Chapter 7 Chapter 5 Preemptive: Wundt

According to most authorities, psychology was born on a certain day in December 1879.Everything before this, from Thales to Fechner, is the evolutionary history of its ancestors. The birth of psychology is a silent and trivial matter, without the slightest publicity.On this day, in a small room on the third floor of a dilapidated building called Convett (a boarding house) at the University of Leipzig, a middle-aged professor and two young people were gathering some equipment for experiments.On a table they set up a microchronometer (a brass clock-like mechanism with a weight suspended from it and two discs), a "sounder" (a metal shelf, from which a long arm rises from which a ball will fall, onto a platform) and the operator's sending key, batteries and a rheostat.Then they wired the five things together in a circuit that was no more complicated than the ones used by beginners starting electrical training today.

These were Professor Wilhelm Wundt, a man of forty-seven, long-faced, modestly attired, and bushy bearded; two of his young pupils, Max Friedrich, German, and G. Stanley Hale, American.The set up was for Friedrich, who was going to use it to collect data for his doctoral dissertation.His doctoral dissertation was titled "Length of Perception"—the time between when a subject perceives that he has heard the ball land on the platform, and when he presses the send button.There is no record of who dropped the ball that day, who sat in front of the send button, but with the thud of the ball on the platform, with the click of the send button, with the micro-time The elapsed time is recorded by the meter, and the era of modern psychology has arrived.

Of course, one could object that it started as early as the 1830s, when Weber was making only noticeable differences, or that it started in the 1850s, when Hailey Mholz was measuring the speed of neurotransmission, Fechner was doing the first psychophysical experiments; or in 1868, when Donders was also working on the response-time aspect.Even as Robert Watson said, it should be in 1875, because in this year, the University of Leipzig approved Wundt to use the room in Convett to store and demonstrate his utensils; Harvard University also set up a room in the Lawrence Building. A room for the experiments of William James.

However, 1879 is the year most authorities recognize, and with good reason.Because in this year, the first experiments were carried out in Convett's room, and Wundt has since called this room his "private research institute".In German universities, formally organized laboratories are called institutes. ) a few years later, the place became a must-visit mecca for would-be psychologists, and was massively expanded, eventually being named the university's official School of Psychology. It is largely because of this institute that Wundt is considered not just one of the founders, but the foremost founder of modern psychology.It was here that he conducted his own research in psychology and trained many graduate students in his laboratory methods and theories.From here he also sent cadres of New Psychology—he personally supervised nearly 200 PhD thesis defenses—to university institutions in Europe and the United States.In addition, he wrote a series of scholarly papers and voluminous books that established psychology as a scientific field with its own identity.He himself was the first scientist who could properly be called a psychologist, rather than just a physiologist, physicist, or philosopher with an interest in psychology.

Perhaps most importantly, Wundt brought conscious mental processes back to psychology.These conscious mental processes have been at the heart of psychology from the time of the Greek philosophers to the time of the English Associationists, who, like their predecessors, learned from the traditional methods of introspection. method to explore these issues.However, the German Mechanists, in their search for a way to make psychology a science, had rejected the method of introspection on the grounds that it was subjective and dealt only with unobservable phenomena.They believed that the scientific method of solving psychological problems could only deal with the physiological aspects of neural responses, and, according to one of them, it could only be "psychology without a soul."

Indeed, long before the first experiments in Wundt's lab, both Fechner and Dondes had used experimental methods to measure certain mental responses.However, it was Wundt who developed these methods in their entirety and made them available to subsequent generations of psychologists, and he is also the most famous proponent of the idea that mental processes may be studied experimentally.In fact, he had been thinking about this idea as early as 1862, in the preface to his Essays on a Theory of Sensory Perception: The importance which the experimental method will eventually produce in psychology is hardly fully appreciated at present.There is often a view that sensation and perception are the only domains in which experimental methods may be exploited... (but) this is clearly a prejudice.Once the soul is regarded as a natural phenomenon, and psychology is regarded as a natural science, the experimental method must also be more widely used in this science.

