Consciousness and Attention

Consciousness is a succession of combinations of compounds, by Wundts definition; the basis of consciousness is the structure of the animal organism. The brain, which conditions consciousness, has separate organs for language, for writing, and so forth—a conception consistent with the assumptions of earlier faculty psychology and phrenology.

One of the major processes of consciousness is attention, which makes certain parts of the conscious field clearer than the background. The product of attention is a condition of very clear perception—the area attended to is the clearest part of consciousness. Apperception is the process of bringing things to attention, that is, to clearest perception; here the word apperception is used as it was by Leibniz, not by Herbart—that is, as clear, complex perception, not as a global attribute of consciousness and its receptivity to new ideas. Wundt distinguished between the focus and the field of consciousness; attention involves bringing things into the focus—items that are not in the focus are in the field.This conception is distantly related to Edgar Rubin’s later distinction between figure and ground, which the Gestalt psychologists were to make a major part of their theoretical system; it is more similar to some ideas in the Gestalt therapy of Frederick Peris, who used these terms not in the way they were to be used in Gestalt theory but as essentially synonymous, respectively, with Wundt’s focus and field.

Association

How are elements combined into compounds, and simple compounds combined into still higher-order complexes? The process is one of association, which occurs in three different forms—fusion, assimilation, and complication:

• 1. Fusion is a combination of elements that never occur separately, as, for example, a piano tone; you do not hear separately the pure-tone elements that compose it.
• 2. Assimilation is the fusion of elements, not all of which are present in consciousness; for example, when you are reading a word, you might not be aware of the particular letters, or of the particular typeface. Assimilation involves supplementing what is perceived by elements that are not in consciousness—a conception that has something in common with Hamilton’s redintegration.
• 3. A complication is a compound of elements from different sense modalities, as in flavor (which is composed of taste, smell, temperature sense, and possibly tactile, kinesthetic, and visual components).

Mental Development

Wundt proposed two major fields of developmental psychological research: the study of child development, that is, the study of the development of psychological processes in the individual, and the cultural development of groups, which involves the study of language, law, art, religion, and so forth. The two were seen as entirely distinct fields; the latter, the evolution of the mind in the history of the human race, is a major focus of Volkerpsychologie, Wundt s favorite area.

Psychic Causality and Creative Synthesis

Wundts answer to the mind—body problem was a psychophysical parallelism: causal laws operate in the mental sphere in a manner similar to the way they work in the physical sphere.What he meant by causality, however, was related to Hume’s analysis. All that he referred to was regularity and lawfulness—the principle of psychic causality holds that mental events are just as orderly as physical ones. Wundt held that experience is unitary, even though one can conceptually divide it into mediated (the physical sciences) and immediate (psychology'). The two kinds of experience are mutually consistent. Mediated experience involves causality; causality is inherent in all experience and thus also in immediate experience; mental causality' cannot possibly contradict physical causality.

Although mental contents are compounded of elements, mental activity' culminates in a creative synthesis. The mind acts on the mental elements, producing creative, unifying combinations; the result of the creative synthesis is different from the sum of the elements composing it. Here Wundt was in a way following the tradition of J. S. Mill and of Kant; a revised version of this principle was to become central in later Gestalt theory.