'McDougall had arrived at his conclusions not primarily through experimental or anatomical study of nerves, but that of his own sensory impressions. After a period on the Cambridge University-led Torres' Strait expedition and a short-lived career in medicine, he had sought out the Göttingen psychologist Georg Elias Müller, whom he later described as 'then the leading exponent of the exact laboratory methods in psychology' (McDougall 1961, 203). This training had brought him into contact with the few British psychologists who had begun to engage psychological experimentation including W.H.R. Rivers, and James Sully. In an effort to import the German tradition of experimental study of mind to Britain, Sully had in 1897 acquired a set of laboratory equipment from Hugo Münsterberg that the latter had created for his own psychological laboratory in Freiburg (Valentine 1999, 212-213). Without experimental training of his own, Sully persuaded McDougall to return to Britain to take up research at University College London. This in 1903 led to McDougall's appointment there in the newly-created post of Reader in Experimental Psychology. McDougall thereby spent the first years of the twentieth century living in a small house on the Surrey Downs, engaging with a set of tools developed within the then-emerging German tradition of psychological research, and adapting his conclusions regarding these to the British context (McDougall 1961, 205).'

'Müller's Göttingen laboratory had been well stocked with equipment developed for the study of colour vision via illusion, and Münsterberg's wide range of devices for sensory and particularly visual experimentation at Freiburg has already been referred to (McDougall 1961, 204-205; Schmidgen, n.d.).'

Relevant passage from McDougall:

'I read Wundt's books and found them very dusty. I read also Külpe, Ziehen, Münsterberg, Höffding, Bain, Hobhouse, Lloyd Morgan, Ward, Stout, and Lotze. Of all these authors, Stout and Lotze seemed to yield more nutriment than the others. Among all the German philosophical writers I had sampled, Lotze was the only one who stirred me to something like enthusiasm. I attended lectures by Henry Sidgwick and James Ward. I was certain that there was something very much at fault in contemporary psychology; but I could not define the fault. I decided I must make first-hand acquaintance with the psychology and psychologists of Europe. I inclined to visit Janet, Bernheim, Kraepelin, and Freud ; but, under the advice of Ward (one of the very few instances in which I have accepted advice), I chose to sit under G. E. Müller at Göttingen, then the leading exponent of the exact laboratory methods in psychology. My choice was partly determined by what might seem an irrelevant consideration. I had, against my principles, fallen suddenly in love and become engaged to marry; and Göttingen promised to be a better scene for a year's honeymoon than Paris, Vienna, or other large city. We spent a delightful year in quaint, quiet Göttingen. My marriage at the comparatively early age of twenty-nine was against my considered principles; for I held that a man whose chosen business in life was to develop to the utmost his intellectual powers should not marry before forty, if at all. But nature was too strong for principles; and I have never regretted the step. It might be thought that for a charming young girl to marry an intellectual monstrosity like myself would be like making a bedfellow of a hedge-hog. But my wife has proved equal to the task she undertook. In intellect and temperament we were as unlike as possible, pure complementaries: I introverted, reserved, outwardly cold and arrogant, severely disciplined, absorbed in abstruse intellectualities; she extroverted, all warmth and sympathy and charm and intuitive understanding. To do one's duty by a wife and five children does require the expenditure of considerable time and energy that might possibly be given to purely intellectual tasks. But I have always found delight and recreation in my home; I have never ceased to grow more grateful to my wife for her influence upon me and her perfect exercise of the privileges of her position; and I realize that she has saved me from entanglements which, if I had followed my principle, might well have wrecked me. Then, too, I have learned more psychology from her intuitive understanding of persons than from any, perhaps all, of the great authors. I venture to think that the success of our marriage has been partly due to my recognition that the intellectual is apt to ruin his domestic relations by permitting himself to regard them as of less importance than his work. At a very early stage I resolved to avoid that error.

At Göttingen I followed Müller's lectures on psychophysics and on the experimental investigation of memory. They were admirably thorough and detailed. Yet I felt sure that these were not the main lines of progress for psychology. I was, then, not in close intellectual sympathy with Müller, though I admired his thoroughness, his energy and honesty and enthusiasm; and he and his wife treated us very graciously.

