Georg Elias Müller- External URL
- Born
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Date: 20 Jul 1850
- Died
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Date: 23 Dec 1934
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Born
20 Jul 1850
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Died
23 Dec 1934
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Related toW. McDougall, 'William McDougall', in C. Murchison (ed.) A History of Psychology in Autobiography' (Vol. I) (Clark University Press; Worcester, MA, 1930), pp. 191-223.
Description:'I decided I must make first-hand acquaintances with the psychology and psychologists of Europe... 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 irrelevent 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.' (203)
'At Göttingen I followed Müller's lectures on psychophysics and on the experimental investigation of memory.... Yet I was, then, not in close intellectual sympathy with Müller...
In my last year as an undergraduate at Cambridge, W.H.R. Rivers had entered on his duties as a 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 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 colour-vision, exoeriments 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.
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At Göttingen I carried on intensively my observations in the field of colour-vision, finding the laboratory well equipped, owing to Müller's active interest in that field. I worked also on the development of a method for studying divided attention... Müller had written on both these topics, and, as usual, I found myself in opposition to his views.' (204-205)
