My first period of work in W�rzburg, lasting for nine years, was the most pleasant period of my academic career.� The teaching went very well.� During the first semester (the Summer Semester of 1896) I gave a one-hour public course on Arthur Schopenhauer and, during the second semester, a private colloquium on the general history of philosophy.� The next semester I taught Ethics. It was only gradually that I undertook the teaching of psychology also.� The [p.194] teaching and my successes gave me much pleasure. At that time, already, as I do today, I attached particular importance to expressing myself clearly and understandably, while at the same time presenting as much material as possible.� K�lpe, who was himself a popular and respected teacher, was far from envying me my effectiveness; on the contrary, he seemed to rejoice in it almost more than I did.
Already, during my third stay in Bonn, I had devoted myself to a certain type of teaching with great pleasure. I not only helped Martius in his work in his private institute but also prepared many friends and other students who were working toward their degrees in Bonn for the doctor's examination.� The situation was that everyone whose main subject was not philosophy (and it was but rarely that a philosophy major came to Bonn at that time!) had to be examined for half an hour in philosophy during the doctor's examination.� Philologists, chemists, in short, everyone who wished to obtain the doctorate, thus also had to undergo an examination in philosophy. Since many students were naturally not at all suited to this field and since most of them had not attended philosophical lectures and moreover had not even covered the field, a philosophical coach for the philosophical portion of the doctor's examination was much in demand at that time. Since it was already pretty well known what the three regular professors of philosophy usually asked in the doctor's examination, and since they were also willing to have the students take a special, not too large field as the subject in which they wished to be examined, I did not find the coaching, which I regarded as a sort of sport and for which I never accepted pay, too hard.
Today, also, teaching has undeniable attraction for me, but my manifold scientific interests and other tasks somewhat limited the pleasure of instructing. My lecture courses today I usually enjoy only while I am on the platform, though I am as enthusiastic about teaching in the Institute and in seminars as I was before.
My scientific activity during my first stay in W�rzburg was expressed in a series of publications on psychological optics, in which I entered partly into opposition with G�tz Martius.� I also pointed out at this time in an essay in Pfl�ger's Archiv f�r die gesamte Psychologie (1903, 100, pp. 551 ff.) that Talbot's law and all facts connected with it are valid and must be valid in the [p. 195] field of acoustics also.� That during my first stay in W�rzburg I also did research in the psychology and the esthetics of language I have already stated above.
In my work, Naturphilosophische Untersuchungen zur Wahrscheinlichkeitslehre (Leipzig, 1899), I approached a very different field.� In school I had already become familiar with the elements of the calculation of probability.� In the work mentioned above, I treated, as d'Alembert had done before me, the problem of the agreement of experience with the expectations to be cherished on the basis of the so-called a priori consideration of the probabilities.� These studies I resumed in my two-volume work to be mentioned later, Die Gleichformigkeit in der Welt (M�nchen, 1916-1919), in which I was also able to utilize my work with Thumb, Experimentelle Untersuchungen �ber die psychologischen Grundlagen der sprachlichen Analogiebildung (Leipzig, 1901), mentioned above, and other later publications of mine connected with it.
In my work with Thumb, belonging in my first W�rzburg period, it was shown for the first time that the association reactions of a rather large number of subjects in response to the same stimulus word were to a large degree the same.� There are always the most preferred, next preferred, etc., reactions, and finally some which are purely idiosyncratic (auseinanderfallend).� There was also revealed the law of familiarity (Gel�ufigkeitsgesetz) according to which, on the average, the more familiar a reaction is, i.e., the larger the number of subjects, relatively, in whom it occurs, the more rapidly it occurs.� These and allied facts have found their way into many other writings and have also led to the so-called association test, since it has been found that it is possible to draw certain conclusions from the fact of whether a subject does or does not conform to the general regularity of the process of association.� Linguistically the work showed that the words which in the history of language have influenced each other in the direction of linguistic analogy formation are at the same time those which show themselves to belong together on the basis of the association experiments.
