History of experimental psychology from an ... - IngentaConnect

Psychological Research (2007) 71: 618–625
DOI 10.1007/s00426-006-0051-9
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Jüri Allik
History of experimental psychology from an Estonian perspective
Received: 2 February 2005 / Accepted: 29 November 2005 / Published online: 26 April 2006
© Springer-Verlag 2006
Abstract A short review of the development of experimental
psychology from an Estonian perspective is presented.
The Wrst rector after the reopening of the
University of Dorpat (Tartu) in 1802, Georg Friedrich
Parrot (1767–1852) was interested in optical phenomena
which he attempted to explain by introducing the concept
of unconscious inferences, anticipating a similar
theory proposed by Herman von Helmholtz 20 years
later. One of the next rectors, Alfred Wilhelm Volkmann
(1800–1878) was regarded by Edwin Boring as one of
the founding fathers of the experimental psychology.
Georg Wilhelm Struve (1793–1864) played an essential
part in solving the problem of personal equations.
Arthur Joachim von Oettingen (1836–1920) developed a
theory of music harmony, which stimulated his student
Wilhelm Friedrich Ostwald (1853–1932) to study colour
harmony. Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926), the founder of
modern psychiatry, is by far the most important experimental
psychologist who has worked in Estonia. His
successor Wladimir von Tchisch (1855–1922), another
student of Wilhelm Wundt, continued Kraepelin’s work
in experimental psychology. The lives of Wolfgang
Köhler (1887–1967), who was born in Reval (Tallinn),
and Oswald Külpe (1862–1915), who graduated from
the University of Dorpat, extended the link between the
history of experimental psychology and Estonia. Karl
Gustav Girgensohn (1875–1925), the founder of the
Dorpat School of the psychology of religion, stretched
the use of experimental methods to the study of religious
experience.
Introduction
Perhaps it was not pure chance that an event like the
German–Estonian symposium on experimental psychology
was possible at all, and that it took place on one of
the most idyllic places in Estonia, the island of Hiiumaa.
My goal in this article is to demonstrate that many scholars
who were born, lived or worked in Estonia took an
active part in the birth of experimental psychology in the
nineteenth century and in its later development. From a
historical point of view, Estonia’s geographical location
is far from fortunate. The fact that such a small nation
with an obscure non-European language survived after
all appears almost as a demographic accident. From an
intellectual viewpoint, however, the location of Estonia
may even have had some advantages. Its marginal position
set Estonia into a situation where the dialogue
between diVerent languages and viewpoints was not only
an expression of intellectual sophistication but also a
matter of survival. The history of experimental psychology
clearly demonstrates that the remote corner as to
which Estonia had to be seen constituted an inseparable
part of the German speaking academic world. Hermann
von Helmholtz in his inaugural lecture as Rector of the
University of Berlin talked about the academic freedom
of German universities and stressed that one manifestation
of it was a complete freedom of movement for the
students between all universities of the German tongue,
from Dorpat to Zurich, Vienna, and Graz (Helmholtz,
1896, p. 201).
J. Allik
Department of Psychology, The Estonian Centre
of Behavioural and Health Sciences, University of Tartu,
Tiigi 78, Tartu, 50410, Estonia
E-mail: juri.allik@ut.ee
Tel.: +372-7-375905
Fax: +372-7-375900
Georg Friedrich Parrot and the theory of unconscious
inferences
Although the University of Tartu was founded in 1632
by the decree of the Swedish King Gustavus II Adolphus,
it ceased to exist in 1710 after the Swedish defeat at
Poltava when two Baltic provinces, Livland and Estland
(Drechsler & Kattel, 2000), were incorporated into

619
Russian empire. The University of Tartu again, then
known as Dorpat, was reopened by a decree of Alexander
I, issued April 12, 1801, and Georg Friedrich Parrot
(1767–1852) became the Wrst rector of the Imperial University
of Dorpat, being elected by the University Council
consisting of all chaired professors.
Although Parrot’s brilliant administrative skills outweighed
his achievements in physics, he was an advanced
theoretical physicist. During his lifetime, the line between
physics and psychology was very thin. In the second volume
of his textbook of theoretical physics he described,
within the framework of optical phenomena, problems,
which without a doubt belong to the category of human
perception (Parrot, 1811). For example, one of his
favourite subjects was a mechanism by which the distance
of objects could be estimated. Parrot also discussed
a method by which the duration of visual impression can
be measured. The method by itself was not new and was
earlier known to Ibn al-Hayatam (Alhazen) and
Leonardo da Vinci (Wade, 1998, p. 195). If one rotates a
rod glowing at one end with suYcient speed, the perceived
trace of light seemed to form an uninterrupted circle.
Because the glowing tip of the rod cannot be in all
places simultaneously, it must mean that the duration of
sensory impression lasts until the rod makes the full turn.
Thus, Parrot concluded, it is possible to determine the
duration of sensory impressions. According to Parrot’s
observations, the duration of sensory impression is
about a quarter of the second in the dark and about 1/
6th of the second in the light (Parrot, 1820), which is one
of the Wrst indications that the perceptual latency
depends on overall illumination. This last value is very
close to a Wgure reported by the Chevalier Patrice d‘Arcy
(1725–1775), who did similar experiments in 1765
(Ramul, 1963; Wade, 1998, p. 196). Both values correspond
closely to those obtained later with much more
sophisticated experimental devices.