He made a comparison between psychology and chemistry.Just as the chemist knows by experiment how a substance is affected by other substances, and also knows what its own chemical nature is, so it is exactly the same in psychology... Saying that experiments can only determine (stimulate) the effect on the soul The resulting effect, which is quite wrong.The behavior of the soul in response to external influences can also be determined, and, by altering these external influences, we can obtain laws by which such soul life is affected.Simply put, sensory stimuli are just tools for experimentation for us.We can apply this principle, which is the essence of the experimental method, by continually studying the phenomena of the soul while producing multiple changes in the stimuli of the senses; as (Francis) Bacon said: "We can vary environment in which the phenomenon occurs."

A dozen years before Wundt conducted his first experiments in the laboratory, he had already made a name for himself as an architect of bridges that wanted to connect physiological and mental processes.Word of his views had reached America long before William James wrote in a letter to a friend in 1867: It seems to me that the time has come for psychology to become a science, and certain measurements have been made in fields that are at the level of physiological changes in the nerves and aspects of consciousness (shapes perceived in the senses)...  Both Mholz and a guy named Wundt at the University of Heidelberg are working on it, and I hope... to visit them this summer.

(He was not able to visit Wundt this summer, but he did a few years later, by which time he himself had become a leading figure in psychology.) Some modern historians who do not like the "heroic" view of history may say that the new science of psychology was not founded by Wundt, but was caused by the general social and intellectual situation in the mid-nineteenth century, and also by the behavioral and social sciences. The state of development dictates.Animal psychology included in Darwin's (and later The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals), the sociological studies of St. Auguste Conte, the anthropologist's thoughts on life, language, and as yet unwritten peoples The increasing number of reports, among other related factors, has created an atmosphere in which it is possible to think of the nature of man as capable of scientific study.

It is true that no Wundt in Tertullian's time, or Aquinas' time, or even Descartes' time, could look up and exhale experimental psychology; However, there are very few landscapes of human behavior that can be studied experimentally as a set of phenomena.However, in any field of knowledge, even if the time and place are just right, it is not thousands or hundreds of people who stand out, but only a few outstanding ones.There was even one: a Galileo, a Newton, a Darwin, who inspired thousands of others to follow (and later women) who learned from them and carried their careers forward.There was only one Wundt, who had the genius and drive to become the guiding light of the new psychology in Europe and America.

But today, he seems to be a strange and contradictory figure.Despite his lofty prestige and long-term influence, his name is now known to few except a few psychologists and scholars; most can easily recognize Freud, Pavlov and Piet. Yajie is a layman, but he doesn't know who Feng Te is.Even those who do know his place in history cannot agree on what Wundt's main views are; different scholars seem to come up with different Wundt conclusions when summarizing his system.And, while most psychologists felt for a while that Wundt's psychology was too narrow, a handful of historians in the field have recently reassessed his work and declared him a visionary. And a psychologist with a big heart.In a way it might be, what makes him inscrutable is that he is the epitome of a nineteenth-century German scholar: omniscient, stubborn, imperious, and, in his own opinion, consistent. Right - an ideal and a figure incomprehensible today. One of the most astonishing things about Wundt is how the kid grew up to be such a wonderful man.In his childhood and youth, he looked utterly unlikely, unmotivated and lacking in the talent, let alone the preeminent colossus of science and higher education.In fact, he looked