ABSTRACT
The new German psychology belonged to the latter half of the nineteenth century; in effect, though, it was an essentially pre-Darwinian enterprise. For twenty years prior to 1858, Charles Darwin had been working on the theory that was soon to be presented in his Origin of Species. The reception of “Darwinism” following 1859 is a fairly well-known story. The first printing of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was sold out on the very first day it appeared. Darwinian Theory held, first, that existing organic species have evolved from earlier forms of life and, second, that the direction of this process has been, in the main, from simplicity to complexity. One of the most vigorous of post- Darwinian psychological movements came into being largely as an attempt to understand, to explain, and in some cases to explain away human “intellectual functions”.
