An Introduction to Psychology by Wilhelm Wundt, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leipsic, presents a concise and accessible account of the foundational principles underlying experimental psychology at the turn of the twentieth century. Translated from the Second German Edition by Rudolf Pintner, the volume was published in London by George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., appearing in 1912 and reprinted in 1920. The translator describes it as “a popular introduction to the Wundtian psychology,” shorter and simpler than Wundt’s more comprehensive Outlines of Psychology, and notes that its popularity in Germany had been “phenomenal.”
“It is impossible to imagine that a combination of letters, such as we have given above, could work as a whole, and then, because it was wrong, be replaced by the right word.”
The book is deliberately modest in scope. In his Author’s Preface, dated Leipsic, June 1911, Wundt states plainly that the work does not intend to discuss the scientific or philosophical conceptions of psychology, nor to survey the full range of investigations and results in the field. Rather, it aims to introduce the reader to the principal thoughts underlying present-day experimental psychology. Wundt acknowledges that omitting all mention of experimental methods and results is impossible in the contemporary state of the discipline, but he maintains that only a comparatively small number of results of first importance are needed for comprehending the basal principles of the new psychology. He deliberately omits reference to complicated instruments and directs readers seeking fuller accounts to his Outlines of Psychology, which contains the necessary bibliography.
The book’s five chapters trace a logical progression through the fundamental concerns of psychological science: consciousness and attention, the elements of consciousness, association, apperception, and the laws of psychical life. Throughout, Wundt grounds his theoretical discussions in concrete experimental demonstrations, most notably the metronome experiments that recur throughout the text as a touchstone for investigating rhythmical perception, the scope of attention, feeling, and time-consciousness. The result is a work that manages to be both an introduction for the general reader and a serious statement of Wundt’s distinctive theoretical positions within the developing science of psychology.
Context
Wundt wrote at a pivotal moment in the history of psychology, when the discipline was establishing itself as an experimental science distinct from both philosophy and physiology. As Professor of Philosophy at Leipsic, Wundt stood at the center of these developments, having founded one of the first laboratories dedicated to psychological research. The present volume represents his attempt to communicate the essential insights of this new experimental psychology to a broader audience, without requiring specialized knowledge of laboratory apparatus or statistical methods.
The intellectual landscape Wundt inhabited was marked by competing conceptions of what psychology should be. The empirical school, associated with British philosophy, defined psychology as the investigation of the facts of consciousness, their combinations and relations, with the aim of discovering the laws governing them. Wundt engages critically with this tradition throughout the book, accepting its emphasis on experience while rejecting what he regards as its oversimplifications—particularly its tendency to treat all mental combination as association and its habit of reifying ideas as permanent mental objects.
Wundt also positions himself against the scholastic tradition, which had transformed psychical processes into logical judgments and attempted to understand the mind through rational analysis alone. He argues that such methods are fruitless because logical laws are late products of scientific thinking that apply only to a small portion of thought-processes. Direct introspection, he maintains, fails for the opposite reason: it requires first a careful analysis of elementary psychical processes before complex phenomena can be understood. Some psychologists, he notes critically, have attributed the difficulties of thought-analysis to thought being “unconscious” or “supersensual,” thereby opening the door to logical reflections read into phenomena—an approach that ends where scholastic philosophy began.
The book also reflects Wundt’s engagement with the German philosophical tradition, particularly the concepts of apprehension and apperception introduced by Leibnitz. Wundt adopts these terms while explicitly setting aside their original philosophical meanings within Leibnitz’s monad theory, using them instead in a purely empirical sense to describe the entrance of content into consciousness and its elevation into the focus of attention. This selective appropriation of philosophical concepts for empirical purposes characterizes Wundt’s approach throughout: he draws freely on the history of ideas while insisting that psychological concepts must be grounded in observable phenomena.
The translator’s note situates the work within Wundt’s larger corpus, indicating that it serves as a shorter and simpler companion to the more comprehensive Outlines of Psychology. Pintner used the same English terms as the translations by Judd and Titchener, ensuring terminological consistency across Wundt’s works in English. This attention to translation reflects the growing international reception of Wundt’s psychology, particularly in Britain and America, where his laboratory methods and theoretical framework were being adopted and adapted by a new generation of experimental psychologists.
Structure of the Book
The book is organized into five chapters that proceed from the most elementary phenomena of consciousness to the most complex laws governing mental life. Each chapter builds systematically on the preceding material, with experimental demonstrations serving as the foundation for theoretical conclusions.
Chapter I, “Consciousness and Attention,” opens with a critical examination of how psychology defines its subject matter. Wundt notes that the empirical school’s definition of psychology as the investigation of facts of consciousness involves a vicious circle, since consciousness is then defined as the sum total of facts of which we are conscious. Nevertheless, he accepts this definition provisionally as the simplest available. The chapter then introduces the metronome experiment, which becomes the book’s central investigative tool. Through systematic variation of beat intervals and rhythms, Wundt demonstrates that consciousness is “rhythmically disposed,” that the scope of consciousness extends to roughly sixteen beats in a complex whole, and that the scope of attention is limited to approximately six simple impressions. The chapter develops the distinction between the field of consciousness and the fixation-point of attention, introduces the concepts of clearness and distinctness, and establishes the threshold of consciousness as the boundary between apprehended and non-apprehended content.
Chapter II, “The Elements of Consciousness,” extends the analysis from the metronome experiments to the full range of sensory experience. Wundt distinguishes sensations from ideas across the senses, examining the relative richness of sight and hearing compared to touch, taste, and smell. The chapter then introduces the subjective elements of consciousness: the feelings of pleasure and displeasure, strain and relaxation, and excitation and quiescence. Through careful analysis of metronome experiments under varying conditions, Wundt demonstrates that these three pairs of feelings constitute fundamental dimensions of affective experience. The chapter concludes with an examination of emotions and volitional processes, arguing that both are complex combinations of these elementary feelings rather than independent mental faculties.
Chapter III, “Association,” examines the passive combinations of mental elements. Wundt distinguishes associations from apperceptive combinations, reserving the former term for combinations that occur “of their own accord” without feelings of activity. The chapter analyzes fusions, in which sensation-components combine so intimately that they cannot be clearly perceived as isolated parts; assimilations and dissimilations, in which reproductive elements from memory modify present impressions; and complications, in which elements from different senses combine. Wundt criticizes the traditional division of memory-associations into associations by similarity and by contiguity, arguing that these are merely limiting cases of more fundamental processes.
Chapter IV, “Apperception,” examines the active combinations of mental elements. Wundt introduces the topic through the contrast between the “flight of ideas” in insanity and the organized thought of a literary passage, arguing that the difference lies in the activity of apperception that organizes associated elements into unified wholes. The chapter explores the relationship between abstract and concrete thought, the role of language in thinking, and the distinction between understanding and imagination. Wundt illustrates his points with examples from Goethe’s writings and from primitive languages, showing how thought-processes vary across different forms of expression.
Chapter V, “The Laws of Psychical Life,” addresses the fundamental principles governing mental phenomena. Wundt distinguishes psychical laws from natural laws, examining the concepts of creative resultants, the heterogony of ends, conditioning relations, and intensifying contrasts. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the nature of the soul, criticizing the substance hypothesis and arguing for the actuality of mind as a process rather than a thing.
Main Arguments
Wundt’s central argument throughout the book is that psychology must ground itself in careful experimental observation of elementary mental processes before attempting to explain complex phenomena. He repeatedly criticizes approaches that begin with sophisticated intellectual products—logical judgments, abstract concepts, complex ideas—and attempt to work backward to simpler processes. Such approaches, he maintains, inevitably read into phenomena structures that belong to later stages of scientific thinking rather than to the phenomena themselves. The proper method proceeds in the opposite direction: from the simplest observable processes to their complex combinations.