straight up silly. Wundt was born in Neckarau near Mannheim in 1832, in southwestern Germany, and he can be regarded as a scholarly family.His father was the village Lutheran minister, but his grandparents included university presidents, doctors, and scholars.For many years, Wundt has not shown his talent, and he has no interest in learning; when he was a child, his only good friend was a mentally handicapped boy, and in school, he habitually wandered off and played wild, with an expressionless expression. Trance.When Wundt was in the first grade, his father came to visit him at school one day and found that he was absent-minded. In a rage, he slapped him several times in front of his classmates.Wundt will never forget this incident, but it has not changed him; at the age of 13, he attended a Catholic professional school in Brusisal, and he was still such a daydreamer who did not grow up, His teacher often incited him openly, and another teacher laughed at him in front of other students—most of whom were peasant children, and they were not educated themselves.The teacher's punishment didn't help either; he failed the year and was left with a dull face. Then, Wundt's parents sent him to the Academy in Heidelberg.There, in the midst of fellow students who he found to be like-minded, he slowly got the hang of his mind under control, and passed middle school, albeit always mediocrely.When he graduated, he didn't know what he wanted to do, but because his father had passed away and his mother had only a small pension, he had to prepare to find a job to maintain a decent life.He chose medicine and applied to the University of Tübingen; he played around without telling his mother for a year and learned nothing. But when he came home at the end of the year and realized that he had little money to put him through 3 years of college, a startling change occurred in him.In the autumn of this year, he went to Heidelberg University to re-study medicine, plunged into the study with enthusiasm, and completed his studies in three years, and won the first place in the national medical examination in 1855. However, during the learning process, he found that clinical practice did not appeal to him, but he was very interested in the science courses in the curriculum. After receiving his master's degree in 1855, he spent a year at the University of Berlin studying with Joan Müller and Wenmil Dubois Raymond, and in 1857 was appointed lecturer in physiology at the University of Heidelberg.The following year, when the famous Hermann Helmholtz came to the university to establish the Institute of Physiology, Wundt applied to be his laboratory assistant and got the job.His work for Helmholtz further focused his interest in physiological psychology. At this time, he was only in his early 20s and unmarried. Wundt had completely become a workaholic.In addition to his laboratory work, he lectured, edited textbooks to earn money, conducted his own research on a theory of sensory perception, and began drafting a tome on the subject, Essays on a Theory of Sensory Perception, which was published in in 1862.In it, Wundt, only 30 years old, challenges venerable philosophers and mechanistic physiologists by saying that psychology can only be a science if it is based on experimental results, and that consciousness does It can be explored through experimental means. In 1864, Wundt was promoted to the position of teaching assistant, and then resigned from his job as Helmholtz's assistant to concentrate on his own research.He no longer had access to Helmholtz's laboratory, so he built one at home, collected and made the necessary instruments himself, and conducted his own psychological experiments.He continued to teach experimental physiology courses, but more and more psychology material had appeared in his classes.It wasn't until his 30s and fast forward to his 40s that he left his job long enough to pursue a girl and eventually got engaged to her, however, they had to postpone the wedding due to financial reasons. Helmholtz left Heidelberg University in 1871.Wundt seemed the most logical successor for him, but while the university kept giving him many Helmholtz jobs, it only gave him one self-help professorship, four of Helmholtz's. one-third.This promotion enabled him and his girlfriend to get married, but he worked harder than