In September 1839, Parrot published a short note
about a peculiar visual phenomenon he had observed in
a fast-moving train commuting between Pavlovsk and
St. Petersburg, namely the relative diminishing of the size
of external objects, situated at a relatively small distance
from the train window (Parrot, 1839). As Parrot
observed, this apparent reduction of the size of objects
depended upon the speed of their movement. When the
speed of the train attained its ordinary maximum, wardhouses
and men, situated close to the train, seemed to
have only half of their regular size, and one might have
the impression, as Parrot put it Wguratively, of being
transported through a land of dwarfs. As the speed of the
train lowered, the men and buildings grew in size, and
when the speed was 10 or 15 ft per second, the objects
appeared approximately in their ordinary size. It seems
that Parrot’s observations were never conWrmed by other
researchers, but the explanation he gave to the strange
perceptual phenomenon contained a profound insight
(Allik & Konstabel, 2005).
Parrot began his explanation with reference to the
size constancy mechanism: although the size of the
retinal image is known to decrease proportionally to the
viewing distance, the perceived size remains unaltered.
One of the mechanisms by which the distance can be
measured is to count the objects between the object and
the eye. It seems that for Parrot it was self-evident that
the perceived size was a result of syllogistic reasoning:
from the recorded retinal size and distance (minor premise)
and the inverse proportion rule of retinal projection
(major premise), an inference about the size can be
made. This decision is made very rapidly and subjectively;
we consider the time necessary for these operations
to be inWnitely short, so we are not even aware of
their very existence. According to Parrot, the soul does
not have the time to judge the distance and visual angle
with the required accuracy. Due to the rapid movement
of the locomotive the soul cannot distinguish all the
external objects that are required for the reliable estimation
of distance. Thus, the judgment that our soul makes
with regard to the size of the objects in these extreme
conditions is based on a preliminary false judgment—the
minor of two premises is false. In other words, it is evident
Parrot was formulating, here, the concept of unconscious
inferences which is better known as the concept of
unbewusster Schluss formulated by Hermann von
Helmholtz—the psychic activities that lead us to infer
that in front of us, at a certain place, there is a certain
object of a certain character (Helmholtz, 1910). However,
in the year of Parrot’s publication, Helmholtz was
only 18 years old and would write his Handbuch der
Physiologischen Optik only 20 years later. According to
Boring, Helmholtz obviously adopted the idea of unconscious
inferences while he was in Königsberg and
exposed its essentials in a lecture that was published in
1855 (Boring, 1957, p. 315). Although the hypothesis of
unconscious inferences was implicit in this paper, it was
not named as such and was later elaborated by Wilhelm
Wundt in his Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung
(Wundt, 1858).
Parrot was not the Wrst to suggest the existence of the
involuntary reasoning-like operations in order to reach a
satisfactory explanation of certain phenomena in the
human perception (HatWeld, 2002). For example, Alhazen’s
theory of “unconscious inferences” resembles
Helmholtz’ theory of unbewusster Schluss practically in
all important details (Bauer, 1911). According to Alhazen,
perceptual judgments occur in an extremely short
interval of time. The faculty of perceptual judgment does
not syllogize by ordering and composing words, that faculty
perceived the conclusion without need for words or
for repeating and ordering premises (II 26b) (Sabra,
1989, p. xxcvi–xcvii).
One remarkable aspect of Parrot’s article was a proposed
plan of an experiment by which it is possible to
determine the time that the soul uses to form its ideas
and make judgments. The idea was to make systematic
observations on the apparent size of locomotives moving
at a given speed and placing objects at diVerent
measured distances. This experimental plan, irrespective
of its actual accomplishment, clearly recognises the

620
possibility of subjecting psychological processes to
experimental study, contrary to Kant’s inXuential opinion
that no such thing is possible (HatWeld, 1998).
So, although the notion of unconscious inference was
conceptualised nine centuries earlier by Alhazen and
independently became re-invented by Parrot many years
before Helmholtz and Wundt articulated and coined the
doctrine of unconscious inferences, it is Helmholtz and
Wundt who are usually credited for the achievement and
not Alhazen. Aside from the concept of unconscious
inferences itself, Parrot had the idea that the speed of
mental processes is not inWnitely high and that in principle,
it can be determined by systematic observations of
phenomena of the type he observed in the moving train.
His way of thinking is in harmony with Fechner,
Helmholtz and Wundt, who all, in one or another way,
demonstrated that sensory judgments can be quantiWed,
that a measurable quantity of time is required for their
execution, and that they are related to events in the physical
environment in a meaningful way. Parrot shared the
conviction of the founding fathers of psychology that it
is possible to study the phenomena of mind in the same
general way that the physical world is studied and can be
described in terms of either mechanical or mathematical
laws (Allik & Konstabel, 2005).
The personal equation and Friedrich Struve
In 1811, Parrot organised a special stipend for a talented
philology graduate, Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve
(1793–1864), to continue his studies in a completely new
direction—mathematics and astronomy. Only a few
years later, in 1813, Struve had became the director of
the Dorpat observatory, and exactly in the same year a
new observatory was erected in Königsberg under the
supervision of Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (1784–1846). In
order to improve the precision of astronomical observations,
Bessel proposed to calibrate observers by establishing
their, as it came to be called, personal equations.
In 1820, Bessel performed at Königsberg one of the most
important experiments in the whole history of experimental
psychology. He and his assistant Walbeck Wrst
selected ten stars, and then they independently observed
the transit of Wve of them in one night and of the remaining
Wve in the following night, and so on, for Wve nights.