This methodological commitment underlies Wundt’s sustained engagement with the metronome experiments. By varying the intervals between beats, the patterns of emphasis, and the complexity of rhythms, Wundt claims to have isolated fundamental features of consciousness that would otherwise remain inaccessible. The experiments reveal that consciousness is rhythmically disposed, that attention has a measurable scope of approximately six simple impressions, and that feelings of strain and relaxation accompany the apprehension of temporal intervals. These findings, Wundt argues, provide the foundation for understanding more complex phenomena such as emotion, volition, and thought.
A second major argument concerns the inadequacy of traditional association psychology. Wundt acknowledges the historical importance of the association concept, which originated in eighteenth-century English philosophy, but he insists that it has been overextended. The old theory rested exclusively on memory-processes, treating all mental combination as the association of ideas in temporal succession. Wundt argues that memory-processes form only a small part of associations and are merely a secondary form. More fundamental are the processes of fusion, assimilation, and complication that operate in all sense-perception, combining elements into wholes that cannot be analyzed into simple succession. Furthermore, Wundt distinguishes passive associations from active apperceptive combinations, arguing that the latter involve feelings of activity that are absent from the former.
Wundt also argues against what he calls the “false materialisation of ideas.” He rejects the view that each idea is an unchangeable thing resembling the object from which it arose. Taking an unprejudiced view of consciousness, he maintains, reveals that an idea is no more constant than a feeling, emotion, or volitional process. There exist only changing and transient ideational processes—no permanent ideas that return and disappear. A remembered idea is neither identical with the previous memory-act of that idea nor with the original impression. This critique has important consequences for association theory: if ideas are not stable entities, then associations cannot be understood as the linking of fixed mental objects. Instead, each association divides into elementary combinations involving hindrance and retardation, with assimilations and dissimilations constituting the fundamental forms.
A fourth argument concerns the nature of volition. Wundt criticizes the common view that the will is a specific psychical element or identical with the idea of an intended act. Closer investigation shows that volitional processes connect closely with emotions and are genuinely affective processes. No act of volition lacks feelings combining into an affective process. The difference between volition and emotion lies not in the presence of some special mental element but in the end stage immediately preceding and accompanying the act. If this end is not reached, the process remains simply an emotion. Wundt distinguishes impulsive acts, which proceed from a single motive; voluntary acts, which arise from several conflicting motives; and selective or discriminative acts, in which one is clearly aware of the previous conflict of opposite motives. He further argues that apperception itself may be viewed as a volitional process, an essential factor in all inner and outer volitional acts.
Finally, Wundt argues for the unity of mental life against attempts to divide it into separate faculties. Understanding and imagination, he maintains, are not separable faculties or different functions but involve the same processes of apperception and association distributed relatively differently. It is wrong to call imagination the property of art and understanding that of science: science without imagination is worth as little as art without understanding. Similarly, the will coincides with the ego, which is neither an idea nor a specific feeling but consists of elementary volitional processes of apperception accompanying consciousness. These are always changing yet always present, forming the lasting substratum of self-consciousness.
Key Concepts
The concept of apperception stands at the center of Wundt’s psychology. Adopted from Leibnitz but stripped of its original philosophical meaning, apperception denotes the elevation of mental content into the focus of attention. Wundt distinguishes it sharply from apprehension, which is the entrance of content into the larger region of consciousness. Apprehended content is that of which we are “more or less darkly aware” but which remains above the threshold of consciousness; apperceived content is that of which we are clearly aware, above the “narrower threshold of attention.” The scope of apperception is relatively limited and constant—approximately six simple impressions—while the scope of apprehension is larger and more variable, depending on the psychical complexes united into wholes.
The threshold of consciousness is another fundamental concept. Wundt describes how impressions gradually lose clearness as they recede from the focus of attention, eventually “sinking beneath the threshold of consciousness” when they disappear entirely. The reverse process is “rising above the threshold.” Gradual approach toward the threshold is called “darkening,” the reverse “brightening.” Comprehension of a multi-part whole is possible as long as no part sinks beneath the threshold. This spatial metaphor of consciousness as a limited plane surface with a fixation-point, a surrounding field, and a bounding threshold structures much of Wundt’s analysis.
The three dimensions of feeling constitute Wundt’s most systematic contribution to the psychology of affect. Through careful analysis of metronome experiments under varying conditions, he identifies three pairs of contrasting feelings: pleasure and displeasure, strain and relaxation, and excitation and quiescence. These seldom appear isolated; several combine into “aggregate feelings,” analogous to ideas as opposed to pure sensations. Contrasts within pairs may balance into a feeling-free state, or contrasting feelings may intertwine into “contrasting combinations” or disjointed moods. Wundt acknowledges that these are ultimate facts of psychological experience that cannot be further analyzed; explaining them is as impossible as explaining why blue is blue and red is red. However, he connects them to the fundamental nature of apperception as a volitional act: every volition contains latently either an attracting or opposing element, and this fundamental relation spreads into different directions in the basal forms of feeling.
Wundt’s classification of mental combinations distinguishes several types. Fusion occurs when sensation-components combine so intimately that they cannot be clearly perceived as isolated parts—as when the overtones of a clang are heard not as separate tones but as modifications of the fundamental tone. Assimilation occurs when reproductive elements from previous impressions modify present impressions, filling gaps and arranging the impression among familiar ideas. Dissimilation is the contrasting process in which elements are pushed aside or made less apparent. Complication occurs when elements from different senses combine, as in the association of visual word-forms with auditory word-images in reading. Wundt argues that these elementary processes, rather than the traditional memory-associations of similarity and contiguity, constitute the fundamental forms of mental combination.
The distinction between passive associations and active apperceptive combinations is crucial to Wundt’s account of thought. Associations occur “of their own accord” without feelings of activity; apperceptive combinations connect closely with volitional processes and involve characteristic feelings of activity made up of alternating feelings of excitation, strain, and relaxation. This distinction underlies Wundt’s analysis of the difference between the “flight of ideas” in insanity and organized thought. Both involve association-chains, but organized thought is arranged into a unified whole through the activity of apperception, which holds the entire thought present in consciousness (even if indistinctly) while its parts enter successively into the fixation-point of apperception.
The concept of creative resultants appears in Wundt’s account of mental combination. When elements combine into wholes, the resulting product possesses qualities that cannot be reduced to the mere sum of its parts. This is evident in the qualitative coloring of aggregate feelings, which differ depending on the constitution of the rhythm even when containing the same simple feelings. The terminal feeling at the end of a rhythmical row carries the affective center of gravity, allowing apprehension of succeeding rows as identical; what is apperceived is not the preceding row itself but the aggregate feeling joined to the last directly apperceived element. This aggregate feeling’s qualitative coloring depends on the rhythm’s constitution and cannot be explained as mere summation of simple feelings.
Themes
A persistent theme throughout the book is the relationship between the simple and the complex in mental life. Wundt repeatedly insists that complex phenomena cannot be understood before simple ones are properly analyzed. This principle guides his method: the metronome experiments provide the general preliminary conditions for understanding rhythm, time-consciousness, feeling, and attention, which in turn illuminate emotion, volition, and thought. Yet Wundt is equally insistent that complex phenomena are not merely aggregates of simple elements. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, and the qualitative character of complex mental states cannot be predicted from the qualities of their components. This dual commitment to analysis and to the recognition of emergent properties gives Wundt’s psychology its distinctive character.
