative
symptoms, it had, as Jackson wrote, “done nothing to the nervous
arrangements concerned in the positive state, except in the indirect
way of removing control…by exhausting their higher, or
‘controlling,’ nervous arrangements.”174
While Jackson’s specific contributions to our understanding of
the etiology, course, and treatment of neurological disorders such
as epilepsy were of great importance, it was his evolutionary,
hierarchical, systemic, sensori-motor conception of cerebral
function that was of greatest interest. How influential it was in
its day is somewhat difficult to say. In his discussion of perception
in The Principles of Psychology, William James, always alive to
evolutionary, systemic thinking, referred to Jackson’s theory as
“masterly” and as involving “principles exactly like those which
I am bringing forward here;”175 but for most late 19th century
psychologists, still burdened with a mechanistic metaphor for
both the nervous system and consciousness, Jackson’s views may
well have been hard to fathom.
174
Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 16.
175
James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology (2 vols.). New York: Henry
Holt, Vol. 2, pp. 125–6.
Rudolf Hermann Lotze: Outlines of Psychology (1881; English

1886)
In his famous Essay on Humane Understanding,176 John Locke

introduced the question of the relationship between the properties
of the external world and our conscious experience of that world.
To what extent, Locke asked, do the simple ideas of sense
resemble the relevant properties of the world sensed? To what
extent, in other words, do we experience external reality as it
really is?
By the 19th century, in Germany at least,177 the most widely
accepted answer to this question was that conscious experience
bears little resemblance to external reality. Under the influence of
the Kantian178 view that the mind superimposes forms of organi-
zation on the data of experience such that we can never experience
the “thing in itself,” and Johannes Müller’s179 argument that
nerves impose their own characteristics on sense perception, most
psychologists had adopted the view that sensation and the external
sense stimulus are fundamentally dissimilar.
One of the clearest and most emphatic proponents of this view
was the physician/philosopher Rudolf Hermann Lotze.180 At the
age of only 27, Lotze had been appointed to a famous chair at the
University of Göttingen, one previously occupied by no less a
figure than Johann Friedrich Herbart. Over the next thirty-seven
years, he built a reputation as one of Germany’s most important
lecturers on philosophical topics. So renowned were Lotze’s
lectures that, after his death, his colleagues saw to the publi-
176
Locke, J. (1690). An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding. London: Eliz.
Holt, for Thomas Basset.
177
In Scotland and in the United States, however, thinkers influenced by the
intuitional realism of the Scottish philosophy took serious issue with this
claim. See, for example, McCosh, J. (1860). The Intuitions of the Mind
Inductively Investigated. London: John Murray.
178
Kant, I. (1781). Critik der reinen Vernunft. Riga: Hartknoch.
179
This was the direct implication of Müller’s doctrine of “specific energies of
nerves.” Although first articulated in Müller, J. (1826). Ueber die
phantastischen Gesichtserscheinungen. Coblenz: Hölscher, Müller’s doctrine
became widely known through its incorporation in his famous handbook,
Müller, J. (1834–40). Handbuch der Physiologie für Vorlesungen. Coblenz:
Hölscher.
180
1817–81. For biographical information on Lotze, see Wentscher, M. (1913).
Hermann Lotze. I. Band: Lotzes Leben und Werke. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.
Outlines of Psychology 63
cation of eight volumes of dictated lecture notes covering courses

in logic, practical philosophy, philosophy of religion, the history
of German philosophy since Kant, metaphysics, philosophy of
nature, aesthetics, and psychology. Of these, those devoted to
psychology181 were the first to be published and the most influ-
ential.
Entitled Outlines of Psychology in its English translation, the
work on psychology consisted of verbatim lecture notes taken by
Lotze’s son Robert, who attended his father’s course during the
Winter Semester of 1880–1. Perhaps because of their relative
brevity and the fact that the material was organized by Lotze for
presentation to students, the Outlines present Lotze’s views in a
remarkably clear and concise fashion.
The book consisted of two sections. The first, entitled “The
Single Elements of the Inner Life,” contained chapters on
sensation, ideas, attention, spatial perception, errors of sense,
feeling, and movement. The second, entitled “Theoretical
Psychology,” dealt with the nature and seat of the soul and the
reciprocal action between soul and body. Although the second
section is of value for those concerned with Lotzian metaphysics,
it is Lotze’s treatment of sensation and spatial perception that is
of particular interest to the historian of psychology.
From the outset Lotze made clear his acceptance of the view that
sensation bears little resemblance to the external event that is its
cause. “The primary process in the originating of sensations,” he
argued, “(is)…the external sense-stimulus….In all cases…such
external sense-stimulus consists in some form or other of the
motion of certain masses of matter: and it possesses in itself no
similarity to the spiritual processes that are to result from it….Our
sensations are only ‘subjective,’ that is to say, only phenomena in
our consciousness, to which nothing in the external world corre-
sponds…phenomena in us which, although they are the conse-
quences of external stimuli, are not copies of them.”182
Given this view of sensation as an element of consciousness to
which nothing in external reality corresponds, the problem of
181
Lotze, H. (1881). Grundzüge der Psychologie. Dictate aus den Vorlesungen.
Leipzig: S. Hirzel; the English translation, from the third German edition of
1884, is Lotze, H. (1886). Outlines of Psychology. Dictated Portions of the
Lectures of Hermann Lotze. Translated and edited by G.T. Ladd. Boston:
Ginn.
182
Ibid., pp. 5–6, 25–6.
space perception became particularly puzzling. As Lotze himself

articulated the question: “How do the Things by their influence
upon us bring it to pass, that we are compelled mentally to
represent them in the same reciprocal position in space, in which
they actually exist outside of us?”183 This question, he noted, is
actually two questions. One has to do with why the mind, dealing
as it does with conscious sensations that are not themselves inher-
ently spatial, perceives things in space at all. The second concerns
specific mechanisms by which the mind, given that it does
construct a spatial perception, localizes sensations so that spatial
consciousness reflects the spatial properties of the external world.
Lotze’s answer to the first of these questions was taken straight
from Kant.184 Since the source of spatial experience “cannot lie
in the impressions themselves, but must lie solely in the nature of
the soul in which they appear, and upon which they themselves
act simply as stimuli…it is customary to ascribe to the soul this
tendency to form an intuition of space, as an originally inborn
capacity.”185
This is not, of course, a particularly satisfying solution for a
psychologist and Lotze knew it. It is hardly surprising, therefore,
that he considered the second question to be “much more
important.”186 Given that the mind “lies under the necessity of
mentally presenting a certain manifold as in juxtaposition in
space; How does it come to localize every individual impression
at a definite place in the space intuited by it, in such manner that
the entire image thus intuited is similar to the external
object…?”187 Lotze’s answer to this question came in the form of
his celebrated Theory of Local Signs.188
The essence of Lotze’s theory was that every sensation has
attached to it a particular pattern of varying intensities that is
specific to a particular point of stimulation. These patterns are
183
Ibid., p. 47.
184
Kant, op. cit.
185
Ibid., p. 51.
186
Ibid.
187
Ibid., pp. 51–2.
188
The theory of local signs first appeared in Lotze, H. (1852). Medicinische
Psychologie oder Physiologie der Seele. Leipzig: Weidmann. The most acces-
sible account, however, appears in the Grundzüge.
“local signs.” Through movement, the various local signs are

integrated into a system of space within which the mind arrays
sensation so that consciousness is of space even though it is not
in space.
In the case of touch, for example, every sensation is accom-
panied by a local sign that depends on the particular area of the
skin that is stimulated. Different areas of skin are characterized
by different local signs (i.e., patterns of intensity) because skin is
more or less elastic in different directions from the point of stimu-
lation as a function of variation in underlying tissue and in bodily
conformation. As a point of stimulation is moved over the surface
of the skin, successive local signs indicate successive localities in
space. The mind then constructs experienced space from the
local signs and their relations to one another in accordance with
its innate tendency to form a spatial intuition.
The importance of this theory in the history of psychology was
considerable. In part, it derived from the content of the theory,
which served as a starting point for a number of later empiricist
accounts of spatial perception; and in part it stemmed from the
fact that it was one of the earliest attempts in psychology to
explain the nature of a specific phenomenal experience by positing
an underlying mechanism to account for the construction of that
experience.
Harald Höffding: Outlines of Psychology (1882; English 1891)
Harald Höffding’s Psykologi i omrids paa grundlag af erfaring

was the first general introductory textbook of the new scientific
psychology.189 It appeared in 1882 at an extremely opportune
moment. Under the inspiration of Herbert Spencer and Charles
Darwin, evolutionary thinking had taken root among those with
an interest in the science of mind.190 Adolph Kussmaul and
William Preyer had reinforced this trend by presenting the first
scientific studies of psychological development in the child.191
William Benjamin Carpenter had popularized the concept of
“unconscious cerebration” and this, together with a growing
concern with the physiology of insanity and the dynamics of
exceptional mental states had led to a burgeoning interest in the
relationship between consciousness and the unconscious.192
Progress and controversy over the nature of localization of
function in the brain had helped to return the mind/body problem
to the fore; and the works of Ernst Heinrich Weber, Gustave
189
Höffding’s dates are 1843–1931; for biographical information on Höffding,
see Höffding, H. (1932). Harald Höffding. In C. Murchison (Ed.). A History
of Psychology in Autobiography (Vol. 2). Worcester, MA: Clark University
Press, pp. 197–205. Höffding’s text is Höffding, H. (1882). Psykologi i
omrids paa grundlag af erfaring. København: P.G. Philipsens. There were, of
course, earlier texts covering aspects of the new psychology such as Bain’s
Senses and Intellect, Taine’s On Intelligence, and Wundt’s Grundzüge der
physiologischen Psychologie (for full citations and discussion of the content and
significance of these works, see essays in this volume), but these were more
specialized treatises. Höffding’s Psykologi was the first book written specifi-
cally to provide students with a general introduction to the newly emerging
field.
190
Spencer, H. (1855). The Principles of Psychology. London: Longman, Brown,
Green, and Longmans; Darwin, C. (1859). On the Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of the Favoured Races in the
Struggle for Life. London: John Murray; and Darwin, C. (1871). The Descent
of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (2 vols.). London: John Murray; for
a discussion of Spencer’s evolutionary ideas, see the essay on his Principles in
this volume.
191
Kussmaul, A. (1859). Untersuchungen über das Seelenleben des neugeborenen
Menschen. Leipzig und Heidelberg: C.F. Winter; Preyer, W. (1882). Die Seele
des Kindes. Beobachtungen über die geistige Entwicklung des Menschen in den
ersten Lebensjahren. Leipzig: Grieben.
192
Morbid Conditions. London: Henry S. King; for a discussion of Carpenter’s
“unconscious cerebration,” see the essay on Carpenter in this volume.
Theodor Fechner, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Wilhelm Wundt,

among others, were beginning to demonstrate the value of the
experimental method applied to problems of psychology.193
In the Outlines, Höffding brought all of these various sources
together, took what seemed most valuable from the philosophical
classics (including Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes,
Locke, Leibnitz, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant) and even from
literary psychology (including Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Brandes,
and Calderon) and constructed a general account of the new field
designed to acquaint students with, as he later put it, “the
immense variety of sources which psychology ought to make use
of and which ought to center on the direct observation of oneself
and others.”194
The book was an immediate success. By 1930, it had reached
eleven editions in Danish. It was first translated into German in
1887 and went through at least seven German editions. Russian
editions appeared in 1892 and 1896 and a French edition, with
a preface by Pierre Janet, in 1900. The first English translation
appeared under the title Outlines of Psychology in 1891 and by
1919 it had been reprinted seven times.195
Although there is much that is of interest in Höffding’s text, the
success of the work probably derived, as much as anything, from
its positivism, its dynamic, functional view of consciousness, its
concern with the relationship between mind and body, its
willingness to examine the role of the unconscious in the deter-
mination of conscious phenomena, its thoroughgoing develop-
mentalism, and its voluntarism. Each of these will be discussed
in turn.
193
Weber, E.H. (1834). De pulsu, resorptione, audita et tactu. Annotationes
anatomicae et physiologicae. Leipzig: Koehler; Fechner, G.T. Elemente der
Psychophysik. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel; Helmholtz, H.L.F.v. (1863). Die
Lehre von den Tonempfindungen, als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie
der Musik. Braunschweig: F. Vieweg und sohn; and Wundt, W. (1874).
Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann.
For a discussion of the content and significance of the Psychophysik,
Tonempfindungen and Grundzüge, see the relevant essays on Fechner,
Helmholtz, and Wundt in this volume.
194
Höffding (1932), op. cit., p. 198.
195
Höffding, H. (1891). Outlines of Psychology. Translated (from the German
edition) by Mary E, Lowndes. London: Macmillan.
In the positivistic spirit of the times, Höffding began by ruling

questions of metaphysics out of court. “Psychology is as little
bound to begin with an explanation of what mind is,” he wrote,
“as physics is obliged to begin with an explanation of what matter
is. And this general statement of the subject of psychology involves
no assumption as to the question how far the mind exists, or does
not exist, as an independent being distinct from matter.”196
For the period, Höffding’s description of consciousness was
remarkably dynamic, anticipating William James’s later analysis
of the “stream of thought” in several significant ways, including
an emphasis on the personal, synthetic unity of consciousness, a
recognition of the constancy of change, and an attack on hyper-
elementalism. Indeed, Höffding even anticipated James in
employing the “stream” as a metaphor for consciousness.197
“Conscious life,” he wrote, “has…three main characteristics: (1)
change and contrast…(2) preservation or reproduction…and
(3)…inner unity…If we look back on our previous states of
consciousness, they come before us as a series of sensations, repre-
sentations, and feelings—as a stream with succeeding waves. It
may often seem…as though this series were composed of
independent, separate units…But…(e)very individual element
belongs to consciousness only through its union with other
elements. The emphasis is thus to be laid on the union, the
connection, and not on the members in their individuality. The
peculiarity of…consciousness…is precisely that inner connection
between the individual elements in virtue of which they appear as
belonging to one and the same subject…”198
And, in Höffding’s view, the characteristics of consciousness
(continuity, change, synthetic unity) paralleled those found within
196
Ibid., p. 1
197
The classic discussion of the “stream of thought” is, of course, to be found in
James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology (2 vols.). New York: Henry
Holt; for a discussion of James’s view on the “stream of thought,” see the essay
on James in this volume. While there are only two references to Höffding in
James’s Principles, one having to do with Höffding’s theory of recognition
memory, a second with Höffding’s position on the role of bodily sensation vs.
“spiritual affection” in emotion, and both are mildly critical, James nonetheless
goes out of his way to indicate a general approval of Höffding’s work, in one
instance referring to “his excellent treatise on Psychology” (James, op. cit., Vol.
2, p. 455) and in the other professing his “respect for him as a psychologist”
(ibid., Vol. 1, p. 674).
198
the nervous system. The empirical fact of a “close connection

between the mental and the material…(together with) the impos-
sibility of a reduction of the one to the other…(and) the difficulties
attending the notion of a transition from the one to the other”199
led Höffding to a dual-aspect monistic view of the relation of mind
and body. Dual-aspect monism involved the claim that there
was only one kind of being and that mind and body differed
only in the perspective from which that being was apprehended.
As Höffding put it, “Every phenomenon of consciousness gives
occasion for a two-fold inquiry. Now the psychical, now the
physical side of the phenomenon is most accessible to us.”200
With regard to the relationship between consciousness and the
unconscious, Höffding again anticipated James. Reviewing
evidence in favor of the existence of unconscious mentality (e.g.,
sudden emergence of a desired memory or problem solution after
conscious search had been abandoned, the role of unconscious
inference in perception, the unconscious operation of habit, the
role of unconscious impressions in feelings, and the facts of
dreaming and the hypnagogic state), and rejecting the notion of
unconscious cerebration as inadequate to the case, Höffding
arrived at a view of the unconscious not as “a negation of
consciousness, but…(as) a lower degree of it, the continuation
backwards of the series of degrees of consciousness.”201
Developmentalism was to be found everywhere in Höffding’s
text.202 Indeed, the tone was set in this regard from the very
beginning. Addressing the question of the subject matter of
psychology, Höffding acknowledged the fact that “in starting
from the position that mental phenomena have certain charac-
teristics that distinguish them from material, we presuppose a
knowledge which was reached only at a certain stage of mental
development…It will set the subject of psychology in a clearer
light if we adduce certain features characteristic of the way in
which the idea of the mental has been developed in the human
race, and is still developed in each individual.” 203 Citing
199
Ibid., p. 67.
200
Ibid., p. 70
201
Ibid., p. 82.
202
In this regard, the influence of Spencer (op. cit.) is widely evident.
203
Höffding (1891), op. cit., pp. 1–2.
Kussmaul’s research on infancy in the first of many references to

ontogenesis contained in the Outlines,204 Höffding then traced the
emergence of the differentiation of self from other, first in children
and then in the history of the race.
Finally, adopting the traditional tripartite classification of
mental elements into cognition, feeling, and will, Höffding argued
for a definition of volition in terms of cognition and feeling:
“Volition proper is characterized psychologically by the ideas of
the end of the action and the means to its realization, and by a
vivid feeling of the worth of that end.”205 He then set out to
demonstrate that the attentional principle underlying the synthetic
unity of consciousness was itself volitional in nature.
First, he focused on involuntary attention; and here again could
be seen the fundamentally dynamic nature of his view. “When a
new sensation emerges, it is more or less welcome according to the
relation which it bears to preceding sensations. If it is in sharp
opposition to them…the mind will strive to repress it…The
contrary is the case, if…it…brings about a feeling of pleasure.
These movements of pleasure and pain…naturally…so slight,
that we are not clearly conscious of them…determine in every
single case the manner in which things shall present themselves to
us, since they lead to an involuntary selection…”206
Then he addressed the role of voluntary attention in the
synthetic construction of consciousness. With “(t)he transition
from involuntary to voluntary attention….” he wrote, “(t)he
choice among emerging sensations can…be determined by earlier
experiences. While involuntary attention has the character of
instinct, voluntary attention makes its appearance as an
impulse…and…is capable of development into clearly conscious,
choosing, will.”207 For Höffding, the phenomena of will (impulse,
wish, purpose) were the most fundamental characteristics of
mind, serving, as it were, to bind consciousness into a personal
unity. As he expressed it, “An activity of will is felt not least in
the retention of the connection between our ideas and in all
thought.”208
204
Kussmaul, op. cit.
205
206
Ibid., p. 314.
207
Ibid., p. 315.
208
Ibid., p. 316.
This emphasis on will, together with Höffding’s eschewal of

metaphysics, his dynamic, functional view of consciousness and
the unconscious, his monism of mind and body, and his devel-
opmentalism either anticipated or actually laid the groundwork
for directions that psychology was to take over the next thirty
years. It is hardly any wonder, then, that Höffding’s text,
published at the dawn of scientific psychology, would nonetheless
maintain its relevance and vitality well into the 1920s.
Francis Galton: Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its

Development (1883)
Francis Galton209 was one of the most seminal, versatile, broad

ranging intellects of all time. He explored and helped map a
portion of the African interior, invented the weather map,
developed the first workable system for classifying and identifying
fingerprints, and pioneered the use of composite photography.
Within the realm of psychology, he introduced among others the
questionnaire method, statistical technique (including correlation
and regression), nature/nurture terminology, and mental testing.
He designed important apparatus, including the first animal maze
and the Galton whistle, and was the first to study mental imagery,
to explore the psychological implications of word associations,
and to make use of twin studies to assess inheritability.
Although Wilhelm Wundt is usually credited with “founding”
scientific psychology,210 in terms of its problems, methods, termi-
nology, and even certain of its concepts, modern scientific
psychology owes a far greater debt to Galton than to Wundt. This
is true despite the fact that Galton was a gentleman scholar
without an official university connection or regular students.211
Galton’s psychological contributions are scattered over a
number of books and articles. There is, however, one text that,
more than any other, illustrates his extraordinary talent for
creative work on the frontiers of the new field that was to become
scientific psychology. This is Inquiries into Human Faculty and
Its Development, published in 1883. Indeed, if the direction
209
210
Wundt established the first psychological laboratory to carry out original
research, at Leipzig in 1879, and served as dissertation advisor to an entire
generation of early experimentalists.
211
Although Galton had no “students” in the generally accepted sense of the term,
he did have two “protégés,” James McKeen Cattell and Karl Pearson, who
continued aspects of his work; and both of these men were themselves
enormously influential.
Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development 73
eventually taken by modern psychology is employed as the

yardstick against which early work is to be measured, a case can
be made that Galton’s Inquiries was one of the greatest works of
the period.
A list of some of the topics taken up in the Inquiries provides a
sense of the books’ exceptional range. These include composite
portraiture, mental measurement techniques and apparatus, statis-
tical methods, criminality, insanity, gregariousness, mental
imagery, color associations, visions and hallucinations,
nature/nurture, word associations, psychometric methods, the
subconscious (or as Galton calls it, the “antechamber” of
consciousness), twin studies, the domestication of animals, the
objective efficacy of prayer, selection and race, population, and
eugenics.
What is not obvious from such a list is the richness of concep-
tualization and innovation in measurement technique that also
mark much of the work. This is especially evident in three areas
of research that have had great impact on psychology: mental
measurement, mental imagery, and word associations.
Although we now think of intelligence in terms of higher mental
functions such as problem solving, reasoning, and thinking, the
prevailing view in Galton’s era was that intelligence involved the
active manipulation of ideas and that ideas derived in part at least
from elementary sensations. It stood to reason, therefore, that
individual differences in intelligence might be a direct reflection of
individual differences in sensation. As Galton wrote in Inquiries:
“The only information that reaches us concerning outward events
appears to pass through the avenue of our senses; and the more
perceptive the senses are of difference, the larger is the field upon
which our judgment and intelligence can act.”212
Basing his work on this assumption, Galton began to devise
apparatus that would enable him to measure sensory acuity.213
Some of this apparatus, including a series of geometrically
increasing test weights and the Galton whistle, together with the
212
Galton, F. (1883). Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development.
London: Macmillan, p. 27.
213
In 1884, Galton brought this apparatus to the London International Health
Exhibition, where he set up an anthropometric laboratory designed to measure
various aspects of individuals’ sensory and motoric skills.
results of observations on sensory acuity in the blind and high

frequency auditory perception in animals, was described in the
Inquiries. Although we now know that individual differences in
intelligence cannot be measured using tests assessing sensory
acuity, Galton’s work defined the problem of intelligence
measurement and helped motivate others to seek a workable
mental test.
Struck by descriptions of photographic memory that had
appeared in the popular press, Galton had also decided to inves-
tigate individual differences in visual imagery. To do so, he
devised a questionnaire asking respondents to visualize something
definite (e.g., their breakfast tables) and then describe aspects of
the brightness, clarity, and apparent location of the resultant
visual images. He also inquired about ability to imagine things
such as scenery, faces, numbers, dates, smells, and sounds.
Galton’s results, published in the Inquiries, indicated an extra-
ordinarily wide range of variability in mental imagery.
Respondents ranged from those, at one end of the distribution, for
whom visual imagery was indistinguishable from perception to
those, at the other end, for whom visual imagery was non-existent,
merely a figure of speech to describe a thought without visual
content of any kind. This characterization of variability in mental
imagery proved to be very influential and is still widely accepted.
Finally, one of the most innovative contributions of the Inquiries
concerned Galton’s self study of associations. Writing seventy-five
stimulus words on sheets of paper, he presented them to himself
one at a time in varying order and recorded the first ideas
(sometimes only one, sometimes, three or four) that came to
mind. After four repetitions of the experiment carried out at
monthly intervals in various places, Galton subjected his data to
statistical analysis.
Among the more important findings, Galton reported much
less variety in associates than he had expected. Twenty-three
percent of his stimulus words gave rise to exactly the same
associates on all four trials, 21% to the same associates on three
out of four trials, etc. He also found that more than a third of his
associates derived from the period of his boyhood and youth, that
these associates were especially likely to have occurred on all
four trials, and that many of his associates were of an embar-
rassing nature. As he put it: “They lay bare the foundations of a
man’s thoughts with curious distinctness, and exhibit his mental
Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development 75
anatomy, with more vividness and truth than he would probably

care to publish to the world.”214
Galton even recognized the unconscious nature of this process:
“Perhaps the strongest of the impressions left by these experiments
regards the multifariousness of the work done by the mind in a
state of half-unconsciousness, and the valid reason they afford for
believing in the existence of still deeper strata of mental opera-
tions, sunk wholly below the level of consciousness, which may
account for such mental phenomena as cannot otherwise be
explained.”215 Here, in other words, as in so many other aspects
of this remarkable work, Galton anticipated one of the most
important directions that psychology would eventually take.
214
Galton (1883), op. cit., p. 202.
215
Ibid., pp. 202–3.
Hermann Ebbinghaus: Memory (1885; English 1913)
The methods available to those who worked in psychology’s first

laboratories were relatively limited. While considerable progress
had been made in designing apparatus to control the systematic
presentation of stimuli, to measure the time taken by or strength
of an observer’s reactions, and even to register the duration or
course of response for later analysis, use of this apparatus was
generally restricted to the study of sense perception and reaction
time. Stimuli were relatively simple (e.g., a flash of light, a sound
of a given frequency or amplitude, pressure from a weight of
known mass or from two points at varying distances from one
another, chemical odors) and the observer’s response typically
involved a simple judgment or movement, possibly accompanied
by introspection regarding the experience itself.
In 1885 a monograph from the pen of a young psychologist,
Hermann Ebbinghaus,216 opened a new vista on experimentation.
Published in German as Über das Gedächtnis and eventually
translated into English as Memory. A Contribution to
Experimental Psychology, 217 this monograph marked the
beginning of programmatic experimental research on higher
mental processes. Using himself as a subject, gathering data for
over a year (1879–80), and then replicating the entire procedure
(1883–4) before publishing, Ebbinghaus not only brought learning
and memory into the laboratory, he set a standard for careful
scientific work in psychology that has rarely been surpassed.
In order to proceed with his research, Ebbinghaus had first to
invent stimulus materials. These needed to be relatively simple,
neutral as to meaning, and homogeneous. They needed to be
available in large numbers and to allow quantitative manipu-
lation of the amount of material to be retained. In answer to these
needs, Ebbinghaus hit upon the idea of a “nonsense syllable.” As
he described it: “Out of the simple consonants of the alphabet and
our eleven vowels and diphthongs all possible syllables of a certain
sort were constructed, a vowel sound being placed between two
216
1850–1909. For biographical information on Ebbinghaus, see Shakow, D.
(1930). Hermann Ebbinghaus. American Journal of Psychology, 42, 505–18.
217
Ebbinghaus, H. (1885). Über das Gedächtnis. Untersuchungen zur experi-
mentellen Psychologie. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot; the English edition is
Ebbinghaus, H. (1913). Memory. A Contribution to Experimental Psychology.
New York: Teachers College, Columbia University.
Memory 77
consonants. These syllables, about 2,300 in number, were mixed

together and then drawn out by chance and used to construct
series of different lengths, several of which each time formed the
material for a test.”218
Next Ebbinghaus had to develop novel methods for controlling
the degree of learning and measuring the amount of retention. At
first glance, it would seem that the most obvious method for
controlling learning would have been to standardize the number
of learning trials. The problem with this method, however, is that
the degree to which any given material is learned in a fixed
number of trials may vary as a function of the material or the
mental state (e.g., attention, fatigue) of the learner. To circumvent
this limitation and assure that material was learned to approxi-
mately the same degree from test to test, Ebbinghaus introduced
the method of learning to criterion. In learning to criterion, the
subject repeated the material as many times as was necessary to
reach an a priori level of accuracy (e.g., one perfect reproduction).
Measuring the amount of retention also presented Ebbinghaus
with a puzzle. Because it is influenced by whole host of factors,
conscious recall of material can vary from moment to moment
even when the material has been well learned; worse yet, material
may not be available to conscious recall at all even though it has
been retained to some degree. To avoid this problem, Ebbinghaus
invented the “savings method”. Subtracting the number of repeti-
tions required to relearn material to a criterion from the number
originally required to learn the material to the same criterion
provided an index of retention that was independent of whether
the material could be consciously recalled.
With these methods, Ebbinghaus obtained a remarkable set of
results. He was the first to describe the shape of the learning
curve. He reported that the time required to memorize an average
nonsense syllable increases sharply as the number of syllables
increases. He discovered that distributing learning trials over
time is more effective in memorizing nonsense syllables than
massing practice into a single session; and he noted that
continuing to practice material after the learning criterion has been
reached enhances retention.
Using savings as an index, he showed that the most commonly
accepted law of association, viz., association by contiguity (the
218
Ebbinghaus (1913), op. cit., p. 22.
idea that items next to one another are associated) had to be

modified to include remote associations (associations between
items that are not next to one another in a list). He was the first
to describe primacy and recency effects (the fact that early and late
items in a list are more likely to be recalled than middle items), and
to report that even a small amount of initial practice, far below
that required for retention, can lead to savings at relearning. He
even addressed the question of memorization of meaningful
material and estimated that learning such material takes only
about one tenth of the effort required to learn comparable
nonsense material.
Finally, in the treatment of his results, Ebbinghaus made consid-
erable use of mathematics. He not only assessed statistical signif-
icance but characterized his findings in mathematical terms. Given
this quantitative treatment, Ebbinghaus’s methodological innova-
tions, and the care with which he carried out his research, it is not
surprising that his results have stood the test of time. Indeed, in
the century since the publication of his monograph, surprisingly
little has been learned about rote learning and retention that was
not already known to Ebbinghaus.
Suggestive Therapeutics 79
Hippolyte Bernheim: Suggestive Therapeutics (1886; English