Bessel was always found to observe the transit earlier
than Wallbeck. The two observers diVered systematically
by about 1 s, a time diVerence that was even larger than
that found between the observations of the Astronomer
Royal Nevil Maskelyne and his assistant David Kinnebrook,
participants in one of the most famous incidents
in the prehistory of the experimental psychology
(Boring, 1957). In 1823, Bessel had an opportunity to
repeat a similar comparison with another assistant Argelander.
Again, a systematic diVerence was found between
the two observers. This convinced Bessel that there are
irreducible individual diVerences between observers.
Even if a given observer was consistent with himself on
diVerent trials, his mean judgment time systematically
disagrees with the same judgment made by another
observer. To verify these observations, Bessel was especially
eager to compare himself with Struve in Dorpat,
who already had earned a reputation as being one of the
best astronomical observers. Having no opportunity for
a direct comparison, Bessel sent three of his assistants
Walbeck 1 , Argelander 2 and Knorre to Dorpat in 1821,
1823 and 1825, respectively, to compare their observation
data with Struve. Through them, Bessel established
indirectly the relation between the personal observation
times between himself and Struve. Only in 1834 did Bessel
and Struve Wnd an opportunity to compare themselves
directly and conWrm the indirect predictions
(Boring, 1957, p. 137). 3
The further history of this problem is well known: in
1861, Wilhelm Wundt constructed his famous pendulum,
also known as Wundt’s complication clock, that swung
across a scale and caused a spring to give a click at a
given point of excursion. The basic design reproduced
essential properties of Bradley’s “eye and ear” method
(cf. Boring, 1957, p. 135) that was used for astronomical
measurements. The Wrst series of experiments on compound
reaction (Boring, 1957, p. 324) were conducted by
Max Friedrich in the Wrst psychological laboratory
founded by Wundt in 1879 (Domanski, 2004).
There is no evidence about Friedrich Struve’s direct
contribution to the problem of the personal equations
besides the practical use of it. However, it was the communication
between Königsberg and Dorpat that helped
to discover measurable individual diVerences between
human observers, which belongs, despite of its seeming
triviality, to one of the most consequential discoveries in
the whole history of psychology.
Alfred Volkmann and Weber’s Law
Gustav Theodor Fechner’s Elemente der Psychophysics,
published in 1860, established a solid foundation for
experimental psychology. As Boring noticed, “with
Fechner it was born, quite as old, and also quite as
1
In 1821, H. J. Walbeck (1794–1823) was an astronomer in Turku,
Finland and he died only 2 years later at the age of 29. In 1819, he
calculated dimensions of the Earth which were very close to the correct
values known today.
2
Friedrich Wilhelm August Argelander (1799–1875) later became
director of the observatory at the University of Bonn.
3
There are few errors in the name index of otherwise accurate Boring’s
History (Boring, 1957). He is referring to Struve as O.W. Struve
which is certainly wrong. The correct reference should be Friedrich
Georg Wilhelm Struve whose son Otto Wilhelm was not even born
when the Wrst personal equation was determined. The reverse error
has happened with regard to Knorre. Boring erroneously thinks that
Bessel wrote about Ernst Christoph Friedrich Knorre (1759–1810)
who was also an astronomer, but he had died 15 years ago when his
son Karl Freidrich Knorre visited Königsberg in 1825 (cf. Petrov &
Pinigin, 2002).

621
4
Rudolf Wagner’s son, Adolf Wagner (1835–1917) was a professor
of Dorpat University (1865–1868) known as the central theorist of
‘state socialism’ (Drechsler, 1997).
young, as a baby” (Boring 1957, p. 275). Fechner had, of
course, predecessors including Ernst Weber after whom
Fechner named “Weber’s law”. Ernst Heinrich Weber
(1795–1878) was a professor of anatomy and physiology
at Leipzig from 1818 and thereafter. Fechner considered
Weber’s law as a cornerstone from which he could move
forward to derive his psychophysical law simply by logical
deduction. Therefore, it was the greatest importance
to establish the universality of the Weber’s law beyond
tactual perception from where it was established Wrst.
At the time when young Fechner got his degree in
medicine in 1822, another young man, Alfred Wilhelm
Volkmann (1800–1878) enrolled as a student of medicine
at Leipzig in 1821. Together with Rudolph Hermann
Lotze (1817–1881) Fechner and Volkmann formed a
small intellectual group, which dissolved only in 1837
when Volkmann received his professorship in Dorpat
(Boring, 1957, p. 277). Four years earlier, in 1833,
Fechner had married Volkmann’s sister.
The role of Volkmann in the development of psychophysics
is generally acknowledged. Usually it is mentioned
that “in co-operation with Volkmann, Fechner
developed the method of “average error” (already in use
in astronomy) for use in visual and tactual measurement”
(Murphy, 1964, p. 90). It is, however, important to
note that the role of Volkmann was not only to assist
Fechner, but in 1864, Volkmann also reported independently
that the threshold for length discrimination
increases with the increase of the reference length. This
was one of the Wrst demonstrations of Weber’s law in the
visual domain. This fundamental Wnding about distance
judgment—Weber’s law for spatial intervals—has been
replicated repeatedly since then, for a variety of stimuli
and response modes, and was proved to be one of the few
Wrmly established and replicable facts of psychology (cf.
Burbeck & Hadden, 1993). Volkmann, like Fechner
before him, was also interested in the transfer of training.
Fechner was one of the Wrst who reported data showing
that learning to write with one hand facilitates the same
activity with the other hand. In his studies, he was again
able to relay on previous studies done by Volkmann who
demonstrated experimentally that the reduction of the
“two-point” threshold in certain regions through training
lowered the threshold in other regions as well (cf.