before, writing his "Principles of Physiological Psychology" for a long time, which he hoped would get him out of Heidelberg University. Really did.In the first part—the book appears in two parts, in 1873 and 1874—Wundt states, without any reservations: "The work I dedicate here to the public intends to delineate a scientific The boundaries of the world." The work brought him what he hoped for, a professorship at the University of Zurich, and a year later a better one at the University of Leipzig. Wundt went to the University of Leipzig in 1875, the idea of ​​occupying the Convett room for storage and demonstrations, and began using it as a private research institute 4 years later.His lectures were very popular, the personal fame and the fame of the laboratory attracted many assistants to Leipzig, and in 1883 the university increased his salary, gave his laboratory a regular status, and gave him additional vacancies, so that He expanded the laboratory into a seven-room suite. He himself spent less time in the laboratory, and spent most of his time lecturing, managing research institutes and writing, and revising thick works on psychology, and later wrote a lot on logic, ethics and philosophy writings.His days are strictly prescribed, just like Immanuel Kant.He spends most of his morning writing, then an hour of consulting, visits the lab in the afternoon, takes a short walk while thinking about his next lecture, finishes the lecture, and then goes back to the lab.His evenings were quiet, he avoided public life except for concerts, and he almost never traveled, but he and his wife often entertained advanced students and had aides come to the house for dinner most Sundays. At home Wundt was genial and somewhat formal, but at university he was dogmatic and bookish; he acted like a big shot, and thought he was.When he was lecturing—the most popular at the university—he would wait until everyone was seated, and the assistants were all there, and they were all in the front row.Then the door would open suddenly, and he stepped in, dressed in black and full of academic style, without looking left or right, and ran straight along the aisle to the podium, fiddling with chalk and paper on the podium, and finally faced the anxious audience, The hand-held podium was full of talk. He gave his lectures eloquently and passionately, and he didn't read his own lecture notes at all. Although his articles were always difficult and dull and the semantics were unclear, when he lectured, he would amuse people in a steady academic way.Here's what he said about the psychic energy of dogs, for example: I spent a great deal of time trying my own poodle to see if he could show empirical concepts with certainty.I taught the dog to close an open door by using its front paws to close the door in the usual way when it heard my command to "close the door."At first, it learned this trick on a special door in my study.One day, I hoped that it would repeat this action on the other door of the study, but it looked at me in surprise and did nothing.It took me a lot of trouble to teach him to repeat his tricks under changed circumstances.However, after that, it obeys orders without hesitation, and it can close two doors like this... (However, although) some special-minded associations have developed into real similarities-associations, but no Any minimal indication can account for the main features of concept formation in its consciousness—that is, the consciousness that particular objects can alternatively represent a whole category of objects.When I command it to close a door that is opened from the outside, it simply does the same action: open the door, that is, it does not close it, and although I repeat the command impatiently, it still cannot make it do anything else.However, it was clearly frustrated at not being able to complete its task. This was Wundt at his most genial, and even Edward Techener, one of Wundt's most dedicated pupils, found him usually "humorless, unrelenting, and extremely aggressive."Being extremely learned, he considered himself an authority.William James wrote wryly to a friend: Because there must be professors in this world, and Wundt is the kind of person who is the most admirable and can never be admired too much.He's not a genius, he's a professor—a being whose job it is to know everything, who