1889)
In the mid-1860s, a French physician who had been working

among the poor in a small village not far from Nancy, published
a book on the therapeutic use of a form of sleep variously known
as artificial somnambulism, magnetic, or hypnotic sleep.219 Unlike
most of those who had preceded him,220 Ambroise-Augustin
Liébeault 221 recognized the central importance of mental
suggestion in the induction of hypnotic sleep and the enhanced
susceptibility to mental suggestion that characterized a patient
who had been hypnotized. Putting his patients into a light trance,
he assured them that their symptoms were being relieved; and
when they awoke, many found that their condition had improved.
When rumors of Liébeault’s therapeutic successes reached the
University of Nancy, they attracted the attention of Hippolyte
Bernheim,222 the university’s renowned professor of internal
medicine. In 1882, Bernheim visited Liébeault and became
convinced of the efficacy of his treatment methods. Returning to
the university, he incorporated Liébeault’s techniques into the
regimen employed at the medical hospital, and refined and ratio-
nalized his approach.
219
Liébeault, A-A. (1866). Du sommeil et des états analogues, considérés surtout
au point de vue de l’action du morale sur le physique. Paris: Victor Masson
et fils; Nancy: Nicolas Grosjean.
220
By 1866, the therapeutic use of artificial somnambulism already had a long
history, beginning with its discovery in 1789 by Amand-Marie-Jacques de
Chastenet, Marquis de Puységur. While most of those involved in the thera-
peutic application of artificial somnambulism subscribed to one or another
version of Franz Anton Mesmer’s physical fluid theory, a few, such as Abbé
Faria, Alexandre Bertrand and Général Noizet, had early on recognized the
importance of mental suggestion in the production of therapeutic effects. For
a lovely discussion of this history, see Ellenberger, H.F. (1970). Discovery of
the Unconscious. The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New
York: Basic Books.
221
1823–1904. For biographical information on Liébeault, see Renterghem, A.W.
van (1898). Liébeault en zijne School. Amsterdam: F. Van Rossen.
222
1840–1919. For biographical information on Bernheim, see Huard, P. (1973).
Hippolyte Bernheim. In C.C. Gillispie (Ed.). Dictionary of Scientific Biography
(Vol. 2). New York: Scribner’s, pp. 35–6.
In 1884, Bernheim published the first major account of his

work, De la suggestion dans l’état hypnotique et dans l’état de
veille.223 Here he provided an historical and theoretical analysis
of the nature of suggestion and the suggestive nature not only of
hypnotic phenomena but of all normal automatic behavior. In
1886, Bernheim revised and expanded this work, adding a section
on the application of suggestion to therapeutics. Published as De
la suggestion et de ses applications à la thérapeutique and trans-
lated into English in 1889 as Suggestive Therapeutics. A Treatise
on the Nature and Uses of Hypnotism,224 this work is widely
considered to be the classic treatment of mental suggestion.
In Suggestive Therapeutics, Bernheim provided the clearest and
most detailed exposition of his theoretical views. While these
views were not for the most part original,225 they were so effec-
tively articulated and so well supported by clinical observation
and Bernheim was a figure of such high scientific reputation that
they exerted a powerful influence on late 19th and early 20th
century psychology. Figures as diverse as Sigmund Freud, James
Mark Baldwin, and Walter Dill Scott made significant use of
Bernheim’s views.226
Suggestive Therapeutics also served as the definitive text for
what came to be called the “Nancy School” of “psychothera-
peutics.” Following its publication, enthusiasm for the therapeutic
223
Bernheim, H. (1884). De la suggestion dans l’état hypnotique et dans l’état de
veille. Paris: Octave Doin.
224
Bernheim, H. (1886). De la suggestion et de ses applications à la thérapeutique.
Paris: Octave Doin; the English translation, from the second revised edition,
is Bernheim, H. (1889). Suggestive Therapeutics. A Treatise on the Nature and
Uses of Hypnotism. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
225
Not only did Bernheim derive much of the content of his views from Liébeault,
who had, in turn, profited from the work of those mentioned in footnote 220,
he was also anticipated by the British physiological psychologist, William B.
Carpenter, who published a seminal paper on suggestion in 1852: Carpenter,
W.B. (1852). On the influence of suggestion modifying and directing muscular
movement, independently of volition. Proceedings, Royal Institution of Great
Britain, 1, 147–53.
226
For Freud, see Chertok, L. & De Saussure, R. (1979). The Therapeutic
Revolution. From Mesmer to Freud. New York: Brunner/Mazel; for Baldwin,
see Baldwin, J. M. (1930). James Mark Baldwin. In C. Murchison (Ed.), A
History of Psychology in Autobiography (Vol. 1). Worcester, MA: Clark
University Press, pp. 1–30; for Scott, see Kuna, D.P. (1976). The concept of
suggestion in the early history of advertising psychology. Journal of the
History of the Behavioral Sciences, 12, 347–53.
Suggestive Therapeutics 81
application of suggestion began to gather momentum; and by the

turn of the century, the Nancy approach had become widespread,
both within Europe and throughout the United States.227
For Bernheim, suggestibility was defined as the capacity to
transform an idea directly and automatically into a sensation or
movement. Sensations and movements so produced were respec-
tively called ideosensory or ideomotor automatisms, where an
automatism is any simple or complex activity proceeding without
conscious monitoring, without conscious volition.
Suggestibility, Bernheim believed, was a natural state of the
normal, healthy individual. Only when automatisms were
consciously regulated by reason, attention, and judgment was
suggestibility reduced. Any condition that tended to lessen the
influence of consciousness, therefore, would tend to increase
suggestibility.
Natural sleep was one such condition; so too was the artificial
sleep of hypnosis. Hypnosis, on this account, was a state of
enhanced suggestibility in which ideas provided to the subject by
the hypnotist tended to lead immediately and directly to sensation
or movement. Paradoxically, this state of enhanced suggestibility
was itself induced by suggestion. The susceptible subject, told
“you are getting sleepy, your eyelids are getting heavy, your vision
is becoming blurry,” lapsed into a state in which the conscious
monitoring characteristic of the waking state was greatly reduced
and suggestibility consequently increased.
For Bernheim, then, hypnosis was the result of suggestion rather
than a separate and necessary prerequisite to it. Anyone willing
to be hypnotized could be hypnotized; and all of the various
hypnotic phenomena—catalepsy, automatic movements, illusions,
active and passive hallucinations—could be produced in a willing
subject through the influence of suggestion alone. Although
others had hinted at this position, Bernheim was the first to take
it explicitly and unambiguously.228
Since suggestibility, not hypnotic sleep, was the basic underlying
phenomenon for Bernheim, he also argued that while hypnosis,
227
Renterghem, op. cit.
228
In doing so, Bernheim placed himself in direct opposition to the great Paris
neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot, who argued that hypnotic susceptibility
was pathological, closely linked to hysteria, and that hypnotic phenomena
emerged in a strictly defined, physiologically determined series of stages. For
a discussion of this interesting controversy, see Ellenberger, op. cit.
and especially the deep sleep of somnambulism, helped eliminate

the interference of conscious reason and judgment and therefore
promoted suggestibility, it was not a prerequisite for suggestion
to be effective. The influence of suggestion could be observed in
the waking state just as it could under hypnosis.
This fact, together with the observation that both negative
(inhibitory) phenomena such as paralysis and systematized
anesthesia and positive (excitatory) phenomena such as ideomotor
actions and hallucinations could be elicited in the subject through
suggestion led Bernheim to the realization that suggestion could
be turned to good effect in relieving subjects of unhealthy sympto-
matology. This was the method of suggestive therapeutics and it
was to the elucidation of this method that Bernheim devoted the
last section of his book.
After providing a short historical review of the various ways in
which therapeutic use had been made of suggestion in the past,
even when the effective mechanism was unknown to those who
employed it, Bernheim presented almost 200 pages of detailed
observations taken from his own clinical use of this technique.
These case studies documented the use of suggestion in the
treatment of diseases of the nervous system, hysteria, neuropathy,
neuroses, paralyses, pain, rheumatism, gastrointestinal ailments,
and menstrual disorders. Coupled as they were with a brilliant
theoretical analysis of suggestibility, Bernheim’s observations
provided both a persuasive argument for the use of suggestive
therapeutics and a manual for how to proceed.
The Psychology of Reasoning 83
Alfred Binet: The Psychology of Reasoning (1886; English 1899)
Alfred Binet229 is best known as the creator of the first workable

intelligence scale. Published in 1905230 and revised in 1908 and
again in 1911,231 Binet’s “test” revolutionized psychology’s
approach to the measurement of higher mental processes.
Between 1890 and 1905, Binet laid the groundwork for this
famous achievement232 in a series of experimental studies in the
psychology of individual differences. In the course of this work,
he came to recognize that any successful measure of intelligence
must focus on higher mental functions such as judgment and
reasoning rather than on the lower sensorimotor processes (e.g.,
visual or auditory acuity) that had been the focus of earlier
attempts to construct an intelligence measure.233
The roots of Binet’s interest in individual differences and in
judgment and reasoning can in turn be traced to the first years of
his career. In the early 1880s, under the influence of Hyppolyte
Taine,234 Binet had immersed himself in the literature of British
associationism, most especially in the works of John Stuart Mill
and Herbert Spencer.235 He had read and been heavily impressed
229
1857–1911. For biographical information on Binet, see Wolf, T, H. (1973).
Alfred Binet. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
230
Binet, A. & Simon, Th. (1905). Méthodes nouvelles pour le diagnostic du
niveau intellectuel des anormaux. L’Année psychologique, 11, 191–244.
231
Binet, A. (1908). Le développement de l’intelligence chez les enfants. L’Année
psychologique, 14, 1–94; Binet, A. (1911). Nouvelles recherches sur la mesure
du niveau intellectuel chez les enfants d’école. L’Année psychologique, 17,
145–201.
232
Binet, A. (1903). L’Étude experimentale de l’intelligence. Paris: Schleicher
Frères.
233
See Peterson, J. (1925). Early Conceptions and Tests of Intelligence. Yonkers-
on-Hudson: World Book.
234
Taine, H. (1870). De l’intelligence (2 vols.). Paris: Hachette; for a discussion
of the content and significance of Taine’s work, see the essay on Taine’s On
Intelligence in this volume.
235
Mill, J.S. (1843). A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, Being a
Connected View of the Principles of Evidence, and the Methods of Scientific
Investigation. London: John W. Parker; Spencer, H. (1855). Principles of
Psychology. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans. For a
discussion of the content and significance of Spencer’s work, see the essay on
Spencer’s Principles in this volume.
with Galton’s research on individual differences in mental

imagery236 and Helmholtz’s analysis of perception based on
unconscious inference.237 In 1883, after joining the research
staff at the Salpêtrière under the renowned neurologist Jean-
Martin Charcot, Binet began to carry out a series of experiments
with hypnotized hysterics focusing on phenomena such as hallu-
cinations and systematized anesthesias in which the experimenter
gains control of the perceptual processes of the subject.238
In 1886, Binet brought these various interests together in his first
book, The Psychology of Reasoning.239 Very clearly written and
unambiguously argued, The Psychology of Reasoning superbly
illustrated the way in which the “new” scientific psychology made
use of three of the most fundamental constructs in its theoretical
repertoire, viz., “association,” the “imaginal basis of thought,”
and “unconscious inference.”
As Binet’s biographer, Theta Wolf, has pointed out, Binet wrote
The Psychology of Reasoning in part at least “to demonstrate that
the principles of the association of ideas could explain all psycho-
logical phenomena.240 As is evident from this rather unrealistic
goal, the young Binet was a somewhat uncritical associationist.
This is reflected, for example, in the claims for association put
forward in a paper published just as he joined the Salpêtrière:
“The operations of intelligence are only diverse forms of the laws
of association: it is to these laws that all psychological phenomena
revert, whether simple or complex. Explanation in psychology,
in the most scientific form, consists in showing that each mental
fact is only a particular case of these general laws…for the laws
236
Galton, F. (1883). Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development.
London: Macmillan; for a discussion of the content and significance of Galton’s
work, see the essay on Galton’s Inquiries in this volume.
237
Helmholtz, H. (1855). Ueber das Sehen des Menschen. Ein populär
wissenschaftlicher Vortrag gehalten zu Königsberg in Pr. zum Besten von
Kant’s Denkmal am 27. Februar 1855. Leipzig: L. Voss.
238
Much of this work is summarized in Binet, A. & Féré, C. (1887). Le
Magnétisme animal. Paris: Félix Alcan.
239
Binet, A. (1886). La Psychologie du raisonnement. Paris: Félix Alcan; trans-
lated into English as Binet, A. (1899). The Psychology of Reasoning. Based on
Experimental Researches in Hypnotism. Chicago: Open Court.
240
Wolf, op. cit., p. 5
The Psychology of Reasoning 85
of association are the most general laws…they embrace all of

psychology.241
From his reading, Binet had also somewhat uncritically accepted
the then prevalent belief that the train of thought is always carried
along on a series of mental images.242 As he expressed it in The
Psychology of Reasoning, “the fundamental element of the mind
is the image…reasoning is the organization of images, determined
by the properties of the images themselves, and…images have
merely to be brought together for them to become organized…
reasoning follows with the inevitable necessity of a reflex.”243
For Binet, in other words, reasoning consisted of an associated
succession of recalled images and present stimuli.
In The Psychology of Reasoning, Binet applied this idea to the
analysis of perception. For centuries psychologists had been
bothered by the fact that sensations by themselves seemed inade-
quate to support the exteriorized perception of the object. In
addressing this problem, Mill,244 among others, had argued that
the mind actively supplements sensation in the construction of the
percept; and in The Psychology of Reasoning, Binet adopted this
point of view and argued that what the mind adds to sensation is
imaginal in nature. As he put it, “in every perception there are
sensations and something more which the mind adds to the sensa-
tions…Perception is the process by which the mind completes,
with the accompaniment of images, an impression of the
senses.”245
Finally, as is suggested by Binet’s definition of reasoning in
terms of associated images and present stimuli and his view of
perception as the addition of an imaginal increment to sensation,
the concept of “unconscious inference” also figured heavily in The
Psychology of Reasoning. For Binet, reasoning and perception
were comparable processes, differing only in the degree to which
241
Binet, A. (1883). Du raisonnement dans les perceptions. Revue philosophiques,
15, 406–32; translated in Wolf, op. cit., p. 42.
242
A view widely held until called into question by the Würzburg School; for a
discussion of the controversy surrounding the concept of “imageless thought,”
see Titchener, E.B. (1909). Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of
Thought-Processes. New York: Macmillan.
243
Binet (1899), op. cit., p. 3.
244
Mill, op. cit.
245
Binet (1899), op. cit., pp. 5–8.
they entered into awareness. In reasoning, the succession of

associated images and present sense impressions was such that the
images and sense impressions were, for the most part, conscious.
In perception, the mind “fused” imaginal and sensory units,
conferring an immediacy on perception that prevented awareness
of the process. The perceptual process, in other words, was one
of unconscious reasoning or unconscious inference.
When The Psychology of Reasoning first appeared, it was hailed
as a pioneering contribution. Pierre Janet, himself a seminal
figure in the experimental study of hypnosis, called it “the first
work in psychology founded on experimental researches by
hypnotism.”246 This may well have been the case; yet from the
modern perspective it is not Binet’s use of hypnotized hysterics as
experimental subjects that gives this book continuing interest, it
is the fact that the work was an almost perfect intellectual period
piece.
246
Janet, P. (1886). Revue de La Psychologie du raisonnement par A. Binet.
Revue philosophique, 21, p. 188.
Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations 87
Ernst Mach: Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations

(1886; English 1897)
The nature of psychology as science has been and continues to be

an issue of considerable debate. Kant had argued against the
possibility of a scientific psychology; Herbart and many other 19th
century thinkers conceived of psychology as an empirical but not
an experimental science.247 John Stuart Mill distinguished
between two aspects of the science of mind. One, which he
labeled “psychology,” focused on the simple laws of mind in
general and employed observation and experiment. A second, for
which he coined the term “ethology,” traced the operation of
simple laws in complex combinations of circumstances and could
not be treated by the methods of natural science.248 Wilhelm
Wundt picked up on this idea and linked it to the characteristic
German distinction between the Naturwissenschaften and the
Geisteswissenschaften.249
For Wundt, psychology was of two kinds: a physiological
psychology focusing on the simpler psychological processes of the
individual and a social psychology treating the more complex
processes that arise among individuals immersed in culture and
history. While the experimental, laboratory methods and analytic
conceptual approaches of the natural sciences might be of use
within physiological psychology, they were, in Wundt’s view,
fundamentally inapplicable to a social psychology focused on
generative processes yielding value and meaning. Within physi-
247
Kant, I. (1786). Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft. Riga:
Hartknoch; translated into English as Kant, I. (1985). Metaphysical
Foundations of Natural Science. Indianapolis: Hackett. See p. 8 for the
relevant passage; Herbart, J.F. (1824–5). Psychologie als Wissenschaft, neu
gegründet auf Erfahrung, Metaphysik und Mathematik. Königsberg: A.W.
Unzer.
248
Mill, J.S. (1843). A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, Being a
Connected View of the Principles of Evidence, and the Methods of Scientific
Investigation (Vol. 2). London: John W. Parker, p. 524.
249
Wundt, W. (1880–3). Logik. Eine Untersuchung der Principien der
Erkenntniss und der Methoden Wissenschaftlicher Forschung. Stuttgart:
Ferdinand Enke; see also Wundt, W. (1896). Über die Definition der
Psychologie. Philosophische Studien, 12, 1–66. Wundt’s views on the nature
of psychology are very well summarized in Danziger, K. (1979). The positivist
repudiation of Wundt. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 15,
205–30.
ological psychology, explanations could be constructed in terms

of a closed, predictive system of physical causes and effects; but
for social psychology, phenomena must be analyzed in terms of
a psychic causality defined in terms of experienced connections
among psychic elements and accompanying attributes of value.
Explanations in terms of psychic causality, for Wundt, were never
predictive, always post hoc.
For many in the first generation of “new” psychologists,
Wundt’s view created a serious problem. In the rush to found
laboratories and win academic legitimacy for psychology as both
a science and a discipline independent of philosophy, younger
experimentalists—Külpe, Ebbinghaus, Titchener and others—
had no wish to separate themselves from the natural sciences and
no inclination to employ a metaphysically derived construct like
“psychic causality.” What they needed was a philosophy of
science that justified the placement of psychology squarely within
the natural sciences; and they found it in the new scientific
positivism elaborated by the physicist/psychologist Ernst Mach250
in his Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen. First published in
1886, the Beiträge was translated into English in 1897 as
Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations.251
The work consisted of eight chapters. The first two chapters
and a conclusion laid out the essence of Mach’s positivism; the five
middle chapters reported research on sensations of space, time,
and tone.252 Although the middle chapters contained numerous
observations of interest, including discussion of what later came
250
1838–1916. For biographical information on Mach, see Blackmore, J.T.
(1972). Ernst Mach. His Work, Life, and Influence. Berkeley: University of
California Press; a similar philosophical position was independently articulated
by the philosopher Richard Avenarius in: Avenarius, R. (1888–90). Kritik der
reinen Erfahrung. Leipzig: Reisland. Because Mach’s views were more clearly
and succinctly presented and because, as a physicist, his scientific prestige was
greater, his influence was considerably more extensive than that of Avenarius,
although it is clear that Avenarius was read and respected by psychologists.
251
Mach, E. (1886). Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen. Jena: Gustav
Fischer; translated into English as: Mach, E. (1897). Contributions to the
Analysis of the Sensations. Chicago: Open Court.
252
The English translation of Mach’s work also included an appendix reprinting
an article from The Monist entitled “Facts and mental symbols”; and an
extract from Lotos, entitled “A new acoustic experiment.” Neither of these
was present in the original German edition.
Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations 89
to be called Mach bands and an early recognition of the gestalt-

like character of object perception, it was the philosophical
chapters that exerted a powerful influence on those searching for
a formula by means of which psychology might be included
within the natural sciences.253
The essence of Mach’s argument can be summarized in terms
of two fundamental principles. The first has been called
“ontological phenomenalism.” By this was meant Mach’s radical
rejection of the existence of any metaphysical substance (e.g.,
matter, mind, the “thing in itself”) underlying experience and the
correlative claim that everything that exists is sensation. As Mach
put it, “it is imagined that it is possible to subtract all the parts
(of a compound entity) and to have something still remaining.
Thus arises the monstrous notion of a thing in itself, unknowable
and different from its ‘phenomenal’ existence. Thing, body,
matter, are nothing apart from their complexes of colors, sounds,
and so forth—nothing apart from their so-called attributes…the
world consists only of our sensations…we have knowledge only
of sensations, and the assumption of (underlying) nuclei…or of a
reciprocal action between them, from which sensations proceed,
turns out to be quite idle and superfluous.”254
The second principle was methodological. Since there was no
underlying substance, for Mach, there was no substantial dualism
of body and mind. Everything that we labeled body, including
both our own bodies (and brains) and objects external to our
bodies and everything that we called mind was simply experience.
If we wished to study the elements of experience (i.e., sensations),
the particular science that would be relevant would depend
entirely on the point of view from which we approached our
subject matter. If we studied sensations and their relationships
without taking the experiencing person into account, we had
physics; if we studied the same sensations and their relationships
253
See, for example, Külpe, O. (1893). Grundriss der Psychologie auf experi-
menteller Grundlage dargestellt. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann; translated into
English as Külpe, O. (1895). Outlines of Psychology. New York: Macmillan;
Ebbinghaus, H. (1897–1902). Grundzüge der Psychologie. Leipzig: Veit; and
Titchener, E.B. (1896). An Outline of Psychology. New York: Macmillan.
For a discussion of the content and significance of the work of Külpe and
Titchener, see the essays on Külpe’s Grundriss and Titchener’s Outline in this
volume.
254
Mach (1897), op. cit., pp. 5–6, 10.
as they depended on the experiencing person, then we had

psychology. Whether sensations were to be studied in terms of
physics or psychology was simply a matter of point of view;
there was no principled distinction between the world of physics
and that of psychology and no reason why psychology could not
aspire to the status of a natural science.
Elements of Physiological Psychology 91
George Trumbull Ladd: Elements of Physiological Psychology

(1887)
When it appears at just the right moment, a comprehensive,

systematic text can provide great impetus to the development of
a newly emerging field. Such was the case with George Trumbull
Ladd’s255 Elements of Physiological Psychology.256 In the later
part of the 1880s, the “new” scientific psychology was just coming
into its own. The publication of major works on
psychophysics,257 visual and auditory perception,258 touch,259
localization of function, 260 and the time taken by mental
processes261 had provided a considerable body of scientific data
relevant to the analysis of the human mind. The development of
new methods for the controlled presentation of stimuli and the
accurate registration and measurement of reaction was beginning
to justify the belief that experimentation could yield progress in
the description and explanation of states of consciousness.
Journals had been founded;262 and students from around the
255
1842–1921. For biographical information on Ladd, see Mills, E.S. (1969).
George Trumbull Ladd: Pioneer American Psychologist. Cleveland: Case
Western Reserve University.
256
Ladd, G.T. (1887). Elements of Physiological Psychology. A Treatise of the
Activities and Nature of the Mind from the Physical and Experimental Point
of View. New York: Scribner’s.
257
Fechner, G.T. Elemente der Psychophysik. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel; for
a discussion of the content and significance of Fechner’s work, see the essay on
Fechner’s Psychophysik in this volume.
258
Helmholtz, H.L.F.v. (1863). Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen, als physi-
ologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik. Braunschweig: F. Vieweg und
sohn; and Helmholtz, H.L.F.v. (1867). Handbuch der physiologischen Optik.
Leipzig: Voss; for a discussion of the content and significance of Helmholtz’s
work on auditory perception, see the essay on Helmholtz’s Tonempfindungen
in this volume.
259
Weber, E.H. (1834). De pulsu, resorptione, audita et tactu. Annotationes
anatomicae et physiologicae. Leipzig: Koehler.
260
Ferrier, D. (1876). The Functions of the Brain. London: Smith, Elder; for a
discussion of the content and significance of Ferrier’s work, see the essay on
Ferrier’s Functions of the Brain in this volume.
261
Donders, F.C. Die Schnelligkeit psychischer Processe. Archiv für Anatomie,
Physiologie und wissenschaftliche Medicin, 1868(6), 657–81.
262
Mind (founded 1876), Philosophische Studien (founded 1883); American
Journal of Psychology (founded 1887).
world were beginning to flock to Leipzig to study in Wilhelm

Wundt’s newly established laboratory of experimental
psychology.263
It was at just this critical juncture that Ladd produced his
Elements, a comprehensive summary of the state of the art in the
emerging science. Drawing explicitly from the work of Bain,
Lotze, Weber, Fechner, Helmholtz, and Wundt,264 among others,
and implicitly from his own grounding in American mental
philosophy, Ladd created a handbook that defined the parameters
of the new science. Gone were the previously obligatory refer-
ences to Locke, Hume, Reid, and Stewart. In their place the
reader found citations to Aubert on the measurement of light,
Bekhterev on the gray matter of the brain, Exner on the speed of
reflex action, Goltz on the spinal cord, Hering on color sensations,
Sechenov on inhibition, and Wagner on the measurement of brain
mass.
This is not to say that Ladd’s work was a treatise on physiology;
quite the reverse. As befit Ladd’s own background in mental
philosophy,265 the Elements was in certain respects still a faculty
psychology; but it was a faculty psychology that emphasized the
physical basis of the higher faculties and in which scientific obser-
vation had largely, if not entirely, replaced the armchair analysis
of mind.
In keeping with this emphasis, Ladd divided the book into three
sections. The first section—a survey of what was then known
about nervous structure and function—was restricted to a
description of the “nervous mechanism” as a physical system. As
263
Bringmann, W.G.; Bringmann, N.J.; & Ungerer, G.A. (1980). The estab-
lishment of Wundt’s laboratory: An archival and documentary study. In
W.G. Bringmann & R.D. Tweney (Eds.). Wundt Studies. A Centennial
Collection. Toronto: C.J. Hogrefe, pp. 123–57.
264
Bain, A. (1855). The Senses and the Intellect. London: John W. Parker and
Son; and Bain, A. (1859). The Emotions and the Will. London: John W. Parker
and Son; Lotze, R.H. (1852). Medicinische Psychologie oder Physiologie der
Seele. Leipzig: Weidmann; and Lotze, R.H. (1881). Grundzüge der
Psychologie. Dictate aus den Vorlesungen. Leipzig: S. Hirzel; Weber, op. cit.;
Fechner, op. cit.; Helmholtz, op. cit.; Wundt, W. (1874). Grundzüge der
physiologischen Psychologie. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann. For a discussion
of the content and significance of the works of Bain, Lotze, and Wundt, see the
essays on Bain’s two works, on Lotze’s Outlines, and on Wundt’s Grundzüge
in this volume.
265
See Mills, op. cit.
Elements of Physiological Psychology 93
Ladd wrote in conclusion to this section: “As far as our consid-

eration of the nervous system has gone hitherto, all might very
well have been the same without the existence of a single act of
conscious thought or feeling occurring in any relation whatever
to this system.”266
The second section focused on “correlations of the nervous
mechanism and the mind.” Here Ladd introduced the
phenomena of human consciousness in relation to the nervous
system. Topics included the localization of cerebral function,
sensory qualities, perception, the time-relations of mental
phenomena, feelings and emotions, and the physical basis of will,
attention, memory, and conception.
Only in the final part of the book, constituting little more than
one sixth of the text, did Ladd address more traditional issues:
unity of the mind, the classification of mental phenomena,
relations between faculties, the duality of material and mental
existence, and the problem of the relationship between mind and
brain. Throughout this discussion, his point of view was both
dualistic and interactionist. As he summarized it: “the assumption
that the mind is a real being, which can be acted upon by the
brain, and which can act on the body through the brain, is the
only one compatible with all the facts of experience.”267
Perhaps the most important single feature of Ladd’s text was its
consistent advocacy of experimentation and controlled obser-
vation, its persistent faith in the relevance of scientific research to
the analysis of the mind. In 1887, no message could have been
more welcome to the fledgling discipline of scientific psychology
than this one. In compiling a handbook of the “new” psychology,
Ladd had effectively built a case for it; and in so doing he had
provided a spur to its further growth. As G. Stanley Hall put it
in his long and generally favorable review of the Elements: “His
work is sure to give a great impulse to those studies which have
been sadly hindered by the want of what he here supplies.”268
266
Ladd, op. cit., p. 236.
267
Ibid., p. 667.
268
Hall, G. S. (1887). (Review of) Elements of Physiological Psychology. A
Treatise of the Activities and Nature of the Mind from the Physical and
Experimental Point of View. By George T. Ladd… American Journal of
Psychology, 1, 159–64, p. 164.
George John Romanes: Mental Evolution in Man (1888)
In the middle of the 19th century, Herbert Spencer provided the

