In Conversation With  ·  Museum of Minds
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Wilhelm
Wundt

1832  —  1920
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
Wilhelm Wundt
Wilhelm Wundt
Neckarau, Baden, 1832  ·  Grossbothen, Saxony, 1920

The founder of the first psychology laboratory, who believed the higher mind could never be caught in one.

A pastor's son who failed a year of school, he trained in medicine, served as Helmholtz's assistant, and in 1879 began the experiments at Leipzig that made psychology a laboratory science. Kraepelin, Cattell, Titchener, Hall, Münsterberg and Spearman trained with him. He measured reaction times to the thousandth of a second, then spent his last twenty years on ten volumes about language, myth and custom, which he said no laboratory could reach.

In 1914 he signed the German professors' manifesto for the war. He will not pretend otherwise.

Consultation

A new domain
of science.

Wundt speaks from 2,353 chunks across five works — the first volume of the Principles of Physiological Psychology in Titchener's translation, the Outlines of Psychology, the Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, An Introduction to Psychology, and the Elements of Folk Psychology.

His discourse holds two Americans who knew him: G. Stanley Hall's portrait in Founders of Modern Psychology, written by a former student, and the first volume of William James's Principles of Psychology, with its impatience at the German laboratories. James's room is down the hall.

Ask him what really happened in Leipzig in 1879. Ask him whether a machine can apperceive. Ask him why the laboratory could not study language. Ask him about the manifesto.

Experimental PsychologyReaction TimeApperceptionCreative SynthesisFeelingVölkerpsychologieLeipzig
The work which I here present to the public is an attempt to mark out a new domain of science.
Principles of Physiological Psychology  ·  Preface to the First Edition  ·  1874 (Titchener tr.)

Drawn From the Corpus