has to have an idea of ​​everything in the world, and has to relate everything to himself. With his graduate students, Wundt was extremely helpful, caring, loving—but also imperious.At the beginning of an academic year, he would often order the graduate students to assemble at the institute, and they would stand in front of him in a queue, and he would read out a list of some of the research projects he had to look at completing for the year, marking the first The task is assigned to the first student standing at the edge of the line, the second task to the second student, and so on.According to Raymond Fancher: No one dared to challenge these assignments, and the students were very responsible for carrying out individual assignments, which in most cases became their doctoral dissertations... (Wundt) directed the reports to be published writing.Although he sometimes allowed the students to express their own opinions in these reports, he often took up the blue pen and practiced vigorously.One of his last American students reported: "Wundt showed a well-known German character, and he defended very passionately the basic principles of his academic views. About one-third of my papers failed to support Wundt. Assimilated views, so it was deleted." In fairness, we have to say that Wundt in his later years has become soft-hearted and kind.He liked to entertain young guests and lecturers in his study, reminiscing about some of his youthful memories.He taught, wrote, and directed research in psychology until his retirement in 1917 at the age of 85.From then on, he was busy writing, and he was still writing until 8 days before his death, that is, in 1920 when he was 88 years old. If we visit Wundt's laboratory in our imagination, whether it is the early single room or the later suite, and observe the experiments they carry out, we will feel that these experiments are commonplace, and at best they can only be regarded as some unworthy mental phenomena; Nor have they explored some of the most critical areas of human psychology—cognition, thinking, language skills, emotion, and personal relationships. We saw Wundt's students, and occasionally Wundt himself, spend hours listening to the metronome, which they played at various speeds, from very low to very high, sometimes after a few beats. Stop and sometimes let it shoot for a few minutes.The person listening to the metronome scrutinized their sensations each time and reported their conscious response.They found that some conditions were pleasurable and some were unpleasant, that a fast tempo evoked a feeling of excitement, and a slow tempo evoked a relaxed mood, and that after each click they experienced a subtle tension followed by a very subtle relaxation feel. This seemingly insignificant exercise is a serious business, training what Wundt calls introspection.He uses the term to mean something very different from the introspection that philosophers from Socrates to Hume have often engaged in, which consists of thinking about their thoughts and feelings.Wundt's introspection is accurate, limited and controlled, and it is limited to what Wundt calls the "elements" of the soul's life—direct and simple perceptions elicited by sounds, lights, colors, and other stimuli and feelings.The experimenter delivers these stimuli and observes the subject's visual responses, which develop in the subject as he focuses his attention on the sensations and emotions. We see many experiments being carried out in the laboratory, more or less like the first experiment carried out in this laboratory, that of Max Friedrich.Hour after hour, day after day, the observer let the ball fall on the platform, causing a piercing noise, which closed the contacts that started the micro-chronograph.As soon as the subject heard the noise, he immediately pressed the send button to stop the micro-timer timer.These experiments are generally performed in two formats.In one form, the subject was told to press the send button as soon as he clearly felt he heard the sound; in the second form, he was told to press the send button as soon as the sound sounded .In the first case the command focuses his attention on his sensations; in the second the attention is on the sound itself. The casual bystander probably wouldn't see any difference between the two conditions, but the researchers, after