Physiological optics, cognition and emotion: A novel look at the warly work of Wilhelm Wundt

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences

Volumn 64, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 213-249

  Wassmann, Claudia ^a  

^a Universite Paris 2   (France)

Author keywords

Charles Darwin; Cognition; Emotion; Epistemology; Experimental psychology; Facial expressions; Perception; Physiology; Wilhelm Wundt; William James

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; COGNITION; EMOTION; GERMANY; HISTORY; HUMAN; OPTICS; PHYSIOLOGY; PSYCHOLOGY; PUBLICATION;

COGNITION; EMOTIONS; GERMANY; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HUMANS; OPTICS AND PHOTONICS; PHYSIOLOGY; PSYCHOLOGY, EXPERIMENTAL; PUBLICATIONS;

EID: 61749095738     PISSN: 00225045     EISSN: 14684373     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/jhmas/jrn058     Document Type: Article

References (198)

1. "Modern" here refers to Jonathan Crary's classification of modernity in Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
2. For Crary the real importance of physiology in the nineteenth century lay in the fact "that it became the arena for new types of epistemological reflection that depended on knowledge about the eye and processes of vision." This applies to Wundt's work. J. Crary Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 79.
3. Wilhelm Wundt, Vorlesungen über die Menschen- mid Thierseele (Leipzig: L. Voss, 1863).
4. The first edition was reprinted facsimile and I cite this edition, Wilhelm Wundt and Wolfgang Nitsche, Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Thierseele, 2 vols. (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1990).
5. Historians mostly considered the time period beginning in 1874. Wundt had an extraordinarily long academic career that spans over sixty years. He became the assistant to Herman von Helmholtz at the University of Heidelberg in 1858 and taught until 1917. Wundt quit as Helmholtz's assistant in 1863 (some sources say 1864). He was hired at the University of Zurich in 1873, and in 1874, at the heights of Kulturkampf, he obtained a chair in philosophy at the University of Leipzig, which was then the ;leading German university. There he remained until the end of his career and also served as rector to the university.
6. On Wundt see Robert W. Rieber, Wilhelm Wundt and the Making of a Scientific Psychology (New York: Plenum Press, 1980),
7. and the second edition, R. W. Rieber and David K. Robinson, Wilhelm Wundt in History: The Making of a Scientific Psychology (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum, 2001).
8. William Ray Woodward and Mitchell G. Ash, The Problematic Science: Psychology in Nineteenth-Century Thought (New York: Praeger, 1982);
9. Wolfgang G. Bringmann and Ryan D. Tweney; eds., Wundt Studies: A Centennial Collection (Toronto: C. J. Hogrefe, 1980).
10. For is early work, see Wolfgang Nitsche, "Einleitung und Materialien zur Rezeptionsgeschichte," in Wilhlem Wundt, Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Thierseele, ed. Wolfgang Nitsche (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2001), 11-57
11. In 1879 Wundt built up the worldwide first laboratory for experimental psychology at the University of Leipzig, See Kurt Danziger, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research, Cambridge Studies in the History of Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 17-33, 49-5.
12. Bringmann et al., "The Establishment of Wundt's Laboratory: An Archival and Documentary Study," in Bringmann and Tweney Wundt Studies, 123-56.
13. Although he never attended a psychological congress, which he judged a waste of time, from the 1890s on he became a member of thirty-four international scientific societies, and he received five honorary doctorates (from the Universities Göttingen, Leipzig, Heidelberg, Budapest, and Princeton), I , l - LXV Auszeichnungen, Folder I Personal und Geschäftspapiere, Wundt Nachlass, Universitätsarchiv Leipzig, Oststr. 40-42, 043 17 Leipzig, Germany.
14. This corrects the current position, see Robinson, "Reaction-Time Experiments in Wundt's Institute and Beyond," in Wilhelm Wundt in History, 161-204, 197-98;
15. Danziger, "The Unknown Wundt," in Wilhelm Wundt in History, 95-121, 117;
16. Wilhelm Wundt, Grundriss der Psychologie (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1896);
17. Third revised edition (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1898), 88-107, 188-230, 317-22;
18. Wilhelm Wundt and Wilhelm Wirth, Gmndzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, 5th rev. ed. (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1902-3), 3:242-313.
