gat

Napoleon Of Mind Science
William James wrote in 1879:
[Wundt] aims on being a Napoleon....Unfortunately he will never have a
Waterloo....cut him up like a worm and each fragment crawls....you can’t kill
him.
From his laboratory in upper Saxony near the Prussian border, Wundt wrote 53,735 published
pages in the sixty-eight years between 1853 and 1920, words which sculpted modern schooling,
from a disorderly attempt to heighten human promise in individuals or to glorify God’s creation,
into mandated psychological indoctrination.
Wundt’s childhood was unrelieved by fun. He never played. He had no friends. He failed to find
love in his family. From this austere forge, a Ph.D. emerged humorless, indefatigable, and
aggressive. At his end he returned to the earth childless. Wundt is the senior psychologist in the
history of psychology, says Boring: "Before him there was psychology but no psychologists, only
philosophers."
Coming out of the physiological tradition of psychophysics in Germany, Wundt followed the path
of de La Mettrie, Condillac, and Descartes in France who argued, each in his own way, that what
we think of as personality is only a collection of physiological facts. Humanity is an illusion.
Wundt had a huge advantage over the mechanists before him. For him the time was right, all
religious and romantic opposition in disarray, bewildered by the rapid onset of machinery into
society. Over in England, Darwin’s brilliant cousin Francis Galton was vigorously promoting
mathematical prediction into the status of a successful cult. In one short decade, bastions of a
more ancient scholarly edifice were overrun by number crunchers. A bleak future suddenly
loomed for men who remained unconvinced that any transcendental power was locked up in
quantification of nature and humankind.
The Pythagorean brotherhood was reseating itself inexorably in this great age of Wundt, the two
in harmony as both contributed heavily to the centralization of things and to the tidal wave of
scientific racism which drowned the university world for decades, culminating in the racial science
station maintained on the old Astor estate in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, by Carnegie
interests until the events of September 1939, caused it to quietly close its doors. 12 Even at the
beginning of the marriage of scholarship and statistics, its principals saw little need to broaden
their investigations into real life, an ominous foreshadowing of the eugenical outlook that
followed.
A friendless, loveless, childless male German calling himself a psychologist set out, I think, to
prove his human condition didn’t matter because feelings were only an aberration. His premises
and methodology were imported into an expanding American system of child confinement and
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