many trials and micro-timers, found that the first response was more Awareness of the perception of sound followed by a conscious spontaneous response, thus usually takes about two-tenths of a second; whereas the second, since it involves a purely muscular or reflex response, only takes about a tenth of a second time. These findings may seem like trivialities in psychological research, but there were other differences between the two experimental formats, more revealing than the length of time.The subjects, who had learned to be introspective, reported that when they focused their attention on the awareness of hearing the sound, they experienced a fluctuating but clear mental image of what they were preparing for. A sound that is good to listen to, a slight fluctuating sense of tension, when they hear this sound, they will feel a slight sense of surprise and have a strong urge to press the send button.Additionally, in the reflexive form of the experiment, they experienced very subtle mental images of the sound they were about to hear, considerable tension, a strong sense of surprise when the ball fell, and a sense of pressing. The urge to press the send button with little conscious will to press it.Thus, this experiment not only measures the time difference between conscious and reflexive volition, but also identifies the conscious process that occurs in the context of self-awareness of this simple action. Although researchers have focused on conscious mental processes, they have only looked at the basic building blocks of these processes.Years ago, Wundt had boldly declared that experiments could probe the soul, but now, he sensed, they could only do so with sensations, perceptions, or emotions—the basic stuff of consciousness—and the connections between them.Higher processes, including complex thought, are, he says, "too variable for subjects of objective observation."Language, concept formation and some other higher cognitive functions can only be studied by observation, especially among common tendencies in some population groups, he said. Wundt defined a scientific psychological experiment as one in which a known, controlled physiological stimulus—what he called a "precursor variable"—is applied, and a person is observed and measured responses.Helmholtz and others had done these things, but they were all limited to their own observations of a person's visual responses.Wundt's great contribution was that he used his own introspective methods to obtain quantitative information about the conscious inner reactions of his subjects.However, he confines these to the simplest emotional states. During the first 20 years of this laboratory, about 100 major experimental studies and countless small experiments were carried out.Many experiments dealt with sensation and perception, and largely in the tradition of Weber, Helmholtz, and Fechner.However, the lab's most original and important discoveries came from its work on "mental chronometry," the measurement of the time it takes for particular mental processes and their interactions. Other studies have introduced a more complex set of processes in order to be able to stimulate and measure several kinds of mental processes.For example, by introducing several possible stimuli and responses—a stimulus may take the form of one of four different colors, each color requiring a different kind of response—the experimenter can broaden the range of exploration and differentiate and options are included. Other studies touch on the boundary between sensation and synaesthesia.In one notable example, the experimenter flashed a group of letters through the perforations of a rotating drum; the subject "perceived" them (seeing them in the periphery of consciousness without letters) but on the next spin will have "sensation" (consciously remembering and recognizing) what has already been seen.The main finding was the size of the attention span: most subjects could develop synesthesia and utter 4-6 letters or a few words after seeing them but not having time to identify them. A smaller group of studies explored associations—not the high-level associations discussed by the British associationists, but the basic building blocks of associations.In a typical study, an assistant reads monosyllabic words, and subjects are asked to press a key as soon as they hear each