19. The first edition of Gmndzüge der physiologischen Psychologie appeared in 1874.
20. Anne Harrington, Reenchauted Science: Holism In German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 15;
21. Willem van Hoorn and Thorn Verhove "Wundt's Changing Conceptions of a General and Theoretical Psychology," in Bringmann and Tweney, Wundt Studies, 77-79.
22. Danziger noted that Wundt was falsely painted as a German Mill; however he placed Wundt's work nonetheless in a philosophical framework, if a German one, Kurt Danziger, "Wundt and the Two Traditions of Psychology" in Wilhelm Wundt and the Making of a Scientific Psychology, 73-87.
23. However, the Latin quote from Leibniz in the preface to Beiträge points as well to the standard work in medical education, which was an important source of Wundt's thought, Johannes Müller, "Der speciellen Physiologie sechstes Buch, vom Seelenleben," in Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen für Vorlesungen, ed. Johannes Müller (Coblenz: J. Hölscher, 1837), 517-18;
24. Wundt, Vorlesungen, 2:438-39.
25. Graumann argued that Wundt "takes the cue for his very important argument" that what goes on in consciousness are complicated phenomena "from John Stuart Mill's A System of Logic (1843)".
26. Carl F. Graumann, "Experiment, Statistics, History: Wundt's First Program of Psychology," in Bringmann and Tweney, Wundt Studies, 33-41, quote 35.
27. However Wundt wrote that even Mill gave very unsatisfying definitions of inductive inference and did not go far enough in his argument. Wundt, Vorlesungen, 441, 471-72.
28. Mill assumed that inductive inference can never achieve apodictic certainty. Wundt in contrast attempted to show how Kant's a priori categories could be based upon inductive inferences that were carried out unconsciously. Wundt, Vorlesungen, 2:106, 316-17;
29. "John Stuart Mill," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Section 10, www.plato.stanforcl.edu (accessed 18 February 2008).
30. Young made this point with reference to the works on brain physiology by Gustav Fritsch and Eduard Hitzig, "Über die elektrische Erregbarkeit des Grosshirns," Archiv für Anatomie, Physiologie, und wissenschaftllche Median, 1870, 37, 300-32.
31. It holds for Wundt's work as well. Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier, History of Neuroscience No. 3 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 225.
32. On the impact of Müller for physiological optics see, Crary, Techniques, 88-93.
33. Wundt grew up deeply embedded in a milieu of physiologists in the liberal country Baden in southern Germany during Vormärz, the time period in German history prior to the revolution in March 1848 that was characterized by the activity of the liberal, national opposition movement, and he was educated in the German medical curriculum at a moment when physiologists also formed the liberal intellectual avant-garde.
34. The ideal of Bildung that was dear to German Liberalism resonated in Wundt's conception of psychic evolution. And Wundt was intimately familiar with the problems that leading physiologists were discussing through the works of his two uncles Arnold. Son of a protestant minister, Wundt (1832-1920) lived in the household of Johann Wilhelm Arnold (1801-73) in Heidelberg after his father died when Wundt was fourteen years old. Johann Wilhelm Arnold was a practicing physician, who briefly taught at the University of Zurich and had conducted some research and published on the reflex concept and on the Bell-Magendie-Müller law;
35. He co-authored the homeopathic journal Hygea together with Wilhelm Griesinger (1817-68), who befriended Francois Magendie ( 1738-1855), and wrote a textbook on physiology together with his younger brother Friedrich Arnold (1803-90).