My strongest influence, however, during my first stay in W�rzburg was probably exercised through my work, Experimentellpsychologische Untersuchungen �ber das Urteil (Eine Einleitung in die Logik) (Leipzig, 1901). �Studies in logic had shown me that the logicians have widely varying opinions on the psychological nature [p. 196] of judgment.� I therefore determined to investigate the nature of judgment from a purely psychological point of view.� I requested several trained subjects, under quite definite conditions set by myself, to make judgments and to give accounts of the conscious processes which occurred while they were judging.� The large amount of material which I obtained in this way showed that all the prevailing psychological theories of judgment, including W. Wundt's�that it is an analysis of a total concept into its parts�were erroneous.� In fact, I came to the conclusion that no psychological criterion of judgment existed.� Many judgments of the utmost practical importance seem to take place quite reflexly, as it were, or automatically.� The merchant or the mathematician who adds 2 and 7 and obtains the answer 9 carries out this judgment process without the presence, or need for the presence, of experiences particularly characterizing judgment.� Many psychological considerations and experiments which had paved the way for this work also led me at that time to the concept of "conscious set" (Bewusstseinslage). �It appeared that a reduction of the whole conscious life to sense perceptions, memory images, and feelings of pleasantness and unpleasantness, such as was the rule at the time, was entirely inadequate, and that quite different experiences exist which are not, or are not yet, accessible to analysis, and which I designated as conscious sets.� In my work at that time I discussed the conscious set of doubt, of uncertainty, of expectation, of surprise, of agreement, of recognition, and many other conscious sets.� The "feelings" of tension and relaxation and other experiences described by Wundt as feelings were accordingly classed in my work under the head of conscious sets.� More obvious conscious sets, too, such as the recollection of conversations, were deduced by me from my experimental records.� Others have subsequently used the expressions "consciousness" (Bewusstheit) and "thoughts" (Gedanken) for the whole or parts of what I designated as conscious sets.
This essay, in which the consciousness of understanding, also, was explicitly discussed on the basis of experiments and which dates the beginning of my opposition to Wundt, who until then had always been very fond of me, is the first work in which the psychology of thinking is systematically and experimentally treated.� That its results are by no means all negative, as someone recently stated them to be, is already shown by my theory of conscious sets.� [p. 197] My methodological procedure was likewise entirely new.� That there cannot, however, be a positive criterion of judgment follows from the fact that the concept of judgment must be conceived as a logical and not as a psychological one.� As I have explicitly shown in the essay referred to, whether conscious phenomena should or should not be treated as judgments depends upon the meaning (Sinn) we attribute to them, but not upon their psychological structure.� This meaning may be but is not necessarily given in consciousness in the form of conscious states (Beswusstseinslagen). �Also, the value of a judgment for science and for practical life is in no way dependent upon the conscious processes which represent the judgment, but solely upon whatever we wish to express through the judgment, although of course this desire for expression need not necessarily be really conscious at every moment.� The merchant into whose calculation the proposition "twice two is four" blends quite automatically is, of course, making a judgment just as truly as is the A-B-C-scout (Abc-Sch�tze�first grader) who painfully works out this proposition.
This essay led K�lpe to assign to Mr. H. J. Watt and Mr. A. Messer further subjects in the field of the psychology of thought. I was somewhat vexed by this, perhaps somewhat unjustly, and did not like to see the psychology of thought, which at the time lay very close to my heart, being led into fields in which I could not make my full influence felt.� When, in the Spring of 1905, before Watt and Messer had yet completed their work, I responded to a call to Frankfort, K. B�hler, too, came to W�rzburg, and worked on the psychology of thought afresh, entirely under K�lpe.� Also, K�lpe assigned his students still further studies in the psychology of thought.� Finally he, too, first in the Fifth Congress of the Gesellschaft f�r experimentelle Psychologie (1912) in Berlin, then in the lnternationale Monatschrift f�r Wissenschaft, Kunst, und Technik (also in 1912), and finally in his philosophical book, Die Realisierung (Leipzig, 1912), took a stand in regard to the psychology of thought.� He finally spoke of the "monarchistic arrangement" of our consciousness and said: "The Ego sits upon the throne and carries out governmental acts.� It observes, perceives, and ascertains."� Although I had previously intended to do so, I did not work specifically any more on the psychology of thought, but in an essay (Fortschritte der Psychologie und ihrer Anwendungen, [p. 198] 1915, 3, 27) I did reject, sharply and on the basis of explicit reasons, the course which the psychology of thought was taking under, after having previously repeatedly expressed my concern to him verbally, without success even though without actual contradiction on K�lpe's part.� For this essay, which had been directly stimulated by the avowed performances of K�lpe and which appeared shortly before his death (1915), K�lpe never forgave me.
