ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one of the first German journals of what might be called psychology: Know Thyself, or Journal For the Experiential Science of the Soul, a Reader for Scholars and Laypersons. The founding editor, Karl Philipp Moritz explores a way of distancing himself from the rationalist associations evoked by the term psychologia – he devoted his journal to Erfahrungsseelenkunde, which is often translated as ‘empirical psychology’, but is more accurately rendered as ‘experiential science of the soul’. In Moritz’s conception, Erfahrungsseelenkunde is more or less a reversal of Wolffian psychologia. Moritz conceived of a field of study that would be strictly observational, empirical and inductive. Moritz criticized the determinism by drawing attention to the systemic character of mind, that is, the mind’s internal coherence and self-determination, its autonomy. In 1782, Moritz’s methods of observing children involve short-term comparisons.