word; this measures "synaesthesia time."The assistant would then say a number of similar words, and the subject would press that key when each word evokes a related thought.This will take a little longer.Subtracting the perceptual time from the total time will give what Wundt calls "associative time"—how long it takes the consciousness to find a word that is related to a word it hears or recognizes—a figure that averages out in the average person. It's three quarters of a second. Sir Calvin, a British physicist of Wundt's contemporary, used to say: "When you can measure what you are saying, and can express it numerically, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it , when you cannot express it numerically, your knowledge is impoverished and unsatisfactory." The data collected in Wundt's lab certainly met this standard of knowledge, at least concerning the basic building blocks of mental processes. Wundt saw himself as more than just an experimental scientist.In his own writings and articles, Wundt assumed the role of the organizer of the psychological system and the architect of its master plan.However, the proof of his system is difficult to explain in detail, and the summary of its main characteristics is always varied and inconsistent. One reason, according to Pauling, is that Fengjiang's system is a classification scheme that cannot be proven or disproved experimentally.It is not the natural development of a large testable theory, but an orderly educational program based on medium-term theory-based topics, many of which cannot be explored with the methods used in the Leipzig laboratory. One of the bigger obstacles to summarizing Wundt's system is that he is constantly modifying it, adding new things, so that it is not one thing but many things.Indeed, critics in his day had a hard time finding trouble with any part of his system, since he either made changes in new editions or moved on to another topic.While praising Wundt's experimental work, William James complained that the sheer variety of his writings and ideas made his guidance as a theoretician unusable: Although (some other psychologists) used their criticism to refute some of his ideas, he was simultaneously writing another book on a completely different subject.If you cut him into several pieces like cutting a worm, each section will crawl on its own.He doesn't have life knots in his medulla, so you can't kill him all at once. However, if no central theme can be found in Wundt's psychology, it is still possible to enumerate some recurring loose topics. One is his soul parallel theory.Although Wundt is often labeled a dualist, he did not believe that anything called consciousness could exist outside the human body.He did say that the phenomena of consciousness are parallel to the processes of the nervous system, but he believed that the former was based on the amalgamation of actual neural phenomena. Another theme is his view that psychology is a science.At first he advocated that it was, or could be, a Naturwissenschaft (natural science), but later he said that he was essentially a Geisteswissenschaft (a science of the mind, not mind in the sense of an immaterial soul, but a higher mental activity).He said that only the experimental research of direct experience is natural science, and the others are spiritual sciences.He wrote at length on personal and social psychology and its related social sciences, but in writing, and without acknowledging or even showing, that rigorous experimental methods could be developed in these fields. The closest to the central thesis of Wundt's psychology is that conscious mental processes consist of fundamental elements—directly experienced sensations or emotions.In his early work, Wundt said that these elements combined automatically into mental processes, a bit like chemical elements form compounds.However, shortly after, he said that the comparison with chemistry was not accurate, because the combination did not happen as chemistry, but as attention, will, and creativity. Whereas immediate experience has its own rules of causality—particular stimuli cause particular elemental experiences—psychological life has its own causality: the mind develops, one thought after another, with particular rules.Wundt gave these rules special names, but these names are basically his reworking of