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In this essay I also emphasized my independence of K�lpe in this field.� Much as I owe him, I have never been his student.� I never attended a single lecture of his and never took part in the laboratory work which he directed.� I was never his assistant and never worked in fields which he had suggested to me or in which he had previously worked himself.� And if I have ever been independent in anything it has been in having arrived independently at the idea of applying the method of systematic introspection (Selbstwahrnehmung) to the study of logical thought. Although K�lpe acted as a subject in my experiments on the psychology of thought, this fact showed only that he was interested in this work, as in all my work at that time.
Taking over ideas from other people to develop them has never been my interest.� It is only in independent work that I really feel at ease; from the start I have emphasized the attainment of new facts, trying at the same time to pursue the study of psychology in as exact a way as possible.� I was animated by this striving when I tried to place the psychology of thought upon an experimental basis.� When a younger psychologist wrote that the striving after precision was the weakness of my school, I gladly accepted this reproach, since I regard it as the highest praise by which our work can be distinguished.� I necessarily disapproved, however, when another psychologist, in the course of a scientific discussion, attempted to disparage the direction of my researches by using the expression "fact finding" (Tatsachenforschung). �In my opinion, theories have a place in science only in so far as they explain facts or have a heuristic significance for the obtainment of new facts.
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I naturally regret very much that I displeased K�lpe in the essay I have mentioned in the Fortschritte der Psychologie und ihrer Anwendungen. �Perhaps after all I should have been more cautious in my choice of words, although, before having it printed, I had the essay read through by my wife and by a professional psychologist [p. 199] who now holds a regular professorship, and although I took into account, to a large extent even though not completely, the mitigations of expression which were suggested to me.� For the rest, K�lpe, when I read him the most important parts of the manuscript of my essay, Experimentelle-psychologische Untersuchungen �ber das Urteil, with which I desired to found a systematic psychology of logical thought, was at first very enthusiastic.� The fact that he then turned aside from me with his school was undoubtedly due to the circumstance that, when K�lpe was further developing the psychology of thought, I was no longer in W�rzburg but in Frankfort, and that he now yielded to other influences than mine.
One of the reasons why I found my first stay in W�rzburg very satisfying was that, in agreement with K�lpe, I was able to stimulate independently some work by students, to guide it, and to lead it to conclusion.� The fact that the number of auditors at my lectures declined after a few semesters and only gradually increased again I cannot regard as evidence against my statement that I was a successful teacher.
This decline is to be explained as follows.� I was baptized and brought up as a Catholic and bore a name which had a very good sound in Catholic-ecclesiastical circles.� An uncle of mine was a Central representative in the Reichstag and in the Bavarian Diet.� I myself had gone beyond any Catholic or even generally religious attitude, since my school days.� My name, however, attracted at first a large number of incipient Catholic theologians to my lecture room.� These soon perceived, however, that I was not, as they had probably at first expected I would be, a representative of the Catholic attitude toward the world.
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My leaning toward complete freedom also became known far and wide through an occurrence which is not without interest.� In a public lecture on the problem of causality, I had occasion to discuss in great detail the cosmological evidence of God, and also to characterize briefly the other arguments for God.� In this connection I contested the stringency of these arguments (in the Kantian manner) without otherwise entering into the question of the existence of God.� In March, 1898, one of the many rural and priestly representatives then belonging to the Diet made a long, spready speech culminating in the assertion that a teacher in one of the Bavarian upper schools had said before his class, "We do not need [p. 200] to discuss the evidence for the existence of God, for there is no God."� This reputed statement was discussed in detail everywhere by the speaker himself and by several of his colleagues.� It was said that evidence of the existence of God had been suppressed, and that there had been dishonesty, pedagogical tactlessness, and other nice things.� Only v. Landmann, the minister of public worship and education, who likewise was close to the centrist party, maintained that such debates never led anywhere.� Since the aforementioned attacks of the representatives bore upon my person and my lecture on the problem of causality, he then had me make a written report on the occurrence.� At the same time, all available students of mine were questioned on the content of that lecture.� This questioning led to the finding that neither this statement nor any statement of similar meaning had been made in my lecture.� Thus, all the gossip in the Diet resolved itself into idle talk at the cost of the Bavarian taxpayers, and the instigator of it, after being sharply reprimanded, was obliged to make a public acknowledgment of his mistake.� One of my auditors had told a clergyman about the content of the lecture in question, and then, through the spreading of gossip (according to the well-known facts of the psychology of rumor), there developed a statement which was entirely nonsensical and almost the opposite of what I had said.� Although the matter was thus settled very favorably to me, I was nevertheless branded in the eyes of many who had originally been well disposed toward me.� Auditors with Catholic tendencies all removed themselves from me at first.� They were replaced by others, and in the course of the following semesters confirmed Catholics also again appeared at my lectures.