The theme of activity versus passivity runs through Wundt’s account of mental life. He distinguishes associations that occur of their own accord from apperceptive combinations that involve feelings of activity. He distinguishes passive apprehension, in which an impression is given without assistance and attention seems compelled, from active apperception, in which one turns to an expected impression with strain and excitation preceding it. He argues that “voluntary” and “involuntary” attention are unsuitable terms since volitional processes occur in both—they differ only in grade. This emphasis on the active character of apperception connects Wundt’s psychology to the German idealist tradition while grounding it in empirical observation.
The body-mind relationship appears as a recurring concern. Wundt notes that consciousness is not separated from physical and mental being but collects contents important for the mental side. The rhythmical disposition of consciousness relates to the whole psycho-physical organisation—heart, breathing, walking movements are rhythmic, and locomotion acts as “natural pendulums.” Feelings of strain and relaxation might be hypothesized to arise from muscle sensations, but Wundt refutes this through careful argument: such sensations continue at constant intensity, lacking the regular increase and sudden transition observed in expectation; voluntarily contracting these muscles or sending electric current through them produces similar sensations without expectation; and muscle-sensations cannot explain superimposed expectation states in complex rhythms or intellectual states. Yet Wundt does not deny the reality of psycho-physical connections; he insists only that subjective feelings cannot be reduced to organic sensations.
The theme of normality and pathology emerges in Wundt’s discussions of illusion, insanity, and the limits of normal mental function. He argues that what we imagine we perceive directly largely belongs to memory of innumerable previous impressions; we are unaware of the separation between given and assimilated content. Only when reproductive elements achieve striking ascendancy, irreconcilably contradicting usual perceptions, do we speak of sense deception or illusion. This is a limiting case, passing by unnoticeable gradations into normal associations—”normal illusions.” Similarly, the “flight of ideas” in severe insanity represents an extreme form of associative thinking that differs in degree, not kind, from the random word series a sane person can produce. The boundary between health and pathology is thus a matter of degree rather than of kind.
The relationship between thought and language constitutes another important theme. Wundt examines how abstract concepts develop from concrete sensuous ideas, tracing original meanings to reveal sensuous origins: “treatment” once meant material handling, “knowledge” referred to sensuous knowing, “reason” meant understanding of words. Words become abstract concepts representing countless processes—like “a bank-note that represents an inexhaustible value of current coin.” The word is the “real ideational equivalent for the concept.” Wundt’s analysis of primitive language, illustrated by the Togo example, shows how thought is shaped by linguistic resources while also revealing universal features of mental process. The Togo version of a simple English sentence arranges ideas in the order the objective process occurs, each word denoting one idea without grammatical categories, remaining at the stage of pure association while following the action element for element.
The theme of individual differences appears in Wundt’s discussions of feeling and attention. Feelings show relative independence from objective impressions: for many individuals they sink below the threshold of consciousness, for others they are prominent. A complicated tone-structure may produce ecstasy in a musician but leave an unmusical person cold; a simple melody may please the latter but seem trivial to the musician. The scope of attention is constant across observers—six simple impressions—but practice can increase performance within limits. These observations ground Wundt’s psychology in the recognition of human variability while also establishing universal laws of mental function.
The Author’s Conclusions
Wundt concludes that psychology, properly understood, is the science of immediate experience, and that its method must be experimental observation of elementary processes combined with careful analysis of their combinations. The metronome experiments demonstrate that even the simplest phenomena of consciousness—the perception of uniform beats—reveal complex structures of rhythmical disposition, feeling, and attention that would be invisible to casual introspection. These experiments establish that consciousness is not a passive receptacle of impressions but an active process that organizes, selects, and combines its contents according to regular laws.
The laws governing mental life are not the same as natural laws, though they are no less regular. Wundt identifies creative resultants, the heterogony of ends, conditioning relations, and intensifying contrasts as fundamental principles of psychical life. These principles reflect the distinctive character of mental phenomena: they involve wholes that transcend their parts, processes that transform their own conditions, and developments that cannot be predicted from initial states. The soul, Wundt argues, is not a substance underlying mental phenomena but the actuality of mind as process—the unity of apperception that accompanies all conscious experience.
Wundt’s final conclusions emphasize the unity of mental life against all attempts to fragment it into separate faculties or elements. Feeling, volition, and thought are not independent powers but different aspects of a single process of apperception. The will coincides with the ego, which consists of elementary volitional processes of apperception accompanying consciousness—always changing yet always present, forming the lasting substratum of self-consciousness. Understanding and imagination involve the same processes differently distributed. Science and art realize the two forms of thinking, but both depend on the same laws of apperception and association.
The book closes with reflections on the relationship between psychology and education. Wundt argues that education must train inner volition—ordered thinking—rather than focusing primarily on outward acts. Speech connects inner and outer volition most clearly, and the development of language reflects the development of thought. The study of primitive languages reveals stages of thinking that have been superseded in civilized cultures but that nevertheless illuminate the fundamental processes of mental combination. Human thought is simultaneously a product of nature and a creation of mental life, unified in the human will.
Significance
An Introduction to Psychology occupies a distinctive position in the history of the discipline. It represents Wundt’s attempt to make the new experimental psychology accessible to a general audience while maintaining the rigor and theoretical sophistication of his system. The book’s phenomenal popularity in Germany, noted by the translator, testifies to its success in communicating the principles of experimental psychology beyond the narrow circle of laboratory researchers. Its translation into English helped disseminate Wundtian psychology throughout the English-speaking world, where it influenced the development of psychology in both Britain and America.
The book’s significance lies partly in its methodological demonstrations. Wundt’s use of the metronome as an instrument for investigating consciousness exemplifies his conviction that even the simplest experimental arrangements can reveal fundamental laws of mental life when properly analyzed. The finding that the scope of attention is limited to approximately six simple impressions, constant across sense modalities and confirmed by the independent development of the Braille system, represents one of the earliest quantitative results in experimental psychology. The three dimensions of feeling—pleasure and displeasure, strain and relaxation, excitation and quiescence—provided a systematic framework for the psychology of affect that influenced subsequent research and theory.
Wundt’s critique of association psychology anticipated later developments in the field. His insistence that memory-associations are merely limiting cases of more fundamental processes of fusion, assimilation, and complication challenged the dominance of the associationist paradigm inherited from eighteenth-century British philosophy. His rejection of the “false materialisation of ideas”—the view that ideas are permanent mental objects that can be stored, retrieved, and associated—pointed toward process-based conceptions of mind that would become influential in twentieth-century psychology. His distinction between passive associations and active apperceptive combinations preserved a place for voluntary attention and will in a psychology that might otherwise have reduced all mental life to mechanical association.
The book also represents an important moment in the ongoing negotiation between philosophy and psychology. Wundt draws freely on the philosophical tradition—adopting and transforming concepts from Leibnitz, engaging critically with the empirical school, rejecting the scholastic transformation of psychical processes into logical judgments—while insisting that psychology must ground itself in experimental observation. His conclusion that the soul is not a substance but the actuality of mind as process reflects a metaphysical position that he presents as following from empirical investigation rather than from a priori reasoning. This integration of philosophical reflection with experimental method characterized psychology at its founding and remains relevant to contemporary debates about the nature of psychological explanation.
For the modern reader, the book offers insight into the origins of experimental psychology and the intellectual context in which it developed. Wundt’s careful reasoning about the metronome experiments, his critical engagement with alternative approaches, and his systematic construction of a framework for understanding consciousness, feeling, and thought exemplify a style of psychological theorizing that combines empirical rigor with conceptual sophistication. The book’s demonstrations of how complex phenomena can be illuminated by careful analysis of simple cases, and how elementary processes combine into wholes that transcend their parts, remain valuable models for psychological investigation.
