Outlines of Psychology (Wundt)/Author's Preface (1st German Ed.)
TO THE FIRST GERMAN EDITION.
THIS book has been written primarily for the purpose of furnishing my students with a brief manual to supplement the lectures on Psychology. At the same time it aims to give the wider circle of scientific scholars who are interested in psychology, either for its own sake or for the sake of its applications, a systematic survey of the fundamentally important results and doctrines of modern psychology. In view of this double purpose, I have limited myself in detailing facts to that which is most important, or to the examples that serve most directly the ends of illustration, and have omitted entirely those aids to demonstration and experiment which are properly made use of in the lecture-room. The fact that I have based this treatise on the doctrines that I have come to hold as valid after long years of labor in this field, needs no special justification. Still, I have not neglected to point out both in a general characterization (Introduction § 2), and with references in detail, the chief theories that differ from the one here presented.
The relation in which this book stands to my earlier psychological works will be apparent after what has been said. The “Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie”[1] aims to bring the means employed by the natural sciences, especially by physiology, into the service of psychology, and to give a critical presentation of the experimental methods of psychology, which have developed in the last few decades, together with their chief results. This special problem rendered necessary a relative subordination of the general psychological points of view. The second, revised edition of the “Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Tierseele”[2]) (the first edition has long been out of date) seeks to give a more popular account of the character and purpose of experimental psychology, and to discuss from the position thus defined those psychological questions which are also of more general philosophical importance. While the treatment in the “Grundzüge” is, accordingly, determined in the main by the relations of psychology to physiology, and the treatment in the “Vorlesungen” by philosophical interests, this Outlines aims to present psychology in its own proper coherency, and in the systematic order which the nature of the subject-matter seems to me to require. In doing this, however, it takes up only what is most important and essential. It is my hope that this book will not be an entirely unwelcome addition even for those readers who are familiar with my earlier works as well as with the discussion of the “Logik der Psychologie” in my “Logik der Geisteswissenschaften” (Logik, 2. Aufl., II, 2. Abt.).
- Leipzig, January 1896.
Footnotes[edit]
- ↑ A translation of this work is being prepared under the title Principles of Physiological Psychology by Professor E. B. Titchener. The first part of the first volume appeared under date 1904.
- ↑ Translated by Prof. J. E. Creighton and Prof. E. B. Titchener: “Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology”, Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1894.