ABSTRACT
Experiments are basically of two kinds: crucial and systematic. Crucial experiments serve to decide between two mutually incompatible conceptions. However, Franz Brentano advised, one should not engage in unproductive systematic experiments—routinely changing an independent variable and measuring the resulting changes in a dependent variable. Three of Wilhelm Wundt’s contemporaries were making their own independent way and attracting students, although they did not have quite the influence Wundt had. According to his contemporaries, in spite of his early animosity toward E. B. Titchener, Oswald Külpe was a charming individual, who got along well with everybody. Francis Galton’s convictions about the importance of heredity in human behavior and morphology led him to conclusions that today would be viewed as racist. They also led him to an analysis of human races in terms of their adaptation to their particular ecological circumstances. James Ward founded a laboratory of experimental psychology at Cambridge but turned out to be more of a systematizer than an experimentalist.