36. Friedrich Arnold, who worked on physiological optics and on the microanatomy of the brain, held chairs in anatomy and physiology at the Universities of Zurich, Freiburg, Tubingen, and Heidelberg. He was acquainted with the important figures for physiology such as Johannes Müller (1801-58), Carl Ludwdg (1816-95), Jacob Henle (1809-85), and Karl Pfeufer (1806-69) and influential in bringing Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-94) to Heidelberg. Wundt studied medicine at the Universities of Tübingen and Heidelberg with Friedrich Arnold and graduated in 1855.
37. On his youth and early career, see (with reservations) Solomon Diamond, "Wundt before Leipzig," in Rieber, Wilhelm Wundt (1980), 3-70;
38. Wolfgang G. Bringmann and W. D. G. Balance, "Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt 1832-1874: The Formative Years," in Bringmann and Tweney, Wundt Studies, 13-32;
39. and Wilhelm Wundt, Erlebtes und Erkanntes (Stuttgart: A. Kroner, 1920).
40. These were problems that his uncles also worked upon, and Wundt was familiar with their work. For instance, he used some of the same experiments on vision as Friedrich Arnold, and he vindicated Johann Wilhelm Arnold's work, who had contested some of Miüller's positions on the reflex, in Wilhelm Wundt, Nouveaux élements de. physiologic humaine, trans. Dr. Bouchard (Paris: F. Savy, 1872), 570;
41. Johann Wilhelm Arnold, Über die Verrichtung der Wurzeln der Rückenmarksnerven (Heidelberg: K. Gross, 1844);
42. Johann Wilhelm Arnold, Die Lehre von der Reflex-Function für Physlologen und Aerzte (Heidelberg: K. Gross, 1842).
43. Particularly important for Wundt's early work were Johannes Mülller's Handhuch der Physiologic des Menschen für Vorlesungen, especially the following sections, "Von den verschiedenen Muskelbewegnngen," 63-112; "Der speciellen Physiologie funftes Buch, von den Sinnen," 249ff;
44. "Der speciellen Physiologie sechstes Buch, vom Seelenleben," 505FF; Abschnitt, "Von der Wechselwirkung der Seele und des Organismus," 553;
45. and also the sections by Eduard Weber, "Der Tastsinn und das Gemeingefuhl" and "Muskelbewegung" in Handwörterbuch der Physiologic, mit Rücksicht auf physiologische Pathologie, ed. Rudolph Wagner (Braunschweig: F. Vieweg und Sohn, 1846).
46. At that moment Helmholtz was writing the handbook of physiological optics. Hermann von Helmholtz, Handhuch der physiologischen Optik (Leipzig: L. Voss, 1867).
47. Friedrich Arnold pioneered microscopic studies of eye tissues in the 1830s and discussed the then still open question of how the eye could adapt co focus on different distances. He advanced the at-the-time controversial argument that the eye muscles were key to accommodation. The role of muscular movements of the eye muscles also acquired special importance in Wundt's work. Friedrich Arnold, Anatomische und physiologische Untersuchtingen über dm Auge des Menschen (Heidelberg and Leipzig: Karl Groos, 1832).
48. On the stereoscope, see Crary Techniques of the Observer, 116-27;
49. Charles Wheatstone, "The Bakerian Lecture. Contributions to the Physiology of Vision. Part the Second. On Some Remarkable, and Hitherto Unobserved Phenomena of Binocular Vision," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1852, 142, 1 -17.
50. Wilhelm Wundt, Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahruehmung (Leipzig and Heidelberg: C. F. Winter, 1862), 47.
51. Ibid., 47.
52. A central component of Wundt's theory of emotion developed in Vorlesungen is enunciated in his argument about the creation of spatial perception. In Beiträge Wundt used the terms Accomodationsgefühl, feeling of accommodation, and Bewegungsgefühl, feeling of movement. He argued that three-dimensional spatial perception was constructed using information that derived from the contractions that the eyes' muscles (at the eye ball and the lens) effectuated during the process of accommodation. The measurement of distance was based upon the estimate of the feelings of contraction of the muscle sensations that was learned through multiple experiences. The degree of precision depended upon the degree of focused attention and there was also a degree of fatigue (independent of volition) that originated in the exhaustion of the local muscles of the eye. The construction of three-dimensional spatial perception was a "creative act," a "mental synthesis." In Vorlesungen, Wundt explicated that the feeling of least effort created a pleasurable feeling; and the pathway of least resistance was the pathway that the muscles of the eye employed in vision. Wundt, Beiträge, 29-35, 65, 130-35, 165-70, 443-45.