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During my first stay in W�rzburg, I also began to work into the field of pedagogy.� Even in Leipzig my attention had been called, through talks with Meumann, to the possibility of applying modern psychology to pedagogy.� Also, K�lpe had suggested to a student by the name of Johann Freidrich a thesis on the effects of duration of work and pauses in work on the mental achievement of school-children.� This study later appeared in Volume 13 of the Zeitschrift f�r Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane (1897, pp. 1 ff.).� I had also obtained some information from other experimental-pedagogical studies.� At that time I still knew very little about these matters, however.� It was not until I came under the influence of Meumann's book (Vorlesungen zur Einf�hrung in die experimentelle [p. 201] Pedagogik und ihre psychologischen Grundlagen, 1st ed., Leipzig, 1907) that I acquired a stronger interest in psychological questions in the field of education and instruction.� And later I not only assigned to my students many dissertation topics relating to psychological pedagogics but I also worked in this field again and again.� Thus, in the study already mentioned on psychotechnical and practical ability, I showed to what a great extent the achievements of children in the same grade at school depend upon their chronological age.� Finally, in association with Ludwig Sell (Zeitschrift f�r Psychologie, 1931, 122, pp. 177 ff. and pp. 188 ff.), I also studied the dependence of school achievements upon the environment and upon the occupation of the parents of the children.
Still less did I understand, during my first teaching period in W�rzburg, of the history of pedagogy, which I had not yet studied at all.� The historical study of pedagogy and with it my general pedagogical interest were well set on the road, however, by an external circumstance.� The W�rzburg professor of pedagogy, Lorenz Grassberger, who has become known through his work on education in ancient times, had retired from his teaching in the year 1901.� The position could not immediately be filled.� The history of pedagogy absolutely had to be given, however, at least for one semester of the year.� At the end of the Winter Semester of 1901-1902, Professor Martin Schanz, then rector, known through his studies on Plato and through his history of Roman literature, came to me and urgently requested me to give a course in the history of pedagogy.� My objection, that I knew nothing about the subject, was not allowed to prevail, and finally I consented.� Immediately and during the subsequent vacation and during the Summer Semester of 1902 I read pedagogical classics and textbooks almost day and night, and in the same Summer Semester I gave a four-hour course in the history of pedagogy which, while certainly not the work of a trained professional, was nevertheless quite adequate.
In Frankfort, to which I moved, as stated, in the year 1905, I had the opportunity, with large means placed at my disposal, to establish a Psychological Institute and a notable philosophical seminar.� In addition to working on my soot method (Russmethode) I was busy with quite different problems there too.� Specifically, I began in Frankfort to work on my philosophical essays, which I published under the title of "Beitr�ge zur Logik und ihren Grenzwissenschaften" [p. 202] in the years 1906-1912 in the Vierteljahrschrift f�r wissenschaftliche Philosophie und Soziologie.
During my stay in Frankfort, where I also took a very active part in the upper-school affairs of the Academy, which was then evolving into a university, and where, as already stated, I was planning many practical applications of my soot method, my practical tendencies began, for the first time, to develop strongly�tendencies which subsequently, during my second stay in W�rzburg, were even more strongly brought out through my legal involvement, the influence of American industrial psychology, and other agencies.
