ABSTRACT
In the 1830s and 1840s, philosophers, psychologists, and scientists were intensely exploring the scientific status of psychology. Those years marked a period of rapid development for mathematics and the natural sciences, which included physics, physiology, and chemistry. The main issue debated in the period from the beginning of the nineteenth century until 1874 was whether or not human mental life could be reduced to physical events alone, and thus be explained scientifically on the basis of experimental data. The aim of the present paper is to examine the specific contribution that Rudolph Hermann Lotze’s Medicinische Psychologie: Oder Physiologie der Seele made to this development.
