The Contemporary Scene in the Age of Wundt

Significant though he is in the history of modern psychology,Wundt was, of course, not the only important psychologist at the end of the 19th century. Three of Wundt’s contemporaries were making their own independent way and attracting students, although they did not have quite the influence Wundt had. These men were Franz Brentano, Carl Stumpf, and G. E. Müller. Two non-psychologists of the time also had a profound impact on later psychology: the physiologist Ewald Hering and the physicist Ernst Mach. Wundts student Oswald Külpe has already been mentioned, and then there was the quiet and independent Hermann Ebbinghaus, who also has been briefly referenced. In England, the versatile Sir Francis Gallon was helping to lay the foundations for a psychology of individual differences and of behavioral genetics, which was to become a major focus of research starting in the middle of the 20th century. Stirrings were also beginning in the United States, but consideration of those developments is left for the next chapter.

Three of Wundt’s Contemporaries

Brentano

Franz Brentano (1838—1917) founded the act school of psychology, whose tenets included ideas fundamental in later schools as diverse as functionalism, Gestalt psychology, and behaviorism. He came from a celebrated family, originally merchants in Italy who settled in Germany near Bonn on the Rhine River. The Brentano family included Clemens Brentano, a lyrical poet who collected folk songs (the world-renowned composer Gustav Mahler used this material in his musical work); Clemens’s sister Bettina, who was one of Goethe’s paramours; and Heinrich Brentano, who during the 1950s was foreign minister of Germany; in addition, a branch of the family owned the Brentanos bookstore chain.

Franz Brentano experienced several crises. A restless man and independent thinker, he studied for the priesthood; he earned his PhD in philosophy at Tübingen and was ordained the same year, 1864. His career as a Catholic priest ran into difficulty because of his liberal views (opposition to the doctrine of the infallibility of the Pope), which eventually led him to leave the Church. Later, he had an intense, long love affair and finally married his beloved; not many years later she died, leaving him heartbroken. He traveled a great deal in Switzerland and Italy and taught at several universities in Germany and Austria, including Wurzburg and Vienna. A man of strong convictions, he was a pacifist and was plagued during the last two decades of his life by progressive blindness that, to his exasperation, interfered with his struggles to write philosophy.

In 1874, the year in which Wundts Physiological Psychology appeared, Brentano— who, it must be remembered, was much more of a philosopher than a psychologist, advocating the phenomenological study of mental events—published his most important psychological work, Psychology from the Empirical Point of View, which presented views that were strikingly different from those ofWundt. Brentano held that it is a mistake to make psychology predominantly or exclusively physiological. Although he agreed that psychology should be empirical, Brentano believed it should not necessarily be experimental—if by experiment one means only systematic variation of an independent variable and concomitant measurement of a dependent variable.

Experiments are basically of two kinds: crucial and systematic. Crucial experiments serve to decide between two mutually incompatible conceptions. However, Brentano advised, one should not engage in unproductive systematic experiments—routinely changing an independent variable and measuring the resulting changes in a dependent variable to generate a mathematical function relating the two variables; they tend to be tedious and not very useful in the early stages of the development of psychology. One should try to systematize psychology, and, when there are doubts, perform an experimentnm cruets (crucial experiment). Crucial experiments help decide about important issues, but systematic experiments do not. Brentano further declared that systematic experiments can produce an overemphasis on method and can create a blindness to the main issues facing psychology. This clearly is a very different position from that of Wundt, who championed thorough systematic experimentation. It can be argued that the distinction has a flavor that is too definite, too final; it is not always easy to tell whether an experiment is systematic or crucial. Furthermore, blindness to important substantive issues might be a characteristic not of a method, but rather of a poor experimenter. Also, it is by no means always possible to perform a crucial experiment—examples abound in 20th-century psychology' as in transposition, latent learning, and the continuity'—noncontinuity issue, in which experiments first thought to be crucial turned out not to be decisive after all.

Another major difference between Brentano and Wundt lies in the distinction between psychology and physics. For Brentano, physical phenomena are self-contained and do not refer to other objects; they' have an intrinsic completeness. Mental phenomena, on the other hand, have immanent objectivity. That is, they refer to content, imply an object or a referent. All mental phenomena are acts referring to outside objects; objects are immanent in mental acts.The mental acts include ideating, recalling, perceiving, sensing, judging, loving and hating, feeling, wishing, and intending to do something. It is because mental events are all oriented “outside,” because all acts imply objects, refer to something else, that Brentano’s approach has been called “act psychology.”

Brentano did not have many students but had a wide influence nevertheless. Kiilpe, trained primarily by Wundt, was later an admirer and follower of Brentano and perhaps his most outstanding one; although the British psychologists James Ward, George Frederick Stout, and William McDougall did not study with Brentano, they were all influenced by him. McDougall, for that matter, translated the German word Akt into the English word behavior, defining psychology as the study of behavior—almost a decade before John Watson did. Although he cannot be considered a close follower of Brentano, the founder of modern psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud also happens to have attended Brentano s lectures for a year.