Inside the Book
Author’s Preface and Translator’s Note
Wilhelm Wundt, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leipsic, opens this volume with a preface dated June 1911, clarifying the book’s purpose. He states explicitly that this is not a work discussing the scientific or philosophical conceptions of psychology, nor is it a survey of investigations and results. Instead, the book aims to introduce the reader to the principal thoughts underlying present-day experimental psychology. To achieve this, Wundt acknowledges that he must omit many facts and methods necessary for a thorough study of the field. While it is impossible today to omit all mention of experimental methods and results, he notes that only a comparatively small number of results of first importance are needed to comprehend the basal principles of the new psychology. He deliberately omits any reference to complicated instruments, directing readers who desire a fuller account to his Outlines of Psychology, which contains the necessary bibliography.
The Translator’s Note, written by Rudolf Pintner in Edinburgh in May 1912, describes the work as “a popular introduction to the Wundtian psychology,” being both shorter and simpler than the Outlines of Psychology. Pintner remarks that its popularity in Germany has been “phenomenal.” He explains that he has used the same English terms as those employed in the translations by Judd and Titchener to maintain consistency, and he thanks Mr. Robert Wilson for his advice and for reading the manuscript. The Contents pages reveal the book’s structure, with chapters covering Consciousness and Attention, Elements of Consciousness, Association, Apperception, and Laws of Psychical Life. The topics within these chapters range from the metronome and rhythmical disposition to sensations, feelings, emotions, and volitional processes, as well as apperceptive combinations, speech, and the nature of the soul.
The Metronome and the Rhythmical Disposition of Consciousness
Chapter I, “Consciousness and Attention,” begins with a discussion of the definition problem. Empirical-school psychologists define psychology as the investigation of the facts of consciousness, their combinations and relations, in order to discover the laws governing them. Wundt calls this definition “to some extent a vicious circle,” since consciousness is then defined as “the sum total of facts of which we are conscious.” Nevertheless, he accepts it as the simplest definition for the time being, noting that objects of experience cannot be defined but only pointed to and analysed into their qualities, an analysis he calls “description.”
To begin his experimental inquiry, Wundt introduces the metronome, a clockwork instrument with an upright pendulum and a sliding weight. By adjusting the weight, the beats can be made to occur at intervals ranging from two seconds to about one-third of a second. The instrument must produce a uniform beat strength. The initial experiment involves subjectively emphasising alternate beats, so that one hears ascending or descending patterns at will. Wundt finds that it is extraordinarily difficult to hear the beats as absolutely unrhythmical, leading him to conclude that “our consciousness is rhythmically disposed.” This disposition is related to the whole psycho-physical organisation, as the heart, breathing, and walking movements are all rhythmic, with locomotion acting as “natural pendulums.” Impressions at stated intervals are thus arranged rhythmically, much like outward movements, and the ascending or descending form is freely chosen, similar to the choice between walking, running, or dancing.
The scope of consciousness is then explored using rows of sixteen beats at a medium rapidity. Wundt finds that immediate recognition of identical rows occurs, and differences of a single beat are noticed. This recognition requires that each row be grasped in consciousness “as a whole,” analogous to recognising a regular hexagon. Sixteen successive beats in 2/8 time is the maximum graspable row, a measure independent of beat rapidity within certain limits. This “scope” denotes the maximum of one complex whole, not the total content of consciousness, which Wundt compares to a limited plane surface where the scope is one diameter, not the whole extent. With more complicated rhythms, such as voluntary 4/4 time, five bars can be grasped, making forty beats the greatest attainable scope. The gradation of intensity reveals that three degrees of emphasis form a maximum differentiation, with counting unaccented beats giving four intensity grades as the highest limit.
Clearness, Distinctness, and the Threshold of Consciousness
The metronome experiments reveal an important phenomenon when comparing a current beat with immediately preceding ones and those further back. Differences appear that are distinct from variations in intensity and emphasis. Wundt borrows terms originally developed for visual perception: “clearness” and “distinctness.” Though nearly synonymous, they differ in that “clearness” refers to the impression’s own constitution, while “distinctness” concerns the impression’s relation to other impressions from which it stands out. In a row of beats, each element shows varying degrees of these qualities. The beat currently affecting consciousness is most clear and distinct, while immediately preceding beats resemble it most closely, and those further back progressively lose clearness. When a distant beat’s impression disappears entirely, it is described as “sinking beneath the threshold of consciousness”; the reverse is “rising above the threshold.” The gradual approach toward the threshold is called “darkening,” and the reverse “brightening.” Comprehension of a multi-part whole is possible as long as no part sinks beneath the threshold.
The clearest element lies in the “fixation-point of consciousness,” while everything else belongs to the “field of consciousness.” This field surrounds the fixation-point like a region growing darker toward the periphery, bounded by the threshold. The fixation-point is only the ideal middle of a central region where several impressions can be clearly apprehended. This psychological process parallels vision, where one fixation-point exists but many impressions around it may be clearly perceived, enabling one to read a word at a glance. The psychical process operating in the clear perception of a narrow region is called “attention.” Impressions remarkable for special clearness lie within the “focus of attention,” a central region cut off by a boundary from the darker surrounding field. This raises a new experimental problem: determining the size of this narrower scope of attention.
The Scope of Attention and Visual Experiments
Rhythmical beat rows are suited to measuring the total scope of consciousness but cannot clearly delimit the focus of attention. Vision offers better conditions, though physiological limits restrict keenest differentiation to the “region of clearest vision.” Wundt describes an experiment using a diagram of letters with a central “_o_,” viewed from a fixed distance with one eye closed. With practice, one can direct attention to peripheral letters while maintaining fixation. The fixation-point of attention and of the field of vision are not identical and can be separated, meaning clear perception (psychological) and clear vision (physiological) need not coincide. Fixating “_o_” while attending to “_n_” allows clear perception of surrounding letters, while letters around “_o_” retreat into the darker field. The diagram contains 95 letters, but at one moment only a few surrounding the attention’s fixation-point can be differentiated. Using tachistoscopic exposure with new diagrams each trial to prevent memory supplementation, an unpracticed observer perceives at most 3-4 letters, increasing to 6 with practice. Six cannot be exceeded and remains constant across observers, establishing a constant for human attention.
Measuring consciousness scope required connected impression rows, while measuring attention scope requires isolated, unarranged elements. This difference is psychological, not sensory. When words replace isolated letters, an observer reads them instantly, grasping seventeen or more elements, paralleling the rhythm experiments. However, words must be previously known; unknown-language words appear as unarranged letter complexes limited to six elements. Wundt concludes that in reading, as in rhythm experiments, attention grasps only part of a complex, and psychical combination extends from that part to elements in the wider field. Misprints go unnoticed because not all elements are equally clearly perceived. Threads of psychical combination stretch from focused elements to unclearly perceived ones, even to merely physiological impressions in indirect vision. The chief difference between hearing and sight cases lies not in the formal relations of attention and consciousness scope but in the constitution of the elements and their combinations.
Apprehension and Apperception
Returning to the metronome experiments, now informed by the visual results, Wundt asks whether rhythm experiments can be arranged to isolate simple impressions. Such isolation arises when one restrains any “hearing into” the beats, avoiding any accentuation. Even the simplest rhythm, 2/8 time, must be avoided, though this proves difficult due to the rhythmical disposition of consciousness. The condition can be met if the interval between beats is long enough to prevent rhythmical grouping but short enough to grasp several beats as one whole, generally 1½ to 2½ seconds. With practice, one can alternate at will between rhythmical and unrhythmical perception. When a row of six beats is given, precise recognition of identity is possible, while a row of nine is not, and even seven or eight give uncertain recognition. This matches the optical experiments: six simple impressions form the limit for the scope of attention.