first fully systematic articulation of the doctrine of mental
evolution.269 In Spencer’s view, processes of mind were funda-
mentally continuous with processes of life, each consisting of the
adaptation of the organism to relations in the environment. As
life evolved, so too did mind: from simple irritability to reflex
activity, instinct, acquired adaptation, and, ultimately, to
reasoning. In its essential processes and functions, therefore,
human mind was continuous with animal mind.
The publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859
and even more his Descent of Man in 1871 gave added impetus
to this claim. 270 As Darwin wrote in The Descent: “My
object…is solely to show that there is no fundamental difference
between man and the higher mammals in their mental
faculties.”271 Darwin’s argument tended, as his co-evolutionist,
Alfred Russel Wallace, pointed out, “to the conclusion that man’s
entire nature and all his faculties, whether moral, intellectual, or
spiritual, have been derived from their rudiments in the lower
animals, in the same manner and by the action of the same general
laws as his physical structure has been derived.”272
Darwin’s conclusion and its corollary—that human mind
differed from animal mind only in level of development and not
in kind—amounted to a denial of human primacy and uniqueness.
Not surprisingly, this provoked a storm of controversy, even
among those who otherwise supported the case for evolution by
natural selection;273 and, in response to this controversy, propo-
269
Green, and Longmans; for further discussion of Spencer’s work, see the essay
on The Principles in this volume.
270
or the Preservation of the Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London:
John Murray; Darwin, C. (1871). The Descent of Man, and Selection in
Relation to Sex (2 vols.). London: John Murray.
271
Darwin (1871), op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 34.
272
Wallace, A.R. (1889). Darwinism. An Exposition of the Theory of Natural
Selection with Some of Its Applications. London: Macmillan, p. 461.
273
See, for example, Mivart, St.G. (1889). The Origin of Human Reason. Being
an Examination of Recent Hypotheses Concerning It. London: Kegan Paul,
Trench; and Wallace, A.R. (1870). Contributions to the Theory of Natural
Selection. A Series of Essays. London: Macmillan.
Mental Evolution in Man 95
nents of human mental evolutionism began to look around for

evidence consistent with the continuity position. This led to a
sharp increase in interest in the nature and development of human
and animal mind.
Of all those addressing themselves to this issue, none was as
thorough, systematic, or influential as George John Romanes.274
Romanes’ overarching goal was to do for mind, and most
especially for human mind, what Darwin had done for body, to
trace the path of its gradual and continuous development from the
lowest to the highest forms. By illustrating the way in which intel-
ligent ideation emerged from reflexes and instincts and providing
an analysis of continuity in graded levels of ideation, Romanes
hoped to provide evidence for the “probable genesis of mind
from non-mental antecedents.”275
The argument for mental evolution was presented in three
books, published between 1882 and 1888: Animal Intelligence,
Mental Evolution in Animals, and Mental Evolution in Man.276
Animal Intelligence provided much of the empirical data on which
the argument for mental evolution in animals was based.
Gathering data from every conceivable source, Romanes compiled
a nearly encyclopedic catalogue of the “facts of Comparative
Psychology.”277 Evidence for memory, emotion, and general
intelligence in animal way-finding, construction, social inter-
action, communication, and problem solving was systematically
presented for each of the major zoological categories arranged in
phylogenetic order.278
274
1848–94. For biographical information on Romanes, see Romanes, G.J.
(1896). The Life and Letters of George John Romanes. London: Longmans,
Green.
275
Romanes, G.J. (1882). Animal Intelligence. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, p.
3.
276
Romanes (1882), op. cit.; Romanes, G.J. (1883). Mental Evolution in Animals.
London: Kegan Paul, Trench; Romanes, G.J. (1888). Mental Evolution in
Man. Origin of Human Faculty. London: Kegan Paul, Trench.
277
Romanes (1882), op. cit., p. vii.
278
Animal Intelligence has often been criticized for its post hoc anecdotalism and
anthropomorphism. While Romanes did rely heavily on anecdotes, did search
for evidence of complex mental processes in animals specifically to demonstrate
continuity between human and animal mind, and could be remarkably
uncritical in analogizing from human to animal experience, it should
nonetheless be noted that the material in Animal Intelligence was painstakingly
collected, anecdotes from patently unreliable sources were excluded, and
experimental evidence, including Romanes’ own, was cited wherever possible.
Mental Evolution in Animals related the data on animal intel-

ligence to evolutionary theory. Distinguishing intelligence
(involving individually acquired adaptations and conscious choice)
from reflex and instinctive actions (fixed by heredity), Romanes
traced the development of mind from its first beginnings in proto-
plasmic life to its successive manifestations in organisms at
progressively higher levels of the phylogenetic scale. Thus, for
example, evidence for the first appearance of memory was found
in echinoderms, for association by contiguity in mollusks, and for
association by similarity in fish and batrachia. Reasoning was first
identified in higher crustacea, communication in hymenoptera,
and the understanding of words in birds. To rodents and carni-
vores, Romanes attributed the first understanding of mechanisms;
to monkeys and elephants, the first tool use; and to anthropoid
apes and dogs, a vague sense of conscience.
It was only in Mental Evolution in Man, however, that
Romanes finally arrived at the vexed question of “whether the
mind of man is essentially the same as the mind of the lower
animals, or, having had, either wholly or in part, some other
mode of origin, is essentially distinct—differing not only in degree
but in kind from all other types of psychical being.”279 Citing the
improbability that organic and mental evolution would be every-
where continuous except with regard to the mind of man and
evidence for recapitulative continuity between human ontoge-
nesis and phylogenesis,280 Romanes argued for a “very strong
primâ facie case in favour of the view that there has been no inter-
ruption of the developmental process in the course of psycho-
logical history; but that the mind of man, like the mind of
animals…has been evolved.”281
Romanes then devoted the remainder of Mental Evolution in
Man to an examination of the probable course of evolution with
regard to the nature and emergence of distinctively human
ideation. Beginning from the traditional distinction between
concrete particular ideas (simple ideas that derive immediately
279
Romanes (1888), op. cit., p. 3.
280
Recapitulationism was the view that the ontogenetic development of the
individual progresses through a series of forms homologous to those through
which animal evolution took place during phylogenesis. The recapitulation of
phylogenesis in ontogenesis was viewed by Romanes and others as another
manifestation of continuity in mental evolution.
281
Romanes (1888), op. cit., p. 6.
from individual percepts) and abstract general ideas (ideas that

derive from “an assemblage of particular ideas”282), he identified
two different levels of general ideation, each dependent for its
development on the power of abstraction but varying in
complexity as a function of relationship to language. At the
lower level were general ideas derived as abstractions from
concrete particulars without the aid of language. For these lower
level abstractions Romanes coined the term “recepts.” At the
higher level were general ideas “rendered possible only by the aid
of language, or by the process of naming abstractions as abstrac-
tions.”283 For these Romanes reserved the term “concepts.”
Recepts were, in effect, “intuitive” or “practical” (rather than
“reflective”) ideas derived by abstraction from similar percepts.
Unnamed, they remained in themselves “unperceived abstrac-
tions.”284 Infants might know that all nipples could be sucked; but
they did not know that they knew.
Concepts, on the other hand, were named abstractions, general
ideas formed with language. Through their names, concepts
could be held up before the mind as objects as well as products
of abstraction. As Romanes described it: “the human mind is
enabled to think about abstractions of its own making, which are
more and more remote from the sensuous perception of concrete
objects; it can unite these abstractions into an endless variety of
ideal combinations; these, in turn, may become elaborated into
ideal constructions of a more and more complex character; and
so on…”285
Since Romanes believed that all warm-blooded animals and
some invertebrates formed and employed recepts in making
intuitive judgments and reasoning about the environment, but that
humans were alone in operating at the reflective conceptual level,
his analysis of mental evolution and his argument for the conti-
nuity of human and animal mind derived directly from this
distinction. As he put it: “The question, then, which we have to
consider is whether there is a difference of kind, or only a
difference of degree, between a recept and a concept. This is really
the question with which the whole of the present volume will be
282
Ibid., p. 23.
283
Ibid., p. 34.
284
Ibid., p. 37
285
Ibid., p. 22.
286
concerned…” .
In attempting to answer this question, Romanes examined the
nature and function of recepts in animals and infants and of
concepts in self-reflective, verbal humans, and the evolution of
language and communication in both children and the race,
particularly in relationship to the development of reflective self-
consciousness. In the course of this examination, he distinguished
five levels of graded ideation: percepts, lower recepts (shared by
animals and very young children just learning to use gestures and
vocal signs for simple associative denotation of the sort found, for
example, in parrots), higher recepts (typical of the young child
who can use words connotatively to assign referents to categories
but not yet “bestow…names consciously recognized as such),287
lower concepts (involving “the self-conscious naming of
recepts”288), and higher concepts (involving “the self-conscious
classification of other concepts…and the self-conscious naming of
such ideal integrations…”)289.
Pointing out that these grades of ideation form a continuous
developmental series from child to adult and animal to human,
Romanes thought that he had demonstrated not only the “possi-
bility of a natural transition”290 from receptive to conceptual
ideation but the “probability of such a transition having previ-
ously occurred in the race.”291 He believed, in other words, that
he had established the principle of human mental evolution.
Whether or not he was successful in this regard, the significance
of Romanes’ work is undoubted. The depth and breadth of his
evidence gathering and his clear articulation of the problem of
comparative mentality inaugurated the field of comparative
psychology and served as an immediate stimulus to those such as
C. Lloyd Morgan who were to develop the field into a science.292
286
Ibid., p. 45.
287
Ibid., p. 180.
288
Ibid., p. 404.
289
Ibid.
290
Ibid., p. 436.
291
Ibid.
292
See, for example, Morgan, C.L. (1894). An Introduction to Comparative
Psychology. London: Walter Scott; and Morgan, C.L. (1896). Habit and
Instinct. London: Edward Arnold; for a discussion of Morgan’s work, see the
essay on Habit and Instinct in this volume.
His developmental analyses, especially those concerning ideation

and language use, were among the first achievements of an
emerging developmental psychology and exerted a considerable
influence on those, like James Mark Baldwin, who were interested
in the implications of human evolution for an understanding of
development in the child.293
293
See, for example, Baldwin, J.M. (1895). Mental Development in the Child and
the Race. Methods and Processes. New York: Macmillan; for a discussion of
Baldwin’s views, see the essay on Mental Development in this volume. Baldwin
was especially influenced by Romanes’s distinction between intuitive abstrac-
tions and practical judgments, on the one hand, and reflective abstractions and
conceptual judgments on the other.
Charles Lloyd Tuckey: Psycho-Therapeutics (1889)
In 1889, two publications appeared in English that were to be of

considerable importance in the history of modern psychotherapy.
One was a translation of Hippolyte Bernheim’s classic Suggestive
Therapeutics. 294 Conceptualizing hypnotic phenomena as
manifestations of ideomotor suggestibility, Bernheim’s work led
to a rejection of the then prevalent conception that hypnosis was
a pathological condition associated with hysteria and to the thera-
peutic use of suggestion in the waking state, which Bernheim
termed “psychotherapeutics.”
The second such work, Psycho-Therapeutics; Or, Treatment by
Sleep and Suggestion,295 was the first text written in English to
present the new technique. Authored by Charles Lloyd Tuckey,296
Psycho-Therapeutics consisted of five relatively short chapters.297
The first chapter was devoted to establishing a case for the power
of the mind over the body. In support of the contention that
bodily effects could be brought about by the action of the
individual’s own mind, the author collected evidence from a
variety of sources, including cases in which drugs had “acted not
according to their proved properties but according to the expec-
tation of the patient,”298 the fact that pain often disappeared
when attention was strongly and otherwise engaged, that healthy
persons could “develop, by pure imagination, the symptoms of
serious illness,”299 that organic functions could be altered through
294
Bernheim, H. (1889). Suggestive Therapeutics; a Treatise on the Nature and
Uses of Hypnotism. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. This is a translation of:
Bernheim, H. (1886). De la suggestion et de ses applications à la thérapeutique.
Paris: Octave Doin, which was, in turn, the revised, enlarged second edition
of: Bernheim, H. (1884). De la suggestion dans l’état hypnotique et dans l’état
de veille. Paris: Octave Doin. For a general discussion of Bernheim’s views
and importance in the history of psychotherapy, see Ellenberger, H.F. (1970).
Discovery of the Unconscious. The History and Evolution of Dynamic
Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books; for a discussion of the content and signif-
icance of Bernheim’s Suggestive Therapeutics, see the essay on Bernheim in this
volume.
295
Tuckey, C. L. (1889). Psycho-Therapeutics; Or, Treatment by Sleep and
Suggestion. London: Bailliére, Tindall, and Cox.
296
1855–1925. Biographical information on Tuckey is not readily available.
297
In the first edition, Psycho-Therapeutics numbered only 80 pages. In a second
edition it was expanded to 189 pages; and in a third edition to 321 pages.
298
Tuckey, op. cit., p. 1
299
Ibid., p. 4.
Psycho-Therapeutics 101
the act of focusing attention on the organ in question, and that

depressive emotional states could lead to illness and positive
emotion to health.
Extending this argument to bodily effects produced by
suggestion from others, Tuckey asserted that just as disease may
be “induced by auto-suggestion…there is no doubt that it may
likewise be induced by suggestion from without. Let a man be
told repeatedly by his friends that he is looking ill, (for
example),…and unless he has a very cheerful and well-balanced
mind, he is pretty sure, for a time at least, to deteriorate in
health.”300 Nor was illness the only effect produced by suggestion
from others. Improvement in health might also be brought about
by external suggestion and it was to this phenomenon that the
author devoted the remainder of his work.
In the second chapter, Tuckey focused on somnambulism,
distinguishing between natural and artificial somnambulism, and
elucidating the nature of artificial somnambulism as a therapeutic
tool. In the writer’s view, the defining characteristic of somnam-
bulism was that “the mind is so withdrawn from the consideration
of all extraneous ideas as to be absolutely concentrated upon
one object.”301 In this state, the individual was highly suggestible;
whatever idea came to thought was likely to be automatically
transferred to action. Natural somnambulism could be either
habitual, as was generally found in persons of weak constitution,
or accidental, brought on by illness or mental strain. In either
event, the effect of natural somnambulism on the health was
usually deleterious. As Tuckey described it: “The concentrated
mind-power does not operate in a beneficial direction but impels
the sleeper to bodily or mental effort likely to have an exhausting
and hurtful effect.”302
Artificial somnambulism, on the other hand, could be employed
in ways that improved the health. The critical difference between
natural and artificial somnambulism was that “in natural sleep the
subject is only in relation with himself, whereas in the artificial
state he is in relation with the operator, who is therefore able to
direct the thoughts into the channel he wishes…. ‘suggestion’ in
300
Ibid., p. 8.
301
Ibid., p. 13.
302
Ibid., p. 18–19.
this condition has power to modify even life-long habits and

deep-rooted tendencies.”303
Tuckey devoted the third chapter of his book to the techniques
of suggestive therapeutics, as developed by Liébault and refined
by Bernheim. In describing the hypnotic induction procedure and
the use of suggestion for symptom relief, Tuckey listed a number
of characteristics essential to therapeutic effectiveness. These
included the importance of the patient’s desire for cure, belief in
the efficacy of the treatment, willingness to suspend critical
judgment in favor of a direct emotional reaction to the situation,
the presence of a sympathetic and impressive environment, and
individual susceptibility to treatment. Tuckey also took pains to
indicate that suggestion did not depend on the depth of hypnotic
sleep; indeed, “all that is necessary is a state of increased recep-
tivity of ideas suggested by the operator, and an ignoring of other
impressions…good results… (may be) effected when there has
been no loss of consciousness, and even when the patient denies
having felt any hypnotic influence.”304
The final chapters of Psycho-Therapeutics were respectively
devoted to an analysis of the diseases for which the suggestive
method had proven effective or for which its effectiveness was
limited and a series of case studies illustrating use of the technique.
The relative inapplicability of psychotherapeutics in the treatment
of diseases such as cancer, glaucoma, kidney disease, and diabetes
and the great importance of this approach in the treatment of the
neuroses were both stressed. Of particular interest was Tuckey’s
clear recognition that the combination of suggestive treatment
with appropriate physical remedies, such as drugs, altering the
diet, massage, and electrotherapy often yielded better results than
either suggestive or physical treatments alone and his view that
psychosomatic ailments were as real and as painful to the patient
as ailments with a clear organic cause and must be treated as such.
Claims such as these will sound familiar to the modern reader.
303
Ibid., p. 19–21.
304
Ibid., p. 28.
William James: The Principles of Psychology (1890)
William James’s The Principles of Psychology305 is widely

considered to be the most important text in the history of modern
psychology. Twelve years in the writing,306 The Principles was,
and in many ways still is, a document unique in the history of
human thought. It’s author was not only completely conversant
with the psychological literature in English, but with that in
French, German, and Italian; and, as a result, The Principles
presented the discipline for the first time as a truly international
endeavor. James was also an artist, with the artist’s eye for
shading and detail, and one of the English language’s truly great
prose stylists.307 In The Principles these characteristics combined
to yield some of the richest descriptions of human experience,
human behavior, and human nature ever to appear in a work of
non-fiction.
As a psychologist, James was as interested in and knowledgeable
about the phenomena of psychopathology and exceptional mental
states as he was in those of normal consciousness; and in the
Principles he drew constantly from this material to enrich his
analyses. Trained as a biologist and a physician, James felt
compelled to ground his psychology wherever possible in the
facts of nervous physiology; but he was also at heart a philosopher
concerned with issues such as the problem of other minds, the
relationship of mind to body, the continuity of self, the mechanism
of objective reference, and the nature of necessary truths. In the
Principles, both of these orientations were manifest, as James
moved effortlessly back and forth from one level of analysis to
another.
305
James’s dates are 1842–1910; for general biographical information on James,
see Allen, G.W. (1967). William James. New York: Viking Press; for
biographical information presented in the context of portions of James’s
extensive correspondence, see Perry, R.B. (1935). The Thought and Character
of William James (2 vols.). Boston: Little, Brown. The work under discussion
here was first published as: James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology
(2 vols.). New York: Henry Holt.
306
James signed a contract for the book with Holt in 1878. In the 12 years
between signing of the contract and the book’s appearance, James published
sixteen articles on which he drew extensively in writing the Principles.
307
It has frequently been said of the James brothers that Henry James was a
novelist who was really a psychologist and William a psychologist who was
really a novelist.
More important than any of these characteristics for the claim

of James’s text to uniqueness and for its extraordinary and
continuing influence was the exceptionally innovative way in
which the subject matter of psychology was approached. The
more traditional topics (e.g., the functions of the nervous system,
sensation, the perception of time, space, objects, and reality,
imagination, conception, reasoning, memory, association,
attention, emotions, and will) were rarely dealt with in a tradi-
tional manner; and a whole series of non-traditional topics (e.g.,
habit, the stream of thought, consciousness of self, discrimination
and comparison, the production of movement, instinct, and
hypnotism) were introduced in ways that forever changed the
discipline.
Not surprisingly The Principles can still be read in its entirety
with great profit.308 Of all James’s contributions, however, there
are three for which he has been especially famous in the history
of psychology: his analysis of the stream of thought, his charac-
terization of the self, and his theory of emotion. Each of these will
be briefly described; but it should be kept in mind that, with
James, there is no substitute for reading the original.
James’s analysis of the stream of thought was first published in
an article in Mind, entitled “On some omissions of introspective
psychology.”309 As it appeared in edited form in The Principles,
it consisted of a number of components. Three of these, all of
which flowed directly from James’s recognition that psychology
had traditionally attributed to thought a characteristic true only
of the objects of thought.(viz., analyzability into discrete
elements), will be addressed here.
The first of these components was an attack on the idea that
sensations constituted the fundamental elements of consciousness.
Sensation, James argued, was an abstraction from not a fact of
experience. “No one,” he wrote, “ever had a simple sensation by
308
Almost the only discussions in the Principles that appear truly dated are those
devoted to the specifics of nervous structure and function. The more properly
psychological analyses can still be mined for insight into the nature of human
mental function. For multiple examples of the continuing value of James’s
work in this regard, see Johnson, M.G. & Henley, T.B. (Eds.). (1990).
Reflections on “The Principles of Psychology.” William James After a Century.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
309
James, W. (1884a). On some omissions of introspective psychology. Mind,
9, 1–26.
itself. Consciousness, from our natal day, is of a teeming multi-

plicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple sensations
are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very
high degree.”310
The two remaining components emphasized change and conti-
nuity in thought. For James, thought contained no constant
elements of any kind, be they sensations or ideas. Every
perception was relative and contextualized, every thought
occurred in a mind modified by every previous thought. States of
mind were never repeated. Objects might be constant and
discrete, but thought was constantly changing and sensibly
continuous. “Consciousness,” he wrote, “…does not appear to
itself chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not
describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is
nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or ‘stream’ are the metaphors
by which it is most naturally described.”311
James’s chapter on the self introduced numerous self-related
concepts and distinctions into psychology.312 The phenomenal self
(the experienced self, the “me” self, the self as known) was distin-
guished from the self thought (the I-self, the self as knower).
“Personality,” he wrote, “implies the incessant presence of two
elements, an objective person, known by a passing subjective
Thought and recognized as continuing in time. Hereafter let us
use the words ME and I for the empirical person and the judging
Thought.”313
In discussing the me-self, James wrote of three different but
interrelated aspects of self: the material self (all those aspects of
material existence in which we feel a strong sense of ownership,
our bodies, our families, our possessions), the social self (our felt
social relations), and the spiritual self (our feelings of our own
subjectivity). These aspects were then treated in terms of relevant
feelings of self-worth and self-seeking actions; and in the course
of this analysis, James made three major contributions to self
310
James (1890), op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 224.
311
Ibid., p. 239.
312
For an excellent and more in-depth discussion of James’s self theory, see
Leary, D.E. (1990). William James on the self and personality: Clearing the
ground for subsequent theorists, researchers, and practitioners. In M.G.
Johnson & T.B. Henley (Eds.), op. cit., pp. 101–37.
313
James (1890), op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 371.
theory. He articulated the principle of multiplicity of social selves

(“a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who
recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind”314),
defined self-esteem in terms of the ratio of successes to pretensions,
arguing that self-esteem can be as easily increased by lowering
aspirations as by increasing successes, and distinguished ideal
selves from real selves (“In each kind of self, material, social, and
spiritual, men distinguish between the immediate and actual, and
the remote and potential…”315).
In addressing the I-self, James turned first to the feeling of self
identity, the experience that “I am the same self that I was
yesterday,”316 pointing out that “the sense of our own personal
identity…is exactly like any one of our other perceptions of
sameness among phenomena.”317 He then proceeded to review
the classical (spiritualist, associationist, and transcendentalist)
theories of personal identity and concluded with an extremely
important discussion of the phenomena and implications of
multiple personality. In this last especially, we see James in his
element, struggling with the nature of the most complex manifes-
tations of the self.
Finally, James’s chapter on the emotions, revised from an 1884
paper,318 presented his famous theory of emotion. The chapter
began with a clear recognition of the close relationship between
action and the expressive and physiological concomitants of
emotion “Objects of rage, love, fear, etc.,” he wrote, “not only
prompt a man to outward deeds, but provoke characteristic alter-
ations in his attitude and visage, and affect his breathing, circu-
lation, and other organic functions in specific ways.”319 Here
James also made it clear that emotion could be as easily triggered
by memory or imagination as by direct perception of an emotion
producing event. As he phrased it, “One may get angrier in
thinking over one’s insult than at the moment of receiving it.”320
314
Ibid., p. 294.
315
Ibid., p. 315.
316
Ibid., p. 332
317
Ibid., p. 334.
318
James, W. (1884b). What is an emotion? Mind, 9, 188–205.
319
James (1890), op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 442.
320
Ibid., p. 443.
In what was to become known as the James-Lange theory of

emotion,321 James then went on the argue that emotion consists
of our experience of these bodily changes. As he put it, “My
theory…is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception
of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as
they occur is the emotion…we feel sorry because we cry, angry
because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry,
strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the
case may be.”322 Although James may have been a bit overstrong
in equating emotion with experience of bodily change (and in
other sections of the chapter made claims in relation to the neural
basis of emotion that have not been supported),323 his description
of the nature of emotion anticipated much of what is commonly
held by modern theorists to be characteristic of emotion: the
presence of an external or internal precipitating event, physio-
logical change, expressive movement, and a characteristic affective
experience.
It is impossible in brief to summarize the many ways in which
James’s Principles, read and assimilated by those coming to
academic maturity in the decades following its publication, altered
the course of development of the newly emerging scientific
psychology. James’s views, especially those on the stream of
consciousness, played a major role in shifting psychology away
from elementalism toward a functional, process oriented account
of mind (and eventually behavior). James’s concern with emotion,
motivation, and the nature of the self, the social self, and self-
esteem, not only lay the groundwork for dynamic psychology, but
for a dynamic psychology that recognized the importance of
social factors in personality. And James’s deep and abiding
concern with exceptional mental states helped legitimize an
emerging, indigenous American psychotherapy and pave the way
for the eventual acceptance of psychoanalysis within psychology.324
321
The theory was independently articulated by James (1884b), op. cit., and by
the Danish physiologist, Carl Lange, in Lange, C. (1885). Om sindsbe-
vaegelser: et psyko-fysiologisk studie. Kjøbenhavn: Jacob Lunds.
322
James (1890), op. cit., Vol. 2, pp. 449–50.
323
James, for example, argued that there were “no special brain-centres for
emotion,” see ibid., pp. 472–4.
324
For a superb account of this side of James’s psychology, see Taylor, E. (1996).
William James on Consciousness beyond the Margin. New Jersey: Princeton
University Press.
Pierre Janet: The Mental State of Hystericals (1892–4; English

1901)
In 1875, the renowned French physiologist, Charles Richet,

published an article on artificial somnambulism in the highly
respected Journal de l’anatomie et de la physiologie.325 The effect
of this article was to repatriate the clinical study of hypnosis in
France, retrieving it from the realm of popular pseudoscience
into which it had fallen during the first half of the 19th century.
From the early 1880s, a steady stream of publications reporting
the use of hypnosis in the exploration of the unconscious emerged
from the laboratories of Charcot and his collaborators at the
Salpêtrière in Paris326 and Bernheim and his coworkers at
Nancy.327 By 1889, when Hericourt summarized the work to
date,328 he could claim that the existence of unconscious mental
activity had been proven beyond reasonable doubt.
In this same year, Pierre Janet, a student of Charcot, published
L’Automatisme psychologique,329 his doctoral dissertation and the
first of a series of treatises on manifestations of the unconscious
that were to establish his reputation as the founder of modern
dynamic psychology. Janet was the first to articulate a theory of
the unconscious mind aimed at replacing the unsystematic, presci-
entific and largely metaphysical theories that characterized 19th
century Mesmerism; and he was the first to systematize careful,
detailed clinical descriptions of various manifestations of the
unconscious. As Ellenberger put it in Discovery of the
Unconscious, “Janet stands at the threshold of all modern
325
Richet, C. (1875). Du somnambulisme provoqué. Journal de l’anatomie et de
la physiologie normales et pathologiques de l’homme et des animaux, 2,
348–77.
326
See Charcot, J-M. (1890). Oeuvres complètes. Leçons sur les maladies du
système nerveux. Paris: Progrès Médicale.
327
Bernheim, H. (1884), De la suggestion dans l’état hypnotique et dans l’état de
veille. Paris: Octave Doin; Bernheim, H. (1886). De la suggestion et de ses
applications à la thérapeutique. Paris: Octave Doin; Bernheim, H. (1891).
Hypnotisme, suggestion, psychothérapie. Etudes nouvelles. Paris: Octave Doin.
For a discussion of the content and significance of Bernheim’s De la suggestion,
see the essay on Bernheim in this volume.
328
Héricourt, J. (1889). L’Activité inconscient de l’esprit. Revue scientifique, 3me
series, 26, 2, 257–68.
329
Janet, P. (1889). L’Automatisme psycholoqique. Paris: Félix Alcan.
The Mental State of Hystericals 109
dynamic psychiatry. His ideas have become so widely known that

their true origin is often unrecognized and attributed to others.”330
This is especially true of the ideas promulgated in Janet’s second
major work, État mental des hystériques.331 Translated into
English in 1901 as The Mental State of Hystericals,332 the État
mental originally appeared in French in two installments. The
first, published in 1892, dealt with symptomatology that Janet
termed “mental stigmata.” Mental stigmata were symptoms
essential to the hysterical condition, lasting about as long as the
disease lasted, and opaque to patients, who were unaware of the
exact source of their discomfort. The mental stigmata included
anesthesias, amnesias, abulias, motor disturbances, and modifi-
cations of character.
The second installment, published in 1894, was devoted to
“mental accidents.” Mental accidents were symptoms that were
not necessarily characteristic of hysteria. They were relatively
transient, accessible to patients who were well aware of the nature
(although not the source) of their discomfort, and included
subconscious acts, fixed ideas, emotional attacks, tics, ecstasies,
somnambulisms, and deliriums.
The Mental State of Hystericals was a masterpiece of clinical
description. Some of Janet’s most famous patients, Bertha,
Celestine, Isabelle, Justine, Léonie, Lucie, Marcelle, Margaret,
and Maria, appeared throughout the text, their symptoms
described in exquisite detail. The fundamentally descriptive
nature of the book was in line with the strong positivistic spirit
of the French science of Janet’s day. Indeed, Janet took great pains
to eschew anything that might be construed as metaphysical
analysis.
Nonetheless, this was also a work known for its theoretical
contributions. The most important of these was a general theory
of hysteria that incorporated a view of the relationship between
conscious and subconscious mind. Janet’s theory derived in part
330
Ellenberger, H.F. (1970). Discovery of the Unconscious. The History and
Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books, p. 406.
331
Janet, P. (1892). État mental des hystériques. Les stigmates mentaux. Paris:
Rueff; Janet, P. (1894). État mental des hystériques. Les accidents mentaux.
Paris: Rueff.
332
Janet, P. (1901). The Mental State of Hystericals. A Study of Mental Stigmata
and Mental Accidents. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
from his response to the perennial problem of accounting for the

transformation of sensation into perception. How were sensa-
tions, existing below the level of awareness and fragmented both
within and between sensory modalities, synthesized into a unified,
personal consciousness?
In answer to this question Janet offered a theory which was both
physiological and psychodynamic. “First, there is produced in the
mind, in the cortical cells of the brain…a very large number of
small, elementary, psychological phenomena, the results
of…innumerable external excitations…(these are) subconscious
phenomena…Secondly, there takes place a reunion, a synthesis of
all these elementary phenomena, which are combined among
themselves…(and then assimilated) to the vast and prior notion
of personality…(to yield) a clearer and more complex
consciousness.”333 Sensations entered the field of consciousness,
in other words, through the dual processes of cortical synthesis
and active assimilation to that “enormous mass of thoughts
already constituted into a system”334 which was the personality.
But not all sensations entered consciousness. As Janet put it,
even “with the best-constituted man there must exist a crowd of
elementary sensations …(that) remain what they are—namely,
subconscious sensations, real, without doubt, and able to play a
considerable role in the psychological life of the individual;
but…not transformed into personal perceptions…”335 The degree
to which subconscious sensations came to awareness was termed
by Janet, the “extent of the field of consciousness;”336 and the
extent of the field of consciousness was widely variable both
between individuals and within a given individual over time.
In hysteria, the field of consciousness was subject to a patho-
logical degree of contraction. This contraction of the field of
consciousness “prevents those subject to it from connecting certain
sensations with their personality.”337 In anaesthesia, for example,
the patient lost the ability to assimilate certain tactile and muscular
sensations to personal consciousness; in amnesia, forgotten events
333
Janet (1901), op. cit., p. 36.
334
Ibid., p. 35.
335
Ibid., p. 37.
336
Ibid., p. 38.
337
Ibid., p. 40.
The Mental State of Hystericals 111
could not be brought to consciousness even though they were

available under hypnosis or through automatic writing.
Indeed, pathological contraction of the field of consciousness
could leave the mind subject to the vagaries of a multitude of
subconscious processes (e.g., suggestions, fixed ideas) that engaged
the mind without being assimilated to the personality, that influ-
enced perception, in other words, without themselves being
perceived. Here was a powerful new conception of mind, mind
as a psychodynamic system in which consciousness reflected the
workings of subconscious process. This was, needless to say, a
construction of mind that was to influence many later theorists,
including both William James338 and Sigmund Freud.339
338
See, for example, Taylor, E. (1983). William James on Exceptional Mental
States, The 1896 Lowell Lectures. New York: Scribner’s.
339
For an analysis of the relationship between Janet and Freud, see Ellenberger,
op. cit.
Wilhelm Wundt: Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology

