ABSTRACT
To illustrate the nature of Wilhelm Wundt's psychology, this chapter considers two topics taken up in the two branches of his psychology. The first applies the experimental method of physiological psychology to an old question in philosophical psychology: how many ideas can consciousness contain at a given moment. The second applies the method of the Volkerpsychologie to the question of how human beings create and understand sentences. Although Wundt launched psychology as a recognized discipline, his Leipzig system did not represent the future of psychology. Wundt is best regarded as a transitional figure linking psychology's philosophical past to its future as a natural science and as an applied science. Wundt and his generation of psychologists saw psychology as part of philosophy, but most of the next generation of psychologists wanted to make it into a pure natural science.