Since this value is identical for optical and acoustical, successive and simultaneous impressions, it denotes some psychical constant independent of any special sense. With senseless syllables not combined into words, a row of six syllables can be correctly repeated, but eight cannot, and even seven generally fail. A third sense confirms this result. Before Braille, a French teacher of the blind who had himself become blind experimented on himself and concluded that groups of distinct points were the only suitable letter-signs, and that not more than six definite points should be used per letter. A nine-point arrangement would have practical advantages, but such complications are useless because one cannot clearly grasp differences among so many points.
The importance of these results lies beyond numerical expression. They reveal relations between elements in the focus of attention and those in the wider field of consciousness. Wundt adopts two expressions introduced by Leibnitz: apprehension (entrance into the large region of consciousness) and apperception (elevation into the focus of attention). He sets aside Leibnitz’s philosophical meanings, using the terms purely empirically. Apprehension is the entrance of content into consciousness, content of which we are “more or less darkly aware” but above the threshold of consciousness. Apperception is the grasping of content by attention, content of which we are clearly aware, above the “narrower threshold of attention.” When apperception is directed to one isolated element, merely apprehended elements disappear “as if they were non-existent.” When apperceived content is bound to apprehended elements, it combines into one total apprehension limited only by the threshold of consciousness. The scope of apperception is relatively limited and constant, while the scope of apprehension is larger and more variable. Wundt offers a picture: the wider darkly apprehended content relates to apperceived content as piano accompaniment chords relate to a singer’s voice—slight variations in accompaniment are mostly unobserved while the voice is correct, yet the whole impression would be feeble without accompaniment.
Oscillations of Apperception and Feelings
The difficulty of apprehending identical beats uniformly connects to a fundamental characteristic of apperception: attention cannot be directed perfectly steadily to one object. Continual change occurs, and under uniform conditions, this change becomes regular and periodic. External impressions with regular periodicity assist this process, so an impression coinciding with a rise in the apperception wave becomes emphasized, making uniform beats rhythmically arranged. With simultaneous impressions, a short word is apprehended at one glance, while a long word requires longer apprehension time made up of two or three rapid successive acts of apperception. A sentence shows three successive acts of apperception, with the last combining the whole into one unified thought, possible only if preceding parts remain in the field of consciousness.
Wundt extends this analysis to all sensory domains. Green, red, white, or black are visual sensations, while a green surface or black body is a visual idea. The relation mirrors that between a single beat and a row of beats. Sight and hearing produce great variety through qualities of simple sensations and through complications of ideas. The tonal scale is an infinite gradation, while light-sensations form a more concise manifoldness. The richness of sensations relates to the spatial distance of objects introduced into consciousness, with touch being the narrowest region and sight being the sense of distance in the true sense.
All sensations and ideas refer to the objective world, but the question arises whether objective elements form the only content of consciousness. Using the metronome with medium intervals and rhythmical emphasis, additional phenomena appear: an impression of an agreeable whole. This “agreeable” comprises an objective idea and a subjective feeling of pleasure, which is not included in the idea itself but is an added subjective element, not projected outward. Between two beats, apprehension of interval identity arises through a subjective process—the change from “expectation” to “realisation.” Expectation is continuous and regularly varying, with strain increasing until the beat occurs, then suddenly relieved. One might hypothesize that sensations from the tympanum membrane or ear muscles bear these phenomena, but this proves untenable: such sensations continue at constant intensity, voluntarily contracting these muscles produces similar sensations without expectation, and muscle-sensations cannot explain superimposed expectation states in complex rhythms or intellectual states. These states are subjective and are called “contrasts of strain and relaxation,” having the same right to be called feelings.
With medium metronome rapidity, pleasure and strain/relaxation appear together. With intervals of 3 seconds, strain and relaxation appear more distinctly, but pleasure decreases until strain becomes painful. With intervals of ½ to ¼ second, strain and relaxation disappear, replaced by excitement increasing with rapidity, generally with lively displeasure. This new feeling is “excitation,” an essential component of emotions like anger and lively joy. Suddenly decreasing rapidity to medium produces a distinct feeling of “quiescence.” Thus three pairs emerge: pleasure and pain, strain and relaxation, and excitation and quiescence. These seldom appear isolated; several combine into “aggregate feelings,” analogous to ideas vs. pure sensations. Contrasts within pairs may balance into a feeling-free state, or contrasting feelings may intertwine into “contrasting combinations” or disjointed moods, demonstrable with the metronome when strain just becomes painful while relaxation still pleases.
Emotions and Affective Processes
Feelings rarely exist in isolation; they combine into what Wundt calls an affective process, which is typically joined to an ideational one. When such a temporal process unfolds with changing but connected affective and ideational content, it is termed an emotion. When the same process is less intense but more lasting, it is called a disposition. Emotions can be classified by their predominant feeling: those dominated by pleasure include joy, delight, merriness, and hope, while those dominated by displeasure include anger, grief, sorrow, and fear. Further dimensions emerge from the interplay of feelings. A quieting feeling combined with displeasure produces depression. Exciting emotions, such as joy and anger, contrast with depressing ones like grief and fear. Straining emotions include hope, sorrow, and fear, while relaxation occurs when an expected result finally arrives or a fear disappears. Many emotions are fluctuating: anger, hope, and sorrow show fluctuations in intensity, while hope, fear, and sorrow fluctuate in quality. Hope and sorrow, in particular, often alternate, and their intensity is increased through this very contrast.
Emotions also manifest objectively through expression movements. These appear in the facial mimic muscles and, when the emotion is strong, in other body muscles as well. These mimic and pantomimic expressions are accompanied by characteristic changes in the heart and lungs. They are the most sensitive indicators of subjective processes, observable even with weak emotions or simple feelings not yet combined into affective processes. Blood-vessel expansion and contraction also occur, producing blushing in anger and shame, and pallor in fear and fright.
Volitional Processes
The will is often wrongly held to be a specific psychical element or identical with the idea of an intended act. Closer investigation shows that volitional processes connect closely with emotions and are, in fact, genuinely affective processes. No act of volition lacks feelings combining into an affective process. The difference between volition and emotion lies in the end stage immediately preceding and accompanying the act. If this end is not reached, the process remains simply an emotion. For example, anger shown only in expression movements is an emotion, but striking down the person who excited the anger is an act of emotion.
Volition has several characteristics. Its motives are ideas with a strong feeling-tone directly connected to the act’s end stage. It also involves feelings of activity, characteristic feelings at the end stage, probably compounded of excitation, strain, and relaxation. Excitation and strain precede the act, while relaxation and excitation accompany it and continue briefly after. Volitional acts can be typed. An impulsive act has only one motive present; animal acts are mostly of this type, though it is also important in human life, arising from repeated complex volitions. Voluntary acts arise from several conflicting motives with strong feeling-tone. Selective or discriminative acts occur when one is clearly aware of a previous conflict of opposite motives. Impulsive acts proceed quickly, while voluntary and selective acts are slower with fluctuating feelings. There are also inner volitional acts, which do not show outwardly in bodily movements but change consciousness itself, as seen in voluntary attention concentration and directed thought.
