A Brill Calendar: June 11

Few emblems for the growth of knowledge are as evocative as a tree.

It figures often as the imprint on products of publishers since the typographical multiplication of manuscripts; the Elsevier version taking pride of place among them. It can’t be a coincidence that the underlying metaphor was earlier used in genealogy: trees of knowledge are akin to family-trees; the Jesse version taking pride of place among them. Learning and scholarship encompass both distances in geographical space and in historical time.

The rise of psychology as a new branch of learning in second half of the 19th century confirms the archetype. Experimental psychology recognizes – without controversy – just one Founding Father, Wilhelm Wundt (1832 – 1920), disciple of the physiologist Von Helmholtz. With Wundt the lore of the psyche emancipates itself from a previous stage of study: love of wisdom: ‘philosophia’.

His Leipzig laboratory, first of its kind, attracted non-conformist students from all over Europe during the last quarter of the 19th century. In 1890 a young Englishman matriculated there: Edward Bradford Titchener (Chichester, Sussex June 11 1867 – Ithaca, New York, August 3 1927), who formulated and defended his Leipzig Doctoral Thesis successfully in 1892. The prestige of Prussian and German scholarship was hardly rivalled then, let alone surpassed, by academic traditions elsewhere. Immediately after receiving his doctorate, Titchener departed for the United States to spread the brand-new gospel of mind & brain from a Chair at Cornell University, Ithaca. This new domain of learning required an almost Herculean task of translation to in an Anglophone environment: Wundt’s apostle translated single-handedly some dozen seminal works from the original German into English.

When his rather short life ended, this foremost structural psychologist, systemizing Wundt’s work, had trans-nationalized a new division of the scholarly tree. Within half a century a bud at Leipzig had become a separate branch.