53. For a detailed discussion see Gary C. Hatfield, The Natural and the Normative; Theories of Spatial Perception from Kant to Helmholtz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 165-234.
54. Helmholtz talked at length about Wundt's experiments on vision and quoted Beiträge, 105-18, in his Handbuch, 485-86, 527, 528, 599, 764, 785, 797, 819.
55. When reading the two editions of Helmholtz's Physlologische Optik and "Wundt's Beiträge and Gmndzüge in parallel, one can notice a certain incompatibility of their views.
56. Helmholtz "treated the laws of psychology as autonomous from physics and physiology" (Hatfield, The Normative, 166).
57. Wundt pointed out their connection. He argued, for instance, that the effect of training on the psychological level translated to an enhanced excitability of the muscular fibers on the physiological level (Wundt, Vorlesungen, 433).
58. Helmholtz held that touch was immediately given (Hatfield, 'The Normative, 174).
59. Wundt argued it was not (Wundt, Beiträge, 65).
60. Helmholtz used the concept of "local signs" on the retina, which are associated with a "spatial meaning" in his explanation of visual perception (Hatfield, The Normative, 174). Wundt did not need local signs in his explanation. Ribot noted this difference.
61. Helmholtz distinguished between logical thought and artistic intuition, "a kind of instinctive intuition, uncontrolled by any definable rule." Hatfield, The Normative, 230; Helmholtz, Handbuch, 430.
62. Diamond, "Wundt before Leipzig," 32, 55-56.
63. For a more recent discussion of Wundt and Helmholtz's concepts, see Hatfield, The Normative, 167.
64. However Hatfield does not mention Vorlesungen. One should note too that time is of issue here. The third part of the Handbuch, where Helmholtz treated psychological questions as a scientific matter, appeared only in 1866.
65. Robert J. Richards, "Wundt's Early Theories of Unconscious Inference and Cognitive Evolution in Their Relation to Darwinian Biopsychology" in Bringmann and Tweney Wundt Studies, 42-70, 49.
66. However this was considered "Wundt's blunder" by Helmholtz and his contemporaries.
67. Ibid., 49.
68. While Helmholtz accepted the argument from evolution-that the movements of the eyes' muscles, which are executed in processes of focusing in vision, may be indeed those executed with the least effort, because they "may have been adapted over the course of generations to the needs of the individual and this adaptation was inherited"-he nonetheless insisted that willed intention of vision was the decisive facto in the choice of movement of the muscles of the eyeballs. The "easiest eye movements are not chosen in the long term if those movements are not at the same time the most advantageous ones for the purpose of vision." Helmholtz, Handbuch, 485-86.
69. In his review of Helmholtz's Handbuch, Wundt explicitly argued that his own theory was superior to Helmholtz's views. "In this sense, I claim that the theory of unconscious inference is the best one presented to date; it is the only one that explains all procedures included in perception coherently out of one basic principle, and it does not demand strange assumptions. It assumes only that the procedures of judgment and inference-known through self-observation-can take place without coming to conscious awareness. Only the final result comes to awareness." Wilhelm Wundt, "Rezension von Helmholtz, 'Handbuch der physiologischen Optik'," Deutsche Klinik, 1867, 19, 327.
70. Wundt, Vorlesungen, 2:354-56.
71. Moricz Wilhelm Drobisch, "Rezension der 'Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahmehmung' und des ersten Bandes der 'Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Thierseele'" Zeitschrift für exacte Philosophie, 1864, 4, 313-48.
72. The review is reprinted in Wundt, Vorlesungen, 87-89, 89,
73. Ernst Haeckel's more positive appraisal of Vorlesungen in Die Welträtsel appeared in the 1899 after the second edition of Vorlesungen (1892) was published.