Apperception and Volition
The feelings of strain, excitation, and relaxation in inner volitional acts closely match the processes accompanying the apperception of impressions or recollected ideas. Different forms of apperception correspond to impulsive and voluntary action. In passive apprehension, an impression is given without assistance, attention seems compelled, and a feeling of activity follows. In active apperception, one turns to an expected impression, and strain and excitation precede it. The terms “voluntary” and “involuntary” attention are unsuitable, since volitional processes occur in both; they differ only in grade. Apperception itself may be viewed as a volitional process, an essential factor in all inner and outer volitional acts.
The Will and the Ego
The will seems our most private possession, most identical with our inner nature. Ideas seem external, something the will reacts upon. The will coincides with the “ego,” which is neither an idea nor a specific feeling but consists of elementary volitional processes of apperception accompanying consciousness. These are always changing yet always present, forming the lasting substratum of self-consciousness. The ego’s inner fortifications are feelings—reactions of apperception to outer experience. The next line is experience itself—ideas, especially those of our own body, which are closely connected with volitional processes. At a naive stage, these combine with the ego into a unity.
Analysis of Feelings
Emotions, dispositions, and volitional processes contain no specific elements; all analyze into the same feeling forms. Volition’s peculiarity depends solely on the mode of combination, not on specific elements. An open question remains: are the six principal feeling forms—pleasure, displeasure, strain, relaxation, excitation, and quiescence—perfectly uniform, or do they have qualitative shades, just as blue has different shades?
Metronome Experiments
Using subjective rhythm with metronome beats in 4/4 time, two arrangements produce different experiences despite identical rises and falls. In arrangement A, a descending row is used; in arrangement B, an ascending then descending row. Once one chooses a rhythm form, subsequent beats are grouped accordingly. The terminal feeling at each row’s end carries the affective center of gravity, allowing apprehension of succeeding rows as identical. What is apperceived is not the preceding row itself but the aggregate feeling joined to the last directly apperceived element. The key finding is that terminal feelings differ qualitatively between arrangements A and B despite containing the same strain and relaxation feelings. This cannot be a mere summation of simple feelings. When objectively accentuated beats are compared by another observer, differing impressions prevent certainty about equal or different row lengths. While five similar 4/4 rows can be apprehended at once, changing the rhythm makes even single-row comparison impossible. The aggregate feeling’s qualitative coloring depends on the rhythm’s constitution, coinciding generally with agreeableness and relaxation following the strain of expectation.
On the Three Dimensions of Feeling
Two remaining questions about feeling are addressed: why feeling appears in contrasts, such as pleasure and displeasure, and why exactly three such pairs of contrasts exist—termed the three dimensions of feeling. Wundt acknowledges these are ultimate facts of psychological experience that cannot be further analyzed; explaining them is as impossible as explaining why blue is blue and red is red. However, one can examine their connection with total processes of consciousness. Wundt views feeling as a way of reaction of the apperception upon a given content, and apperception itself represents a simple volitional act. Every volition contains latently either an attracting or opposing element—we are attracted by desired objects and turn away from opposing ones. This fundamental relation spreads into different directions in the basal forms of feeling.
Pleasure and displeasure derive from the attracting and opposing elements directly connected to the qualitative constitution of impressions or ideas: what we desire brings pleasure; what opposes us brings displeasure. Excitation and quiescence relate to the intensity with which apperception enters into action, regardless of whether the content is pleasurable, displeasurable, or indifferent. This action consists of an increase or decrease of apperception’s normal function, dividing into these two opposites. Relaxation and strain arise because each act of apperception connects with preceding and succeeding processes of consciousness—when directed to an immediately passed or coming series, feelings of relaxation or strain emerge. Each single feeling is in principle a compound divisible into all these dimensions and their two directions, with components emphasized or absent, while the total qualitative constitution of consciousness gives a specific coloring distinguishing it from every other content.
Chapter III: Association
Consciousness elements stand in general combinations. Even without objective steady combinations, we construct them via subjective sensations and feelings—metronome beats become rhythmical wholes through feelings of strain and relaxation and weak muscle-sensations. Ideational compounds, complex feelings, emotions, and volitional processes are all resultants of psychical combination processes. Psychologists call these “associations,” a term from eighteenth-century English philosophy. Some believe this one concept covers all psychical combinations, but Wundt identifies a crucial difference: one set of combinations acts “of its own accord” without feelings of activity, while another set connects closely with these activities. Wundt calls the passive combinations “associations” and the active ones “apperceptive combinations” or “apperceptions.” The old theory of association rested exclusively on memory-processes—ideational compounds arranged in temporal succession. But memory-processes form only a small part of associations and are merely a secondary form.
Fusions
A piano string plucked in the middle vibrates wholly and in segments, producing overtones corresponding to the octave, fifth of the octave, double octave, and so on. A clang consists not only of the fundamental tone but a series of overtones giving “clang-colour” or timbre. Though overtones exist in sensation and can be perceived with intense attention, ordinarily they appear massed together as a modification of the fundamental tone. This association, where sensation-components fuse so they cannot be clearly perceived as isolated parts, is called a fusion—either close, as in a single clang, or loose, as in a chord, whose separate tones can be heard plainly.
Spatial Ideas and Local Signs
For spatial ideas of touch and sight, one proceeds from the principle that any sensation whose change essentially influences the resulting idea belongs to that idea’s components. In cases of partial paralysis, disturbance of outer cutaneous sensitivity causes mislocalization of touch, and paralysis of muscles near the touched place also causes confusion. Both cutaneous and muscle sensations together, by fusion, give rise to the idea of the place touched. Blind persons, especially those born blind, show continuous co-operation of cutaneous sensations and touch movements. Visual spatial ideas similarly involve two sensation-components: retinal sensations, varying by quality and retinal region affected, and sensations accompanying eye positions and movements, varying in intensity by movement distance. Retinal inflammations or eye-movement abnormalities disturb spatial perception, causing apparent dislocations or illusions of size and distance. Experiments show that hindering eye movement makes distances over-valued—a line interrupted by transverse lines appears longer than an undivided equal line. Wearing prismatic spectacles distorts vision, but the distortions disappear after several days, reappearing when the glasses are discarded. Retinal sensations possess “qualitative local signs” corresponding to “intensive local signs” of movement sensations, their relation to the retina’s center determining correspondence. This relation is neither permanent nor innate but acquired by practice—a true association and fusion, though unlike clang-fusions it combines elements from different senses.
Affective Fusions
Feelings fuse into complex compounds where single elements bear the rest, modifying form like the overtones of a clang. These affective fusions bind closely with corresponding ideational fusions—a musical chord’s impression comprises both, separable only in psychological analysis. The “common or organic feeling” consists of indefinite organic feelings, predominantly pleasant-unpleasant, with certain elements predominant and others modifying concomitants. General health—freshness, activeness, or displeasure and exhaustion—is essentially a product of this affective complex, where sensuous feelings joined to muscle strain and movement sensations play the most important part.
Fusion and Time-Consciousness
Fusion in hearing and locomotion impressions serves as an intermediary for time ideas. Analyzing consciousness during metronome beats of medium rapidity reveals two element classes: sensations and feelings. The sensations present include individual metronome beats separated by empty intervals, plus a continuous weak strain sensation, probably from the tensor muscle of the tympanum, lasting between beats. A further sensation arises in the mimic muscles surrounding the ear. The entire process appears as a continuous sensation-process interrupted at regular intervals by stronger impulses from the objective beat impressions. The feelings present are regularly alternating feelings of strain and relaxation that determine rhythmical ideas. These elements form an indivisible whole. If temporal ideas require all components, then without sensations, feelings lack foundation; without feelings of strain and relaxation, sensations remain unconnected and cannot combine into successive rows, since these feelings aid apprehension of equality or inequality between time periods. If beats follow too slowly, the previous disappears from consciousness before the next enters, and time ideas become uncertain. If beats are too rapid for strain and relaxation feelings to arise, the same occurs. Any uncertain time idea then depends on extraneous factors. Just as objective time measurement depends on regular periodic movements, subjective time-consciousness depends absolutely on rhythmical ideas. These arise first from locomotion movements, then in richer, finer form through hearing. The resulting time idea divides into a sensation substratum plus an affective process of strain and relaxation and expectation and realisation, fusing perfectly together. The factors’ influence appears only through essential changes when one factor is markedly altered.
