A Wundt Primer

Abstract

It was a well-known title in its day: Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie. When it first took shape in 1873, tentative yet bold, it ignited a theme that had been ready and waiting for someone who could bring it off. Spirited reviews appeared in journals everywhere. Students flocked to study with its author. That early rush to join in the book’s pronouncements and promises should continue to arouse our curiosity, even today. But subsequent collisions of ideologies and clashes of cultures were, inevitably, to consign the old book to the less frequented corners of library shelves. Lost from view now, as well, is the old German parochialism of the title’s adjective physiologische in its 1870s local German usage. That adjective once referred to a methodology rather than a program of reducing psychological processes to physiological mechanisms. The methodology so implied was laboratory experimentation, newly successful and lauded in German physiology laboratories.¹ Grundzüge, when translated literally, means “main features” or “characteristics.” After sorting out the title’s meaning as a treatise on experimentation, we find, however, that the book is weighted with theory and philosophy, even to the point of overshadowing its depictions of “characteristics of experimental psychology.”