74. See the prefaces to the second and third editions, Wundt, Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Thierseele (Hamburg und Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1892 and 1911).
75. Only the revised one-volume second edition of Vorlesungen that was published in 1892 was translated to English.
76. Wilhelm Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, ed. James Edwin Creighton and Edward Bradford Titchener (London and New York: S. Sonnenschein & Co, Macmillan & Co, 1894).
77. In his introduction to the reprint of the first edition of Vorlesungen, Wolfgang Nitsche argued there was no history of reception of Vorlesungen. Nitsche, "Einleitung und Materialien zur Rezeptionsgeschichte," 52.
78. But see Théodule Ribot, L'hérédité, étude psychologique sur ses phéuomènes, ses lois, ses causes, ses conséquences (Paris: Librairie philosophique de Ladrange, 1873), 319, 474-76;
79. Ribot, Les maladies de la volonté (Paris: F. Alcan, 1883), and the work of his students Georges Dumas and Alfred Binet.
80. Wundt, Vorlesungen, 2:1.
81. The nervous system was "a paradigmatic case for the vindication of romantic principles," because it displayed the progressive development that was supposed to pervade nature. The principles of a "genetic" approach to the nervous system were established long before the Origin of Species appeared. Their origins lay in the romantic philosophy of biology and "Darwinian theory offered a posteriori justification for the theory of the unity of type." Edwin Clarke and L. S. Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 43, 56.
82. Wundt, Vorlesungen, 2:354-56.
83. Richards pointed out that Wundt was one of the first scientists to use Darwin's theory of evolution in his own work. Richards, "Wundt's Early Theories," 43.
84. The claim is made explicit in Wundt, "Rezension von Helmholtz, 'Handbuch'," 327.
85. For this argument see Jean Gayon, Darwinism's Struggle for Survival Heredity and the Hypothesis of Natural Selection, trans. Matthew Cobb (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 31-32, 179.
86. Wundt, Vorlesungen, 2:354.
87. Ibid., 2:335.
88. It is noteworthy that Wundt gives room to the individual's responsibility in the development of intelligence. Théodule Ribot, in contrast, who used Wundt's concept of "the personal factor" from Vorlesungen in L'hérédité, formulated the relationship between intelligence and emotion in the opposite way; for him, differences in intelligence were inherited.
89. Wundt distinguished between evolution and the development of mental faculties in the child's brain. Nitsche pointed out the similarities between Vorlesungen (1863)
90. and W. Th. Preyer, Die Seek des Kindes (1882; Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1989).
91. Wundt, Vorlesungen, 2:2.
92. For twentieth-century positions, see Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999).
93. Wundt, Vorlesungen, 2:43.
94. In the psychological literature emotion is used for "basic emotions" such as happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise, as well as for love and hate, and for the unconscious processing of emotional stimuli (amygdala activation) and emotional reactions such as the startle reflex. Today some researchers argue for reintroducing the separation of "feeling" and "emotion" into the psychological debate.
95. A variety of terms were employed that are no longer used today for instance, Gefühlston, literally translated by feeling tone, and Gemüthshewegung, which is also translated with emotion.
96. On the problem of translation, see also Kurt Danziger, "The Unknown Wundt," in Wilhelm Wundt in History, 101.
97. In this context I use "sensory" emotion rather than "sensuous" in order to avoid associations with sexual arousal, which was not discussed by Wundt.
98. Wundt, Vorlesungen, 2:3.
99. Ibid., 2:2-3.
100. Ibid., 2:3.
101. Empfindung can also be translated by "feeling" but must be translated here with sensation.
102. In 1900, Empfindung was translated in the Muret-Sanders Encyklopädisches Worterbuch as sentiment and sensibility, whereas Wundt used it in the meaning of sensation, which it has today Empfindung translated to the English sentiment, whereas the French sentiment was used for the German Gefühl. Gefühl, however, translated to the English feelings, meaning the sense of touch. In English, James shifted from the use of "feeling," in is article "The Feeling of Effort" in 1880, to "emotion" in his article "What Is an Emotion?" in 1884.