Murphy 1964, p. 241). He also determined the speed of
eye movements and constructed the Wrst prototype of the
tachistoscope (Volkmann, 1859). Volkmann also wrote a
section on vision in Wagner’s. 4 Handwörterbuch der
Physiologie, which became a standard textbook for the
next half of a century. Among other observations, he
repeated his earlier explanation to upright vision: the
most natural explanation of upright vision is that it does
not require an explanation (Volkmann, 1836, p. 41).
Perhaps Volkmann’s most important contribution to
experimental psychology concerns not only visual physiology
but also principles of operation of the whole nervous
system. In 1832, he published in Müller’s Archiv, a
study in which he demonstrated the inhibitory role of the
vagus nerve on cardiac activity. Usually the discovery of
a entirely new kind of nervous action—inhibition—is
credited to Volkmann’s teachers in Leipzig University,
the Weber brothers (Fulton, 1930, p. 276; Singer &
Underwood, 1962, p. 331). It was claimed that Volkmann
just “missed an important opportunity”. Volkmann himself
never regarded the observed eVect as some technical
error or an uninteresting observation. He realised the
importance of his discovery despite the dominant belief
that activation could only lead to the increase of nervous
activity (Käbin, 1986, p. 79).
Helmholtz paid respect to Volkmann and cited his
work in his Handbook of Physiological Optics (1867) 58
times (Piper, 2000). Therefore, it is not surprising that
Boring listed Volkmann beside Helmholtz and Fechner
as one of the “founding fathers” of the experimental psychology
(Boring, 1957, p. 384).
Arthur Joachim von Oettingen and the system of harmony
Arthur Joachim von Oettingen (1836–1920) was the oldest
of the six Oettingen brothers. Like his two other
brothers, he became a professor of Tartu University at
age 31. Besides physics, which was his main subject, he
was particularly interested in music and held a special
course on the perception of music. He summarised his
explorations in a book called Das Harmoniesystem in
duale Entwicklung which was recognised by musical theorists
at that time (Oettingen, 1866). Hermann von
Helmholtz, for example, was particularly interested in
Oettingen’s report according to which the old modal
song tradition was still alive and strong among
Estonians; they had diYculties to master the Protestant
plainsong, common in Europe, because of its high leading
tone (Ross, 1991). It is interesting that in the principal
dispute between August Seebeck 5 and Helmholtz,
concerning the question whether the perceived pitch is
determined by the objective Fourier components or not,
Oettingen rather took the position of his countryman
rather than Helmholtz’s. In his theory of consonance and
dissonance Oettingen, like Seebeck before him, proposed
that higher harmonics can collaborate in the creation of
the perceived pitch which could depart from the physically
present or absent fundamental tone. Ernst Mach,
for example, used Oettingen’s harmony theory as a
5
August Seebeck’s farther, Thomas Seebeck (1770–1831) was born
in Tallinn and, despite the fact that he spent the most part of his life
in Germany, was estimated by his contemporaries as belonging to
the Baltic German elite not only due to his famous career as a physicist
but also due to his close friendship with Goethe. Thomas Seebeck
is known in the history of physics with his seminal works in
thermo-electricity. He also discovered several new entoptic color
phenomena (Ross, 1991).

622
substantial evidence against Helmholtz’ acoustic theory
(Mach, 1922, p. 222).
It is certainly not a coincidence that one of Oettingen’s
students Wilhelm Friedrich Ostwald (1853–1932)
winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1909 was also
interested in the analysis of music and art. As Ostwald
writes in his memories he attended Oettingen’s lectures
on psychology of music and was particularly inspired by
his theory of harmony, which contained several fundamental
discoveries. Although Ostwald found Harmoniesystem
inspiring it was in his opinion written in such
obscure manner that nobody has really managed to read
it, except the author himself and the typesetter. Inspired
by Oettingen’s lectures Ostwald himself tried to apply
quantitative methods to the analysis of Beethoven’s
piano sonatas (Ostwald, 1926). Unfortunately, Ostwald’s
studies in musical harmony are not widely known and
have been overshadowed by his more celebrated studies
on colour harmony (Ostwald, 1918). In 1927, Ostwald
even lectured in the Bauhaus School of art and made a
strong impression on Wassily Kandinsky (Ball, 2003).
Emil Kraepelin and experimental psychology
Emil Kraepelin (Neustrelitz, Germany, 1856—München,
1926) is by far the most important experimental psychologist
who has been associated with Estonia. The founder
of modern psychiatry he became professor of psychiatry
at Dorpat University in 1886 when he was 30 years old
(Steinberg & Angermeyer, 2001). It was Wundt who suggested
to his favourite student about medical vocation
instead of the uncertainties of being a psychologist. In his
Memoirs Kraepelin summarises his years in Tartu in the
following way: “...besides my clinical training I was able
to hold quite a number of independent lectures about
criminal psychology, forensic psychiatry, about the conscience
and its disorders and experimental psychology.
There was never lack of students for these lectures. I considered
psychological discussions, based on Wundt’s
model, to be specially important and I made the students
make reports on individual problems” (Kraepelin, 1987,
p. 42). As he later confessed, experimental work appealed
to him much more than clinical work (Kraepelin, 1987, p.
42). There were two main reasons to be not satisWed with
his clinical work: the Wrst was the language barrier 6 and
the second was the insuYcient number of patients.
