Founders of Modern Psychology (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: GUSTAV THBODOR FECHNBB 1801-1887 Fechner sprang, on both his father's and mother's sides, from a line of rather liberal and cheerful Lutheran pastors, and this heritage made itself very strongly felt in his later and even middle life. His father, although a country pastor, was one of the first of his kind to feel the spirit of the Aufklarung, first to have a lightning rod on his ehurch, and not to wear a peruke in the pulpit, despite the excitement these innovations caused among his flock, whom he told that Jesus preached without a peruke. The father died when Fechner was in his fifth year. Theo- dor was sent to the Gymnasium at fourteen, and at sixteen began to study surgery and medicine at the University of Leipzig, and in this city he remained the rest of his life, rarely leaving it. It grew from 40,000 citizens within the promenade to a world city or "kleine Paris," and was called the heart of Germany. Fechner eked out the very slender means his mother could give him by giving lessons, making translations, and doing other kinds of literary work. In his early youth he planned to make literature his calling, and his temperament was always poetic and aesthetic. In the university, however, he became an avowed atheist until he read Oken's natural history, which brought him sudden and new light, and he became an enthusiastic disciple of Schelling, saying later that he was an apple that grew on Schelling's tree, although he fell some distance from it. Medicine then had no scientific method, and was evenmore entirely empirical than when Helmholtz wrote on "Thinking in Medicine," almost implying that there was none. Its practice consisted mainly in following certain prescribed and unexplained precepts. For one interested in the intellectual side of it, it was unsatisfying, and...