Some Intellectual Antecedents of Experimental Psychology

The origins of experimental psychology in Germany are to be sought in the intellectual development of western Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and most of all in the progress of other experimental sciences in France and Germany. We must turn first to the progress of the exact sciences, particularly mathematics, chemistry, and physics; next, to that of the biological sciences. ¹ For experimental psychology grew out of the soil of an experimental physiology which was dependent upon all of these for its existence.