Wilhelm Wundt Quotes on Mind
Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) — the founder of the experimental-psychological laboratory at Leipzig in 1879 that is conventionally treated as the institutional birth of modern scientific psychology — gave late nineteenth-century philosophy of mind its founding programmatic statement in Principles of Physiological Psychology (1874) and the multi-volume Völkerpsychologie (1900–20). The central distinction is between the experimental analysis of the elementary processes of consciousness through controlled introspection and the historical-cultural analysis of the higher mental functions of language, myth, and custom whose structure cannot be recovered through laboratory methods — and the corresponding two-tier philosophy of mind frames psychology as a hybrid science integrating natural-scientific and humanistic methods. The framework, partially obscured by the subsequent dominance of behaviorism and cognitive psychology, shaped the early generation of American psychologists Wundt trained and remains a principal historical source for the philosophical reflection on psychological method.
Quotes
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Attributed to Wilhelm Wundt:
“Psychology is the science of immediate experience.”
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Attributed to Wilhelm Wundt:
“Mind is not a thing but a process.”
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Attributed to Wilhelm Wundt:
“Voluntary attention is the foundation of mental life.”
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Attributed to Wilhelm Wundt:
“Folk psychology is the study of the higher mental products of communities.”
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Attributed to Wilhelm Wundt:
“All inner experience is a process; nothing in the mind is at rest.”
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“In Aristotle the mind , regarded as the principle of life, divides into nutrition, sensation, and faculty of thought, corresponding to the inner most important stages in the succession of vital phenomena.”
p. 22 -
“We call that psychical process, which is operative in the clear perception of a narrow region of the content of consciousness , attention .”
p. 16 -
“The whole task of psychology can therefore be summed up in these two problems : (1) What are the elements of consciousness ? (2) What combinations do these elements undergo and what laws govern these combinations ?”
p. 44; Cited in: Stephen Kosslyn . Image and Mind. 1980, p. 438 -
“If we take an unprejudiced view of the processes of consciousness, free from all the so-called association rules and theories, we see at once that an idea is no more an even relatively constant thing than is a feeling or emotion or volitional process. There exist only changing and transient ideational processes ; there are no permanent ideas that return again and disappear again.”
p. 122