(1892; English 1894)
In the summer of 1862, Wilhelm Wundt, the titular “founder of

experimental psychology,”340 gave his first series of lectures on
“Psychology from the Standpoint of Natural Science.”341 A year
later he published the substance of these lectures as a two-volume
work entitled Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Thierseele.342
This was Wundt’s first full length text on psychology, published
when he was just 31 years of age; and in later life he twice referred
to the work as a “youthful indiscretion.” He did this in his
autobiography;343 and he did it in the preface to the completely
revised, greatly shortened second edition, which appeared in
1892, after a lapse of almost three decades. In 1894, this edition
was translated into English as Lectures on Human and Animal
Psychology.344
As is now well known, Wundt was in the habit of revising and
rewriting his books as his concepts, methodological commit-
ments, and factual data base changed. This was sometimes taken
so far that a text titled and published as a later edition of an earlier
book was in large measure a new work. In the early years of
historiography in psychology, this sometimes had the unfortunate
effect of leading scholars astray with regard to the chronology of
Wundt’s ideas. Quotations from later editions might be carelessly
cited as representative of Wundt’s earlier views. More recently,
however, this characteristic has conveniently provided historians
340
Erlebtes und Erkanntes. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner; Wundt was awarded the title
of “founder” by Boring in his widely read disciplinary history, Boring, E.G.
(1950). A History of Experimental Psychology (2nd ed.). New York: Appleton-
Century-Crofts; see especially p. 316.
341
Diamond, S. (1980). Wundt before Leipzig. In R.W. Rieber (Ed.). Wilhelm
Wundt and the Making of a Scientific Psychology. New York: Plenum, pp.
3–70.
342
Wundt, W. (1863). Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Thierseele. Leipzig:
Leopold Voss; this edition of the work has never been translated into English.
343
Wundt (1920), op. cit.
344
Wundt, W. (1894). Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology. Translated
from the second German edition by J.E. Creighton & E.B. Titchener. London:
Swan Sonnenschein; the German edition is Wundt, W. (1892). Vorlesungen
ueber die Menschen- und Thierseele. Hamburg und Leipzig: Leopold Voss.
Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology 113
with a virtual roadmap to the development of Wundt’s intel-

lectual career.345
Of all the texts that Wundt rewrote, none was so completely
reconstructed as the Vorlesungen. In its first edition, despite its
immaturity, it was, as one Wundt scholar put it, “perhaps the best
single guide to the breadth and orientation of his later accom-
plishments.”346 In its second edition, it became an expanded
treatment of a much narrower slice of Wundt’s work. Before the
edition of 1892 is read, therefore, it is instructive to compare it
with that of 1863 to determine what has been dropped, entirely
rewritten, or merely revised from the earlier edition and what has
been added in the way of completely new material.347
In the first edition, the Vorlesungen consisted of 57 lectures.
The first two lectures were part criticism of spiritualist and materi-
alist failures to allow for the possibility of a scientific investi-
gation of the mind and part methodological prolegomena to the
new science. Historical, statistical, comparative, ethnopsycho-
logical, and, of course, experimental methods were, in Wundt’s
view, all relevant to the construction of a science of the mind.348
This broad methodological sweep was also, in a sense, Wundt’s
program for the book. In the first volume he pulled together what
was then known from experimental work in sensory anatomy and
physiology, reaction time and the personal equation, reflex
movement and the muscle sense, psychophysics, sensory
psychology (sensations of light and color, color contrast, color
blindness, and tone), and visual, auditory, and tactile space
345
See, for example, Wundt, W. (1980). Selected texts from writings of Wilhelm
Wundt. Translated with commentary notes by S. Diamond. In Rieber, op. cit.,
pp. 155–77; and Hoorn, W.v. & Verhave, T. (1980). Wundt’s changing
conceptions of a general and theoretical psychology. In W.G. Bringmann &
R.D. Tweney (1980). Wundt Studies. A Centennial Collection. Toronto:
Hogrefe, pp. 71–113.
346
Blumenthal, A. (1985). Wilhelm Wundt: Psychology as the propaedeutic
science. In C.E. Buxton (Ed.). Points of View in the Modern History of
Psychology. New York: Academic Press, pp. 19–50, p. 22.
347
A detailed content analysis of the changes taking place between the first and
second editions of the Vorlesungen is, of course, far beyond the scope of this
short essay. Given the programmatic nature of this work for Wundt’s later
career, however, it would be a worthwhile endeavor.
348
This is fundamentally a restatement of the famous methodological preface to
Wundt, W. (1860) Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung. Leipzig und
Heidelberg: C.F. Winter.
perception. To this he added more theoretical discussions of the

nature and content of consciousness and the components of
thought, and criticism of the Herbartian statics and dynamics of
memory and ideas.
In the second volume, however, Wundt made much heavier use
of historical, ethnopsychological, and to a lesser extent compar-
ative analyses than he did experimental data. After a general
discussion of feelings and emotions, he turned to a lengthy
treatment of aesthetic, moral, intellectual, and religious feelings in
the course of which he surveyed an extraordinarily wide range of
ethnopsychological topics, often from an historical and
occasionally from a comparative point of view.349 Conscience,
morality, custom, cannibalism, nomadic versus agricultural modes
of life, the effects of climate and natural surroundings on culture,
history of society, the family, and the state, religion, monotheism
and polytheism, fetishism, shamanism, mysticism, faith and super-
stition, and the nature and origin of language all found a place in
these discussions.
The second edition of the Vorlesungen, however, was a very
different book. Reduced to 30 lectures, it opened with a short
synopsis of the argument against spiritualism and materialism and
a discussion of method oriented more toward experimentation
than to history or ethnopsychology. More strikingly, all of the
ethnopsychological and cultural-historical material had been
removed. So drastic was the change that some were led to believe
that Wundt had lost interest in sociohistorical phenomena in
favor of a narrow experimental psychology of individual
consciousness; but nothing could have been farther from the
truth. Indeed, Wundt had gathered so much ethnopsychological
material that he would eventually be able to publish a 10-volume
Völkerpsychologie;350 and, in the light of all this new material, his
earlier discussions had become completely obsolete.
349
Despite the title of Wundt’s book and his espoused support for the compar-
ative method, relatively little attention was given to the nature of animal
mind. What discussion there was focused primarily on social and cognitive
instincts.
350
Wundt, W. (1904–23). Völkerpsychologie; eine Untersuchung der
Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythus, und Sitte. Leipzig: Wilhelm
Engelmann.
Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology 115
Other omissions in the new edition included sections of the

original text dealing with sensory anatomy and physiology, the
critique of Herbart, and the analysis of thought. These too had
become severely dated. Lectures on sensation, psychophysics,
feeling, will, and reflex movement were all retained; but they
were revised and in some cases heavily rewritten. Finally, twelve
completely new lectures were added to the second edition. These
focused on topics that had been absent from or given very short
shrift in the earlier edition (e.g., apperception, attention, the
relation of feeling to will, the association of ideas, dreams,
suggestion, and methodology in animal psychology) or dealt with
topics in which Wundt’s own work had so far exceeded his earlier
discussion as to require completely new treatment (e.g., reaction
time, the intellectual processes).
Taken as a whole, the second edition of the Vorlesungen
provided an accessible introduction Wundt’s views on psychology
as an experimental science. As the first of his writings to be
made available in English, the Lectures exerted a tremendous
influence among non-German speakers on perceptions of the
Wundtian program as strictly experimental. One cannot help but
wonder how differently Wundt might have been perceived abroad
had the 1892 edition of his Lectures, like that of 1863, included
a second volume summarizing his ethnopsychology.
Oswald Külpe: Outlines of Psychology (1893; English 1895)
In 1886 Oswald Külpe351 arrived as a student at the laboratory

of Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig, having already spent three
semesters at Göttingen working on his dissertation under the
supervision of Georg Elias Müller. Müller was a consummate
experimentalist, driven by an almost obsessive concern with
methodological rigor and reliable fact; and under his guidance, the
young Külpe had become deeply imbued with the spirit of exper-
imentalism.
During this same period, Külpe had also come under the
influence of the radical empiricism of the physicist/psychologist
Ernst Mach and the philosopher Richard Avenarius.352 Rejecting
the concept of underlying substance, Mach and Avenarius had
held that sensational experience is all that exists. Both the
“external world” and our “mental states” are nothing other than
experience, albeit experience approached from different points of
view. The difference between physics as the science of the external
world and psychology as the science of mental states is, therefore,
also merely one of point of view. If we study sensations and their
relationships without taking the experiencing person into account,
we have physics; if we study the same sensations and their
relationships as they depend on the experiencing person, we have
psychology. There is no principled reason, therefore, why
psychology cannot rank as one of the natural sciences.
Although Wundt also believed that both physics and psychology
must take their point of departure from experience, he drew a
sharp distinction between the mediate experience (abstracted
from the subject) studied by the natural sciences and the
immediate experience (in relation to the subject) studied by
psychology. Indeed, Wundt’s very definition of psychology as the
351
1862–1915. For biographical information on Külpe, see Bäumker, C. (1916).
Nekrologie (Oswald Külpe). Jahrbuch der Bayr. Königl. Akad. Wiss., 73–102.
352
See Mach, E. (1886). Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen. Jena: Gustav
Analysis of the Sensations. Chicago: Open Court; and Avenarius, R.
(1888–90). Kritik der reinen Erfahrung. Leipzig: Fues. For a discussion of
the content and significance of Mach’s Beiträge, see the essay on Mach in this
volume.
study of “the whole content of experience in its relations to the

subject…”353 and his use of the concept of “psychic causality” in
explanation of the flow of subjective experience precluded
psychology’s assimilation to the natural sciences.
Wundt was also firmly opposed to the extension of natural
science methodology into areas of psychology for which he felt it
was wholly inappropriate. While experimental methods might,
in Wundt’s view, be useful in the investigation of simpler psycho-
logical processes in the individual, such as those involved in
sensation, they were of no use whatsoever in the study of the
more complex processes of value and meaning attribution
involved in interactions between individuals. Only a portion of
psychology (and a relatively small portion at that) could therefore
profitably make use of the methods of natural science.
Despite these differences, Külpe got along quite well in the
Leipzig laboratory.354 Within a year he had finished his disser-
tation and shortly thereafter he was appointed both as Wundt’s
assistant and as Privatdozent, a position that required periodic
teaching of psychology. At the time no good general introductory
text of the Wundtian psychology was available for student use and
Wundt suggested to Külpe that he might wish to write one.
For the next three years, Külpe devoted himself to this task, one
undoubtedly made easier by the arrival from Oxford in 1890 of
a new student, Edward Bradford Titchener, whose background in
English empiricism predisposed him to share many of Külpe’s
views. Over the two years that Titchener spent in Leipzig, he
worked quite closely with Külpe on the preparation of the
textbook. In 1893 the book appeared under the title Grundriss
der Psychologie; and in 1895 it was translated into English by
Titchener as Outlines of Psychology.355 Although it was dedicated
to Wundt, the Outlines embodied a shift away from Wundtian
353
Wundt, W. (1897). Outlines of Psychology. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, p.
3; this work was first published in German as Wundt, W. (1896). Grundriss
der Psychologie. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann. For a discussion of the content
and significance of this work, see the essay on Wundt’s Outlines in this volume.
354
Külpe presumably kept his views largely to himself or at least from Wundt.
355
Külpe, O. (1893). Grundriss der Psychologie. Auf experimenteller Grundlage
dargestellt. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann; translated into English by E.B.
Titchener as Külpe, O. (1895). Outlines of Psychology. Based upon the
Results of Experimental Investigation. London: Swan Sonnenschein.
principles so radical in nature that Wundt felt compelled

eventually to publish his own countertext.356
Excluding introductory material, over three quarters of Külpe’s
Grundriss dealt with sensation. Only twenty-four pages were
devoted to the central Wundtian concept of attention and a mere
five pages to will and self-consciousness. Everywhere the emphasis
was on facts; and nowhere was there mention of “psychic
causality.” Even the discussion of more complex processes
showed, as Danziger has suggested, that Külpe “regarded sensa-
tions as the basis for practically the whole of psychology.”357
Departure from Wundtian orthodoxy was evident in other
ways as well. Thus, for example, Külpe classified psychology
with the natural sciences and defined it in reductive terms. “The
facts with which science in general…has to deal,” Külpe wrote,
“we term facts of experience…Now it is evident that the ideas,
passions, etc….must be considered facts of experience. Hence it
follows that psychology belongs not with the philosophical disci-
plines, but with the special sciences.”358 And as a science,
psychology studies “the dependency of facts of experience
upon…the corporeal individual,”359 that is, upon the body with
its nervous system.
In defining psychology in terms of its relationship to the nervous
system, Külpe rejected the “psychical individual” and “psychic
causality” as primary explanatory principles for scientific
psychology. As he put it, “Idea is not dependent upon emotion,
nor emotion upon idea; a change in one is not necessarily followed
by a definite change in the other. And ideas are not dependent
solely upon one another; they come and go in our inner experience
very much at random; their interconnections are for the most part
not due to their mutual influence, but obviously follow a law
imposed upon them from without…the objects of psychological
enquiry would never present the advantages of measurability and
356
Wundt (1896), op. cit.
357
Danziger, K. (1979). The positivist repudiation of Wundt. Journal of the
History of the Behavioral Sciences, 15, 205–30, p. 220.
358
Külpe (1895), op. cit., p. 1
359
Ibid., pp. 2–4.
unequivocalness, possessed in so high a degree by the objects

investigated by natural science, if they could be brought into
relation only with the psychical individual.”360
Finally, Külpe argued for the relevance of experimental method
to all of psychology. “In principle there is no topic of psycho-
logical inquiry which cannot be approached by the experimental
method. And experimental psychology is, therefore, fully within
its rights when it claims to be…general psychology…”361
It is hardly any wonder that Wundt was shocked. With its
strong emphasis on the accumulation of fact, its heavy reliance on
the experimental method, its eschewal of explanation in terms of
purely psychological constructs, its stress on the dependency of
psychological fact on the nervous system, and its classification of
psychology with the natural sciences, Külpe’s Grundriss signaled
the beginning of the end for psychology in the Wundtian style and
the emergence of a new, more positivistic view of psychology
that would eventually come to dominate the field.
360
Ibid., pp.3–4.
361
Ibid., p. 12.
James Mark Baldwin: Mental Development in the Child and the

Race (1895)
In the long history of human thought, opinions regarding children

and childhood were based on religious belief, cultural myth, and
philosophical speculation,362 but rarely on systematic observation.
Toward the end of the 19th century, however, developments in
science and changes in society converged to support the emergence
of a new field of scientific child study.
Men and women with scientific training began to take a profes-
sional interest in children and their development. Research
questions became more focused; methods became more
systematic; and, under the influence of Darwin’s evolutionism, the
first theories of psychological developmental began to appear.
Among the scientists who led this movement, none was more
important than James Mark Baldwin363 and no work more influ-
ential than his Mental Development in the Child and the Race.364
Baldwin’s career as a developmentalist began in 1889 with the
birth of his first daughter. Intrigued by the baby’s behavior,
Baldwin designed a series of experiments to examine develop-
mental changes in the infant’s reaching.365 Stimuli (objects and
colors) were placed in front of the infant in positions precisely
determined and recorded by a simple arrangement of sliding rods.
362
Borstelmann, L. J. (1983). Children before psychology: Ideas about children
from antiquity to the late 1800s. In W. Kessen (Ed.)., Handbook of Child
Psychology (Vol. 1: History, Theory, and Methods). New York: Wiley, pp.
1–40.
363
1861–1934. For biographical information on Baldwin, see Wozniak, R.H.
(1998). Thought and things: James Mark Baldwin and the biosocial origins of
mind. In R.W. Rieber & K.D. Salzinger (Eds.) Psychology: Theoretical-
Historical Perspectives. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association,
pp. 429–53; also see Baldwin, J. M. (1930). James Mark Baldwin. In C.
Murchison (Ed.), A History of Psychology in Autobiography (Vol. 1).
Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, pp. 1–30.
364
Methods and Processes. New York: Macmillan.
365
Originally published as: Baldwin, J. M. (1890a). Origin of right or left-
handedness. Science, 16(408), 247–8; Baldwin, J. M. (1890b). Right-
handedness and effort. Science, 16(408), 302–3; Baldwin, J. M. (1890c).
Infant psychology. Science, 16(408), 351–3; and Baldwin, J. M. (1892).
Origin of volition in childhood. Science, 20, 286–7. This research is summa-
rized in Baldwin (1895), op. cit., Chapters 2–4.
Mental Development in the Child and the Race 121
Distance and direction of the stimulus from the child’s body were
systematically varied, and midway through each series of exper-
iments, the child’s position at the table was reversed.
Although Baldwin’s results—optimal reaching distance at 9–10
inches, a preponderance of two-handed reaching, and right-hand
preference only with brightly colored objects—were interesting
and important in their own right, the great value of this work was
its thorough objectivism and its effect on the author. Not only did
Baldwin employ methods that were experimental, controlled, and
quantitative, he did so in the context of an explicit concern for
issues of experimental design and with an exclusive focus on the
development of a particular kind of behavior.
Furthermore, as he pursued this work, Baldwin began to realize
the potential importance for psychology of a broad develop-
mental perspective. In 1893, he organized a graduate seminar at
Princeton around the topic of mental development in the child and
began to read “again the literature of biological evolution, with
view to a possible synthesis of the current biological theory of
organic adaptation with the doctrine of the infant’s devel-
opment…”366 The outcome of this effort was Baldwin’s first
major theoretical contribution to developmental psychology and
one of the field’s most seminal works, Mental Development in the
Child and the Race.
Adopting a modified recapitulationism, Baldwin suggested that
there is an analogy between development of the individual and
that of the species: “We find more and more developed stages of
conscious function in a series corresponding in the main with the
stages of nervous growth in the animals; and then we find this
growth paralleled in its great features in the mental development
of the human infant.”367 Yet, for Baldwin, this parallelism was
far from strict. Necessary stages in the development of the
ancestors in a phylogenetic series were often omitted in the
descendants. This suggested the possibility that adaptations
366
Baldwin (1895), op. cit., p. vii. In this regard, the works of Spencer and
Romanes were particularly important, see especially Spencer, H. (1855). The
Principles of Psychology. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans;
and Romanes, G.J. (1888). Mental Evolution in Man. Origin of Human
Faculty. London: Kegan Paul, Trench. For a discussion of the content and
significance of these works, see the essays on Spencer and on Romanes in this
volume.
367
Ibid., p. 15.
achieved in the ontogenesis of single organisms might eventually

find their way into the evolutionary progress of the species.
The issue, as Baldwin saw it, was one of “whether the effects of
habit, itself a phenomenon of development, would not be
inherited, or selected, thus abbreviating the ontogenetic
process.”368 In order to lay the groundwork for linking individual
adaptation to the evolutionary history of the species, Baldwin first
turned in Mental Development to delineating a biological theory
of individual intellectual growth or adaptation.
Starting from the assumption that children naturally relate to
objects by acting on them, Baldwin argued that all such action is
characterized by two principles—habit, the child’s retention of
that which is worth repeating, and accommodation, the child’s
ability to vary its activity in relationship to circumstance.
Children, in other words, are biologically endowed with the
ability to act repetitively on the environment and to vary their
activity within certain constraints.
Because the environment naturally limits the child’s action,
some variations lead to better environmental outcomes than
others. Actions that produce better outcomes are more likely to
be repeated (i.e., are selected by the environment) and to lead in
turn to additional variations that are even more successful.
Adaptation, in other words, takes place through a gradual,
circular process in which actions (and ultimately thoughts) are
repeated with variation and environmental selection. Circular
reaction—repetition of action with variation and selection—
constitutes an invariant, functional mechanism through which the
mind develops toward a more adequate apprehension of reality.369
Having laid out a theory of individual adaptation, Baldwin
then addressed the problem of the relationship between individual
and species development. “No theory of development,” Baldwin
suggested, “is complete…which does not account for the trans-
mission in some way, from one generation to another, of the
gains of the earlier generations…”370 The principle that Baldwin
368
Ibid., p. 26
369
In developing this concept, Baldwin profited from his reading of Bain, especially
Bain, A. (1859). The Emotions and the Will. London: John W. Parker and
Son; for a discussion of the content and significance of this work, see the essay
on Bain’s Emotions and the Will in this volume.
370
Ibid., p. 204.
Mental Development in the Child and the Race 123
invoked to serve this function, a principle which he termed

“organic selection,” was not fully articulated in 1895.371 In its
most developed form, however, the basic idea was that adaptive
behaviors acquired in the course of experience differentially
increase the survival rate of organisms born with hereditary varia-
tions that favor those acquisitions. Over evolutionary time,
therefore, acquired adaptations can become congenital.
Reprinted six times within ten years and multiply translated,
Mental Development influenced several generations of scholars.372
In providing students of childhood with a reflective approach to
research method and sophisticated theories of adaptation and
acculturation, Baldwin took developmental psychology to a new
level and helped to turn the psychological study of children’s
development into a full-fledged scientific enterprise in its own
right.373
371
For a detailed discussion of changes in Baldwin’s concept and use of the term
“organic selection,” see Richards, R.J. (1987). Darwin and the Emergence of
Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, pp. 451–503; Baldwin’s articulation of this concept occurred simulta-
neously (and presumably independently, but see Richards, op. cit.) with that
of C.L. Morgan. For Morgan’s version, see Morgan, C.L. (1896). Habit and
Instinct. London: Edward Arnold and the essay on Habit and Instinct in this
volume.
372
Most notably the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, who made extensive use of
Baldwin’s ideas, see especially, Piaget, J. (1936). La Naissance de l’intelligence
chez l’enfant. Neuchatel: Delachaux & Niestlé.
373
However, in 1900 the field’s research status was still far more promissory than
actual. One problem lay in the depth of the chasm between theory and
method. Developmental psychology had methods, but these methods were
hopelessly inadequate to the assessment of the kinds of theoretical propositions
articulated by Baldwin.
Conwy Lloyd Morgan: Habit and Instinct (1896)
As the 19th century drew to a close, C. Lloyd Morgan374 published

two of comparative psychology’s most influential early treatises:
Introduction to Comparative Psychology, which appeared in
1894, and Habit and Instinct, published two years later.375
Morgan’s Introduction was the first self-reflectively scientific
textbook of the new field. In it the available evidence for mind
in animals (association of ideas, memory, sense experience, the
perception of relations, and reasoning) was systematically
examined in relation to hypotheses concerning the nature of the
human mind and the evolution of consciousness. Eschewing the
anecdotalism that had characterized the work of his mentor,
George John Romanes,376 Morgan argued the case for experi-
mentalism. In discussing the hypothesis that animals lack
conceptual thought, for example, he made it clear that in his
view questions such as this “will have to be settled, if…(they) can
be settled at all, not by any number of anecdotes…but by carefully
conducted experimental observations, carried out as far as
possible under nicely controlled conditions.”377
In reflecting on the use of human analogy in the interpretation
of animal mind, Morgan also adopted a strict methodological
criterion that became one of psychology’s most widely cited
principles. Later known as Morgan’s Canon, this methodological
dictum called on psychologists who wished to employ the results
of personal introspection in drawing analogical inferences
concerning the nature of animal mind to avoid interpreting an
animal’s actions in terms of higher psychical processes (e.g.,
reasoning) when lower processes (e.g., simple association of ideas)
were sufficient. Parsimony in the attribution of mentality to
374
1852–1936. For biographical information on Morgan, see Morgan, C.L.
(1932). C. Lloyd Morgan. In C. Murchison (Ed.). History of Psychology in
Autobiography (Vol. 2). Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, pp. 237–64.
375
Morgan, C.L. (1894). Introduction to Comparative Psychology. London:
Walter Scott; Morgan, C.L. (1896). Habit and Instinct. London: Edward
Arnold.
376
See, for example, Romanes, G.J. (1882). Animal Intelligence. London: Kegan
Paul, Trench; for a general discussion of Romanes’s work, see the essay on his
Mental Evolution in Man in this volume.
377
Morgan (1894), op. cit., p. 359.
Habit and Instinct 125
animals, in other words, was to be prerequisite to the scientific use

of the comparative method.
Habit and Instinct, which consisted of the Lowell Lectures
written for delivery at Harvard,378 presented the first full account
of Morgan’s experimental investigations of bird behavior
(research that began the systematic study of learning and instinct
in vertebrates379), an extensive analysis of instinct, and a seminal
discussion of issues in learning (i.e., the acquisition of new
behavior patterns as a function of individual experience). It also
contained the first appearance of Morgan’s natural selectionist
theory of the evolutionary relationship between acquired behavior
patterns in the individual and inherited behavior patterns in the
species.
To distinguish congenital from acquired behaviors, Morgan
had carried out a series of observations of first responses to the
environment in chicks, ducklings and other species hatched in an
incubator. The question was whether newborn organisms
exhibited definite coordinations, “inherited ready-made…(and)
practically perfect at birth”380 and in what ways these and other
behavior patterns were modified in the course of individual
experience. In the case of chicks, for example, Morgan deter-
mined that pecking, walking, scratching, preening, stretching up
and clapping the wings, scattering and crouching when alarmed,
and making the danger churr were all congenital behavior patterns
(although practice was sometimes necessary for the animal to
acquire a high level of skill in these behaviors).
Acquired behavior was studied by subjecting newborn animals
to experimentally varying environmental conditions. Thus, for
example, when noxious tasting cinnabar larvae were deliberately
mixed with edible worms and given to three-day-old chicks, the
chicks were found at first exposure to peck at both indiscrimi-
nately. As soon as the cinnabar larvae were taken into the mouth,
however, they were immediately rejected and on succeeding trials
378
And repeated in part at various stops along Morgan’s tour of American
academic institutions in the Winter of 1895–6.
379
Morgan was not, however, the first to experiment on vertebrate behavior. The
earliest studies in this area were published by Spalding; see, for example,
Spalding, D.A. (1872). On instinct. Nature, 6, 485–6 and Spalding, D.A.
(1873). Instinct. With original observations on young animals. Macmillan’s
Magazine, 27, 282–3. Morgan was aware of and cited this work.
380
Morgan (1896), op. cit., p. 23.
actively avoided. As Morgan explained it, “The chicks first

experience of the cinnabar caterpillar leads to an association
between the appearance of the larva and its taste…On the second
occasion the taste is suggested by the sight of the cinnabar
larva…It is through association and suggestion that an organism
is able to profit by experience….”381
As it’s name implies, Habit and Instinct was also the vehicle for
Morgan to present his theory of instinct and to set forth his view
of habit formation in terms of factors such as consciousness of
effect, response selection, need satisfaction, and imitation.
Instinct, for Morgan, was defined in terms of characteristics such
as its heritability, adaptiveness, coordination, and universality
within the species. In addition, he distinguished instinct from
reflex behavior in terms of level of involvement of the organism
(global for instincts, restricted for reflexes), relative complexity of
the eliciting stimulus pattern (more complex for instincts), and
presence in instinct of “an internal factor which causes uneasiness
or distress…if it do (sic!) not find its normal instinctive satis-
faction”382 (a factor absent in reflex behavior).
Habit formation was the process whereby individually acquired
behavior patterns became, like instincts, automatic and uncon-
scious. For Morgan, habit was an individually acquired behavior
pattern that had become “stereotyped through repetition.”383
The two issues of importance for the question of habit formation,
therefore, were the process by which a novel behavior pattern was
acquired in the first place and the process by which the pattern,
once acquired, was automatized.
In addressing these issues, Morgan touched on a wide range of
topics that were to become central to the later study of animal
learning. What role, for example, did consciousness (both
consciousness of the effect of response and conscious choice and
selection of response for repetition) serve in enabling “an animal
to guide its actions in the light of previous experience”?384 How
did the impulse provided by general needs (e.g, hunger) prepare
the organism to respond in a way appropriate to satisfying those
381
Ibid., p. 151.
382
Ibid., p. 7.
383
Ibid., p. 1.
384
Ibid., p. 127.
Habit and Instinct 127
needs? What was the effect on future response of “the thwarting

