Founders of Modern Psychology

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. This book is an amplification of six lectures given early in 1912 at Columbia University to an audience composed of students and a wider public. They were not addressed to experts and were only designed to give those who heard them some general idea of the personality, standpoint, and achievements of each of the men described. The chapters are therefore for the most part light and untechnical. They can make no claim to completeness or originality.

Of the twelve years from 1870 to 1882, the author spent nearly six as a student in Germany. The first triennium, ending with the year 1873, was devoted to philosophy, and it was at this period that I came under the influence of those men characterized in the first four chapters. After coming home and teaching what I had learned from these masters and others for six years, during which my interest in more scientific methods and modes of approach grew, especially after the first edition of Wundt's Psycho-logie in 1874 and as a pupil of James and Bowditch, I passed a second triennium in Germany, to which period Wundt and Helmholtz belong. Since then empirical and scientific interests have been so dominant, and many of the results of the first stage so neglected or forgotten, that the re-reading of my own old lecture notes and of works more lately written by the authors treated has proven a pleasant recreation. I do not know of any other American student of these subjects who came into even the slight personal contact it was my fortune to enjoy with Hartmann and Fechner, nor of any psychologist who had the experience of attempting experimental work with Helmholtz, and I think I was the first American pupil of Wundt.

This book is an amplification of six lectures given early in 1912 at Columbia University to an audience composed of students and a wider public. They were not addressed to experts and were only designed to give those who heard them some general idea of the personality, standpoint, and achievements of each of the men described. The chapters are therefore for the most part light and untechnical. They can make no claim to completeness or originality.Of the twelve years from 1870 to 1882, the author spent nearly six as a student in Germany. The first triennium, ending with the year 1873, was devoted to philosophy, and it was at this period that I came under the influence of those men characterized in the first four chapters. After coming home and teaching what I had learned from these masters and others for six years, during which my interest in more scientific methods and modes of approach grew, especially after the first edition of Wundt's Psycho-logie in 1874 and as a pupil of James and Bowditch, I passed a second triennium in Germany, to which period Wundt and Helmholtz belong. Since then empirical and scientific interests have been so dominant, and many of the results of the first stage so neglected or forgotten, that the re-reading of my own old lecture notes and of works more lately written by the authors treated has proven a pleasant recreation. I do not know of any other American student of these subjects who came into even the slight personal contact it was my fortune to enjoy with Hartmann and Fechner, nor of any psychologist who had the experience of attempting experimental work with Helmholtz, and I think I was the first American pupil of Wundt.