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Reception by his contemporaries

The psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin described the pioneering spirit at the new Leipzig Institute in this fashion: "We felt that we were trailblazers entering virgin territory, like creators of a science with undreamt-of prospects. Wundt spent several afternoons every week in his adjacent modest Professorial office, came to see us, advised us and often got involved in the experiments; he was also available to us at any time."

The philosopher Rudolf Eisler considered Wundt's approach as follows: "A major advantage of Wundt's philosophy is that it neither consciously nor unconsciously takes metaphysics back to its beginnings, but strictly distinguishes between empirical-scientific and epistemological-metaphysical approaches, and considers each point-of-view in isolation in its relative legitimacy before finally producing a uniform world view. Wundt always differentiates between the physical-physiological and the purely psychological, and then again from the philosophical point-of-view. As a result, apparent 'contradictions' are created for those who do not observe more precisely and who constantly forget that the differences in results are only due to the approach and not the laws of reality..." Traugott Oesterreich (1923/1951) wrote an unusually detailed description of Wundt's work in his Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie (Foundations of the History of Philosophy). This knowledgeable representation examines Wundt's main topics, views and scientific activities and exceeds the generally much briefer Wundt reception within the field of psychology, in which many of the important prerequisites and references are ignored right from the start.

The internal consistency of Wundt's work from 1862 to 1920, between the main works and within the reworked editions, has repeatedly been discussed and been subject to differing assessments in parts. One could not say that the scientific conception of psychology underwent a fundamental revision of principal ideas and central postulates, though there was gradual development and a change in emphasis. One could consider Wundt's gradual concurrence with Kant's position, that conscious processes are not measurable on the basis of self-observation and cannot be mathematically formulated, to be a major divergence. Wundt, however, never claimed that psychology could be advanced through experiment and measurement alone, but had already stressed in 1862 that the development history of the mind and comparative psychology should provide some assistance.

Wundt attempted to redefine and restructure the fields of psychology and philosophy. "Experimental psychology in the narrower sense and child psychology form individual psychology, while cultural and animal psychology are both parts of a general and comparative psychology"). None of his Leipzig assistants and hardly any textbook authors in the subsequent two generations have adopted Wundt's broad theoretical horizon, his demanding scientific theory or the multi-method approach. Oswald Külpe had already ruled cultural and animal psychology out.

While the Principles of physiological Psychology met with worldwide resonance, Wundt's cultural psychology (ethno-psychology) appeared to have had a less widespread impact. But there are indications that George Herbert Mead and Franz Boas, among others, were influenced by it. In his Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud frequently quoted Wundt's cultural psychology. In its time, Wundt's Ethik received more reviews than almost any of his other main works. Most of the objections were ranged against his renouncing any ultimate transcendental ethical basis (God, the Absolute), as well as against his ideas regarding evolution, i.e. that ethical standards changed culturally in the course of human intellectual development. As Wundt did not describe any concrete ethical conflicts on the basis of examples and did not describe any social ethics in particular, his teachings with the general idea of humanism appear rather too abstract.

The XXII International Congress for Psychology in Leipzig in 1980, i.e. on the hundredth jubilee of the initial founding of the institute in 1879, stimulated a number of publications about Wundt, also in the US Very little productive research work has been carried out since then. While Wundt was occasionally mentioned in the centenary review of the founding of the German Society for Experimental Psychology 1904/2004, it was without the principal ideas of his psychology and philosophy of science.