Therefore, fortunately to psychology, he concentrated on
psychology. He wrote about it:
The conditions for starting a school of psychology in
Dorpat were favourable. The distinguished physiologist,
6
His knowledge of Estonian was quite enough to make a tremendous
impression on the personell of the Istanbul’s mental asylum he
visited during one of his frequent travels. During his visit a patient
was shown, whose origin was unclear, as he spoke a completely unknown
language. The Estonian sailman was, of course, very happy
to Wnd someone, who could speak at least few words of his mother
tongue with him (Kraepelin, 1987, p. 82).
Alexander Schmidt, had placed a room in his new institute
at our disposal, which was of great help, as the clinic was
too far away and had no spare room. The university
mechanics Schulze proved to be an exceptionally skilled
and understanding helper and produced a number of well
invented and carefully planned machines for various investigations.
Luckily, I found a lot of keen, self-sacriWcing
students prepared to devote many, many months’ work
solely to their doctorate theses. Thus, studies were made,
which brought important new Wndings with them; for
example the work by Michelson on the depth of sleep, individual
psychology by Oehrn, time sense by Eyner, contrast
sensitivity with perception of space by Higier and the
diversion of attention by Bertels. DiYculties to overcome
on the technical side were often considerable and I constantly
admired the patience of the youngsters in withstanding
all these obstacles. Sometimes, the physicist
Arthur von Oettingen gave us his kind advice.” (Kraepelin,
1987, pp. 44–45).
Kraepelin found the general scientiWc life in Dorpat
stimulating, as there were always a number of younger
professors present, who worked with enthusiasm. He
wrote that with the university very near, the university
members had active contact with one another in an
atmosphere of unconditional equality (Kraepelin,
1987, p. 47). In these conditions, Kraepelin pursued
diVerent lines of investigation, including word
associations:
I had set up my own equipment for the measurement of
mental reactions and carried out tests on aphasic and other
suitable psychiatric patients and on manic patients. I made
the surprising discovery that the association’s times were
by no means shorter, but were often longer and very irregular.
This fact led me to understand that the Xight of ideas
was not the accelerated consequence of mental images, but
were volatile and instable emerging processes in the conscience”
(p. 44).
Among psychological problems, however, the subject
of Kraepelin’s special interest was fatigue. He regarded
his established work curve as his chief contribution.
W. Weygandt, who wrote an elaborate obituary in Psychologische
Arbeiten, revealed that Kraepelin had hoped
to receive the Nobel award not for dementia praecox or
his nosological classiWcation but for his results on the
work curve (Roback, 1961, p. 308).
It is not surprising that today, almost a century later
of his innovative studies, he remains one of the most
cited behavioural scientists of all times. According to the
Social Sciences Citation Index Kraepelin was cited 6,618
times in the period from 1972 to 2005 (November) more
than 200£ every year.
Along with the intensive RussiWcation campaign
launched in 1889, the autonomy of the University of
Dorpat was considerably reduced: rector, deans and
professors were not elected any more but appointed by
the Minister of Education (the appointment of the rector
required approval by the czar himself). Besides
diminishing the role of Baltic Germans, one of the goals
of these reforms was to prevent people from lower

623
strata to study at the university. In order to achieve this
goal, the study fee was increased from 10 to 50 roubles
per year. Typically for the Russian Empire, then and
later, strict quotas of Jews admitted by the universities
were imposed (Siilivask, 1982, p. 258). Russian became
the oYcial language of teaching and all German professors
who were not able or willing to lecture in Russian
had to leave Tartu. Among those who had to leave
Dortpat, or Jurjev, as it was renamed, were Oettingen,
Ostwald, and Kraepelin.
Wladimir Tchisch as a successor of Kraepelin
One of the Wrst Russian students of Wundt, Wladimir
Tchisch (1855–1922) 7 was appointed as a successor of
Kraepelin. When Tchisch arrived at Leipzig in 1884, he
naturally was appointed to work with Wundt’s pendulum
and complication reaction. He noticed in particular
that in some cases a click could be heard before the pendulum
actually reached the spring; in other cases the
click appeared later when the pendulum had already
passed the spring (Tchisch, 1885). Since then diVerent
time paradoxes fascinated philosophers as well as psychologists
(cf. Dennett, 1991). For example, the apparent
lagging behind of a moving object in relation to a short
sound or Xash was repeatedly rediscovered and has
recently become known under the name of the Flash–
Lag EVect (Nijhawan, 1994; Kreegipuu & Allik, 2004).
Concerning his teaching, Tchisch regularly held
courses on experimental psychology and supervised
doctoral dissertations that had a clear experimental–
psychological orientation (Ramul, 1974). From the
titles of dissertations supervised by Tchisch the following
can be named: experiments concerning spatial
memory of the skin (E. Loewenton, 1893); memory of
active movements (F. Schneider, 1894); the sense
of location and its memory (B. Barth, 1894); memory
of visual perceptions (K. Zaborovsky, 1894); comparative
study of tactile and gustatory sensitivity of women
from diVerent social classes (W.V. Dehm, 1894); the
change of pulse and aspiration during diVerent psychical
states (G. Hirsch, 1899); an experimental study of
the skin sensitivity (G. Hildebrand, 1899) (Ramul,
1974, p. 107).
The list of these studies characterises Tchisch’s somewhat
unsystematic interests which nevertheless kept the
tradition of experimental psychological investigations
alive at Tartu University. Some of them, especially the
inXuence of social factors on perception, anticipated the
popularity of these problems in the subsequent history of
psychology.
7
Sometimes in Russian (means ‘siskin’) is also transcribed
into the Latin alphabet as Chizh. William James’ Principles referred
to him as Tschisch (James, 1890).