Assimilations and Dissimilations
Consciousness elements fuse into compounds, and these compounds undergo changes producing new combinations. Important second-class associations include assimilations and dissimilations, demonstrable as ideational combinations, while affective associations join as secondary components or form complex feelings connected with recollection, recognition, and memory. A visual demonstration of assimilation involves drawing sectors from one center, making one sector smaller by only a few degrees; we apprehend all as equal, as the larger sectors work assimilatively upon the smaller. A visual demonstration of dissimilation involves drawing one large sector among smaller ones; it appears greatly enlarged, and comparing it to an identical sector drawn separately, the independent sector appears smaller. This dissimilative change is called “contrast,” but it must not be confused with feeling-contrast, such as pleasure and displeasure, which involves no apparent size differences.
Reproductive Assimilations
More important are assimilations between direct impressions and ideational elements from previous impressions, or memory acts. Reading experiments show well-known words read almost instantaneously despite exceeding the focus of attention’s scope. This facilitation occurs because familiarity reproduces former impressions, completing the partially perceived image. In altered-letter experiments, when certain letters of a long word are voluntarily altered, changes are only partially or not at all perceived in quick reading. For instance, “Miscaldoniousness” is taken for “Miscellaneousness”—four of seventeen letters changed. If attention concentrates strongly on one wrong letter, that mistake is perceived, but other wrong letters have right ones substituted. This parallels overlooking misprints, though experiments favor false reading through short exposition-time. This is not mere not-seeing of wrong letters but actually seeing right letters in their place. Immediately after the experiment, one can often see the right letter in full distinctness where the wrong letter stood—possible only because the wrong letter is displaced by reproduction of the right one. The process has two parts: displacement of the wrong letter and reproduction of the right one, occurring simultaneously. Displacement may be viewed as an effect of reproduction. Assimilation and dissimilation join: assimilation from other letters reproduces the right letter, which, with the rest of the word, dissimilates the wrong letter. A letter combination cannot work as a whole and then be replaced wholesale; assimilation and displacement occur only at certain places.
The True Nature of Memory and Association
Wundt begins this section by challenging the traditional division of memory-associations into those of “similarity” and “contiguity.” He argues that this classification is a superficial “schematisation” that misses the essential character of these mental processes, particularly their deep connection with the simultaneous assimilations that occur during perception. The root of this flawed observation method, he contends, lies in the “false materialisation of ideas”—a tendency to treat ideas as solid, unchanging objects. A more rigorous analysis would reveal that memory-associations are not the typical or only forms of association, but rather “mere limiting cases” that develop under specific conditions from more fundamental processes like fusion, assimilation, and complication.
Wundt firmly rejects the notion that an idea is a fixed entity resembling the object that produced it. An unprejudiced view of consciousness, unburdened by the rules of association psychology, shows that an idea is no more constant than a feeling or a volitional act. There are only “changing and transient ideational processes”—no permanent ideas that simply return and disappear. A remembered idea is neither identical to the previous act of remembering it nor to the original impression. Furthermore, ideas are not independent of feelings and emotions; even indistinct ideational content influences our apperception through its feeling-tone. Even in memory associations, complex ideas never associate as whole units; each association is broken down into elementary combinations that involve processes of hindrance and retardation. Ultimately, all acts of memory are governed by the fundamental forms of assimilation and dissimilation, which are the reproductive factors in immediate sense-perceptions, and these can be reduced to assimilation processes that are divided into a succession partly by hindrances and partly by temporal arrangement.
Apperception and the Flight of Ideas
Wundt turns to a striking phenomenon of severe insanity: the “flight of ideas,” where patients rapidly utter a stream of senseless words. He points out that a sane person can produce a similar series by randomly repeating words like “school house garden build stones ground hard soft long see harvest rain move pain.” He contrasts this with a descriptive passage from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, which describes a spring landscape, a thunderstorm, and a rainbow, and asks what the fundamental difference is. The first series appears unconnected, yet memory-associations do link successive words—”house” with “school,” “garden” with “house”—sometimes across distances or to multiple preceding words. Rhyme can also connect words, as with “rain” and “pain.” Even where no definite association is apparent, latent associations must be assumed to exist due to affective influences. A “free, unconnected chain of ideas” belongs in the same category as “chance” in physical phenomena, meaning only that the cause cannot be found. The first series is psychologically conditioned by association but forms no coherent whole—it is like a heap of stones without a building plan or a unifying thought. The second series, while also using association-chains, arranges its elements into a unified image that places the reader in the author’s intended situation and mood.
Apperception in Author and Reader
If a child were to learn the Wilhelm Meister sentences by heart without attending to their meaning, the reproduction would be psychologically identical to the random word series. The author, however, has the whole passage present in his consciousness, even if indistinctly, before he writes it. He behaves like someone hearing a rhythm in a series of metronome beats. The whole exists at the beginning and the end, with the parts entering successively into the “fixation-point of apperception.” The reader’s experience is different: initially, there is only an expectation directed toward a whole, shown in feelings of strain that guide the developing parts into clear consciousness. In both cases, the “activity of apperception” is essential, and this is what distinguishes a thought-context from a mere association row. Passive reproduction lacks this consciousness of activity—that feeling made up of alternating feelings of excitation, strain, and relaxation—which characterizes active apperception.
Abstract and Concrete Thought
Wundt compares a sentence from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason with the Wilhelm Meister description, noting that the former uses abstract concepts while the latter uses sensuous ideas. Yet, he argues, abstract thought ultimately reduces to concrete concepts, for words themselves are sensuous impressions. Tracing the original meanings of words reveals their sensuous origins: “treatment” once meant material handling, “knowledge” referred to sensuous knowing, and “reason” meant the understanding of words. Abstract thinking developed step by step from concrete thinking: original sensuous ideas entered into relations with each other, and then these relations were themselves treated as elements at a higher stage. Words like “knowledge” become abstract concepts representing countless processes, like “a bank-note that represents an inexhaustible value of current coin.” He quotes Mephistopheles from Faust: “One throw of the shuttle stirs up a thousand combinations” and “just where concepts are lacking, a word comes in at the right moment.” The word, he concludes, is the “real ideational equivalent for the concept.”
Art, Science, and Everyday Speech
Primitive concrete thinking retains its own value alongside abstract thought. Science and art realize these two forms of thinking. Art creations follow the same laws of apperception as thought in speech: the whole is in consciousness first, working through a total feeling, and then develops into parts through successive apperceptions. The artist, poet, or composer grasps the whole work in outline before executing its parts. A work of art is no more a mere product of association than is a thought arranged in sentences. Everyday experience confirms this: we can complete complicated thoughts without being clear at the outset about the separate words. People who fail in public speaking lack confidence in the “self-regulation of the train of thoughts,” believing they must first find suitable transitions between words. In free conversation they speak fluently, but in public they hesitate. Absolute confidence in freely and involuntarily expressing one’s thought is the surest help.
