PROFESSOR HUGO MÜNSTERBERG, HARVARD UNIVERSITY.
The psychological laboratory sprang first from no single mind; not wholly from science nor yet from philosophy, but from an age. In 1860 Gustave Theodore Fechner, the godfather of experimental psychology, published his famous Law. Fechner was as much a mystic as a scientist. His Law was, perhaps, the first great impetus to active psycho-physical experimentation. The prospects now are, however, that this Law will stand, a halfway truth, beside Newton’s erroneous theory of 409 light, rather than, as was at first claimed for it, beside the Law of Gravity, a great primary law of nature.
The spirit of Fechner, of evolution, and of our times joined to fall upon Wilhelm Wundt, who founded at Leipsic, in 1878, the first laboratory in the world for regular scientific mental experimentation. Professor Wundt is the greatest psychologist now living in Europe, and a majority of the noted psychological experts, both of Germany and of America, have been his pupils.
One of these pupils, G. Stanley Hall, now President of Clark University, opened the first American laboratory at Johns Hopkins in 1883, and the larger laboratory at Worcester in 1889. To him must be credited the founding of experimental psychology in this country, and an eminent share of its present successful growth.
A foremost figure in modern psychology is Professor William James, of Harvard, whose great text-book, the product of twelve years of labor, appeared in 1890. In 1891 he opened the present Harvard Laboratory, or, at least, expanded a previously slow growth to important dimensions.
In 1892 Harvard established a new chair of Experimental Psychology, and elected to the same, and to direct its new laboratory, Professor Hugo Münsterberg, previously Professor of Philosophy at Freyburg, Germany. Professor Münsterberg was at one time a pupil of Wundt, but is much more a man of original inspiration; and in his genius the hopes and destiny of experimental psychology at Harvard are now centred.
Some twenty laboratories are now actively at work in America, and about half that number in Europe. The twentieth century will be to mental what the sixteenth century was to physical science, and the central field of its development is likely to be America.
Harvard University, July, 1893.