Two experimentalists with Estonian connections
It is impossible to avoid mentioning the two psychologists
who never practised their profession in Estonia but
were nevertheless connected to Estonia. They are
Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967) and Oswald Külpe (1862–
1915)
Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967), the main theoretician
of gestalt psychology, was born in Tallinn (Reval) in his
parents residence Toomkooli 4 (Schulgasse 9) on the 21st
of January, 1887 (Lõo, 2004). His farther, Franz Köhler,
was the Headmaster of the German Gymnasium (Domschule)
and his residence was just across the street. His
mother, Wilhelmine Girgensohn, was a daughter of lutheran
priest. When Köhler was about 6, the family moved
to Germany. The main reason for leaving Estonia was
again the campaign of RussiWcation which put an end to
education in other languages rather than Russian.
There is no need to reiterate the importance of Wolfgang
Köhler, one of the most distingushed psychologists
of the twentieth century. Besides his illustrious professional
career he is an example of extraordinary personal
integrity. Only few German scientists and intellectuals
had the courage to protest against the dismissal of Jewish
scientists after the Nazis took power in January 1933.
Köhler was an exception. With the dismissal of James
Franck, the physicist and Nobel Prize winner in 1925,
Köhler made a public statement. On April 28, 1933 he
wrote for the Deutsches Allgemeine Zeitung, the last antinazi
article to be published under the Nazi regime. In this
article he wrote that Franck’s dismissal “shows the deepest
reason why all these people are not joining the Party:
they feel moral imposition. They believe that only the
quality of human being should determine his worth, that
intellectual achievement, character, and obvious contribution
to German culture retain their signiWcance
whether a person is Jewish or not” (Henle, 1978; Ash,
1995, p. 326 V.).
Oswald Külpe, the founder of the Würzburg School,
was born near the Baltic coast in Courland which is now
Latvia. He began his studies of psychology under Wundt
in Leipzig but then went to Berlin for a semester to study
history instead. Afterwards he returned to psychology
again and studied three semesters in Göttingen with
G.E. Müller who had succeeded Lotze (Boring, 1957,
pp. 397–398). In 1885, however, he left Göttingen and
went to Tartu for a whole year in order to graduate as an
art historian. After receiving his degree, he returned to
Leipzig where he wrote, as an assistant of Wundt, an
introductory textbook (Külpe, 1893). Wundt, as it is well
known, was very skeptical about the possibility of studying,
in a scientiWcally sound way, anything more intricate
than elementary sensations and simple motor responses.
More complex phenomena, like feelings and thoughts,
are too Wrmly enclosed by the boundaries of the subject
and their causes are generally hidden from objective
investigation. Külpe, in turn, states in his textbook that
in principle there is no topic of psychological inquiry

624
which cannot be approached by the experimental
method. And experimental psychology is therefore fully
within its rights when it claims to be the general psychology
(Külpe, 1893). In Wundt’s view, Külpe’s approach to
psychology was based on an erroneous overestimation of
the scope of natural science and reduces psychology to a
kind of “applied physiology” (Danziger, 1979, p. 211). In
any case, Külpe was unwilling to follow Wundt’s recommendations
and like Ebbinghaus, who had brought
memory as another specimen of the “higher mental processes”,
under the scrutiny of experimental methods,
decided to bring thought into the laboratory as well
(Boring, 1957, p. 402). This basic idea marked the beginning
of the Würzburg School and the breakdown of
another barrier on the way of experimental psychology.
Dorpat School of psychology of religion
Karl Gustav Girgensohn (1875–1925) was a cousin of
Wolfgang Köhler’s mother, Wilhelmine Girgensohn
(Lõo, 2004). In 1903, Girgensohn returned to Dorpat
after studies in Germany for defending his Master Thesis
“The religion, its psychical form and its central idea”
(Die Religion, ihre psychischen Formen und ihre Zentralidee).
Seven years later, in 1910, he obtained his doctoral
degree from Berlin University. At the same year an
important event happened which changed his life. He
Wnally found an answer to a question that had puzzled
him: is it possible by means of the modern science to
explain the nature of Christianity? A colleague at Dorpat
University introduced Girgensohn to the revolutionary
work of the Würzburg School (WulV, 1991, p. 554). In
1910 he accepted Külpe’s invitation to spend a term with
him at Bonn. Girgensohn soon became a convinced
adherent of the Würzburg School procedures. He
believed that the method of experimental introspection
suits ideally to the study of religious experiences and can
resolve the debate of the psychological nature of religion.
In 1911 Girgensohn began his experiments by laboriously
recording the observations of 14 individuals,
including himself. He presented to his subjects not very
well known texts from various theological writers, and
recorded the thoughts and feelings as they arose in his
subjects while they were reading the texts. Girgensohn
not only recorded the associations of his subject, but also
interviewed them in order to further explore their
responses to the texts. In this Wrst experiment, each participant
was tested on 26 diVerent texts. The work lasted
for 2 years and the Wrst results of the Wrst experimental
study of religious experience were summarised in 1913.
In 1921 his monumental book containing more than 700
pages was published (Girgensohn, 1921). Girgensohn’s
ideas inspired many people and as WulV (1991, p. 16)
wrote: “Students and visiting scholars found their way to
Dorpat and, after 1919, to Greifswald and then to Leipzig,
in order to work with Girgensohn”. This group of
people formed an intellectual unity which is still called
the Dorpat School of religious psychology (WulV, 1985).