103. Eduard Muret et al., EncyKlopädisches Englisch-Deutsches und Deutsch-Englisches Wörterhuch; Ein Parallelwerk zu Sachs- Villatte's Französisch-Deutschem und Deutsch-Französischem Wörterbuche (Berlin and New York: Langenscheidt, 1900).
104. Wundt, Vorlesungen, 2:9. He gave this explanation in full in the same volume, 2:316.
105. Ibid., 2:7.
106. Ibid.
107. Ibid., 2:15.
108. Wundt stressed that Gemeingefühl was not an amorphous mass of sensations, in contrast to what was commonly believed.
109. Wundt argued that the psychologists' view was based on outdated views of the natural sciences. He quoted the outdated view: "Of our proper movements we have immediate consciousness (unmittelbares Bewusstsein) and for this we do not need any sensory feelings (sinnlichen Empfindungen) at all, we know that we stretch the arm and move our feet immediately through the movement itself, and consciousness and movement simply conflate."
110. Leopold George, Lehrbuch der Psychologie (Berlin: Reimer, 1854), 231,
111. in Wundt, Beiträge, 377.
112. Wundt, Vorlesungen, 2:1-57.
113. For his detailed and interesting elaboration on Affekte see in particular, ibid., 2:25-43.
114. Ibid., 2:29.
115. According to Wundt an underlying affinity must exist between the association of a certain "sensory form" and the emotion it prompted, for instance an affinity between black and sadness. Wundt assumed a necessary (logical) connection (in contrast to Mill). This is made explicit in his argument about the origin of facial expressions of emotion.
116. In order to analyse an Affekt a successive analysis of several ideas (Vorstellungen) was necessary
117. Ibid., 2:28.
118. Ibid., 2:31.
119. Note that Wundt used the terms Gefühl and Affekt in a different way than later Carl Georg Lange, Üller Gemüthsbewegungen, Eine psycho-physiologische Studie (Leipzig: Theodor Thomas, 1887).
120. Wundt added upon his previous description of emotion as a process. In the fifth edition of Grundzüge der physiolegischen Psychologie, Wundt discussed the "basic forms of emotion" (Grundformen der Gefühle) and described the "basic forms of emotion as three dimensional multifariousness" (Die Grundformen der Gefühie als dreidimensionale Mannigfaltlgkelt). He presented an illustration that showed "arousal and slow-down" (Erregung und Bemhigung) on the y-coordinate, "pleasure and pain" (Lust und Unlust) on the x-coordinate, and "dissolution and tension" (Lösung und Spannung) as a diagonal line cutting through zero. He argued that multiple studies on emotion had demonstrated that emotions could not be characterized by their location between two opposing poles (pleasure and pain) alone, other dimensions had to be considered in addition in order to differentiate among different emotions. Wundt called those dimensions arousal (or excitation) and slow-down, tension, and dissolution. Previously, Wundt had already considered the quality of an emotion, their duration, and their intensify as key features in the genesis and the course (Verlauf) of an emotion. He now added that these dimensions too unfolded between opposite poles.
121. Wundt and Wirth, Gmndzüge, 2:284-304, 288.
122. See footnote 5.
123. Wundt, Vorlesungen, 2:19.
124. Ibid., 2:19-25.
125. Note also René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1989), §13, §96, §107.
126. Wundt, Vorlesungen, 2:33- 34.
127. Ibid., 2:39.
128. Ibid., 2:41.
129. Ibid., 2:43.
130. Ibid., 2:59, 80.
131. Ibid., 2:204.
132. Ibid., 2:204.
133. Ibid., 2:205.
134. Ibid., 2:106.
135. Wundt argued that it seemed as if there was "a compelling drive to generalize." We seem to think, "If it happened once, it will always happen" (Ibid., 2:313).
136. He derived this claim via the discussion of inferences by analogy and the development of religious feelings (Ibid., 2:239-40).