association, judgment, creativity and memory. Another psychological theme of his, especially in his later writings, is that "acts of will" are essential to all conscious action and mental activity; Feelings of thought, speech and action represent results.In his view, even simple, non-thought actions are voluntary, but he believes that these actions are compulsive.Actions from more complex mental activities are voluntary and automatic.Although this theory can no longer be found in today's psychology, this is Wundt's own efforts in order to surpass the automatism of mechanistic psychology and establish a more complete model. Overall, Wundt's psychology is much broader and more inclusive than is generally believed.On average, however, he was strict and exclusive, and thus left behind, or prohibited, many fields of study that are accepted today as essential parts of the field: —he was without exception opposed to any form of practical use of psychology; when one of his most able pupils, Ernest Moman, turned to educational psychology, Wundt considered him abandoning this side and turning to the enemy . ——他还反对除了他自己规定的内省法以外的任何别种形式。他猛烈地抨击了其他一些研究者的工作——即沃滋堡学派的成员，关于这个学派，我们不一会儿会了解更多一些。这个学派要他们的受试者在实验期间讲出他们想到的任何东西。这种方法，冯特说，就是“假”实验，即不是实验方法学上的，也不是内省式的。 -儿童心理学刚一出现他就提出反对意见，因为这些研究的条件不能够得到足够的控制，因而其结果也不是真正的心理学。 ——他摒弃了同时代的法国心理学工作，因为法国心理学在很大程度上依赖催眠法和暗示法。因为这种研究缺乏严格的内省，他说也不是心理学的实验。 ——最后，他特别反感威廉·詹姆斯的心理学，而后者的心理学却更为完整，更有洞察力，更有个人特色。读完了詹姆斯极受全世界普遍欢迎的《心理学原理》一书后，冯特酸酸地说：“这是文学，它很美，但不是心理学。” 有关威尔汉姆·冯特的任何东西都没有他对心理学的影响奇怪——广泛得很矛盾，然而又不是太大。 广泛： ——他是这个领域里的博学之士和大计划的决策人，他给这片学术领土划分了疆界，并定义它为一门新的科学。 ——他个人培训了许多人，这些人后来在这门科学的前几十年都成了德国和美国最伟大的心理学家。 ——他把生理心理学开始阶段最有特色的方法论引入了实验心理学。他的实验室及其方法都是下半个世纪许多实验室的模范。 ——通过他厚厚的、权威性的教科书，冯特影响了头两代美国心理学家及其学生。在20世纪初期，美国心理学的学生都可以把他们的历史渊源追踪到冯特那里去。 可又不是很大，冯特的思想在当代心理学理论中不起任何作用。主要的原因有： ——冯特就心理学几乎每一个可以想象到的领域写作，包括按照他自己的实验方法无法通过检验的许多话题，比如灵魂因果关系、催眠术和通灵术。结果，一些年轻的心理学家认为他是某种二元论者和玄学思辩者，因而，对一些可以进行科学调查的心理现象更加热烈地采纳了实证主义的标准。他们的观点将在行为主义中象征出来，而行为主义认为内省、哪怕是冯特形式的内省，都是非科学和无价值的。 —一可是，其他的许多心理学家，都反对他们认为是过于狭窄和生硬的冯特心理学。他们被吸引到了带有实际应用目的的研究领域，其中有儿童心理学、教育心理学、心理学测试和临床心理学。所有这些领域，虽然都超出了冯特心理学的界限，但都成长并发达起来。 ——在冯特的晚年，一些新的心理学研究流派出现了，是对他的心理学系统特征的一种拨乱反正。这些学派都有一个共同点，即实验心理学不应该局限于基本的直接体验，而应该探索更高级的心理活动。 比如记忆。在柏林大学，赫曼·艾宾豪斯（1850-1909）发明了调查记忆活动的一个方法，这个方法排除了主观和一个人以前的经验影响。他发明了23O0个没有意义的音节——由一个元音间隔开的两个辅音组成的无意义组合，比如bap、tox、muk、rif等，并用这些词进行一系列的记忆实验。 比如，他读出一组音节，然后尽量记忆其中的音节。通过一些调整，如增加长度，阅读的速度、阅读的次数，他很有激情地探索这些课题，如，音节的数目与阅读的速度如何发生关系，而且必须能记住（记忆住这个单子的难度比记忆其长度增长快多了），遗忘与学习及复习之间的时间间隔有什么联系，重复及复习对学习与遗忘产生的影响。 艾宾豪斯如此专注于研究，竟至于让自己背负了无法想象的劳动。有一次，为了确定重复的次数如何会对记忆的保持产生影响，他背诵了420排16音节，每个音节背诵34次，总共14280个，这是心理学上的高峰。他的方法虽然听上去耸人听闻，但极为成功，从这以后，它成了实验心理学的标准。（最近几十年来，他从工作当中得出的一些预测已经在其重要性上下落了许多；对最近记忆的研究，重点已经从无意义的内容转到有意义内容的记忆上了。） 哥丁根大学的乔治·艾利亚斯·穆勒（1850 -1934）在艾宾豪斯的方法里面加入了内省法，以便检查统计发现结果后面的心理活动。穆勒发现，无意义音节的回记忆远不仅只与排的长度有关系而且与重复的次数及类似因素有关系，它在很大程度上与受试者积极使用自己的方法呈偶然关系，比如成组、节奏和甚至有意识地将一些意义安放在这些词上。简短地说，学习不是一种消极的过程，而是积极和创造性的过程。这些发现也有助于心理学从在莱比锡大学强加上去的局限中解放出来。 还有其他一些心理学家，包括冯特的一些学生，发展出更为激进的实验研究方法。奥斯瓦尔德·克尔普（1862 -1915）尽管是在冯特指导下完成学位并跟他当了8年助手，但他慢慢觉得，不仅记忆，而且其它许多的思想过程都可以在实验室里加以研究。1896年，他在沃滋堡大学成立了一个逻辑实验室，这个实验室很快产生了影响，地位仅次于冯特实验室，他和学生也成了沃滋堡学派。他们最有特色的贡献在于使用到了“系统实验内省法”，受试者不仅报告自己的感觉和感情，而且要报告进行心理测试工作时的想法。 克尔普利用这个方法来试验东德斯的假想，即复杂的心理活动由简单的活动组成，结果是，一级级的心理活动在反应时间实验中经常会完全改变思想过程，得出一个与将所有涉及的步骤简单相加不同的反应时间。 沃滋堡学派其他一些人的工作——卡尔·马尔布、纳希斯·阿什和卡尔·布勒-使这个学派的名字与人类思想实验研究等同起来。在典型的沃滋堡实验中，受试者也许会得到作为刺激用的一个词，然后要他产生一个更为复杂的相关词，或者一个更为具体的相关词。如果刺激用的词是，比如说，“鸟”，则处于“较上位”的词（更综合）可能是“动物”，“较下位的”词（更具体）可能是“金丝雀”。之后，受试者要重述执行任务的几秒钟时间内脑子里想的所有事情——他对刺激词的辨识、对这项任务的反应、由刺激词唤起的心理图象、对合适词的搜寻和合适词的样子。这些回顾活动，写下来后进行分析，找出其中线索，了解记忆工作的机制。 （最近几年，这个方法被人工智能专家们采用来创造“专家系统”——计算机程序，可以刺激人类解决问题的活动，如通过计算机语言复制人类专家推理的步骤进行医疗诊断。） 沃滋堡学派的成员们作出的另一项奇怪的发现是，受试者有时候在内省中找不到心理图象的痕迹。比如，增加或者减少数字，或者判断一句话是否正确，可能不会涉及图象。研究者们把这个现象叫做“无图象思维”；它表明，与冯特理论不一样的是，有些思维过程不是由基本感觉或者通感构成的。 一位名叫亨利·瓦特的研究者也属于沃滋堡学派，他为这个学派找到了另一个极有价值的发现。他发现，如果在把刺激词告诉受试者之前，把任务告诉他——也许是“找一个综合词”，内省会显示，受试者并没有去找这个词，而这个词却自己显现出来了。瓦特在这之前曾发现“确定倾向”，或者叫“心理定式”——思维通过无意识的方法为完成一项任务作出的心理准备。 沃滋堡学派根据这些方法扩大了实验心理学，远远超出了冯特规定的范围，并使心理学朝着更完整的方向迈出了步伐。 到20世纪20年代，冯特心理学慢慢退出历史舞台了。鲁迪特·本杰明教授是这个领域的历史大家，他作出了一个总结： 最终，冯特心理学以及他同时代的心理学都被更新的心理学方法所替代了。尽管这种心理学系统的一些部分还存在于现代心理学中……我们还能记住他的主要原因是，他看到了心理学作为一门科学的出现和希望，并在19世纪迈开了大步，确立了这门新科学主要的原则。 可是，他还说，最近的研究发现，冯特具有“深刻的理解和广泛的兴趣（例如，他在文化、法律、艺术、语言、历史和宗教上的论著）”，而这方面一直为大众所忽略。 尽管如此，波林对冯特的评价却好像是无懈可击的，这个评论最早是60年前作出的，1950年还是如此： 艾宾豪斯而不是冯特……在如何研究学习上面闪耀出天才的火花。有关情绪、思维、意志、智力和性格这些大问题也是如此，这些问题将会得到成功的解决，但冯特实验室尚没有准备好解决这些问题。然而，我们不应该轻视我们的遗产，因为，是在这些遗产的帮助下，我们才在时机成熟的时候远远超越了它。