After Girgensohn’s unexpected death in 1925, Werner
Gruehn (1887–1961) became the leader of the Dorpat
schoool. The full program of the Dorpat School is represented
in the large handbook Contemporary Piety
(Gruehn, 1956). David WulV’s (1991) most comprehensive
treatise on psychology of religion devotes an entire
chapter to Girgensohn and the Dorpat School.
The history of psychology can be seen as a struggle
for a deWnition of the borderline separating psychological
issues allowing for an experimental approach and
issues that do not. Kant’s pessimistic dictum that “no
other thinking subject can be subjected to our experiments
in accordance with purpose” still captivated the
minds of most psychologists (Ramul, 1960). Many areas,
including that of human thought which Wundt believed
to remain terra incognita forever, were already emancipated
from Kant’s moratorium. Religious experience, as
attacked by the Dorpat School, certainly belonged to
those topic least expected to the subject of systematic
experimental analysis.
Concluding remarks
In 1919, after Estonia had obtained independence, Tartu
University became a national university with instruction
language being primarily Estonian. The Wrst professor of
psychology was Konstantin Ramul (1879–1975) who is
primarily known as a historian of psychology (Ramul,
1963; Ramul, 1974; Ramul, 1960). In 1921, one of
Ramul’s assistants Juhan Tork (1889–1980) 8 spent one
semester in Leipzig where he attended, among the others,
lectures of Wilhelm Wundt. Returning from Germany,
he brought with him equipment that was needed to
launch a laboratory of experimental psychology.
Although this laboratory mainly served for teaching purposes,
it played, together with Ramul’s general theoretical
attitudes (cf. Ramul, 1929), an essential constituent in
keeping the experimental research tradition alive even
during the period of Soviet occupation (Allik, 1992).
Without this tradition it would have been absolutely
improbable that in 2003, 48 articles were published in
Journals and other sources indexed by the PsychINFO
database with at least one author having an Estonian
aYliation. Divided by the number of population it gives
36.3 articles per million of population which is, for example,
only slightly less than the same indicator of
Germany (42.7) but a little bit more than that of France
(28.8). 9
8
Juhan Tork is an author of the most important psychological study
that was carried out between two wars. In 1940, he published doctoral
dissertation (Tork, 1940) on the intelligence of Estonian children
based on the study of 6,000 schoolchildren (cf. Must, Must, &
Raudik, 2003).
9
There were 3,527 and 1,732 articles of which one author either had
German or French aYliation, respectively.

625
Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dirk Vorberg and a reviewer
for valuable comments and suggestions.
References
Allik, J. (1992). Psychology in Estonia. News From EFPPA, 6, 7–10.
Allik, J., & Konstabel, K. (2005). G. F. Parrot and the theory of unconscious
inferences. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences,
41, 317–330.
Ash, M. G. (1995). Gestalt psychology in German culture 1890–1967:
Holism and the quest of objectivity. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge
University Press.
Ball, P. (2003). Chemist Wilhelm Ostwald added colour to the art
work. Nature, 425, 904.
Bauer, H. (1911). Die Psychologie Alhazens. Beiträge Zur Geschichte
Der Philosophie Des Mittelalters, 10, 29–32.
Boring, E. G. (1957). A history of experimental psychology. New
York: Appleton Century Crofts.
Burbeck, C. A., & Hadden, S. (1993). Scaled position integration areas—accounting
for Weber Law for separation. Journal of the
Optical Society of America: A-Optics Image Science and Vision,
10, 5–15.
Danziger, K. (1979). The positivist repudiation of Wundt. Journal of
the History of the Behavioral Science, 15, 205–230.
Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness explained. Boston: Little,
Brown and Company.
Domanski, C. W. (2004). A biographical note on Max Friedrich (1856–
1887), Wundt’s Wrst PhD student in experimental psychology. Journal
of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 40 (3), 311–317.
Drechsler, W. (1997). State socialism and political philosophy. In J.
G. Backhaus (Ed.), Essays on social security and taxation. Marburg:
Metropolis Verlag.
Drechsler, W., & Kattel, R. (2000). Karl Bücher in Dorpat. In J. G.
Backhaus (Ed.), Karl Bücher: Theory, history, anthropoly, non
market economics (pp. 11–72). Marburg: Metropolis Verlag.
Fulton, J. F. (1930). Selected readings in the history of physiology.
SpringWeld: Thomas.
Girgensohn, K. (1921). Der Seelisches Aufbau des Religiösen Erlebens.
Eine religionpsychologishe Untersuchung auf experimentaller
Grundlage. Lepzig: Hirzel.
Gruehn, W. (1956). Die Frömmigkeit der Gegenwart: Grundatsachen
der empirischen Psychologie. Constance: Friedrich Bahn.
HatWeld, G. (1998). Kant and empirical psychology in the 18th Century.
Psychological Science, 9, 423–428.
HatWeld, G. (2002). Perception as unconscious inference. In M. Heyer,
& R. Mansfeld (Eds.), Perception and the physical world: Psychological
and philosophical issues (pp. 115–143). New York: Wiley.
Helmholtz, H. v. (1896). Über die academische Freiheit der Deutschen
Univärsität. In H. v. Helmholtz (Ed.), Vorträge und Reden,
Vol. 2 (4th ed., pp. 191–212). Braunschweig: Vieweg.
Helmholtz, H. v. (1910). Handbuch der Physiologischen Optik. Hamburg:
Leopold Voss.
Henle, M. (1978). One man against the Nazis—Wolfgang Köhler.
American Psychologist, 33, 939–944.
James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology (2 vols.). New York:
Henry Holt.