137. In particular, he claimed that human movements were the initial trigger even for the creation of religious feelings. These feelings were based on inductive inferences. Inductive inferences were inferences from analogy, and an analogy must have "a starting point." The starting point was "our own willed actions." Wundt explained: "In that we move, we move and change external objects at will. The more effort we exert the greater is the resulting effect. Soon we take the measure for both, the movement and the effected change from our own experience of effort and we go on to compare in analogy everything we see in nature. Thereby we encounter stark contradictions" (Ibid., 2:236). These contradictions lead us to the idea of men-like gods because one can observe in nature that things move, which surpass human force. "The only thing that prompts the analogy is movement" Wundt held, if a body moves we provide it with a will, because we conclude from analogy that if things correspond in one respect they will correspond in other respects as well. The example of moving objects reminds me of recent psychological studies on intentionality, which show that children ascribe an intention to moving geometrical objects.
138. Ibid., 2:316.
139. Ibid., 2:316-17.
140. Wundt explained: "We have previously demonstrated how the regularly connection of sensation and movement develops. After it has developed a feeling of movement of a specific kind and specific degree corresponds to the excitation of a specific location in the sensory organ (the eye). When this connection is established the two sorts of sensation stand in mutual dependence: if an excitation stimulates the first one, an excitation is elicited in the second one as well. A similar example is provided in the mutual influence of the sense of vision and the sense of touch. If pressure is exerted on our hand we see at the same time the location where this pressure takes place. Every time that in the following this location of the skin (with its invariable degree of sensitivity) is touched, we convince ourselves at the same time by looking at it that the location remains the same. In this way a fixed relationship establishes itself between the sensation of touch and the visual impression. What happens once repeates innumerable times. Each sensation is in this case an experience. .. ." Ibid., 2:317.
141. Ibid., 2:317.
142. See ibid., on desire, 2:323-39, on volition and "die personal factor," 2:412-24, on language, 2:364-97.
143. Wundt used Völkerpsychologie as evidence where he could not provide proofs on the level of the individual.
144. See also Grundzüge, 838-39.
145. French and German authors preferred Wundt's explanation of expressions of emotion to Darwin's. It was still reiterated in the 1910s and used as the basis for experiments on expressions of emotion. See Rudolf Schulze, Aus der Werkstatt der experimentellen Psychologie und Pädagogik (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1913).
146. Wundt, Vorlesungen, 2:348.
147. Ibid., 2:350.
148. Ibid., 2:351.
149. Ibid., 2:352.
150. Ibid., 2:358.
151. Ibid., 2:434.
152. Ibid., 2:357.
153. Ibid.
154. Ibid., 2:330.
155. Ibid., 2:387.
156. Ibid., 2:358.
157. Dumas mentioned the same example. Georges Dumas, Le somite; psychologie el physiologie (Paris: E Alcan, 1906), 61.
158. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: J. Murray, 1872);
159. Wilhelm Wundt, Gmndzüge der Physiologischen Psychologie (Leipzig: W. Engelman, 1874), 856.
160. On the history of the reflex concept, see Mary Agnes Burniston Brazier, A History of Neurophysiology in the 17th and 18th Centuries: From Concept to Experiment (New York: Raven Press, 1984);
161. Edwin Clarke and L. S. Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 42-57 and chap. 4.
162. Whytt proved that a segment of the spinal cord was necessary for the simple reflex. "According to Whytt, the spinal cord Is the centre of a reflecting power, turning sensibility into movement." Georges Canguilhem, "Le concept du réflexe au XIXe siécle," in Von Boerhaave his Berger, ed. Karl E. Rothschuh (Stuttgart: G. Fischer, 1964), 157-67, 165.
163. Clarke and Jacyna, Nineteenth- Century Origins, 103.
164. M.J. Eadie, "Robert Whytt and die Pupils," J. Clin, Neurosci., 2002, 7, 295-97;
165. Julius Rocca, "William Cullen (1710-1790) and Robert Whytt (1714-1766) on the Nervous System," in Brain Mind and Medicine: Essays in Eighteents-Century Neuroscience, ed. Harry Whitaker, C. U. M. Smith, and Stanley Finger (New York: Springer, 2007), 85-98.