or the satisfaction of impulse”?385 And how was learning influ-
enced by imitation?
Finally, in the context of relating habit to instinct, Morgan
arrived at a question that had bedeviled evolutionists since
Darwin’s articulation of the hypothesis of natural selection.386 To
what extent must natural selection be supplemented by the inher-
itance of acquired habits in order to account for the evolution of
complex instinctive behavior patterns? “Is the greater relative
perfection in the instinctive flight of some insects,” for example,
“due to the inheritance of acquired skill on the part of their
ancestors? Or is it due to the fact that there has been among
insects more elimination of those who failed in congenital power
of flight, and hence a survival through natural selection of those
in which the instinctive flight was better developed?”387 How, in
other words, is congenital variation related to acquired modifi-
cation?
In answer to this question, Morgan rejected the idea of inheri-
tance of acquired characters and opted for natural selection as the
sole mechanism underlying evolutionary change. “There is,” he
said, “no conclusive evidence that the secondary automatism of
habit is transmitted by heredity, so as to give rise to the primary
automatism of instinct…The balance of evidence appears to
favour the view that instinctive behaviour is the result of natural
selection working on variations of germinal origin without the
direct transmission of acquired modifications of structure.”388
But then what of those “cases in which behaviour, generally
believed to be instinctive…appears to run curiously parallel with
that due to intelligent acquisition”?389 Here Morgan proposed a
mechanism that came to be called “organic selection.”390 The
385
Ibid., p. 140.
386
or the Preservation of the Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London:
John Murray.
387
Morgan (1896), op. cit., p. 24–5.
388
Ibid., pp. 325–6.
389
Ibid.
390
For a detailed discussion of the simultaneous and presumably independent
development of this concept by both Morgan and J.M. Baldwin, Baldwin’s use
of the term “organic selection” to refer to the concept, and its eventually
basic idea of organic selection was that when a relatively sudden

change occurred in the environment, adaptive behaviors acquired
in the course of experience differentially increased the survival rate
of organisms born with congenital variations that favored those
acquisitions. As Morgan put it: “Congenital variations in the
same direction as the adaptive modification will be so much to the
good of the individual concerned. They will constitute a
congenital predisposition to that strengthening…which is essential
for survival.”391 Over evolutionary time, therefore, “congenital
variation will gradually render hereditary…that (which) was
provisionally attained by plastic modification. The effects are
precisely the same as they would be if the modification in question
were directly transmitted in a slight but cumulatively increasing
degree; they are reached, however, in a manner which involves no
such transmission.”392
In articulating this principle, Morgan gave the acquisition of
new adaptations in the individual experience of the organism a
crucial evolutionary function. In his lectures, he also proposed
mechanisms by which such adaptations might take place, and
provided concrete examples of how they might be studied. Not
surprisingly, Habit and Instinct generated a groundswell of
interest in the experimental study of vertebrate learning and
behavior; and, in so doing, it provided the impetus for psycholo-
gists such as Edward Lee Thorndike, Willard Stanton Small, and
Linus Ward Kline to take the study of animal learning into the
laboratory.393
becoming known as the “Baldwin effect,” see Richards, R.J. (1987). Darwin
and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, pp. 398–404, 451–503; for an early form of
Baldwin’s version, see Baldwin, J.M. (1895). Mental Development in the
Child and the Race. Methods and Processes. New York: Macmillan and the
essay on Mental Development in this volume.
391
Morgan (1896), op. cit., p. 317
392
Ibid.
393
Thorndike, E. L. (1898). Animal Intelligence: An Experimental Study of the
Associative Processes in Animals (Psychological Review, Monograph
Supplements, No. 8). New York: Macmillan; Small, W.S. (1900–1).
Experimental study of the mental processes of the rat. American Journal of
Psychology, 11, 133–65; 12, 206–39; Kline, L.W. (1899). Methods in animal
psychology. American Journal of Psychology, 10, 256–79; for a discussion of
Thorndike’s work, see the essay on Animal Intelligence in this volume.
An Outline of Psychology 129
Edward Bradford Titchener: An Outline of Psychology (1896)
The passing of Edward Bradford Titchener394 in 1927 moved his

most famous student, E.G. Boring, to observe that “the death of
no other psychologist could so alter the psychological picture in
America…he was a cardinal point in the national systematic
orientation. The clear cut opposition between behaviorism and
its allies, on the one hand, and something else, on the other,
remains clear only when the opposition is between behaviorism
and Titchener, mental tests and Titchener, or applied psychology
and Titchener. His death thus, in a sense, creates a classificatory
chaos in American systematic psychology.”395
While this may have been something of an overstatement at the
time that it was written, it would not have been far from the truth
a decade or two earlier. From the late 1890s through the early
years of World War I, Titchener’s unswerving allegiance to one
particular view of the nature, subject matter, and conduct of
psychology defined an orthodoxy against which other approaches
(e.g., the “functionalism” of Angell, the “behaviorism” of
Watson)396 typically had to define themselves. Termed “struc-
turalism” by Titchener himself,397 these views were given their first
comprehensive statement in 1896 in An Outline of Psychology.398
The product of an alliance between English associationist
empiricism,399 Wundtian experimental laboratory procedure, and
394
1867–1927. For biographical information on Titchener, see Boring, E.G.
(1927). Edward Bradford Titchener 1867–1927. The American Journal of
Psychology, 38, 489–506.
395
Ibid., p. 489.
396
Angell, J.R. (1907). The province of functional psychology. Psychological
Review, 14, 61–91; Watson, J.B. (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist views
it. Psychological Review, 20, 158–77.
397
Titchener, E.B. (1898). The postulates of a structural psychology.
Philosophical Review, 7(5), 449–65,
398
Titchener, E.B. (1896). An Outline of Psychology. New York: Macmillan; it
would be difficult to overestimate the influence of Titchener’s Outline. Between
1896 and 1914, it went through twenty printings and three editions (in the last
edition its title was changed to A Text-Book of Psychology). Many of those
choosing a career in psychology during the first two decades of the twentieth
century received their introduction to the new science through Titchener’s text.
399
In some ways Titchener represented both the final development and the last
gasp of a philosophical tradition stretching from Locke through Hume to
James Mill and eventually to John Stuart Mill.
400
Machian phenomenalism, the Outline was positivistic, analytic,
descriptive, methodologically rigorous, universalistic, pure, and
systematic to a fault. Titchener’s positivism was evident in his
single-minded concern with the phenomena of conscious
experience. If anything mental lay beneath the surface of
consciousness, it’s nature and existence was the province of
metaphysics not psychology.
The analytic, descriptive ideal formed the core of Titchener’s
approach. As he described it, “The aim of the psychologist is…to
analyse concrete (actual) mental experience into its simplest
components…(and) to discover… the laws which govern their
combination…”401 To the extent that explanation entered the
system at all, it was merely as the “statement of the circumstances
or conditions under which the described phenomenon occurs.”402
The primary difference between Titchener’s new scientific
psychology and the old empirical psychology of the mental
philosophers was the addition, in Titchener’s case, of rigorous
scientific method and an emphasis on the facts of experience
generated by this method. The method, of course, was systematic
experimental introspection. In systematic introspection, as
described in the Outline, the Observer first attends not to the
conscious process itself but to the object which gives rise to the
conscious process. This has the effect of making the resultant
conscious process clearer. When the object has ceased to influence
consciousness, the Observer calls the conscious process back into
memory and examines and analyzes it in detail. In experimental
introspection, the object giving rise to the conscious process is
experimentally controlled and/or manipulated in order to facilitate
replicability of results across different Observers. For Titchener,
only those analyses carried out through systematic introspection
400
Analysis of the Sensations. Chicago: Open Court; for a discussion of the
content of the Beiträge with mention of its impact on Titchener, see the essay
on Mach in this volume.
401
Titchener (1896), op. cit., p. 12.
402
Ibid., p. 17.
An Outline of Psychology 131
and experimentally verified across Observers could lay claim to

scientific status.403
The psychology of Titchener’s Outline was also universalistic
and pure. His scientific goal was to study mental processes that
characterize the “normal, adult, human”404 in general. There was
no place in this system for individual differences,
psychopathology, animal, child, social, or applied psychology.
Even the nervous system, to which Titchener paid lip service,
never received a chapter in any of his textbooks.
Finally, Titchener’s psychology was almost oppressively
systematic, tracing the nature of mental process from mental
elements through combinations of these elements, to combinations
built from combinations. In the first main section of the Outline,
Titchener described the nature, methods of study, and attributes
of the two conscious elements on which the entire edifice was
constructed: sensation (that element of consciousness arising as a
result of impressions received by definite organs of sense and
varying in quality, intensity, extent, and duration) and affection
(that element of consciousness arising as a result of impressions
either building up or breaking down the body as a whole and
varying in quality—pleasantness/unpleasantness—intensity and
duration).
In the second section, he focused on those more complex mental
phenomena that consisted of combinations of sensations, affec-
tions or both. Thus, for example, perceptions and ideas were said
to arise “from the interconnection and intermixture of sensa-
tions;”405 simultaneous and successive associations from the inter-
connection of perceptions and ideas. Feelings were thought to be
“composed of a perception or idea and affection, in which
affection plays the principal part…”406 and emotion to consist “of
a strong affection, and a simultaneous association of ideas.”407
403
In later editions of this work and notably in the Text-Book, Titchener relaxed
the requirement of retrospection for adequate introspection, arguing that
while this might be useful for the beginner and even occasionally for the
trained Observer, it was not necessary to proper scientific procedure.
404
Titchener (1896), op. cit., p. 17.
405
Ibid., p. 92
406
Ibid., p. 214.
407
Ibid., pp. 220–1.
In the last major section of the Outline, Titchener dealt with

those phenomena of conscious experience that were maximally
complex—recognition, memory, imagination, self-consciousness,
judgment, reasoning, concept formation, and sentiment. Each
was shown to build on what had come before. One example will
suffice. For Titchener, sentiment was “the total affective
experience which arises when we face a situation by…means of
judgment;”408 but judgment was itself a type of successive associ-
ation between ideas; and ideas, of course, consisted in turn of
complexes of sensations.
408
Ibid., pp. 304–5.
Wilhelm Wundt: Outlines of Psychology (1896; English 1897)
The Outlines of Psychology409 is by far the best general intro-

duction to the mature psychological views of Wilhelm Wundt.410
Reasons for this include its relative clarity, brevity, and the fact
that Wundt wrote the book to provide students with “a systematic
survey of the fundamentally important results and doctrines of
modern psychology.”411 In addition, the Outlines was also
published to counter the rise, within his own laboratory, of a view
of psychology that Wundt believed to be pernicious. As such it
was written not only to lay out Wundt’s views on fundamental
issues but to make the rationale behind these views impeccably
clear.
The impetus for Wundt’s work on the Outlines came from the
1893 publication of Oswald Külpe’s Grundriss der Psychologie.412
Külpe had arrived at Wundt’s Leipzig laboratory as a student in
1886. Under the influence of Georg Elias Müller, with whom he
had studied at Göttingen, and the radical empiricism of Ernst
Mach and Richard Avenarius,413 Külpe had already begun to
view psychology as a natural science. This implied, among other
things, an almost exclusive emphasis on the experimental method
and on psychological processes most amenable to experimental
treatment, viz., sensations; it required understanding psycho-
logical phenomena in their relationship to and dependence on the
body (and hence biology); and it meant ridding theory of purely
psychological constructs that seemed to Külpe to be more closely
aligned with metaphysics than with science.
409
Wundt, W. (1897). Outlines of Psychology. Translated…by C.H. Judd.
Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann; first published in German as Wundt, W. (1896).
Grundriss der Psychologie. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann.
410
Erlebtes und Erkanntes. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner.
411
Wundt (1897), op. cit., p. v.
412
Külpe, O. (1893). Grundriss der Psychologie. Auf experimenteller Grundlage
dargestellt. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann; translated into English by E.B.
Titchener as Külpe, O. (1895). Outlines of Psychology. Based upon the
Results of Experimental Investigation. London: Swan Sonnenschein.
413
Analysis of the Sensations. Chicago: Open Court; and Avenarius, R.
(1888–90). Kritik der reinen Erfahrung. Leipzig: Fues; for a discussion of the
Beiträge, see the essay on Mach in this volume.
414
The break with Wundt, however, was slow in developing.
During his first few years in Leipzig, Külpe was something of a star
in Wundt’s laboratory. In rapid succession, he finished his disser-
tation, received appointment to a coveted position as Wundt’s
assistant, and was made Privatdozent with teaching responsibil-
ities in psychology. His divergent views on the nature and scope
of the discipline had yet to become public. The catalyst that led
to Külpe’s airing these views was Wundt’s suggestion that he
write an introductory text for student use. When that text
appeared in 1893 as the Grundriss,415 it created a sensation.416
Although the work was dedicated to Wundt, it marked a radical
departure from Wundt’s conception of the nature, methods, and
limits of psychology.
Wundt had little choice but to reply to this challenge. In 1896,
after Külpe had moved on to a professorship at Würzburg, Wundt
published his own Grundriss der Psychologie. The significance of
his decision to give the work the same title as that of Külpe could
hardly have been more pointed. Wundt’s goal was not only to
offer students an introduction to psychology but to produce what
was, in effect, a countertext to that of Külpe, one that would
provide students with the “correct” conception of the nature and
scope of psychology. This involved making a clear distinction
between psychology and natural science, defining psychology in
such a way as to preclude its reduction to biology, exposing
readers to the full range of complex psychological phenomena
beyond sensation, arguing for a severe restriction of the role of
experimentation in psychology, and recognizing the theoretical
importance of purely psychological constructs.
In introducing the Outlines, Wundt turned first to the
distinction between psychology and natural science. There are
“two directions for the treatment of experience,” he wrote, “one
is that of the natural sciences, which concern themselves with the
objects of experience, thought of as independent of the subject.
414
And seems never to have extended to the personal domain, see Blumenthal,
A.L. (1985). Shaping a tradition: Experimentalism begins. In C.E. Buxton
(Ed.). Points of View in the Modern History of Psychology. Orlando, FL:
Academic Press, pp. 51–83.
415
Külpe (1895), op. cit.
416
See Kiesow, F. (1930). F. Kiesow. In C. Murchison (Ed.)., A History of
Psychology in Autobiography (Vol. 1). Worcester, MA: Clark University
Press, pp. 163–90.
The other is that of psychology, which investigates the whole

content of experience in its relations to the subject and in its
attributes derived directly from the subject.”417
Where Külpe had defined psychology “as a science of the facts
of experience in their dependency upon…the corporeal
individual,” 418 Wundt defined psychology as the study of
experience “in its relations to the subject”.419 The point of
reference, in other words, was not the individual as a nervous
system, but the individual as an active apprehender of the contents
of experience. Where Külpe laid the groundwork for biological
reductionism, Wundt stressed the independence of psychology
from biology.
Given this difference, it is not surprising that the two texts
varied markedly in the distribution of discussion allocated to
various content areas within the field. Külpe devoted over three
fourths of his text to sensation, much of it to the elementary
phenomena of sensation. By contrast, Wundt gave approximately
equal treatment to sensations/ideas and to feelings/emotions.
More importantly, less than a third of Wundt’s text was focused
on elementary processes; the remainder was taken up with more
complex psychological phenomena ranging from psychical
compounds and their interconnections to the psychological devel-
opment of animals (e.g., the rise of instincts), children (e.g., the
development of ideas, self-consciousness, will, and play), and
cultures (e.g., the emergence of language, myth and custom).
In discussing these more complex phenomena, Wundt made it
clear that he did not, by any means, share Külpe’s faith in the
broad relevance of experimental method. Külpe had claimed
that “there is no topic of psychological inquiry which cannot be
approached by the experimental method.”420 Wundt, on the
other hand, drew a sharp distinction between those aspects of
psychology for which experimentation was useful (viz., “the
analysis of simpler psychical processes”421 in the individual) and
those for which it was not (viz., the more complex psychical
417
Wundt (1897), op. cit., p. 3.
418
Külpe (1895), op. cit., pp. 3–4.
419
Wundt (1897), op. cit., p. 3.
420
Külpe (1895), op. cit., p. 12.
421
Wundt (1897), op. cit., p. 23.
processes of value and meaning elaborated in interactions between

individuals). For Wundt the higher processes were
“unapproachable by means of experiment.”422
In the last section of the book, Wundt laid out his argument for
the necessity of purely psychological constructs. Reemphasizing
the distinction between psychology, which studies immediate
experience dependent on the experiencing subject, and natural
science, which studies mediate experience in abstraction from
the subject, and arguing that the parallelism between mediate
and immediate experience was only partial, Wundt pointed to the
existence of phenomena that “lie entirely outside the sphere of
experience to which the principle of parallelism applies.”423
Purely psychological phenomena of this sort (e.g., value,
meaning, purpose) could, for Wundt, “only be understood
through psychological analysis.”424 Moreover, the existence of
such phenomena required “the recognition of an independent
psychical causality…just as different from…physical causality as
the point of view adopted in psychology…is different from the
point of view taken in the natural sciences…”425 In psychical
causality, Wundt believed that he had found the basis not only for
psychology’s right to exist in independence of biology, but for
psychology’s claim to serve as the foundation for all of the human
sciences. It is hardly any wonder that he was loathe to see this
principle lost in an overassimilation of psychology to natural
science.
422
Ibid.
423
Ibid., p. 319.
424
Ibid., p. 320.
425
Ibid.
Social & Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development 137
James Mark Baldwin: Social and Ethical Interpretations in

Mental Development (1897)
The rise of social psychology as a distinct discipline occurred at

the end of the 19th century. Its roots lay in both the new scien-
tific psychology, with its emphasis on the nature of mental
phenomena but distinctly individualistic orientation, and the new
sociology, with its interest in the study of objective social organi-
zation. The folk psychology of Moritz Lazarus, Heymann
Steinthal, and Wilhelm Wundt, the imitation theory of Gabriel
Tarde, the concept of “collective representation” in Émile
Durkheim, the evolutionary sociology of Herbert Spencer, and
William James’s treatment of self and habit were all part of the
intellectual context from within which social psychology
emerged.426
One of those who contributed centrally to this development was
James Mark Baldwin. 427 By the time his classic Mental
Development428 had appeared in 1895, Baldwin had already
begun to extend his developmental, evolutionary insight to an
analysis of the individual in society. The resulting text, which
appeared in 1897, was entitled Social and Ethical Interpretations
in Mental Development: A Study in Social Psychology.429 Making
use of the various psychological and sociological conceptions
then available, with additional insights drawn from observations
of his own daughters, Baldwin created a work of enormous
theoretical originality, sophistication, and importance.
426
For a discussion of this development, see Karpf, F.B. (1932). American Social
Psychology. Its Origins, Development, and European Background. New
York: McGraw-Hill.
427
1861–1934. For biographical information on Baldwin, see Wozniak, R.H.
(1998). Thought and things: James Mark Baldwin and the biosocial origins of
mind. In R.W. Rieber & K.D. Salzinger (Eds.) Psychology: Theoretical-
Historical Perspectives. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association,
pp. 429–53; also see Baldwin, J. M. (1930). James Mark Baldwin. In C.
Murchison (Ed.), A History of Psychology in Autobiography (Vol. 1).
Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, pp. 1–30.
428
Baldwin, J.M. (1895). Mental Development in the Child and the Race. New
York: Macmillan; for a discussion of the content and significance of this work,
see the essay on Mental Development in this volume.
429
Baldwin, J.M. (1897). Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental
Development A Study in Social Psychology. New York: Macmillan.
Starting from the notion that the principle of circular reaction

with selection is the “fundamental method of fruitful organic
reaction to the environment of things and persons,”430 Baldwin
developed a theory of social adaptation to complement his theory
of intellectual development. In Baldwin’s view, social adaptation
took place through a continuous three-phase, dialectical process
in which children acted as others did, experienced themselves in
ways that were similar to others, and assumed that the experiences
of others were similar to their own.
In the first phase, which Baldwin called the projective phase,
children modeled their behavior imitatively on that of others
(e.g., smiling when others smile). In acting as others did, children
then naturally experienced themselves in ways that were similar
to the experiences of others (e.g., just as others felt themselves
smile, so too did the child). This was the second or subjective
phase.
Finally, in struggling at the same time to understand others,
children just as naturally assumed that the subjectivity of the
other was similar to their own. Baldwin called this the ejective
phase. In the interplay between shared action, a subjective feeling
of self, and understanding of the other, in other words, children’s
sense of self grew through common action with others and their
sense of the other grew in terms of their sense of self. For Baldwin,
the self and the other were fundamentally social and inherently
linked. It was this linkage that underlay enculturation, the process
by which children became like-minded members of the social
group of which they were a part.
To this theory of the mechanism of social adaptation, Baldwin
added a stage-like conception of the course of development.
Although he used the concept of “stage” very loosely, even calling
his stages by different names at different times, depending on the
aspect of development that he wished to emphasize, Baldwin
divided development, roughly speaking, into four major periods,
usually labeled the “organic,” the “spontaneous,” the “reflective,”
and the “hyper-reflective.”
In the organic period, the child’s primary means of engaging the
world was the instinctive reflex. This was not a period that lasted
very long and it was not a period to which Baldwin paid much
430
Baldwin (1930), op. cit., p. 4; for a discussion of the nature of the “circular
reaction,” see the essay on Baldwin’s Mental Development in this volume.
Social & Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development 139
attention. The spontaneous period was marked by the emergence

of imitation. The child’s action was imitatively determined by
whatever was present to the mind. The child’s thought, in other
words, tended to result in immediate action; the spontaneous
child was a creature of suggestion.
Somewhere toward the end of the preschool period, however,
the child became capable of thought about thought. The content
of the child’s consciousness could now operate at one level
removed from the environment. Children could now, for
example, not only think about a parent, but think about their
thought of the parent. This new procedure was reflection and
Baldwin typically referred to this as the “reflective” period.
Finally, somewhere in late childhood, a new ability emerged.
The child became capable of synthesizing disparate thoughts
about thoughts. His new thought, in other words, could take as
its object, the relationship between thoughts that were themselves
already reflective. This Baldwin called the “hyper-reflective”
period.
Making joint use of his theory of social adaptation and his
stage theory, Baldwin’s Social and Ethical Interpretations
addressed the development of a remarkable number of important
social and psychological phenomena. For many of these
phenomena, Baldwin’s discussion constituted the first develop-
mental or, in some cases, even the first systematic psychological
treatment that they had ever received. These included altruism,
conformity, conscience, deception, egoism, empathy, encultur-
ation, ethical self, fads, friendship, ideal self, identity devel-
opment, invention, multiple selves, oppositionality, play, reaction
to novelty, religious sentiment, self-esteem, shyness, sibling
relations, social heredity, social norms, social suggestibility,
stranger anxiety, temperament, theory of mind, and values.
It is hardly any wonder, given the power of its theoretical
conception and the breadth of its interest, that Social and Ethical
Interpretations was influential.431 In addition to being the first
book in English to include the term “social psychology” in the title
and recipient of the Gold Medal of the Danish Royal Academy,
431
As with that of Baldwin’s Mental Development, much of the impact of Social
and Ethical Interpretations was long-range rather than immediate and exerted
indirectly, through the work of later thinkers who had been influenced by
Baldwin.
it served as a fundamental source of ideas for later thinkers.

Thus, for example, many of the most important concepts of
George Herbert Mead’s symbolic interactionism were derived
from Baldwin432; Vygotsky’s analysis of the enculturating force of
the social system of meanings into which the child is born was
influenced by Baldwin’s views on social heredity;433 and Baldwin
stimulated both Piaget and, later, Kohlberg to the study of
children’s moral development.434
432
Holmes, E.C. (1942). Social Philosophy and the Social Mind: A Study of the
Genetic Methods of J.M. Baldwin, G.H. Mead, and J.E. Boodin. New York:
Privately Printed.
433
Wozniak, R.H. (1983). Lev Semonovich Vygotsky (1896–1934). History of
Psychology Newsletter, 15, 49–55.
434
Kohlberg, L. (1982). Moral development. In J.M. Broughton & D.J. Freeman-
Moir (Eds.). The Cognitive-Developmental Psychology of James Mark
Baldwin. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, pp. 277–325.
The Senses of Insects 141
Auguste Forel: The Senses of Insects (1900–1; English 1908)
In any field of research, there are pioneers who establish the

agenda for future work by articulating the basic range of questions
to be addressed and developing the fundamental methods by
which research proceeds. In the comparative psychology of insect
behavior, there were two such pioneers: John Lubbock and
Auguste Forel.435 In 1882, Lubbock published a work, Ants,
Bees, and Wasps. A Record of Observations on the Habits of the
Social Hymenoptera,436 that helped inaugurate the transition in
comparative psychology from natural history to experimen-
tation.437
In studies of insect sensory discrimination, path-finding, and
problem solving, Lubbock provided precise, detailed, quantitative
descriptions of the conditions of observation,438 computed simple
summary statistics on his data, made analog records of behavior
for later coding, and constrained reactions using what were, in
effect, the first animal mazes.439 He was also the first to mark
particular insects for the systematic observation of individual
behavior, to design apparatus (a glass-covered ant nest) for long-
term naturalistic observation, and to employ the “problem
method” to assess adaptive reaction.
Between 1878 and 1888, Forel also carried out researches
transitional between natural history and experimentation. In
some ways these anticipated and in other ways built upon
Lubbock’s techniques and results. In this work Forel combined
careful observations of insect behavior under naturalistic condi-
435
Lubbock’s dates are 1834–1913; Forel’s dates are 1848–1931; for biographical
information on Forel, see Forel, A. (1937). Out of My Life and Work.
London: George Allen & Unwin; others who made important contributions to
this area during the 1880s included Vitus Graber and Felix Plateau.
436
Lubbock, J. (1882). Ants, Bees, and Wasps. A Record of Observations on the
Habits of the Social Hymenoptera. London: Kegan Paul, Trench.
437
Research on the behavior of invertebrate organisms constituted by far the
largest and most scientific component of early work in comparative psychology.
In this regard, for example, see Washburn, M.F. (1908). The Animal Mind.
A Text-book of Comparative Psychology. New York: Macmillan; for a
discussion of Washburn’s text, see the essay on Animal Mind in this volume.
438
Lubbock, op. cit., see especially pp. 240–1.
439
It will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the work of Francis Galton
that some of Lubbock’s apparatus development took place in collaboration
with Galton. See, for example, ibid., p. 263.
tions with experimental studies that involved either the systematic

variation of stimulus conditions (e.g., shape or color cues speci-
fying the location of food) or the controlled manipulation of
sensory input (e.g., coating the eyes with opaque varnish or extir-
pating sensory organs). The overall goals of Forel’s research
were to examine the acuity and discriminatory ability of insect
visual, chemical, and vibratory senses and to identify factors influ-
encing insects’ perception and spatial localization of environ-
mental objects such as food, the nest, mates, and conspecifics.
Unfortunately for Forel, this early work remained relatively
unknown.440 As he himself described it: “Misfortune attended the
publication of my experiments. The early ones appeared in
German in a local journal which did not long survive its birth.
The complete account…appeared in the Recueil Zoologique
Suisse, a journal which was both dear and of small circulation,
whose life was hardly longer than that of its predecessor…”441 To
make his work more readily available, Forel republished these
early observations in a series of papers that appeared in 1900–1
in the Rivista di Scienze Biologiche and the Rivista di Biologia
Generale.442 In 1908, these articles were brought together in a
single volume, new material was added,443 and the whole was
translated into English as The Senses of Insects.444
In The Senses of Insects, Forel presented the first systematic
description of the structure and functions of the arthropod sense
organs. In the context of this description, he also provided the
classic early summary of evidence in favor of the so-called
440
By contrast, Lubbock’s work appeared in the high profile International
Scientific Series.
441
Forel, A. (1908). The Senses of Insects. Translated by Macleod Yearsley.
London: Methuen, p. ix; the “complete account” to which Forel refers is Forel,
A. (1888). Sur les sensations des insects. Recueil zoologique suisse, 4(2).
442
These were then bound together and issued as Forel, A. (1900–1). Expériences
et remarques critiques sur les sensations des insects. [Parties I–V. Como:
Romeo Longatti].
443
This new material was taken from Forel, A. (1906). La mémoire du temps chez
les abeilles. Bulletin de l’institut général psychologique (Paris), 6, 258.
444
Ibid. The English translation appears to be the first edition in regularly
published book form. It was preceded by a bound set of separately paginated
reprints, Forel (1900–1), op. cit., and followed by a German edition that
appeared as Forel, A. (1910). Das Sinnesleben der Insekten. Eine Sammlung
von experimentellen und kritischen Studien über Insektenpsychologie.
München: Ernst Reinhardt.
The Senses of Insects 143
antennal hypothesis, the hypothesis that both distance and contact

chemoreception and a tactile sense are located in insect antennae
and that insects make use of chemical, tactile, and proprioceptive
sensations in the perception of chemical configurations (e.g.,
chemical contours, smell forms) and spatial localization of sources
of chemical diffusion.
Forel referred to the chemoreception of spatial configuration as
“relational smell” or the “topochemical sense.” Functionally, this
sense provided insects with information about “precise
relations…in space (that) must necessarily furnish associated
perceptions and precise recollections of parts of the space traveled
over in succession or in juxtaposition…”445 In Forel’s view, for
example, ants capable of distinguishing outward from inward
paths to the nest did so on the basis of perceiving the “smell
forms” of directional footprints.
Other important contributions of Forel included an analysis of
the role of visual memory in long-distance aerial orientation (e.g.,
the homing behavior of carrier-pigeons), his demonstration that
perception of ultraviolet light by ants was primarily visual and not
photodermatic (i.e., when ants’ eyes were varnished they appeared
almost indifferent to ultraviolet light), and his exploration in ants
of the differentiation of taste and smell (ants fed honey mixed with
strychnine would taste it and then stop). Forel also reported
systematic studies of chromatic and pattern discrimination in
bees, thermal discrimination in ants, and tactile vibratory sensi-
bility in a number of insect species.
Throughout his work, Forel demonstrated a clear awareness of
the need to avoid anthropomorphism. Since “we do not detect
any morphological homology between their (insect) senses and
ours,” he argued, “we must assume nothing of their quality…”446
We have, in other words, no idea at all of what insect
consciousness might or might not be like. On the other hand, he
also believed strongly that neural and mental events were simply
two sides of one unified psychophysical process447 and from this
perspective he thought it absurd to deny mental states to insects,
445
Forel (1908), op. cit., p. 242.
446
Ibid., pp. 1–2.
447
See ibid., pp. 288–300; this is a mind/body view known as dual-aspect monism.
For a discussion of dual-aspect monism, see the essays on Fechner and Lewes
in this volume.
who do, after all, have a functioning nervous system. Inferences

concerning the existence in insects of perception, recognition,
memory, emotion, and even simple judgment were, he thought,
amply justified by the complexity of their behavior.
For this reason, Forel was also markedly reluctant to abandon
mental terms, even though he was always quick to point out that
these terms could not be taken to suggest that insect mentality was
in any way similar to our own. This was nowhere clearer than
in his description of insects’ emotional reactions. “(E)motion,”
he wrote, “can take on the character of joy, fright, anger, and
discouragement among bees as among ants. These are anthropo-
morphic terms, I admit, but I do not know how to find any that
better convey the facts and their consequences. Let us rather say
that they are ‘bee-like’ or ‘ant-like’ emotions and not human, to
avoid all misunderstanding on the subject.”448
448
Forel (1908), op. cit., p. 250.
Mind in Evolution 145
Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse: Mind in Evolution (1901)
The rise of scientific psychology is often portrayed as a revolution

in method, and it many ways it was. The development of exper-
imental methods for controlling and manipulating the presen-
tation of stimuli allowed observers to engage in the systematic
introspection characteristic of the early laboratory; and the
eventual shift from introspection to methodological behaviorism
depended upon the development of objective methods for the
study of behavior.
Not surprisingly perhaps, objective methods first took hold
among psychologists studying animal mind, where introspection
was ruled out. In the early 1870s, for example, Douglas Spalding
published papers in which the antecedent conditions of behavior
in young animals were systematically manipulated and variations
in response observed.449 In 1882, in collaboration with Francis
Galton, John Lubbock, studying ants, introduced apparatus,
quantification, and the analogue recording of response into the
study of animal behavior;450 and in 1898 Edward Lee Thorndike
took animal behavior into the laboratory in research with cats,
dogs, and chicks that established a benchmark for objective,
quantitative, replicable behavior methodology.451
Given their generally objectivist orientation, it is also not
surprising that animal psychologists were among the first to index
mental development not in terms of level of consciousness but in
terms of complexity of adaptive behavior. This change went
hand in hand with the introduction of objective methods for the
study of more complex behaviors that began around the turn of
the century; and one of the most important contributors to both
the development of objective methodology and the articulation of
449
Spalding, D.A. (1873). On instinct. Nature, 6, 485–6; Darwin (1877). A
biographical sketch of an infant. Mind, 2, 285–94; Spalding, D.A. (1873).
Instinct. With original observations on young animals. Macmillan’s Magazine,
27, 282–93.
450
451
Thorndike, E.L. (1898). Animal Intelligence. An Experimental Study of the
Associative Process in Animals (Psychological Review, Monograph
Supplements, No. 8). New York: Macmillan; for a discussion of Thorndike’s
laboratory work, see the essay on Thorndike’s Animal Intelligence in this
volume.
a behavioral theory of mental evolution was Leonard Trelawney