Käbin, I. (1986). Die medizinische Forschung und Lehre an der Universität
Dorpat/Tartu 1802–1940. Lüneburg: Nordostdeutsches
Kulturwerk.
Kraepelin, E. (1987). Memoirs. Berlin Heidelberg New York: Springer.
Kreegipuu, K., & Allik, J. (2004). Confusion of space and time in the
Flash–Lag EVect. Perception, 33, 293–306.
Külpe, O. (1893). Grundriss der Psychologie. Auf experimenteller
Grundlage dargestellt. Lepzig: Wilhelm Engelmann.
Lõo, K. (2004). Wolfgang Köhleri seosed Eestiga [Wolfgang Köhler’s
connections with Estonia] (Unpublished Bachelor Thesis). Tartu:
Department of Psychology, University of Tartu.
Mach, E. (1922). Die Analyse der EmpWndungen und das Verhältnis
des Physischen zum Psychischen. Jena: Gustav Fischer.
Murphy, G. (1964). Historical introduction to modern psychology.
London: Routlage and Kegan Paul.
Must, O., Must, A., & Raudik, V. (2003). The secular rise in IQs: In
Estonia, the Flynn EVect is not a Jensen EVect. Intelligence, 31,
461–471.
Nijhawan, R. (1994). Motion extrapolation in catching. Nature, 370,
256–257.
Oettingen, A. J. v. (1866). Harmoniesystem in dualer Entwicklung:
Studien zur Theorie der Musik. Dorpat-Leipzig: W. Gläser.
Ostwald, W. (1918). Die Harmonie der Farben. Leipzig: Unesma.
Ostwald, W. (1926). Lebenslinien: Eine Selbstbiographie, Vol. 1. Berlin:
Klasing.
Parrot, G. F. (1811). Grundriss der theoretischen Physik zum Gebrauche
für Vorlesungen. Dorpat.
Parrot, G. F. (1820). Entretiens sur la physique. Dorpat: Schünmann.
Parrot, G. F. (1839). Notice sur un phénomène d’optique observé sur
les chemins de fer. Bulletin ScientiWque Publié Par L’Académie
Impériale Des Sciences De Saint-Pétersbourg, 6 (9–10), 138–141.
Petrov, G. M., & Pinigin, G. I. (2002). Karl Knorre, the Wrst astronomer
of Nikolaev Observatory (on the occasion of his Bicentenary).
Astronomische Nachrichten, 323, 559–561.
Piper, H.-F. (2000). Alfred Wilhelm Volkmann (1801–1877)—as sensory
physiologist: Blamed, appraised, remembered. XVIIIth
Convention of the Julius-Hirschberg-Gesellschaft. Innsbruck.
Ramul, K. (1929). Ueber nichtempirische Psychologie [Non-empirical
psychology]. Archiv Für Die Gesamte Psychologie, 73, 369–406.
Ramul, K. (1960). The problem of measurement in the psychology of
the eighteenth century. American Psychologist, 15, 256–265.
Ramul, K. (1963). Some early measurements and ratings in psychology.
American Psychologist, 18, 653–659.
Ramul, K. (1974). Iz istorij psikhologii [From history of psychology].
Tartu: Tartu Riiklik Ülikool.
Roback, A. A. (1961). History of psychology and psychiatry. London:
Vision.
Ross, J. (1991). Seebeck, Helmholtz, and Oettingen: Some brief remarks
to the history of modern psychoacoustics. In M. Kõiv
(Ed.), Jahrbuch der Estnischen Goethe-Gesellscahft (pp. 103–105).
Tartu: Estnische Goethe-Gesellschaft.
Sabra, A. I. (1989). The Optics of Ibn al-Hayatham, Books I-III. On
direct vision. Vol. 1: Translation. London: The Warburg Institute,
University of London.
Siilivask, K. Ed. (1982). Tartu Ülikooli ajalugu, II (1798–1918) [History
of Tartu University, Vol. II (1798–1918)]. Tallinn: Eesti Raamat.
Singer, C., & Underwood, E. (1962). A short history of medicine. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Steinberg, H., & Angermeyer, M. C. (2001). Emil Kraepelin’s years
at Dorpat as Professor of Psychiatry in nineteenth-century Russia.
History of Psychiatry, 12, 297–327.
Tchisch, W. v. (1885). Ueber die Zeitverhältnisse der Apperception
einfacher und zusammengesetzter Vorstellungen, untersucht mit
Hülfe der Complications-methode [On the time relationships involved
in the apperception of simple and combined Vorstellungen,
investigated with the aid of the complication method].
Philosophische Studien, 2, 603–634.
Tork, J. (1940). Eesti laste intelligents [The intelligence of Estonian
children]. Tartu: Koolivara.
Volkmann, A. W. (1836). Neue Beiträge zur Physiologie des Gesichtssinnes.
Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.
Volkmann, A. W. (1859). Das Tachistoscop, ein Instrument, welches
bei Untersuchung des momentanen Sehens des Gebrauch des
elektrischen Funkens ersetz. Berichte Über Die Verhandlungen
Der Königlichen Sächsischen Akedemie Der Vissenschaften Mathematische-Naturwissenscaftlichte
Klassen, 2, 90–98.
Wade, N. J. (1998). A natural history of vision. Cambridge, MA:
Bradford.
WulV, D. M. (1985). Experimental introspection and religious experience:
The Dorpat School of religious psychology. Journal for
the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 21, 131–150.
WulV, D. M. (1991). Psychology of religion. Classics and contemporary
views. New York: Wiley.
Wundt, W. (1858). Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung.
Leipzig.