ABSTRACT
In the second half of the 19th century in Germany, mental philosophy, or psychology, transformed itself from a discipline of metaphysical discussion to empirical and especially experimental research. Physiologists, physicists, and physicians all played a role in this movement, following in the footsteps of Gustav Theodor Fechner (chap. 1, Pioneers II), the physicist, who founded psychophysics (Fechner, 1966)—in Fechner’s view a means of measuring psychological processes (Adler, 1996). Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz, an individual with wide-ranging interests, was among those who contributed to this change. By inclination he was a physicist, but at various times he also was a physician, a psychologist, a physiologist, an anatomist, a meteorologist, a mathematician, and a chemist. In addition he was deeply involved in promoting empiricism in science and in educational reform. He stressed the teaching of science in the German schools instead of Latin and Greek.