166. Whytt assumed that "the soul, and therefore some degree of consciousness, was necessary to all movements, and for this mechanism nerves were essential." Brazier, A History of Neurophysiology, 104.
167. Clarke and Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins, 105.
168. Ibid.
169. Müller, Handhuch, 1:688; 2:83.
170. Note that Wilhelm Griesinger, who befriended Wundt's uncle Johann Wilhelm Arnold, also opposed Hall's theory. Wilhelm Griesinger, "Über psychische Reflexactionen. Mit einem Blick auf das Wesen der psychischen Krankheiten," Archiv für physiologische Heilkunde, 1843, 2, 81-82.
171. Johann Wilhelm Arnold noted that the quality, intensity and location of a stimulus were important factors in the type of reflex response elicited. Arnold, Die Lehre von der Reflex-Function, 86;
172. Clarke and Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins, 126.
173. See the final discussion in Wundt, Vorlesungen, 2:427-36.
174. William James, "What Is an Emotion?" Mind, 1884, 9, 188-205.
175. See Robinson, "Reaction-Time Experiments in Wundt's Institute and Beyond";
176. Danziger, "The Unknown Wundt";
177. Wundt, Grundriss;
178. Wundt and Wirth, Grundzüge, 3:242-313.
179. William James to Stanley Hall, 10 October 1879, in The Correspondence of William James, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis, Elizabeth M. Berkeley, and Henry James (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 5:64-65;
180. and William James to Hall, 16 January 1880,
181. ibid., 5:81-82.
182. See, Claudia Wassmann, The science of emotion; Studying emotions in Germany, France, and the US 1860-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005), chap. 4, and "Riving the Way to Behaviorism: The Debate about the Nature of Emotion during the 1890s," in preparation.
183. Wundt, Grundzüge (1874), 316.
184. William James, "The Feeling of Effort," in Anniversary Memoirs of the Boston Society of Natural History 1830-1880 (Boston: Boston Society of Natural History; 1880), 3-32.
185. The article appeared in translation in the same year, James, "Le sentiment de l'effort," La critique philosophique, politique, scientifique, littéraire, [880, 9, 123, 129, 145, 200, 220, 225, 289.
186. James, "Le sentiment de l'effort," 124; James cited Beiträze, 420, and Grundzüge, 316.
187. James, "Le sentiment de l'effort," 128.
188. It is noteworthy that James would call this the "received wisdom," because the role of muscular feelings of the eyes' muscles in perception had been the neuralgic point in Wundt's argument twenty years earlier. Besides, Wundt never claimed that muscular feelings are the only instances that inform us about a reality outside of ourselves. James, "Le sentiment de l'effort," 289.
189. James claimed that, previously people had overlooked the afferent impulses that came from the other eye.
190. James, "What Is an Emotion?" 188.
191. See footnote 63.
192. See footnote 5.
193. Wundt and Wirth, Grundzüge, 2:263-83;
194. Wundt, "Zur Lehre von den Gemüthsbewegungen," Philosophische Studien, 1891, 6, 335-93.
195. Wundt and Wirth, Grundzüge, 3:209-10.
196. In his dissertation and subsequent articles, which started the historiography of a "science of emotion," Otniel E. Dror situated the birth of such a science in laboratory experiments at the end of the nineteenth century, and he argued that emotions entered science as disruptions of the scientific protocol; they were an "intrusive event," a "disorder," a "moment of loss of control." He interpreted
197. Dror, "The Affect of Experiment: The Turn to Emotions, in Anglo-American Physiology, 1900-1940," Isis, 1999, 9o, 208.
198. Nitsche, "Einleitung und Materialien," 19; Berthold Oelze, Wilhelm Wundt: Die Konzeption der Völkerpsychologie (Münster: New York, 1991).