ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the changes that were undergone by those two great traditions of psychological thought, mental and physiological mechanism, as they passed through German hands. By the early years of the nineteenth century German intellectual life had begun to have an identity of its own. The mood and temper of the new German physiological mechanism may be best conveyed by recounting a pledge made in 1842 by two of the most active fomenters of the Physikalische Gesellschaft, Ernst Brucke and Emil Du Bois-Reymond. It was through the genius of Hermann von Helmholtz, after whom the German physicalistic movement came later to be named, that the ambitions of the Physikalische Gesellschaft received their most critical support. The English doctrine of psychological empiricism never seems to have sat very well on the German imagination. Johann Friedrich Herbart’s most immediate successor in the German tradition of mental mechanism was Moritz Wilhelm Drobisch.