Thought Processes and Feeling-Quality
Wundt examines how the beginning and end of an expression of thought are held together in a sentence or series of sentences. He observes that the general content in its whole feeling-quality is present as soon as the first word is spoken, while the individual ideas and words are not yet clearly in consciousness. When the process continues without associative distractions, the initial feeling corresponds perfectly with the terminal feeling that accompanies the thought’s completion. This terminal feeling is initially stronger than the initial feeling but gradually transitions into the feeling-quality that prepares the next thought. These phenomena correspond essentially with observations from Wundt’s metronome experiments, where conditions were simpler and more exact, thereby strengthening the more uncertain observations from ordinary reading and thinking.
Complex Thought-Creations
More complicated phenomena occur when thought-processes stretch over vast mental creations. The whole idea hovers in the mind of an inspired artist or a philosopher conceiving a complicated system before either executes it. This anticipation is only an indefinite total feeling that points a direction for continuation and becomes clearer during that continuation. In such cases, distracting influences increase continually, altering the feeling-tone quality. The resulting product may become quite different from its first conception, sometimes undergoing several such changes. These changes are caused by new associations arising from single elements of the total thought, which may assimilate with the total thought or crowd it out entirely. Goethe’s Faust shows traces of repeated change in its overall idea, suggesting the author had forgotten his earlier conceptions. In Wilhelm Meister, Goethe seemingly gave free scope to associations caused by the plot. Hardly any creation in science or art remains free from such intervening influences, sourced partly in new impressions and partly in thought-compounds from execution.
Understanding and Imagination
Psychologists classify the two interacting psychical processes as “understanding” and “imagination.” The regular arrangement of thought-compounds with abstract tendencies is assigned to understanding, while the free play of associations with concrete thinking is called imagination. However, these are not separable faculties or different functions—both involve apperceptions and associations distributed relatively differently. It is wrong to call imagination the property of art and understanding that of science. Science without imagination is worth as little as art without understanding.
Primitive Speech Example
Wundt illustrates associative thinking using an example from the Togo language. The English sentence “He gave the children the slate-pencil” would be incomprehensible to Togo natives. “Slate-pencil” would be too abstract; one cannot give something without first taking it from somewhere; and “children” requires knowing whose children they are. The Togo version runs: “He take stone to write something this gives of somebody child they.” Even this translation retains traces of abstract culture, as the substantive/verb distinction does not exist in Togo. Ideas are arranged in the order the objective process occurs; each word denotes one idea without grammatical categories. Such expression remains at the stage of pure association, differentiated from unsystematic association only by following the action element for element.
Two Motives for Apperceptive Combinations
Two motives raise associations to apperceptive combinations. The objective motive lies in the regular concatenation of outward phenomena, which forces association to combine ideas regularly. The subjective motive is attention, which follows the series members and binds them into a whole. Ordered thinking arises from nature’s ordered course; human thought is simultaneously a product of nature and a creation of mental life, unified in the human will. Every outward voluntary action corresponds to inner acts of volition that influence thought. Speech connects inner and outer volition most clearly. Education, therefore, must train inner volition—ordered thinking—rather than focusing primarily on outward acts.
Critique of Logical and Introspective Methods
Wundt critiques scholastic philosophy for changing psychical processes into logical judgments, a practice that spread to associations, sense-perception, sensations, feelings, and emotions. Such laws are late products of scientific thinking and only apply to a small part of thought-processes; these attempts have been fruitless. Direct introspection also fails because we first need a careful analysis of elementary psychical processes. Some psychologists wrongly attributed the difficulties to thought being “unconscious” or “supersensual,” thereby opening the door to logical reflections read into phenomena—ending where scholastic philosophy began. Complex phenomena cannot be understood before simple ones. The metronome experiments provide general preliminary conditions. Child development offers only doubtful results due to inherited dispositions and environmental influences. Primitive peoples show relatively spontaneous stages of thinking, expressed most adequately in speech—which is both a means of expression and an instrument of thought. Different speech stages reveal the gradual transition from associative to apperceptive processes, leading into racial psychology.
Two Opposing Views on Psychical Laws
Wundt now addresses psychologists and philosophers who deny the existence of special laws for psychical life—meaning specific laws that differ from universal physical ones. He describes two positions. The first is materialistic psychology, which claims that everything called a psychical law is merely a psychological reflex of physical combinations, composed of sensations joined to central cerebral processes. The second is the denial of all mental laws, which maintains that no laws exist in the mental sphere, asserting that natural sciences alone can be reduced to definite laws, while mental sciences lack any lawful arrangement of phenomena. The first opinion is dismissed rapidly. It is contradicted by all previously discussed phenomena of consciousness, and by the fact of consciousness itself, which cannot be derived from the physical qualities of molecules or atoms. The materialistic hypothesis transforms the indisputable claim that no conscious processes exist unconnected to physical processes into the dogma that conscious processes are in their real essence physical. This directly contradicts immediate experience, which shows a human being is a psycho-physical unity, not merely physical.
Refutation of the Lawlessness Theory
The second opinion rests on a mistaken conception of law. It assumes laws must be regularities that always repeat in exactly the same manner. But no such laws exist even in natural science. The principle holds that laws determine phenomena only insofar as they are not annulled by other laws. Because all phenomena are complex, each process stands under many laws, so even the most universal natural laws cannot be demonstrated in full power empirically. As an example, Wundt cites Newton’s first law of motion—a body in motion not acted on by external force continues indefinitely in a straight line with uniform velocity—which can never be realized in experience, since independence from external forces never exists. Yet it remains an infallible law because all real motions are lawful modifications of that ideal case.
Defining Psychical Laws Properly
Only regularities within consciousness count as psychical laws—not those outside it, such as brain physiology. Combinations of sensations or simple feelings into complex ideas, emotions, and so forth qualify as psychical laws if they occur regularly. For example, a bright point appearing on a dark field causing both eyes’ visual lines to direct toward it is physiological, not psychical. Physical laws may influence psychical laws but do not erase the distinction. The criterion is that the components and resultants of psychical laws must be parts of immediate consciousness—sensations, feelings, and their combinations. All conscious processes show “stem regularity”—not exceptionless rules, but the reducibility of each complex phenomenon to the lawful cooperation of elements. Without this, psychical life would be chaos, and consciousness itself, which is the opposite of chaotic disarrangement, would be impossible. For instance, each idea combines sensations lawfully; a clang of definite timbre is unchangeably composed of elementary tone-sensations. Physical facts about sound sources matter but remain powerless without consciousness’s disposition to regular combinations. The same applies to light-sensations forming spatial ideas, binocular image fusion, total feelings from partial feelings, and the composition of emotions and volitions.
Critique of Association Psychology
The old association psychology’s generalizations were inadequate. Its chief mistake was not postulating laws too hastily but failing to analyze deeply enough into the laws underlying association processes. Apperceptive combinations provide conclusive testimony for a lawful character, as their products, which are dependent on association laws, are thought-process combinations. The theory of lawlessness leads to absurdity: it would conclude that the conception of law itself is contrary to law, yet that conception is itself a result of the very psychical thought-combinations whose lawfulness is questioned.
The Principle of Creative Resultants
Like natural sciences, psychology can establish fundamental laws gained from general views of phenomena. Physics has the law of inertia, the indestructibility of matter, and the conservation of energy. The question arises whether there are psychological principles of similar universal validity. Even natural-science principles are subject to hypotheses. The conservation of energy holds only for closed or finite material systems; it fails for infinite systems or those acted on by external forces. Psychical laws similarly hold only within limits where the interconnection of psychical processes occurs—within a single consciousness. This narrows the validity of psychological principles compared to natural laws, since psychology deals with inner rather than outer relations.
The first fundamental principle concerns the relations of parts in complex psychical processes to their unified resultants.