In my last year as an undergraduate at Cambridge, W. H. R. Rivers had entered on his duties as lecturer in the physiology of the sense-organs. He had recently returned from a long period of study under Kraepelin and Ewald Hering. Of the latter's theories he was an enthusiastic exponent. Those theories were in line with much, of the work of W. H. Gaskell, whose lectures at Cambridge I had greatly appreciated. And those theories were then dominant in the physiological and psychological circles of Germany, England, and America. At first I was much inclined to agree. But I soon rebelled, and began independent experiments in the field of light-and- color-vision, experiments which soon convinced me that Hering was on a wholly false line. I seemed also to see that his most fundamental physiological principles were wholly untenable.

This rebellion illustrates a tendency of my nature which has, I think, played a principal part in determining my lines of thought and work. It is allied to, but not wholly to be identified with, the arrogance which I have already mentioned. Whenever I have found a theory widely accepted in the scientific world, and especially when it has acquired something of the nature of a popular dogma among scientists, I have found myself repelled into skepticism. This tendency had already led me to espouse the cause of psychophysical interaction, as against the then popular and orthodox parallelism and epiphenomenalism. Now it led me to active rebellion against the dominant theories of Hering.

At Göttingen I carried on intensively my observations in the field of color-vision, finding the laboratory well equipped, owing to Muller's active interest in that field. I worked also on the development of a method for studying the problem of divided attention: for the singleness and limitation of the field of attention seemed to present problems of fundamental importance. Müller had written on both these topics, and, as usual, I found myself in opposition to his views.

At University College, London, James Sully had acquired, when Münsterberg went to Harvard, the apparatus which that distinguished pioneer had gathered in his laboratory at Freiburg. Sully's knowledge of the field of psychology was wide and deep, but he had not the least training for laboratory work. He desired to find a man to teach laboratory methods and had invited me to attempt this task. I undertook to give each year a short course of lecture-demonstrations, one meeting a week during one term only and at a nominal salary. In order to take up this work we returned to England and settled at the end of 1900 in a delightfully situated small house on the Surrey Downs near Haslemere. My very light teaching duties left me ample time for study. I read widely, especially in history, as preparation for an eventual Social Psychology. I also became interested in psychical research ; and I wrote a number of long and careful reviews of important books, an excellent exercise for a young man. But my chief work of this, my most productive period, was experimental. I made a laboratory of two attic rooms in my house; and there during four years I carried on the most enjoyable and profitable of my experimental researches, mostly in the field of vision.

As I conceived it, I was carrying on my attack on the secrets of human nature along both the possible lines. I would burrow in from below by penetrating the nature of the retino-cerebral processes. I would at the same time approach those secrets from above by continuing to study the phenomena of attention.

These studies issued in a series of papers, all of which fell in the province of physiological psychology as I conceived it. I continued to hold the view of the psychophysical relation which I had suggested in my first paper of 1899, namely, the view that the psychical qualities are engendered by (or as would now be said, "emerge from") the complex conjunctions of brain-processes (now called "configurations") but not as mere epiphenomena, rather as synthetic wholes that react upon the physical events of the brain or have causal efficacy within the whole complex psychophysical event. About half of these papers were concerned with particular problems in the psychophysics of vision; the other half were more speculative and concerned with the general functioning of the brain, the synaptic functions, inhibition, and the phenomena of attention. I also found opportunities to study the phenomena of hypnosis and to see mental and nervous cases.

Most of my papers seemed to be still-born; but at that time I was not troubled by the fact. It was not that I was indifferent to recognition; but I had the naive belief that sound and original work is sure of recognition in the long run. To some extent this belief was justified, for it was in the main the papers of this period that led at a later date to my election to the Royal Society. But there were only two or three persons in Great Britain interested in the special problems with which I was busy. German academic circles were hardly accessible to British contributions; those of America were dominated by the Germans; and, in both, Hering's views were orthodox. In the field of visual theory I had found it necessary to reject both Hering and Helmholtz (whose rival views had for more than a generation occupied the field) and to go back to Thomas Young. As regards the general functioning of the brain, I could not accept the view then and still now current among the physiologists, namely, that each neuron merely transmits to its neighbors a stimulus. It seemed to me clear that the beginning of all understanding of brain-functioning was to regard the brain as the seat of action of fields of energy, within which fields there was widespread reciprocal influence and free flow of energy from part to part. In both my main interests, then, I was as usual opposed to the popular or orthodox views. In consequence, most of my contributions of that period have remained buried in their original depositories.' (203-206)