Hobhouse.452
In 1901, Hobhouse published his major contribution to the
topic, Mind in Evolution.453 In it, he articulated a biofunctional
theory of intelligence defined solely in terms of levels of adaptive
behavior, introduced a series of animal problem solving tasks
that initiated the experimental study of more complex animal
behavior, and reported evidence of sudden improvement in the
learning curve that appeared to reflect animals’ ability to employ
perceptual relations in problem solution. Hobhouse referred to
this as “practical judgment,” but later students of animal behavior
have sometimes termed it “insight.”454
The goal of Mind in Evolution was to “trace the main stages
of…the evolution of Mind…by considering its generic function in
organic life and evolution, and distinguishing certain principal
stages into which the development of that function…the
adjustment of action to the ends of the individual or of the
species…(falls).”455 In carrying out this plan, Hobhouse devoted
the first seven chapters of his book to the development of adaptive
ability from the simplest tendencies to maintain organic
equilibrium, through the relatively stereotyped, inherited,
stimulus-specific reflexes and more variable but also inherited
patterns of instinctive behavior, to the individually acquired
adaptations of intelligence.
For Hobhouse, intelligent behavior was that “devised by the
individual on the basis of its own experience for compassing the
ultimate and proximate ends to which it is impelled.”456 The
presence of intelligence was indicated by the modification of
action in accordance with the results of experience…showing
“that in some degree the animal can correlate its own past experi-
ences with its subsequent action.”457
452
1864–1929. For biographical information on Hobhouse, see Barker, E. (1929).
Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse. Proceedings of the British Academy, 14,
536–54.
453
Hobhouse, L.T. (1901). Mind in Evolution. London: Macmillan.
454
See, for example, Köhler, W. (1925). The Mentality of Apes. NY: Harcourt,
Brace & Co. Indeed, Hobhouse’s problems became the basis for many of the
tasks that Köhler used in his later studies of insight in monkeys and apes.
455
Hobhouse, op. cit., pp. 9–10.
456
Ibid., p.79.
457
Ibid., p. 82.
Mind in Evolution 147
At the lower levels of intelligence, Hobhouse placed behavior

that was habitual—acquired correlations that function as general
modes of reaction to circumstance. At the higher levels of intel-
ligence, however, behavior, was, in his view, purposive.
Appropriate means were chosen for a specific end in mind. This
implied knowledge (anticipation) of the end state and of the
means/ends relation. Purposive action dealt with the complex and
varying circumstances of individual cases; and, unlike habit,
which was a general mode of reaction, higher intelligence was
selective, choosing appropriate means from among a host of
possible actions best suited to achieve the desired ends.
After canvassing the broad trend of mental development,
Hobhouse then turned in Chapters 8 through 11 to the general
question of whether the higher levels of intelligence were attained
by animals other than man. To address this question, he intro-
duced an ingenious set of problem tasks and described a long
series of experiments employing these tasks with dogs, cats,
monkeys, an elephant, and an otter. The problems involved the
manipulation of some sort of a simple mechanism (e.g., pulling a
string, pushing a door, pushing a lever, sliding a lid, lifting a
catch) or even more complicated behavior (e.g., box stacking or
rake use with monkeys) to obtain food. In the animals’ response
to these problems, Hobhouse found evidence of sudden
improvement in the learning curve, improvement that he inter-
preted as suggesting that animals are, indeed, capable of some
degree of higher intelligence.
Finally, in the remaining chapters of Mind in Evolution,
Hobhouse extended his analysis first to conceptual and then to
systematic thought in humans. Here he presented a four stage
theory of the development of intelligent adaptation from
Unconscious Readjustment (Stage 1) through Concrete Experience
and the Practical Judgment (Stage 2), to Conceptual Thinking and
Will (Stage 3), and finally Rational System (Stage 4) that antici-
pated certain of Jean Piaget’s later and more famous claims.458 In
tandem with the other contributions in this seminal volume, this
theory marks Hobhouse as one of the great contributors to the
comparative psychology of mental development.
458
Piaget, J. (1950). The Psychology of Intelligence. New York: Harcourt,
Brace.
Edward Lee Thorndike: An Introduction to the Theory of Mental

and Social Measurements (1904)
By the turn of the century, a number of the most essential statis-

tical techniques for the treatment of quantitative psychological
data had been made available. Francis Galton had introduced the
rank-order correlation and regression analysis459 and Karl
Pearson, Galton’s protégé, had coined the terms “normal curve”
and “standard deviation” and introduced the product-moment,
multiple, and probable-error correlation coefficients and the Chi-
square test for goodness of fit among others.460
Despite the availability of these techniques, however, relatively
little in the way of quantitative analysis was to be found among
the studies published in the standard psychological journals. The
typical approach was simply to list the data from individual
subjects (often identifying subjects by initials) and draw qualitative
conclusions from the overall pattern of results. Occasionally
averages were calculated but rarely if ever was variability taken
into account in such a way as to allow the researcher to assess the
statistical reliability of any relationship that might have been
obtained.
Measurement problems were also abundant. Little attention
was paid to the problem of units of measurement, to issues of
scaling and levels of measurement, or to measurement error. And
for the most part neither research faculty nor students being
trained for careers in research had sufficient mathematical
background to mine the technical statistical literature of the
period for techniques that might have been brought to bear on
quantitative psychological data.
459
Galton, F. (1888). Co-relations and their measurement, chiefly from anthro-
pometric data. Proceedings of the Royal Society, London, 45, 135–45; Galton,
F. (1889), Natural Inheritance. London: Macmillan.
460
Pearson, K. (1894). Contributions to the mathematical theory of evolution.
Phil Trans. Roy. Soc., CLXXXV, A, 71–110; Pearson, K. (1896). Regression,
heredity, and panmixia. Phil Trans. Roy. Soc., CLXXXVII, A, 253–318;
Pearson, K. (1898). On the probable errors of frequency constants and on the
influence of random selection on variation and correlation. Phil Trans. Roy.
Soc., CXCI, A, 229–311; and Pearson, K. (1900). On the criterion that a given
system of deviations from the probable in the case of a correlated system of
variables is such that it can be reasonably supposed to have arisen from
random sampling. Philosophical Magazine, L, A, 157–75.
Theory of Mental and Social Measurements 149
461
It was into this vacuum, in 1904, that Edward Lee Thorndike
stepped with An Introduction to the Theory of Mental and Social
Measurements, the first complete theoretical exposition and statis-
tical handbook designed specifically for students in psychology,
education, sociology, and economics. The aim of the book, as
Thorndike indicated in the preface, was to “introduce students to
the theory of mental measurements and to provide them with such
knowledge and practice as may assist them to follow critically
quantitative evidence and argument and to make their own
researches exact and logical.”462
Written for the most part in straightforward, non-technical
language, relatively free of mathematical symbolization, and filled
with concrete illustrations and examples, Thorndike’s work was
greeted as something of a tour de force. The experimental
biologist, C.B. Davenport, gave the book a favorable review in
Science;463 and even William James, Thorndike’s mentor but
certainly no friend of quantitative psychological research,
expressed “full feelings of awe and admiration”464 at Thorndike’s
achievement.
Within the text, Thorndike first addressed the problem of units
of measurement, advising his readers to attempt as far as possible
to arrange observations or experiments so “that the trait is
measured in terms of some objective units… (and to) call equal
only those things which can be interchanged without making any
difference to the issue involved.”465 He then introduced the idea
that chance bias in the individual could be averaged out in the
general tendency of a number of observers and explained how
measures of central tendency and variability were to be calculated.
Discussing the causes of variability, Thorndike delineated the
approach required for applying the theory of probability to mental
461
1874–1949. For biographical information on Thorndike, see Joncich, G.
(1968). The Sane Positivist: A Biography of Edward L. Thorndike.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
462
Thorndike, E.L. (1904). An Introduction to the Theory of Mental and Social
Measurements. New York: The Science Press, p. v.
463
Davenport, C.B. (1904). Review of An Introduction to the Theory of Mental
and Social Measurements by Edward L. Thorndike. Science, N.S. 20, No. 519,
798–9.
464
James to Thorndike, October 6, 1904, Thorndike MSS, cited in Joncich, op cit.,
p. 290.
465
Thorndike, op. cit., pp. 14–15.
measurements, outlined issues arising in the measurement of

differences and changes, and illustrated the use of correlational
techniques in the measurement of the relationship between two
variables. Reliability of measurement, sources of measurement
error, and the proper use of probability tables were also taken up
and discussed.
Thorndike’s high profile within both the psychological and
educational research communities and his contact with large
numbers of students attending Teachers College guaranteed a
relatively wide readership for the Introduction. The fact that it
was a statistical manual written for non-mathematicians made it
accessible to a large audience. And the emphasis on the impor-
tance of quantitative techniques in research led to its being
embraced by a discipline trying to forge an identity for itself as a
science. Even education, then in the midst of a widespread reform
movement, looked to the possibility of gathering reliable quanti-
tative data on student outcomes as an essential goal for educa-
tional research.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Thorndike’s book met
with considerable success. Together with other statistical manuals
appearing in the years immediately following 1904,466 it helped
transform the way in which psychologists approached their data.
By 1913, when a second revised edition of the Introduction
appeared, the use of statistical techniques in the analysis of
psychological data had become widespread if not yet completely
routine.
466
Such as Brown, W. (1911). The Essentials of Mental Measurement.
Cambridge: At the University Press; and Yule, G. U. (1911). An Introduction
to the Theory of Statistics. London: Griffin.
The Dissociation of a Personality 151
Morton Prince: The Dissociation of a Personality (1906)
Throughout the 19th century, the idea that the human mind is
influenced by factors operating below the level of consciousness
existed as a central feature of dynamic psychology.467 Even within
the mental philosophy/experimental psychology tradition, in
concepts such as Herbart’s “apperception,” Fechner’s “negative
sensations,” or Carpenter’s “unconscious cerebration,” a clear
distinction was drawn between mentality which was conscious
and that which was not.468
One of the most striking phenomena to exemplify the power of
the unconscious during this period was that of divided personality.
In 1830, Robert Macnish469 publicized the case of Mary Reynolds,
a young American girl who experienced periodic alternations
between two distinct personalities, one quiet, sober, and unimag-
inative, the other gay, exuberant, and poetic. A decade later,
Antoine Despine470 published what is often considered to be the
first objective study of dual personality, one in which cure was
achieved through the eventual fusion of the pathological person-
ality of the waking state with a healthy personality elicited during
magnetic treatment.
In 1889, Pierre Janet took work in this area a step further when
he demonstrated the experimental elicitation of multiple person-
alities.471 When a personality emerging under hypnosis, different
from that of the waking state, was itself subjected to hypnotic
induction, a third personality different from either of the first two
sometimes appeared. In the writings of Janet himself, and of
467
From Mesmer to Bernheim; for an extraordinarily valuable treatment of this
history, see Ellenberger, H.F. (1970). Discovery of the Unconscious. The
History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books.
468
Herbart, J.F. (1816). Lehrbuch der Psychologie. Königsberg: Unzer; Fechner,
G.T. (1860). Elemente der Psychophysik. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel;
Morbid Conditions. London: Henry S. King. For a discussion of the works of
Fechner and Carpenter, see essays on the Psychophysik and the Mental
Physiology in this volume.
469
Macnish, R. (1830). Philosophy of Sleep. Glasgow: M’Phun.
470
Despine, A. (1840). De l’emploi du magnétisme animal et des eaux minérales
dans le traitement des maladies nerveuses, suivi d’une observation très curieuse
de guérison de névropathie. Paris et Lyon: Germer Baillière.
471
Janet, P. (1889). L’Automatisme psychologique. Paris: Félix Alcan.
472
William James, F.W.H. Myers, and others, this phenomenon
gave rise to a conception of the human mind as a plurality of
partial selves, multiple streams of consciousness each consisting
of constellations of ideas leading semi-autonomous existences
outside of awareness. In the extreme, these constellations could
even cohere into separate, independent personalities alternating
with one another in the waking state.
Probably the best known instance of multiple personality of this
sort is one described by Morton Prince473 in his classic account,
the Dissociation of a Personality.474 In this monograph Prince
presented the case of a young woman, Christine Beauchamp,
with whom he had worked extensively in his capacity as a neurol-
ogist.
Miss Beauchamp first came to Prince’s attention when she
sought treatment for standard neurasthenic complaints: headache,
chronic fatigue, and aboulia. Her personality at this time (which
Prince named B1) was characterized by gravity of demeanor,
extreme reticence with regard to her own affairs, a high level of
general sensitivity, excessive conscientiousness, and a kind of
morbid pride that made her shy away from the receipt of favors
or attention from others.
To relieve the patient of her symptoms, Prince began a course
of therapy involving hypnotic suggestion. Within a few weeks,
however, he noticed that under hypnosis the patient manifested
two distinct personalities. One, which Prince named BII, was a
somewhat exaggerated form of BI. Prince considered this to be
a standard “hypnotic personality,” arising as an artificial and
temporary product of suggestion and lasting only as long as the
patient remained under hypnosis.475
472
For a lovely discussion of the views of William James and F.W.H. Myers in this
regard, see Taylor, E. (1996). William James on Consciousness beyond the
Margin. Princeton: Princeton University Press; and for Janet, see Ellenberger,
H.F. (1970), op. cit.
473
1854–1929. For biographical information on Prince, see Hale, N.G., Jr.
(1975). Introduction. In M. Prince. Psychotherapy and Multiple Personality:
Selected Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 1–18; for
Prince’s views on the nature and function of the mind, see Taylor, W.S. (1928).
Morton Prince and Abnormal Psychology. New York: D. Appleton.
474
Prince, M. (1906). The Dissociation of a Personality. A Biographical Study
in Abnormal Psychology. New York: Longmans, Green.
475
Prince was emphatic in arguing that, although some elements of the hypnotic
consciousness may become temporarily dissociated during hypnosis and persist
The Dissociation of a Personality 153
The other, which Prince called BIII, had a much more unusual
nature. As a personality, her characteristics were almost directly
opposite to those of BI. Where B1 was serious, sensitive,
scrupulous, and personally reticent, BII was gay, relatively insen-
sitive, carefree, and attention loving. She was also generally
energetic and physically healthy. As treatment proceeded, BIII
adopted the name Sally and coalesced as an overt personality
spontaneously alternating with BI. Sally knew all about BI and
BII (though not the reverse) and despised BI, taking every oppor-
tunity to cause her embarrassment and difficulty.
Over time, Prince became convinced that Sally was not, in fact,
a hypnotic personality but a persistent subconsciousness,
coexisting with and, in effect, doubling the waking consciousness.
As he put it, “a subconsciousness is a particular group of mental
states, dissociated from but concomitant with the personal
self.”476 As a subconscious personality, Sally had her own
thoughts, perceptions, and volitions separate from and parallel to
those of BI.
Finally, after a little more than a year in treatment, a fourth
personality (BIV) emerged. Nicknamed “the Idiot” by Sally, this
personality, characterized by greater composure and social skill
than BI, but little real moral, intellectual, or aesthetic strength, had
no knowledge of what had gone on during the previous six years
or what went on when either Sally or BI was in possession of the
waking state. Gradually Prince came to the conclusion that BIV
had formed as a dissociation from the “real” Miss Beauchamp in
response to a severe psychological trauma suffered six years previ-
ously and that this dissociation had left BI, also in effect a disso-
ciated part of the original personality, in sole possession of the
field until BIII had appeared during the course of treatment.
After careful interrogation of all three major personalities,
Prince came to the conclusion that the course of therapy should
proceed by suppressing BIII and resynthesizing BI and BIV,
holding onto the good qualities and jettisoning the weaknesses of
both. This, in effect, would recreate the personality that had
during the subsequent waking state as subconscious suggestions, the hypnotic

personality as a whole does not persist beyond the recurrence of the waking
state.
476
Prince (1906), op. cit., p. 46.
existed prior to the trauma. This he proceeded to do and with

considerable success.
The importance of this achievement and the popularity of the
monograph in which Prince reported his work was considerable.
As a contribution to psychotherapy, it was the first successful
treatment of a full-blown case of spontaneous multiple person-
ality. As a contribution to abnormal psychology, it provided a
clear and valuable conceptualization of the relationship between
the hypnotic personality, the subconscious, and the waking state
under pathological conditions. And as a contribution to the
popularization of psychology, it served greatly to heighten the
public’s awareness of the mind’s complexity and of the need for
research into normal and abnormal mental states.477
477
Marx, O.M. (1970). Morton Prince and the dissociation of a personality.
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 6, 120–30.
Clever Hans (The Horse of Mr. von Osten) 155
Oskar Pfungst: Clever Hans (The Horse of Mr. von Osten)

(1907; English 1911)
While the early years of scientific psychology were witness to a few

publications notable for the rigor of their research technique and
the systematicity of their approach (e.g., Fechner’s psychophysics,
Ebbinghaus’s memory studies478), much of the work that appeared
during psychology’s first decades would, from a modern point of
view, be judged as methodologically deficient—lacking in proper
controls and/or insufficiently programmatic to be persuasive.
Great methodological contributions from this period, therefore,
stand out, not only as markers of the field’s growing sophistication
but as models that set a standard and helped refine psychology’s
evolving conception of methodological adequacy. Such, for
example, was the research carried out in 1907 by Oskar Pfungst
and translated into English in 1911 as Clever Hans (The Horse of
Mr. von Osten).479 Although Pfungst’s work is justly famous for
its demonstration that animal behavior can be placed under the
control of cues so slight as to be almost unnoticeable and that
expectations in humans can lead them unwittingly to provide
just such cues, it is, if anything, even more important for its
methodological technique.
Planned in collaboration with the Berlin psychologist, Carl
Stumpf,480 Pfungst’s research was designed to explore the condi-
tions under which a horse, Clever Hans, could perform a number
478
Fechner, G.T. (1860). Elemente der Psychophysik. Leipzig: Breitkopf und
Härtel; Ebbinghaus, H. (1885). Über das Gedachtnis. Untersuchungen zur
experimentellen Psychologie. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot; for a discussion
of the content and significance of these works, see the essays on Fechner and
on Ebbinghaus in this volume.
479
Pfungst’s dates are 1874–1932. His research was first published as: Pfungst,
O. (1907). Das Pferd des Herrn von Osten (Der Kluge Hans). Ein Beitrag zur
experimentellen Tier- und Menschen-Psychologie. Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius
Barth; the book was translated into English by C.L. Rahn, with a prefatory note
by J.R. Angell as Pfungst, O. (1911). Clever Hans (The Horse of Mr. Von
Osten). A Contribution to Experimental Animal and Human Psychology.
New York: Henry Holt.
480
1848–1936. For biographical information on Stumpf, see Stumpf, C. (1924).
Carl Stumpf. In R. Schmidt (Hrsg.). Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in
Selbstdarstellungen (Vol. 5). Leipzig: Meiner, pp. 105–265; translated into
English without bibliography in Murchison, C. (1930). A History of
Psychology in Autobiography (Vol. 1). Worcester, MA: Clark University
Press, pp. 389–441.
of seemingly remarkable intellectual feats: add, subtract, multiply,

and divide, work with integers as well as fractions, read, spell, and
identify and relate musical tones. He communicated this ability
by converting answers to questions given him by his master into
numbers and tapping out these numbers with his foot.
In setting out to understand the basis for Clever Hans’ feats of
intellect, Pfungst designed a model program of research. First, he
erected a large canvas tent in the courtyard of Mr. von Osten so
that the experiments could be carried out without the danger of
distraction. To assess the generality of the horse’s ability to
respond to questions, he employed a number of different
questioners in addition to the horse’s master. The number of tests
in each series was made sufficiently large to rule out the effects of
chance; and to assess possible effects of questioner expectation, the
questioner’s knowledge of the correct response was systematically
manipulated. On certain trials, the questioner knew the correct
answer in advance; on alternate trials, he did not. Finally, to
ascertain whether the horse’s behavior was under the control of
visual cues, trials were included in which the horse was fitted with
a pair of very large blinders. The distance between the questioner
and the horse was also systematically varied.
Results indicated unequivocally that Clever Hans was successful
only when he had visual access to the questioner-—his accuracy
declined as distance to the questioner increased and was markedly
reduced by blinders. Clever Hans also depended on the questioner
knowing the correct answer. On trials on which the questioner
was ignorant of the answer, the horse failed miserably. Taken
together, these findings suggested to Pfungst that, knowingly or
not, questioners were providing visual cues to which Clever Hans
was sensitive. The horse’s intellectual achievements were due, not
to independent thinking, but to external signs.
What, then, was the nature of these signs? This question
Pfungst addressed by means of careful observation of his own
behavior and of that of Mr. von Osten. Based on these observa-
tions, he concluded that the relevant visual cues were provided by
unconscious, involuntary movements and changes in posture
(very slight raising or lowering of the head or the trunk, very slight
changes in facial expression) on the part of the questioner and
hypothesized that these cues might be produced in response to the
release of tension accompanying the questioner’s perception of the
correct response. As Clever Hans was getting closer to the correct
Clever Hans (The Horse of Mr. von Osten) 157
response, in other words, the questioner’s tension level would go

up. At the moment the horse gave the correct answer, tension
release would yield a tiny, involuntary movement in the
questioner; and this movement was all Clever Hans needed to tell
him that the task had been completed.
Had Pfungst stopped here, his research would still have been
groundbreaking; but he did not. If his observations were correct,
he reasoned, he ought to be able to reproduce the basic
phenomenon in the laboratory; he ought to be able to do so with
human beings; and he ought to be able to evaluate his tension
release hypothesis. Taking the role of Clever Hans himself,
Pfungst invited subjects into the laboratory, connected them to
apparatus measuring both head movement and respiration, and
instructed them to ask questions. Like Clever Hans, Pfungst
responded by tapping. The results were overwhelming: over
90% of the subjects tested provided Pfungst with unintentional
visual cues for the cessation of response, cues of which they were
wholly unaware. Furthermore, these cues consisted of the same
kinds of movements and changes in posture that had been noted
in those questioning Clever Hans. Based on the questioners’
introspections, Pfungst also concluded that his tension hypothesis
had been supported.
As Pfungst himself put it, “ having described the observations
made upon the horse, and having discussed the activities of the
questioner upon the basis of observations made objectively and
upon his own introspections, and having verified the results thus
obtained, by means of laboratory tests,”481 he had solved the
puzzle provided by Clever Hans’ amazing feats. In honor of this
achievement, later psychologists have come to refer to the fact that
a subject’s behavior may be influenced by subtle and unintentional
cueing on the part of a questioner and that this cueing may reflect
the experimenter’s own expectations as the “Clever Hans effect.”
481
Pfungst, op. cit., p. 141.
Edmund Burke Huey: The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading

