Wilhelm Wundt, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The laboratory has a boundary, and I have marked it from the first. The simple processes of the individual consciousness — sensation, perception, attention, feeling, the reaction — can be brought under experimental control, because their conditions can be produced and varied at will.1 But the higher mental life does not arise in the isolated individual under controllable conditions; it arises only in the community and only over the long course of history.2
Language, myth, religion, custom, art, law — these are the mental products of peoples, formed by the interaction of many minds across generations, and no experiment can produce them or vary their conditions.3 To study them one must turn to the method proper to them: the historical and comparative study of their actual products, the tracing of their development across the peoples of the earth.
This is Völkerpsychologie, and it is not a supplement to experimental psychology but its necessary other half — the science of the higher and collective mind, standing to the experimental science of the elementary individual mind as history stands to physiology. A psychology that has only the laboratory has only the lower half of its subject.4
The same is true of feelings and volitions; they will be presented in the fofm best adapted to exact investigation when those impressions are purposely produced which experience has shown to be regularly connected with affective and volitional reactions. There is, then, no fundamental psychical process to which experimental 25 Introduction.Outlines of Psychology, pp. 56–57
So-called social psychology corresponds to the method of pure observation, the objects of observation in this case being the mental products. The necessary connection of these products with social communities, which has given to social psychology its name, is due to the fact that the mental products of the individual are of too variable a character to be the subjects of objective observation.Outlines of Psychology, pp. 57–58
The great importance of the experimental method, therefore, lies not simply in the fact that, here as in the physical realm, it enables us arbitrarily to vary the conditions of our observations, but also and essentially in the further fact that it makes observation itself possible for us.Principles of Physiological Psychology Vol I, pp. 5–6
Some uncertainty still prevailed, especially with regard to the relation of these studies to philosophy, and as to the method which psychology must follow when thus carried over into a new field. It was only gradually, as the psychological point of view gained ground in the special fields of research, that this condition was improved.Elements of Folk Psychology
Wundt's own conception of psychology as necessarily double — experimental for the elementary individual mind, cultural- historical for the higher and collective mind — and the half of his life's work most completely forgotten. The ten volumes of the Völkerpsychologie were scarcely translated and scarcely read in the Anglo-American world, which took Wundt to be the founder of the laboratory and nothing more; yet the work influenced anthropology and sociology (there are affinities with Durkheim's collective representations, and echoes in the early culture-and-personality tradition). The near-erasure of this half of Wundt's psychology is one of the clearest cases of a founder's actual program being lost in favor of a narrower image. Modern cultural, developmental, and historical psychology has renewed interest in his two-method conception as a prescient recognition that the mind is not wholly a laboratory object.