(1908)
The development of novel apparatus has often exerted a signif-

icant impact on the direction of research in psychology. New
apparatus allows psychologists to ask new questions in new ways
and produces a new kind of data that leads, as often as not, to
novel theoretical conceptions. One of the best examples of this
phenomenon can be found in the early days of research in the
psychology of reading.
As early as 1878, the French physiologist Émile Javal had
become interested in the question of eye movements during
reading. Using direct observation of the eyes, Javal reported the
existence of saccadic movements and recognized that the eye’s
trajectory rarely strays above or below a line of text as it is
read.482 Direct observation, however, could provide only vague
estimates of the speed and number of a reader’s eye movements
or of the length and variability of pauses between such
movements.
In 1897, Edmund Burke Huey,483 working on his dissertation
at Clark University, developed an apparatus for recording eye
movements for later analysis that improved measurably on direct
observation.484 A very small, very light, plaster of Paris cup with
a hole drilled in the center to permit vision was designed to fit over
the cornea. An equally light tubular lever connected the cup to
an aluminum pointer suspended over a smoked-paper surface on
a moving drum-cylinder. Any movement of the reader’s eye
traced a corresponding pattern on the surface of the paper. This
enabled Huey to provide much more precise descriptions of the
nature of eye movements during reading than those dependent on
direct observation.485
482
For a summary of Javal’s work, see Javal, É. (1905). Physiologie de la lecture
et de l’écriture. Paris: Félix Alcan.
483
1870–1913. For what little is known about Huey’s life, see brief notes
appearing in 1914 in the American Journal of Psychology, 25, 319; and the
Psychological Bulletin, 11, 80.
484
Huey, E.B. (1898). Preliminary experiments in the psychology and physiology
of reading. American Journal of Psychology, 9, 575–86.
485
Huey, E.B. (1900). On the psychology and physiology of reading. American
Journal of Psychology, 11, 283–302.
The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading 159
Between 1899 and 1901, Raymond Dodge designed the first

camera to be used for recording eye movements using corneal
reflection photography. Work with this camera led in 1901 to
publication of the first photograph of eye movements taken during
reading486 and, within a few years, to the first use of the corneal
reflection method in a systematic study of eye movements during
reading.487
While research on eye movements was in progress, two other
extremely important techniques for reading research were being
developed. One, pioneered by James McKeen Cattell in his disser-
tation research under Wundt at Leipzig, involved measuring
reaction time to text.488 In this work, Cattell found that single
words were recognized as quickly as single letters and that it
took longer to name single letters than to name whole words. The
implication of course, was that reading takes place in whole
words or even in whole phrases and not on a letter by letter basis.
The second technique involved an early version of the tachis-
toscope called the Cattell Fall apparatus. This was an instrument
designed to provide very brief and controlled exposure to an
underlying visual stimulus. Used to expose text, this apparatus
allowed Huey, among other things, to measure span of appre-
hension—the amount of textual material taken in during a single
fixation.489
By 1908, enough new data on the reading process had been
accumulated that a systematic presentation of this material,
together with relevant theoretical analysis, was called for; and, in
that year, Huey published just such a work: The Psychology and
Pedagogy of Reading.490 Consisting of three major sections, one
reviewing research in the psychology of reading, a second
describing the history of reading and reading methods, and a
486
Dodge, R. & Cline, T.S. (1901). The angle velocity of eye-movements.
Psychological Review, 8, 145–57.
487
Dearborn, W.F. (1906). The Psychology of Reading. (Archives of Philosophy,
Psychology, and Scientific Methods, No. 4). New York: Science Press.
488
Cattell, J. McK. (1885). Über die zeit der erkennung und bennenung von
schriftzeichen, bildern, und farben. Philosophische Studien, 2, 635–50.
489
Huey (1901), op. cit.
490
Huey, E.B. (1908). The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading. With a Review
of the History of Reading and Writing and of Methods, Texts, and Hygiene
in Reading. New York: Macmillan.
third focusing on the teaching of reading, Huey’s text was a

major contribution not only to educational psychology but to our
understanding of the nature and cognitive function of the mind.
In the first section of the book, Huey provided a critical and
synthetic review of the methods and results of early reading
research. Especially striking was the exceptionally modern nature
of this account and the extent to which Huey employed data on
reading to draw more general conclusions about the workings of
the mind. Throughout the discussion, his point of view was
unambiguously cognitive. Reading was construed as a mental
activity in which meanings were extracted from conventional sets
of symbols through the movements of the eyes and the perception
of text.
Among the many important conclusions of this section were the
fact that the eyes did not move continuously during reading, that
they sometimes moved backward along the line of text before
moving forward again, and that readers took in and extracted
meaning from several pieces of text at once, in parallel, rather than
serially. Huey also reported that the beginnings of words and the
upper half of a line of text were more informative than the ends
of words or bottom half of the line, that auditory images were not
necessary to skilled reading, that skilled reading was largely indif-
ferent to font type, and that comprehension was an active process
determined as much by the reader’s knowledge base, assumptions,
and expectations as by the text itself.
In the second section of the work, Huey suggested that the
earliest origins of reading skill could be found in the interpretation
of gestures and pictures. He then discussed the evolution of the
alphabet, historical changes in the organization of the printed
page, and the development of reading methods and texts.
Although modern scholarship has supplemented and corrected
some of the ideas discussed by Huey in this section, his work can
still serve as a useful introduction to the topic.
Finally, in the last major section of the book, Huey plunged into
the then and still controversial question of reading teaching,
describing the methods then in use and noting “the present trend
of practice among the better teachers of reading.”491 His conclu-
sions and recommendations from this review of methods are still
worth serious contemplation. They included the following: “1)
491
Ibid., p. 261.
The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading 161
The home is the natural place for learning to read…2. The school
should cease to make primary reading the fetich that it has long
been…3. The technique of reading should not appear in the
early years…4. The child should never be permitted to read…(as
an) end in itself…5. There should…be much more practice in
silent reading than in reading aloud…6. Until the speech habits are
well formed, the school should have much more of oral
work…than of work involving reading… (and) 7. The learning of
real literature should begin in the home and in the very first days
of school…”492
In the preface to this extraordinary work, Huey gave voice to
a desire to see works like his “written for each of the more
important school subjects.”493 Anyone who reads the current
work will wish that Huey’s desire had been satisfied.
492
Ibid., pp. 379–81.
493
Ibid., p. viii.
William McDougall: An Introduction to Social Psychology (1908)
From its origin in the works of Auguste Comte and Herbert

Spencer, social psychology has struggled with the fact that human
beings are both social and biological in nature.494 For Comte, the
course of mental development was one in which social conditions
came to modify the operation of biological laws. The study of
human psychological processes, therefore, required a sociological
perspective.495 The biological point of view with its emphasis on
the individual was inadequate for the analysis of social facts such
as cooperation, division of labor, interdependence, cultural trans-
mission, and family life.
Spencer, on the other hand, gave a distinctly individualistic and
biological cast to his social theory. For Spencer, mental and
social evolution were continuous with the biological evolution of
the species. The combined actions of persons in groups could be
explained in terms of principles characterizing the actions of
individuals as biological organisms. Specifically social categories
of analysis were unnecessary because the analytic principle “that
the properties of the units determine the properties of the whole
they make up, evidently holds of societies as of other things.”496
It was as an extension of Spencer’s view that William
McDougall497 published one of two pioneering systematic treatises
on social psychology to appear in 1908, his Introduction to Social
Psychology.498 The other such treatise, the Social Psychology of
Edward Alsworth Ross, was much more firmly in the tradition of
494
Comte, A. (1830–42). Cours de philosophie positive (6 vols.). Paris: Bachelier;
Spencer, H. (1873). The Study of Sociology. London: Henry S. King; Spencer,
H. (1876–96). The Principles of Sociology (3 vols.). London: Williams and
Norgate.
495
Comte, as is well known, did not include psychology in his hierarchy of funda-
mental positive sciences. This was not because he denied the possibility of a
positive science of mental phenomena; but rather because he divided the
content of psychology between biology, on the one hand, and sociology on the
other.
496
Spencer (1873), op. cit., p. 51.
497
1871–1938. For biographical information on McDougall, see McDougall, W.
(1930). William McDougall. In C. Murchison (Ed.). A History of Psychology
in Autobiography (Vol. 1). Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, pp.
191–223.
498
McDougall, W. (1908). An Introduction to Social Psychology. London:
Methuen.
An Introduction to Social Psychology 163
499
Comte. When humans participate in social groups, Ross
argued, “the individuality each has received from the hand of
nature is largely effaced, and we find people gathered into great
planes of uniformity.” 500 In keeping with his sociological
perspective, Ross focused on high level social phenomena such as
the behavior of the crowd, fashion, conventionality, custom,
conflict, compromise, public opinion, and culture.
By contrast, McDougall’s Introduction grounded social
behavior in biology and focused on the individual. This was
tantamount to providing an analysis of the motive force in human
affairs; and the first four chapters of McDougall’s book were
devoted to laying out this argument. As the author put it, “The
department of psychology that is of primary importance for the
social sciences is that which deals with the springs of human
action, the impulses and motives that sustain mental and bodily
activity and regulate conduct.”501
For help in conceptualizing human social motivation,
McDougall turned to comparative and evolutionary psychology.
“It is only a comparative and evolutionary psychology,” he wrote,
“that can provide the needed basis (for social science)…(since)
men are moved by a variety of impulses whose nature has been
determined through long ages of the evolutionary process without
reference to the life of men in civilised societies.”502 And, for
McDougall, these impulses, “those most fundamental elements of
our constitution, the innate tendencies to thought and action that
constitute the native basis of mind,”503 were of two types: instincts
(or specific tendencies), and non-specific general tendencies.
Instincts were broadly defined in terms of integrated systems of
specific cognitive, affective, and conative predispositions: “We
may,” McDougall wrote, “…define an instinct as an inherited or
innate psycho-physical disposition which determines its possessor
to perceive, and to pay attention to, objects of a certain class, to
experience an emotional excitement of a particular quality upon
perceiving such an object, and to act in regard to it in a particular
499
Ross, E.A. (1908). Social Psychology. New York: Macmillan.
500
Ibid., p. 1.
501
McDougall (1908), op. cit., pp. 2–3.
502
Ibid., pp. 5 & 10.
503
Ibid., p. 15.
504
manner, or, at least, to experience an impulse to such action.”
The principal instincts and their associated primary emotions
were: flight/fear, repulsion/disgust, curiousity/wonder,
pugnacity/anger, self-abasement/subjection, self-assertion/elation,
and parenting/tenderness. In addition, McDougall identified four
other principal instincts for which emotional accompaniment
was less specific: reproduction, gregariousness, acquisition, and
construction.
General tendencies, for McDougall, were also innate disposi-
tions but dispositions that manifested themselves in much more
varied patterns of cognition, emotion, and conation than the
more focused instincts. As McDougall wrote of the general
tendency of imitation, for example, “the modes of action in which
this tendency expresses itself and the accompanying subjective
states are as various as the things or actions that can be
imitated.”505 In addition to imitation, McDougall included
suggestibility, sympathy, play, rivalry, habit formation, and
temperament among the general tendencies.
In elaborating the implications of these views, McDougall then
turned in the remainder of the book to two broad topics. The first
was an extension of Alexander Shand’s506 theory of emotion and
sentiment (“an organised system of emotional tendencies centred
about some object”507); the second was a discussion of the
operation of the instincts and general tendencies in social life. In
treating the first topic, McDougall provided a physiological inter-
pretation of sentiment as a nervous disposition, an analysis of the
principal complex emotions in terms of their joint relationship to
sentiment and to instinct, a discussion of the development of the
sentiments, especially in regard to the growth of self-consciousness
and morality, and a theory of volition couched in terms of the
exertion of self-conscious moral effort in the reinforcement of an
ideal impulse.
In discussing the operation of innate tendencies in social life,
McDougall drew on the anthropological and sociological liter-
504
Ibid., p. 29.
505
Ibid., p.90.
506
Shand, A. (1914). The Foundations of Character. Being a Study of the
Tendencies of the Emotions and Sentiments. London: Macmillan.
507
McDougall (1908), op. cit., p. 122.
An Introduction to Social Psychology 165
ature to shed light on issues as diverse as the relationship between

the reproductive instinct and the birth-rate, the operation of
pugnacity among primitive peoples, the influence of gregari-
ousness on societal structures, the contribution of flight/fear,
curiousity/wonder, self-abasement/subjection, and parenting/
tenderness to religious experience, the function of acquisitiveness
in the accumulation of capital, and the role of imitation, play, and
habit in collective mental life.
McDougall’s text proved to be enormously popular, long-lived,
and influential.508 Its popularity and longevity derived in part at
least from the fact that it was written in a direct and forceful style
with few if any concessions to hesitancy of doctrine. Its influence
undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that it broke new ground.
The Introduction was the first work to draw out the implications
of instinct theory for the analysis of social process. It was one of
the first treatises in modern psychology to make human
motivation its central concern; and, as one of the first two
systematic texts of social psychology, it helped establish the
parameters of the new discipline in its own right, independent of
the sociology and general psychology from which it sprang.
Finally, by emphasizing the instinctive basis of social phenomena,
McDougall also helped foster the individualistic approach that
continues to characterize psychological social psychology to this
day.
508
In 1942, thirty-five years after it was first published, McDougall’s Introduction
appeared in a twenty-fourth edition.
Walter Dill Scott: The Psychology of Advertising (1908)
One of the most important new developments in turn-of-the-

century psychology was the beginning application of psycho-
logical theory and method to problems of everyday life. For the
first time, issues in vocational guidance, mental health, child
rearing, education, law, and business were subjected to systematic
psychological analysis.
While not the first to apply the new scientific psychology to the
study of business practices,509 Walter Dill Scott510 was one of the
most influential figures in this movement. His contributions,
which spanned a period of more than 40 years, dealt with topics
ranging from the psychology of advertising, sales, and public
speaking, to personnel selection, classification, assessment, and
management.511
Scott’s earliest work was in the psychology of advertising. At
the time, advertising executives were divided on the most effective
approach to advertising design. The prevailing view was that
consumers were rational. Given information about the product
and reasons why it should be purchased, they would respond
appropriately. The minority view held that consumer response to
advertising was non-rational. To be effective, advertising had to
make a strong impression, appealing less to readers’ under-
standing than to their wishes and desires.512
In a series of articles extending from 1901 to 1908, Scott
brought current psychological theory and experiment to bear in
support of the minority view, at the same time lobbying effectively
509
As early as 1896, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, Harlow Gale,
had begun to carry out laboratory experiments designed to assess the relative
attention value of various characteristics of advertisements. Self published as:
Gale, H. (1900). On the psychology of advertising. In H. Gale (Ed.).
Psychological Studies. Minneapolis: Author, his research received little
attention and had no impact on advertising practice.
510
1869–1955. For biographical information on Scott, see Jacobson, J.Z. (1951).
Scott of Northwestern. Chicago: Louis Mariano; see also Ferguson, L.W.
(1962). The Heritage of Industrial Psychology (Vol. 1: Walter Dill Scott, first
industrial psychologist). Hartford, CT: Finlay Press, pp. 1–10; for Scott’s
obituary, see Strong, E.K., Jr. (1954–5). Walter Dill Scott: 1869–1955.
American Journal of Psychology, 67–8, 682–3.
511
For a bibliography of Scott’s publications, see Jacobson, op. cit.
512
For a discussion of this split, see Curti, M. (1967). The changing concept of
human nature in the literature of American advertising. Business History
Review, 41(4), 335–57.
The Psychology of Advertising 167
for the importance of a scientific approach to questions of adver-

tising effectiveness. In 1908, he gathered this material together in
The Psychology of Advertising,513 a book that gave birth to adver-
tising psychology as a subdiscipline in its own right.514 As Scott
put it: “advertising has as its one function the influencing of
human minds…As it is the human mind that advertising is dealing
with, its only scientific basis is psychology.”515
At the time, the dominant theoretical concept in the analysis of
social influence was that of “suggestion,” the process whereby a
“conception, conclusion or action…follow(s) with less than the
normal amount of deliberation” when “called forth at the insti-
gation of a second person or upon the presentation of an
object”516 in the absence of competing thoughts. Every normal
person, Scott thought, was subject to the influence of suggestion;
and suggestion, not reason, was the primary determinant of
human action.517
The implication for advertising was clear. Effective advertising
must implant the thought of purchasing the product in the mind
of the consumer without raising interfering thoughts. To help
advertisers achieve this goal, Scott assessed the relevance of what
was then known about basic psychological functions, including
memory, feeling, sympathy, instinctive action, volition, habit,
and attention, to the design of advertisements that would
maximize the power of suggestion and minimize interference.
With regard to memory, Scott emphasized the importance of
four principles believed to increase the memorability of an adver-
tisement. These were repetition, intensity (e.g., use of vivid colors,
placement in the initial or final position in the publication, request
for action such as filling out a postcard), association value
(especially with the reader’s personal interests and motives), and
ingenuity (e.g., choice of names reflective of the nature of the
product).
513
Scott, W.D. (1908). The Psychology of Advertising. A Simple Exposition of
The Principles of Psychology in Their Relation to Successful Advertising.
Boston: Small, Maynard.
514
This was not Scott’s first book on the topic, however. In 1903, he had
published the material from his early articles as Scott, W.D. (1903). The
Theory of Advertising. A Simple Exposition of the Principles of Psychology
in their Relation to Successful Advertising. Boston: Small, Maynard. Although
of significance as the first book on the topic, the 1903 work was not written
with a view to systematic presentation of the subject, while the 1908 book was.
515
Scott (1908), op. cit., p. 2.
Feeling was discussed in terms of pleasure and pain and their

effects on suggestibility: “In pleasure our minds expand. We
become extremely suggestible, and are likely to see everything in
a favorable light…In pain we …refuse to receive suggestions, are
not easily influenced, and are in a suspicious attitude toward
everything which is proposed.”518 To be successful, therefore,
advertising must be designed to elicit pleasure in the reader; and,
in this regard, Scott discussed “the significance of such simple laws
as that of proportion and symmetry in accomplishing the desired
result.”519
Sympathy, for Scott, was “a mental attitude which is induced
by the realization of the fact that someone else is going through
that particular form of experience.”520 In general, the greater the
perceived similarity between the reader and those seen pictured in
an advertisement, the greater the degree of sympathy elicited by
an advertisement; and the greater the sympathy, the higher the
likelihood that the advertisement would influence the reader
through the power of suggestion.
In analyzing the relevance of instinctive action to advertising,
Scott introduced the issue of motivation. “Every instinctive action
is directed toward some object, but the effect of the action is to
bring the object into a relation which will make it helpful toward
the preservation or furtherance of the interests of the
individual…”521 Effective advertising, in other words, had to
appeal to individual interests or motives. For Scott, these included
interest in property, food, clothing, hoarding, hunting,
constructing, parenting, and enhancement of the social, moral,
intellectual, or aesthetic self.
Examining the nature of volition in terms of clarity and
valuation of ends, accessibility and valuation of means, and choice
of means and ends, Scott argued that advertisers wishing to ensure
516
Ibid., p. 81.
517
Scott was strongly influenced in his view of suggestion by the work of
Bernheim, especially by Bernheim, H. (1889). Suggestive Therapeutics. A
Treatise on the Nature and Uses of Hypnotism. New York: G.P. Putnam’s
Sons; for a discussion of the content and significance of this work, see the essay
on Bernheim in this volume.
518
Ibid., p. 24.
519
Ibid., p. 37.
520
Ibid., p. 38.
521
Ibid., pp. 52–5.
The Psychology of Advertising 169
that decision making favored purchase of their product should

bring the product “before the public in such a manner that the
idea of it will be clear and distinct in the minds of potential
purchasers.”522 They should inform the public of exactly what is
necessary to secure the product; and they should present the
product “in such a manner that its value seems great”523 and its
purchase desirable.
Borrowing his analysis of habit directly from William James,524
Scott also emphasized the importance for the advertiser of
inducing “the public to get the habit of using his particular line
of goods. When the habit is once formed it acts as a great drive-
wheel and makes further action easy in the same direction.”525 To
establish a habit, advertising must be extensive; to maintain the
habit, it must be continued.
In discussing attention, Scott argued that “the power of any
object to compel attention depends upon the absence of counter
attraction.”526 In support of this view, he reported an empirical
study of the attention value of large versus small advertisements,
concluding that, all other things being equal, attention value
varies with the size of the advertisement (e.g., a full page adver-
tisement elicited more attention than two half-page advertise-
ments).
Finally, in addition to discussing basic mental functions in
relation to advertising effectiveness, Scott also addressed issues
specific to the advertising of foods, the impact of street railway
advertising, the use of the questionnaire method, and the applic-
ability of laws of progressive thinking to advertisers. Taken
together with the main thrust of the book, these topics covered
virtually everything that was then known about the application
of psychology to advertising. It is hardly any wonder that Scott’s
work was influential. Indeed, within only a few years, the non-
rational approach to advertising, which had been a minority view
when Scott entered the field, had become the mainstream
perspective.
522
Ibid., p. 95.
523
Ibid.
524
James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt; for
a discussion of the Principles, see the essay on James in this volume.
525
Scott (1908), op. cit., p. 132.
526
Ibid., p. 157.
Margaret Floy Washburn: The Animal Mind (1908)
Although mankind has always been fascinated by the habits of

animals,527 a science of animal mind and behavior only first
emerged in the later part of the 19th century. Part of the impetus
for this occurrence was provided by a conception of mental
evolution derived from the writings of Herbert Spencer, Charles
Darwin, and George John Romanes;528 and part from the devel-
opment of experimental methodology for the systematic control
and manipulation of animal behavior.529
According to the mental evolution point of view, the structure
and functions of mind, like those of the body, are a product of the
evolutionary history of the species. Since human evolutionary
history is partially shared with that of lower organisms, mental
characteristics of animals at various levels of the phylogenetic scale
will be found embedded in the more complex, hierarchically
organized human mind. One important corollary of this view was
that scientists who wished to understand the consciousness of
animals could do so, despite their inability to experience the
world as animals do, by analogy to the more elementary charac-
teristics of human consciousness.
In 1894, this view was codified in C. Lloyd Morgan’s
Introduction to Comparative Psychology, the first self-reflectively
scientific textbook of the new field.530 In this text, Morgan artic-
ulated a methodological dictum, later known as Morgan’s Canon,
that called on psychologists who wished to employ the results of
527
Singer, B. (1981). History of the study of animal behaviour. In D. McFarland
(Ed.). The Oxford Companion to Animal Behaviour. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, pp. 255–72.
528
Green, and Longmans Darwin, C. (1871). The Descent of Man, and Selection
in Relation to Sex. London: John Murray; Romanes, G.J. (1883). Mental
Evolution in Animals. London: Kegan Paul, Trench; and Romanes, G.J.
(1888). Mental Evolution in Man: Origin of Human Faculty. London: Kegan
Paul, Trench. For a discussion of Romanes’s work, see the essay on Mental
Evolution in Man in this volume.
529
See Wozniak, R.H. (1993). Experimental and comparative roots of early
behaviourism. In R.H. Wozniak (Ed.). Experimental and Comparative Roots
of Early Behaviourism. Studies of Animal and Infant Behaviour. London:
Routledge/Thoemmes Press, pp. vii–xxviii.
530
Morgan, C.L. (1894). An Introduction to Comparative Psychology. London:
Walter Scott.
The Animal Mind 171
personal introspection in drawing analogical inferences

concerning the nature of animal mind to avoid interpreting an
animal’s actions in terms of higher psychical processes (e.g.,
reasoning) when lower processes (e.g., simple association of ideas)
were sufficient. Parsimony in the attribution of mentality to
animals, in other words, was to be prerequisite to the scientific use
of the comparative method.
Experimentation was introduced into the study of animal
behavior as early as the 1870s in the work of Douglas Alexander
Spalding who, among other things, systematically manipulated the
visual experience of newborn chicks in order to assess the
relevance of such experience to the emergence of visually guided
pecking.531 In 1882 John Lubbock published studies of “way-
finding” in ants that were not only experimental but involved the
use of apparatus to control the antecedent conditions of ant
behavior;532 and in 1898, Edward Lee Thorndike took animal
behavior into the laboratory in a systematic study of animals’
ability to form new associations that firmly established the value
of the experimental method in animal psychology.533
In the decade following the appearance of Thorndike’s work,
the number of experimental studies of animal behavior increased
geometrically; and it quickly became evident that a handbook of
the new field was badly needed. Such a handbook would not only
have to gather together the results of the many widely scattered
researches that had by then appeared but present them in a
systematic framework in relation to issues of both methodology
and interpretation.
In 1908, Margaret Floy Washburn534 provided just such a
531
Spalding, D.A. (1873). Instinct. With original observations on young animals.
Macmillan’s Magazine, 27, 282–93.
532
533
Thorndike, E.L. (1898). Animal Intelligence. An Experimental Study of the
Associative Process in Animals (Psychological Review, Monograph
Supplements, No. 8). New York: Macmillan; for a brief discussion of
Thorndike’s experimental work, see the essay on Animal Intelligence in this
volume.
534
1871–1939. For biographical information on Washburn, see Washburn, M.F.
(1932). Margaret Floy Washburn. Some Recollections. In C. Murchison
(Ed.). A History of Psychology in Autobiography (Vol. 2). Worcester, MA:
Clark University Press, pp. 333–58.
535
handbook in her classic textbook, Animal Mind. The book
opened with a discussion of the problem of other minds. “That
the mind of each human being forms a region inaccessible to all
save its possessor,” Washburn wrote, “is one of the common-
places of reflection.”536 How, then, was any psychology possible?
The answer, for Washburn, was that we know the minds of
others, to the extent that we do, by inference from their words and
actions and that we ground these inferences on the “hypothesis
that human minds are built on the same pattern, that what a given
word or action would mean for my mind, this it means also for
my neighbor’s mind.”537
Unfortunately, however, this hypothesis “fails us utterly when
we turn to the lower animals. If my neighbor’s mind is a mystery
to me, how great is the mystery which looks out of the eyes of a
dog, and how insoluble the problem presented by the mind of an
invertebrate animal, an ant or a spider.”538 By what criteria then
could we infer mentality in animals? From what kind of data
collected by what methods? How should such data be inter-
preted; and what kind of mentality could therefore be inferred?
These were the fundamental questions addressed by Animal Mind.
In analyzing criteria for the attribution of mind to animals,
Washburn first considered and then rejected behavioral response
to stimulation, presence of approach/avoidance behavior, behav-
ioral adaptation to a goal, and mere variability of behavior. In
their place, she proposed a dual criterion: structural physiological
resemblance to humans and rapid learning—learning that occurs
so quickly that “the effects of previous experience are recalled in
the guise of an idea or mental image of some sort.”539 Where
these characteristics were present, it was, in her view, plausible to
attribute consciousness to animals.
With regard to data collection methods, Washburn criticized
anecdotalism for susceptibility to subjective bias and advocated
the experimental approach. At the same time, however, she called
535
Washburn, M.F. (1908). The Animal Mind. A Text-Book of Comparative
Psychology. New York: Macmillan; the book was thoroughly revised in
1917, 1926, and 1936.
536
Washburn, op. cit., p. 1.
537
Ibid., p. 2.
538
Ibid.
539
Ibid., p. 33.
The Animal Mind 173
attention to the possibility of distortion in behavior brought

about by the artificiality of the experimental environment and
identified naturalistic, longitudinal observation with occasional
experimentation as the methodological ideal.
In discussing the interpretation of behavioral data, Washburn
placed herself squarely in the tradition of mentalistic comparative
psychology.540 “[A]ll psychic interpretation of animal behavior,”
she wrote, “must be on the analogy of human experience….Our
acquaintance with the mind of animals rests upon the same basis
as our acquaintance with the mind of our fellow-man; both are
derived by inference from observed behavior. The actions of our
fellow-men resemble our own, and we therefore infer in them like
subjective states to ours: the actions of animals represent ours less
completely, but the difference is one of degree, not of kind…the
facts are those of human and animal behavior; but the mental
processes are as justifiable inferences as any others with which
science deals.”541
Absence of these characteristics, on the other hand, did not
necessarily indicate an absence of consciousness for Washburn.
As she put it, “We know not where consciousness begins in the
animal world. We know where it surely resides—in ourselves; we
know where it exists beyond a reasonable doubt—in those
animals of structure resembling ours which rapidly adapt
themselves to the lessons of experience. Beyond this point, for all
we know, it may exist in simpler and simpler forms until we
reach the very lowest of living beings.”542
Finally, in addressing the question of types of mentality that
might be attributed to animals, Washburn presented a highly
detailed, informative, and critical review of experimental results.
In this review, which took up the majority of her book, Washburn
successively examined data suggesting the presence/absence of
sensory discrimination, spatial perception, visual imagery, the
540
This was a view that Washburn never abandoned, even in the later editions of
her text and despite the advent of behaviorism. Indeed, it seems likely that the
titular “father” of behaviorism, John B. Watson, had Washburn in mind when
he argued that “the scientific value of…(behavioral) data (are not) dependent
upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms
of consciousness; see Watson, J.B. (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist
views it. Psychological Review, 20, 158–77, p. 158.
541
Washburn, op. cit., pp. 13, 23.
542
Ibid., p. 36.
modification of conscious processes by individual experience, and

ideas in animals at different levels of the phylogenetic scale.
Encyclopedic in scope with over 450 references and systematic
in organization, Animal Mind marked the emergence of compar-
ative psychology as a discipline in its own right. Indeed, as E.G.
Boring wrote in 1929, “A movement in a field of research can
hardly be said to have passed adolescence until there is a
compendium that represents it, and Washburn’s book constitutes
just such a symbol of self-conscious unity…”543
543
Boring, E.G. (1929). A History of Experimental Psychology. New York:
Century, p. 561.
Experimental Psychology and Pedagogy 175
Rudolph Schulze: Experimental Psychology and Pedagogy

(1909; English 1912)
It is a commonplace among historians of science that there is an

intimate relationship between the questions scientists ask and the
apparatus that they have available for research and that this
relationship is bidirectional. Theoretically derived questions may
motivate the search for adequate apparatus; and apparatus, once
developed, not only permits but in some cases even drives the
search for additional questions.
The well-known historian of psychology, Edwin G. Boring,
once suggested that discoveries in physiology made during the first
half of the 19th century helped lay the foundation for the eventual
rise of experimental psychology;544 and there is undoubted truth
to this assertion. The elaboration of a distinction between sensory
and motor nerves, development of a sensory phenomenology of
vision and of touch, the articulation of a doctrine of specific nerve
energies, measurement of the speed of nervous conductivity, and
progress toward localization of function in the brain all paved the
way for an emerging scientific psychology.
It may also be argued, however, that physiology made an
equally important contribution to the emergence of scientific
psychology through its development of experimental apparatus.
To study physiological processes with the care and precision
required for the generation of reliable findings, experimental
physiologists had had to develop a wide array of instrumentation.
Roughly speaking the function of these instruments was to control
variation in stimulus presentation or to register and measure
response.
Among the instruments designed for the control of variation in
stimulus presentation, for example, were the color mixer (for
varying wavelength composition and/or brightness of a visual
stimulus), the aesthesiometer (for varying tactile stimuli), the
accoumeter (for varying amplitude of sound), and the tonometer
(for varying frequency of sound). Apparatus designed to register
and measure response included the kymograph (which allowed
analog registration of a continuous response), the cardiograph (for
heart rate), the plethysmograph (for pulse), the ergograph (for
544
Boring, E. G. (1950). A History of Experimental Psychology (2nd ed.). New
York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
effort expended and fatigue), and, of course, the chronoscope (for

elapsed time).
During the later part of the 19th century, as psychologists began
to set up laboratories for experimental research, it was natural for
them to look to physiology for basic apparatus; and items of the
sort listed above became standard fixtures in these laboratories.
In addition, however, and rather quickly, psychologists also began
to develop specialized apparatus of their own. Often these instru-
ments were designed for research on higher or more complex
mental processes. Examples might include Georg Elias Müller’s
memory apparatus, Felix Krueger’s larynx sound recorder, Karl
Marbe’s apparatus for the melody of speech, and Emil Kraepelin’s
writing apparatus.
During this period, psychologists also published several texts on
instrumentation.545 One of the most valuable of these for modern
historians of psychology appeared in 1909.546 Written by Rudolf
Schulze,547 a member of the Leipzig Teachers’ Association, and
translated into English in 1912 as Experimental Psychology and
Pedagogy. For Teachers, Normal Colleges, and Universities, this
text was designed to introduce “the experimental method in
psychology and pedagogy to a wider circle of readers…(especially)
teachers, normal students, and all those interested in the progress
of education.”548
Because Schulze was writing for teachers, he took great care to
be as illustrative as possible with regard to the particular instru-
ments and the procedures for instrument use that he described. In
English translation, for example, Experimental Psychology and
Pedagogy contained over 300 figures depicting a wide range of
experimental material, much of it apparatus, and some of it
apparatus in use during actual experimentation. Accompanying
545
Chief among these were: Titchener, E. B. (1901–5). Experimental Psychology.
A Manual of Laboratory Practice (4 vols.). New York: Macmillan; and Judd,
C. H. (1907). Laboratory Equipment for Psychological Experiments. New
York: Scribner’s.
546
Schulze, R. (1909). Aus der Werkstatt der experimentellen Psychologie und
Pädagogik. Leipzig: Voigtländer; the English translation is Schulze, R. (1912).
Experimental Psychology and Pedagogy. For Teachers, Normal Colleges,
and Univerities. London: George Allen.
547
Dates are unknown.
548
Schulze (1912), op. cit., p. vii.
Experimental Psychology and Pedagogy 177
text provided detailed descriptions and examples of how the

depicted apparatus was to be employed in the laboratory.
Organized according to the “chief divisions of pure
psychology,”549 the book opened with a chapter on the mathe-
matical treatment of results. Schulze then turned to the
measurement of sensation, illustrating and describing, among
others, the use of the color mixer, Yerkes’ discrimination
apparatus, the aesthesiometer, kinematometer, Weber’s procedure
for the psychophysics of lifted weights, Zoth’s acoumeter, and the
use of tuning forks in auditory psychophysics.
In a chapter on perceptions and ideas, instrumentation for
assessing the visual spatial threshold, extent of the Müller-Lyer
illusion, accuracy of depth perception, and rhythmicity of
movement were discussed. Under the heading of “feelings,”
Schulze described, among other things, the use of the cardio-
graph and plethysmograph to measure heart rate, pulse, and
breathing and the use of the kymograph, including procedures for
smoking the drum and fixing and drying the curves, to register
change in response over time.
Under “will,” apparatus for assessing reaction time to carefully
controlled optical and acoustical stimuli were described. Here
Schulze discussed the use of the contact key, five-finger reaction
keys, the electromagnetic sound hammer, Wundt’s control
hammer, and Ebbinghaus’ gravity apparatus. In a chapter on
“consciousness and attention,” Sommer’s apparatus for analyzing
movements in two and in three dimensions and a tachistoscope
employed by Wundt were depicted.
In a section on “memory,” three different pieces of apparatus
respectively designed by Ranschburg, Wirth, and Müller for the
purpose of controlling presentation of words or paired associates
were pictured and described in detail. In chapters on “apper-
ceptive combinations” and “speech,” the use of the voice key,
Krueger and Wirth’s larynx sound recorder, and Marbe’s
apparatus for the melody of speech were also discussed.
Under the headings “physical work” and “mental work,”
Schulze illustrated the use of a variety of ergographs attributed
respectively to Mosso, Meumann, Dubois, Lehmann, and Henri.
Also included here was a discussion of Kraepelin’s writing
apparatus and electrical pencil. Finally, the book concluded with
549
Ibid.
a chapter on the calculation of correlation and appendices

describing a new chronoscope and providing a list of basic
apparatus recommended for inclusion in psychological labora-
tories designed for colleges and normal schools.
In its day, Schulze’s book was well received; it went through at
least four editions and was republished as late as 1921. However,
given the importance of instrumentation in the early history of
scientific psychology and the fact that Experimental Psychology
and Pedagogy is a veritable gold mine of information on early
instruments, it may well be that Schulze’s book is even more
valuable for the modern historian of psychology than it was for
those who read it in its day.
Experimental Pedagogy & the Psychology of the Child 179
Edouard Claparède: Experimental Pedagogy and the Psychology

of the Child (1911)
Toward the end of the 19th century, a number of social forces

combined to create an unprecedented demand for information
about children. Industrialization increased the need for a better-
educated work force; urbanization and compulsory schooling
brought large numbers of children into urban classrooms.
Recreational movements concentrated groups of children in after
school associations and public playgrounds; and an ideology of
domesticity glorified childrearing as a mother’s most important
occupation. By the 1880s, educators, welfare workers,
playground personnel, and, most of all, mothers were seeking
information about children’s development.
In 1882, William Preyer provided the first extensive source of
such information in an influential book, Mind of the Child, that
described naturalistic observations that he had carried out on his
own son.550 Preyer’s method was simple but effective. Observe
carefully, record observations several times daily, repeat obser-
vations when possible, interpret with caution, and relate obser-
vations to prior research. Mind of the Child was an immediate
success; and soon additional studies of the same sort began to
appear. By the 1890s, observations of children were being
published with regularity.551
At approximately the same time, G. Stanley Hall, one of the
founders of American psychology, had begun to employ the
questionnaire method in research on children.552 Improving on
550
Preyer, W. Die Seele des Kindes. Beobachtungen über die geistige Entwicklung
des Menschen in den ersten Lebensjahren. Leipzig: Grieben. Translated into
English as Preyer, W. (1888–9). The Mind of the Child. Part 1: The Senses
and the Will; Part 2: The Development of the Intellect. New York: Appleton.
The first such study on record is Tiedemann, D. (1787/1890). Tiedemann’s
Record of Infant Life. Syracuse: Bardeen; also important in stimulating others
to engage in systematic observations of children were two short diary pieces
that appeared in Mind: Darwin, C. (1877). A biographical sketch of an infant.
Mind, 2, 285–94; and Taine, H. (1877). Taine on the acquisition of language
in children. Mind, 2, 252–9.
551
Wallace, D.B.; Franklin, M.B.; & Keegan, R.T. (1994). The observing eye: A
century of baby diaries. Human Development, 37, 1–29.
552
Ross, D. (1972). G. Stanley Hall. The Psychologist as Prophet. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
553
earlier work by German educators and motivated by the belief
that teaching and parenting would be more effective if it were
geared to the child’s level of development, Hall and his students
embarked on a long series of studies documenting, among other
things, children’s knowledge base, use of questions, crying and
laughing, play with dolls and toys, obedience and obstinacy,
daydreams, and sense of personal ownership.
Convinced that scientific child study was the only rational basis
for work with children and that teachers and parents should be
introduced to the facts of development through first hand study
of the child, Hall began to campaign actively for the establishment
of child study associations. During the early 1890s, in public
meetings and in the national press, he encouraged parents and
teachers to form local child study groups. At Clark University,
where he served as President, he even established summer
programs in child study for teachers.
Hall was a persuasive advocate; and within a few years, child
study had become a full-fledged, international movement,
spreading throughout America and Europe to Asia and South
America. By 1911, when Edouard Claparède554 published the
greatly revised and expanded fourth edition of his classic
compendium of child study, Experimental Pedagogy and the
Psychology of the Child,555 child study had its own journals,556
553
Schwabe, H. & Bartolomai, F. (1870). Über inhalt und methode einer Berliner
Schulstatistik. Berliner Städtischer Jahrbuch, 4, 1–77.
554
1873–1940. For biographical information on Claparède, see Claparède, E.
(1930). Edouard Claparède. In C. Murchison (Ed.). A History of Psychology
in Autobiography (Vol. 1). Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, pp. 63–97;
also see Trombetta, C. (1989). Edouard Claparède. Psicologo. Roma:
Armando.
555
Claparède, E. (1911). Experimental Pedagogy and the Psychology of the
Child. Translated from the Fourth Edition…by Mary Louch and Henry
Holman. London: Edward Arnold; reference to the original French fourth
edition is Claparède, E. (1911). Psychologie de l’enfant et pédagogie expéri-
mentale. Genève: Kündig.
556
See, for example, Pedagogical Seminary, founded by Hall in 1891; Transactions
of the Illinois Society for Child Study, founded in 1894; Studies in Education,
first published in 1896; and Northwestern Journal of Education, which began
focusing on child study in 1896.
557 558
bibliographies, and training centers.
The rationale for Claparède’s book was very much in keeping
with the orientation of the child study movement as a whole.
“Pedagogy,” he wrote, “ought to be based upon the knowledge
of the child, as horticulture is based upon the knowledge of
plants.”559 The book’s goal, therefore, was “to introduce the
educator to psychological science, and particularly to the
psychology of the child…(and to stimulate the) practical teacher
to abandon the groove of ordinary routine, to ask himself from
time to time some hard questions, which he would try to answer
by reference to facts.”560
In keeping with this goal, Claparède devoted the first chapter of
his book to a sketch of the historical development and current
status of child study. Any teacher or parent who encountered this
introduction would surely have been impressed with the scope and
international character of the movement of which he or she might
become a part.
Claparède then turned to providing a taxonomy of pure
(paidology) and applied (paidotechny) problems of child study. In
particular he emphasized the centrality of issues in experimental
pedagogy (“inquiry into…the circumstances favorable to the
development of the child, and the means of educating him towards
a given end”561), psychopaidology (study of the general laws of
children’s development), psychodiagnostics (testing), and
psychotechnics (study of the best ways to “obtain…a certain
desired resultant”562).
The overall point of view adopted with regard to these problems
was one that Claparède labeled “genetico-functional.” From a
genetico-functional perspective, the questions of interest with
regard to any psychological process were: “1st. What are the
conditions of its production? 2nd. What is its genetic function;
557
Compiled by Louis N. Wilson, Clark University librarian; see Wilson, L. N.
(1975). Bibliography of Child Study: 1898–1912. New York: Arno (modern
reprint).
558
At Clark, University of Nebraska, and Stanford among others.
559
Claparède (1911), op. cit., p. 1.
560
Ibid., pp. iii–iv.
561
Ibid., p. 41.
562
Ibid., p. 45.
that is to say, what part does it play in the formation of future

functions?”563 Criticizing those like Preyer who found it “suffi-
cient to draw up a list of the various faculties exhibited by a
child at certain ages,”564 Claparède argued that to be of value to
educators child study must go beyond simple normative
description to determine the role played by a given process in the
individual’s development, identify factors that favor or hinder
development, and discover how and why, at any given period, one
process is succeeded by another.
To achieve this aim, of course, child study must make use of
adequate methods and appropriate interpretations. Claparède
therefore followed his analysis of the problems of child study
with a chapter on methods of data collection and interpretation.
The section on interpretation was especially interesting for its
early statement regarding the importance of conceptualizing the
psychological characteristics of children in their own right rather
than in relation to an adult standard, and its emphasis on
functional analysis, viz., “discovering the meaning of a process
and the part its plays in the mental life of the child.”565
Finally, Claparède turned to content. The remainder of the
book, which consisted of two chapters each over a hundred pages
in length, was devoted to summarizing major child study research
findings. In keeping with the field’s overall emphasis on the
importance of both pure and applied research, the first of these
chapters, entitled “Mental Development,” reviewed results from
studies in what might be called “pure” child psychology (physical
growth, play, games, imitation, interests, and the function of
childhood). The second, entitled “Intellectual Fatigue,” surveyed
measurement methods and investigations (of the influence of
factors such as age, sex, intelligence, seasonal and diurnal cycles,
habits, and interests) in what was then the most important area
of the application of psychological knowledge to children in the
classroom.
As is evident from the nature and content of Claparède’s text,
the child study movement played an extremely important role in
the development of a scientific approach to the psychology of the
child. By helping to sensitize researchers to scientific standards
563
Ibid., p. 70.
564
Ibid., p. 71.
565
Ibid., p. 94.
through its early concern with method, broadening the range of

questions asked about children, and emphasizing parents’ and
teachers’ need for scientific information, child study helped shape
the overall climate of opinion within which a scientific develop-
mental psychology was to emerge.
Paradoxically, however, just as the fourth edition of the
Experimental Pedagogy was making its appearance, the child
study movement began to go into decline. The growing concern
with a scientific approach to children that the movement had
fostered became its swan song. Parents and teachers, after all,
were not trained as research scientists. Normative description was
one thing, genetico-functional analysis quite another. The seeds
of this decline can already be seen in Claparède’s book. While
providing what may have been the final and best summary of the
state of the art in child study, it nonetheless also presented a new
and sophisticated view of the nature of research on children that
effectively precluded parents’ and teachers’ acting as researchers.
In this way Experimental Pedagogy served as both a capstone to
the old tradition and a bridge to the new.
Edward Lee Thorndike: Animal Intelligence (1911)
Between 1898 and 1901, Edward Lee Thorndike566 published

two major research monographs and several shorter articles that
established the study of animal learning as a laboratory science.
As he himself put it, this work marked a “change from books of
general argumentation on the basis of common experience inter-
preted in terms of the faculty psychology, to monographs
reporting detailed and often highly technical experiments inter-
preted in terms of original and acquired connections between
situation and response.”567
A decade or so later, in 1911, Thorndike brought these early
studies together in a single volume. Adding an introduction
arguing for the importance of studying behavior in its own right
and a theoretical chapter on “laws and hypotheses of behavior,”
he entitled the new work, Animal Intelligence: Experimental
Studies.
By far the most important section of the new volume consisted
of a reprint of Thorndike’s dissertation of 1898. This dissertation,
also entitled Animal Intelligence, but subtitled, An Experimental
Study of the Associative Processes in Animals,568 is widely
considered to be one of the most influential publications of the first
half century of psychological science. In addition to offering a
conception of animal intelligence couched solely in terms of the
organism’s ability to form new associations, it described ingenious
apparatus for the observation of animal learning and demon-
strated the use of such apparatus in systematic laboratory
research.
Although not as well known or as influential as Thorndike’s
dissertation, The Mental Life of Monkeys,569 also reprinted in
Animal Intelligence, is another monograph of considerable
interest. Starting from the hypothesis that rational thought and
566
567
Thorndike, E. L. (1911). Animal Intelligence. New York: Macmillan, p. v.
568
Thorndike, E. L. (1898). Animal Intelligence: An Experimental Study of the
Associative Processes in Animals (Psychological Review, Monograph
Supplements, No. 8). New York: Macmillan.
569
Thorndike, E. L. (1901). The Mental Life of the Monkeys (Psychological
Review, Monograph Supplements, No. 15). New York: Macmillan.
Animal Intelligence 185
ideation in humans was merely an extension of animal intelli-

gence, that concepts, feelings of relationship, association by
similarity, and even reason itself followed from a simple increase
in the number, delicacy, and complexity of associations,
Thorndike examined the learning curve in monkeys for evidence
of ability to learn by imitation or by inference. Despite finding
marked differences in learning between monkeys and cats and
dogs, Thorndike concluded that there was little support for the
claim that monkeys were capable of either imitation or reasoning.
In both of these monographs and in more minor papers on
behavior in young chicks and in fishes also included in Animal
Intelligence, Thorndike situated himself theoretically within the
long tradition of associationism. Unlike his associationist prede-
cessors, however, he construed association not as linking one
idea or element of consciousness with another nor even as linking
ideas with movements. Rather, for Thorndike, associations exist
between situations in which an organism finds itself and impulses
in the organism to action. In this regard, Thorndike took a step
beyond traditional associationism in the direction of the stimulus-
response approach that would eventually come to dominate the
field.
In this work, Thorndike was also a methodological innovator,
developing a general experimental technique that was to revolu-
tionize the psychological study of animal behavior. As described
by a prominent modern researcher, Thorndike’s approach to
method “was objective: it minimized the influence of the
observer…quantitative: the course of learning could be measured
accurately in terms of the time taken for the appearance of the
correct response on each trial…reproducible: the work of one
investigator could be repeated and verified by others…flexible: the
responses required could be varied in kind and
complexity…natural:…the problems presented…were not too
remote from the animal’s ordinary course of life…(and) conve-
nient: a large enough sample of animals could be studied to
provide a representative picture of each of a variety of species.”570
Finally, the new sections of Animal Intelligence —Thorndike’s
introductory apology for the study of behavior and his chapter on
“laws and hypotheses of behavior”—were also innovative. In his
570
Bitterman, M.E. (1969). Thorndike and the problem of animal intelligence.
American Psychologist, 24, 444–53.
introduction to the book, Thorndike defended two propositions.

The first, that psychology could be viewed as the science of
behavior continuous with physiology, anticipated arguments soon
to be advanced by John B. Watson in his famous behaviorist
manifesto.571 The second, that the study of “consciousness for the
sake of inferring what a man can or will do, is as proper as to
study behavior for the sake of inferring what conscious states he
can or will have,” 572 anticipated the general approach to
consciousness that would become common among early behav-
iorists.573
In the chapter on “laws and hypotheses of behavior,”
Thorndike first discussed “effect” and “exercise” as provisional
laws of acquired behavior. Then, focusing on the phylogenesis of
intellectual and moral behavior as an example, he attempted to
show how acceptance of these laws facilitated the analysis of
problems related to learning. In both respects, this essay
foreshadowed the more extensive analysis of learning principles
that Thorndike himself was to provide in his Educational
Psychology.574
571
Watson, J. B. (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological
Review, 20, 158–77.
572
Thorndike (1911), op. cit., p. 5.
573
Wozniak, R. H. (1994). Behaviourism: The early years. In R.H. Wozniak
(Ed.). Reflex, Habit and Implicit Response: The Early Elaboration of
Theoretical and Methodological Behaviourism. London: Routledge/Thoemmes
Press, pp. ix–xxxii.
574
Thorndike, E. L. (1914). Educational Psychology: Briefer Course. New
York: Teachers College, Columbia University; for a discussion of Thorndike’s
learning principles, see the essay on his Educational Psychology in this volume.
Psychology and Industrial Efficiency 187
Hugo Münsterberg: Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (1913)
Toward the end of the 19th century, industrialists had begun to

work toward the rationalization of the factory, centralizing
purchasing, standardizing materials and machinery, and
attempting to bring scientific principles to bear on the
management of the labor force. One of the most effective and
best-known advocates for scientific management during this
period was Frederick Winslow Taylor.
In 1911, after years spent observing manufacturing conditions
and methods with an eye toward increasing industrial efficiency,
Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management.575
The goal of Taylor’s approach, or “Taylorism,” as it came to be
called, was to increase the rate of work on the factory floor by
identifying optimal manufacturing methods and then standard-
izing them. To achieve this goal, Taylor advocated careful, scien-
tific study of the time taken and the movements required to
perform every step and operation in the production process.
Once optimal procedures were identified, workers could then be
trained to employ them in a standardized fashion under wage-
incentive programs designed to overcome worker resistance to the
monotony inherent in standardization.
Not surprisingly, Taylorism had its critics, many of whom
focused on the tendency among those involved in the scientific
management movement to ignore human factors such as person-
ality, motivation, and job satisfaction and to regard labor as
simply another machine within the factory. It was in this context,
in 1913, that Hugo Münsterberg published Psychology and
Industrial Efficiency.576
Although Münsterberg devoted considerable attention in this
work to problems of scientific management, including chapters on
575
Taylor, F. W. (1911). The Principles of Scientific Management. New York:
Harper.
576
Münsterberg’s dates are 1863–1916. For biographical information on
Münsterberg, see Hale, M., Jr. (1980). Human Science and Social Order.
Hugo Münsterberg and the Origins of Applied Psychology. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press. The work under discussion here is Münsterberg, H.
(1913). Psychology and Industrial Efficiency. Boston & New York: Houghton
Mifflin; although not a direct translation, this work was based on Münsterberg,
H. (1912). Psychologie und Wirtschaftsleben. Ein Beitrag zur angewandten
Experimental-Psychologie. Leipzig: Barth.
the economy of movement, the problem of monotony, and issues

of attention and fatigue, his aim was much broader: “to sketch the
outlines of a new science which is to intermediate between the
modern laboratory psychology and the problems of
economics.”577 With this book, in other words, Münsterberg
hoped to bring psychological science into the service of the
marketplace.
To secure this end, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency was
divided into three large sections, one devoted to problems of
selection, a second to issues of scientific management (although
such issues were defined psychologically rather than simply in
terms of time and motion), and a third to the use of psychology
to increase success in the marketplace. As Münsterberg himself
put it: “We ask how we can find the men whose mental qualities
make them best fitted for the work which they have to do;
secondly, under what psychological conditions we can secure the
greatest and most satisfactory output of work from every man;
and finally, how we can produce most completely the influences
on human minds which are desired in the interest of business.”578
By the time Münsterberg had become interested in problems of
selection, the idea that the workplace ran more smoothly if people
were well suited to their jobs was widespread. This was the basic
principle underlying the vocational guidance movement that
began with the work of Frank Parsons;579 a number of industries
were already using specialized tests such as those for color
blindness to weed out employees unfit for particular tasks; and as
early as 1899 Taylor himself had urged the development of scien-
tific methods for selecting especially able workers.580 Münsterberg
took the general problem of selection a step further by developing
a series of experimental tests specifically designed to assess
particular characteristics needed for specialized occupations.
This was the general focus of the first section of Psychology and
Industrial Efficiency. Here Münsterberg discussed the problem of
vocational guidance and selection as a component of scientific
management, then described the tests that he himself had
577
Münsterberg (1913), op. cit., p. 1
578
Ibid., p. 23–4.
579
Parsons, F. (1909). Choosing a Vocation. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
580
Cited in Hale, op. cit., p. 153.
Psychology and Industrial Efficiency 189
developed. On such test was designed to weed out accident prone

trolley drivers by simulating conditions requiring rapid recog-
nition of pedestrians, horses, and automobiles on a collision
course with the trolley car; another assessed speed of decision
making, which Münsterberg considered to be an essential quality
in a successful ship captain; and a third employed a battery of tests
assessing memory, attention, intelligence, speed, and accuracy of
reaction to select those who would make good telephone switch-
board operators.
In the second section of the book, Münsterberg focused on
general issues of labor management. While admitting that
Taylorism represented progress in the rationalization of the
workplace and agreeing wholeheartedly with Taylor’s belief that
management by tradition needed to yield to management by
scientific observation and measurement, Münsterberg severely
criticized the scientific management movement for failing to take
the psychological characteristics of the worker adequately into
account. To be successful, in other words, a scientific industrial
psychology had, in Münsterberg’s view, to take the mental
structure of the worker as seriously as it took the mechanics of
work. Only in this way would “mental dissatisfaction in the
work, mental depression and discouragement…be replaced in
our social community by overflowing joy and perfect inner
harmony.”581
Finally, the last section of Psychology and Industrial Efficiency
was devoted to ways in which the methods of scientific psychology
could be used to improve success in the marketplace. Topics
included the psychology of advertising, the perception of product
displays, the design of trademarks and labels to maximize salience
and recognition, and principles of effective salesmanship.
In the period immediately following publication, Münsterberg’s
book was well received and widely read, even appearing briefly
on the non-fiction best seller list.582 Its considerable importance
stems from the fact that it served not only to systematize the
newly emerging field of industrial psychology but to popularize
the notion that scientific psychology had the potential to make a
significant contribution to the betterment of everyday life.
581
Münsterberg (1913), op. cit., p. 309.
582
Cited in Hale, op. cit., p. 148.
Edward Lee Thorndike: Educational Psychology: Briefer Course

(1914)
In 1914, at a time when Edward Lee Thorndike’s583 reputation in

educational and psychological circles was at or near its peak, he
published an abridgment of his three-volume Educational
Psychology.584 Entitled Educational Psychology: Briefer Course,
this text was designed to cover the fundamental subject matter of
the Educational Psychology in a fashion that made it accessible
to teachers and students. In keeping with the original work, the
Briefer Course was divided into three sections roughly corre-
sponding to the three volumes of the original work.
The first section focused on the “original nature of man” and
dealt with innate tendencies in human nature that influenced the
learning process. These included sensory capacities and reflexes,
attentional processes, social instincts, innate wants, interests, and
motives, and the capacity to learn. The second section, on the
“psychology of learning,” was devoted to an analysis of why and
how human beings were changed by experience. Here Thorndike
summarized his famous laws of learning and discussed general
factors that influenced the amount, rate, and permanence of
improvement in performance. The third section, on “individual
differences and their causes,” addressed sex differences, variations
in maturity, and situational factors that fostered or impaired
learning.
The main categories of Thorndike’s analysis of learning were the
stimulus, the response, and the connection. As Thorndike himself
put it: “Any fact of intellect, character or skill means a tendency
to respond in a certain way to a certain situation—involves a
situation or state of affairs influencing the man, a response or state
of affairs in the man, and a connection or bond whereby the
latter is the result of the former.”585
In any discussion of Thorndike’s “connectionism,” it is
important to recognize that his concepts of stimulus, response, and
583
584
Thorndike, E. L. (1913–14). Educational Psychology. New York: Teachers
College, Columbia University.
585
Thorndike, E. L. (1914). Educational Psychology: Briefer Course. New
York: Teachers College, Columbia University, p. 1.
Educational Psychology: Briefer Course 191
connection were complex and multidimensional. For Thorndike,

the stimulus was not some punctate event like the blink of a light
or the tick of a metronome but rather the “total state of affairs”
perceived by the organism; and perception in Thorndike’s view
was both analytic and selective. Some elements were ignored;
others were isolated and selected out of the totality of the
situation.
While selection was partly a function of the organism’s naturally
evolved sensitivity to certain elements in preference to others,
predispositions to selection could also be acquired through
cultural and individual conditioning. Indeed, for Thorndike,
“the progress of knowledge is far less a matter of acquaintance
with more and more gross situations in the world than it is a
matter of insight into the constitution and relations of long
familiar ones.”586
Thorndike’s characterization of “response” was similarly multi-
faceted, including not only overt behaviors but thoughts, interests,
and feelings and ranging from reflexes and instincts to learned
reactions. Although Thorndike actively criticized the prescientific
faculty-oriented concept of “instinct,” his analysis of the original
nature of man included an extensive treatment of instinctive
responses and their utilization by education.
His analysis of the process whereby connections were formed
led Thorndike to formulate Educational Psychology’s most
famous contribution: the three principal laws of learning—
exercise, effect, and readiness. According to the law of exercise,
when an organism makes (or fails to make) a response to a given
situation, the probability that the same situation will elicit that
response is increased (or decreased as the case may be). According
to the law of effect, when an organism makes a response to a given
situation and that response is followed by a satisfying (or
annoying) state of affairs, all other things being equal, the proba-
bility that the same situation will elicit that response is increased
(or decreased as the case may be). Finally, the law of readiness,
formulated in somewhat pseudoneurological terms, asserted that
“for a conduction unit ready to conduct to do so is satisfying and
for it not to do so is annoying.”587
586
Ibid., p. 148.
587
Ibid., p. 54.
It would be difficult to overestimate Thorndike’s importance.

As a member of the faculty at Teachers College, Columbia
University, he not only supervised a large number of graduate
students who went on to productive careers in psychological
research at many of the world’s leading universities, but lectured
annually to hundreds of teachers, principals, school superinten-
dents, and normal school faculty who subsequently returned
home to positions of influence within public and private
education. Through his own writings and the impact of these
students, Thorndike redefined the relationship between scientific
psychological research and educational practice, brought learning,
for the first time, to the forefront within scientific psychology, and
helped define psychology as the scientific study of the relationship
between stimulus and response.

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R. H.

The emergence and growth of scientific psychology in the period

Classics in Psychology, 1855–1914: Historical Essays

Classics in Psychology, 1855–1914: Historical Essays is the companion

Thoemmes Press Maruzen Co., Ltd

Classics in Psychology, 1855–1914: Historical Essays

© Robert H. Wozniak, 1999

Classics in Psychology, 1855–1914

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Printed in England by Pear Tree Press Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may

There are many people whose direct and indirect contributions

Romanes, Mental Evolution in Man 94

The emergence and growth of scientific psychology in the period

The essays in this volume document instances of all of these

Romanes, and Külpe respectively. Galton’s strong position on

story and it would be difficult to make routine science into a

Alexander Bain: The Senses and the Intellect (1855)

The publication of Alexander Bain’s The Senses and the Intellect1

experience and action or the physiological concomitants of

Sir William Hamilton. Paradoxically, Bain seems to have accepted

In the last section of the book, Bain focused on intellect and on

movement into psychology as a category of analysis in its own

Herbert Spencer: The Principles of Psychology (1855)

In 1855, the same year in which Bain inaugurated modern

of view built around principles of adaptation, development, and

For Spencer, the construction of relations lay at the heart of all

ization of function) owed more than a little to Spencer’s contem-

Alexander Bain: The Emotions and the Will (1859)

The Emotions and the Will is the sequel to Alexander Bain’s

over the system…a wave of nervous influence…(affecting) the

The emotions of intellect were those accompanying operations

Gustav Theodor Fechner: Elemente der Psychophysik (1860)

The emergence of laboratory psychology in the 19th century

To achieve this goal, however, Fechner had to find a way to

notion of a “just noticeable difference” from Weber’s earlier

between the intensity of sensation, the psychophysical unity

Francis Galton: Hereditary Genius (1869)

Around the middle of the 19th century, two publications of great

In pursuing this analysis, Galton’s first problem was to develop

cousins) of members of the target sample, Galton compared these

Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz: On the Sensations

The earliest systematic applications of experimental laboratory

The characteristic feature of Helmholtz’s approach to the study

of their higher harmonics), his theory of tone and vowel quality

investigation for sensations, and thirdly, a specially psychological

Henry Maudsley: Body and Mind (1870)

The problem of the relationship of mind to body and body to

In response to these developments, a variety of mind/body views

lating this view and emphasizing the relevance of pathological

Hippolyte Adolphe Taine: On Intelligence (1870; English 1871)

Hippolyte Taine’s On Intelligence77 played much the same role in

Part Two, primarily epistemological in orientation, “examined

First general ideas were reduced to names, “We do not perceive

it seems localized and external, and a second in which this exter-

As is evident, Taine not only brought the available data in

William Benjamin Carpenter: Principles of Mental Physiology

Scientific psychology has historical roots in both mental

published in 1874 as a separate volume entitled Principles of

view, he was unable to abandon either. As he put it: “It will, I

circuit is ‘closed,’ so does a Sensation, an Instinctive tendency, an

Francis Galton: English Men of Science (1874)

In 1869, Francis Galton107 had published the groundbreaking

countries with more moderate climatic conditions, more democ-