In Frankfort, too, I stimulated various scientific studies by students.� Here, too, I found satisfaction in teaching, although the satisfaction was not as strong as it had been during my first, and was again during my second, stay in W�rzburg.� The auditors of the new Frankfort upper school (Hochschule) consisted of young commercial high school students, high school teachers, high school superintendents, physicians, society ladies, and people from many other circles.� Although I was able to be effective through my suggestions in the Institute, it was nevertheless very diffcult [sic] to offer in the lectures something which should be equally satisfying to all the different elements of which my audience consisted.
I must not neglect to state that, in Frankfort, at the age of 38, I married the painter, Milly Fries, the daughter of a Frankfort manufacturer, who has very zealously continued her activity to this day, and who since her marriage has been exhibiting under the name of Milly Marbe-Fries.� Although my marriage has remained childless, it has nevertheless been a very happy one.
Having returned to W�rzburg in the year 1908, I worked (besides doing much other writing of which I have already spoken in part) particularly on my two-volume work, Die Gleichformigkeit in der Welt (Munich, 1916-1919), in which I discussed from the most varied points of view the problem of uniformity, to which I had been led by the consideration of probability and by studies on association.� It had already been shown in my essay with Thumb that, the reactions of subjects in association experiments are concordant to a very large extent, and now I was able to show in addition that the behavior of human beings, when they are subjected to similar conditions, reveals striking similarities or uniformities to a greater extent than it was previously assumed to do.
[p. 203] During my second stay in W�rzburg I also wrote my essay on animal psychology, "Die Rechenkunst der Schimpansin Basso im Frankfurter Zoologischen Garten" (Fortschritte der Psychologie und ihrer Anwendungen, 1917, 4, 135-186).� This animal had brought thousands and hundreds of thousands of people into the Frankfort zoo to admire its arithmetical skill.� Before her lay a pile of little tablets upon which the numbers from 1 to 10 had been written.� Then the caretaker said, for example, "Basso, how much is 10 minus 8?" whereupon the chimpanzee took a tablet into her hand upon which stood the number 2.� The caretaker thought that he had systematically instructed Basso in arithmetic, but then became convinced that, after all, her achievements were due not to instruction but rather to thought transference.� The superintendent of the zoo was not able to account for the behavior of the chimpanzee.� And when, while I was temporarily staying in Frankfort, I had occasion to see Basso at work, I too was completely at a loss.� Through systematic investigations which the superintendent of the zoo permitted me to conduct, I was finally easily able to show, however, that with his questions the keeper combined involuntary and unconscious movements, on the basis of which Basso figured correctly. Thus what was here revealed was essentially the same as what had been established previously by Pfungst when he was studying Clever Hans, the calculating horse of Mr. von Osten in Berlin.
Subsequently I have used this study, in which I also treated more general questions in animal psychology, again and again as a point of departure of the emphatic statement that it is only through systematic experiments and not through mere observation that apparently mysterious performances of human beings and animals can be solved.
I have tried in many other writings, also, to reduce occultistic statements to their proper scope by means of an exact scientific attitude.� I treated in this way the problem of the wishing rod (W�nschelrute), among other problems.� Unfortunately, however, I cannot maintain that I have achieved anything in a practical way by my fight against occultism.� The mob's craving for sensation, especially in periods of economic depression such as we have had to experience in Germany since the War, is far too strong to be shaken by the sober expositions of a scholar.� I found out, inevitably, in this as in other fields, that faith is much stronger than science.
It was not until the time of my second stay in W�rzburg that I [p. 204] attained a following on a larger scale.� A large number of studies of the most varied kinds issued from my Institute here.� Slips of the pen, the problem of instruction in languages, the testimony of witnesses, the psychology of lying, musicalness, the psychology of the deaf and dumb, and many other quite different matters were investigated by my students under my direction.� Some of these studies have appeared in the five volumes of my Fortschritte der Psychologie und ihrer Anwendungen (1913-1922).� Other studies have been printed in other journals, mainly in the Archiv f�r die gesamte Psychologie, in the Zeitschrift fur Psychologie, and in the Psychotechnische Zeitschrift. �About 90 doctors' theses and other publications by my collaborators have come out of my W�rzburger Institute, not including the many studies by my assistants.� My own studies have been published in psychological, philosophical, natural science, legal, and medical journals.� Many studies by me which are not mentioned in the present article have been listed under "Marbe" in the "Psychological Register," edited by Professor Carl Murchison.� Many have not been mentioned there either.
I have certainly come to realize more and more clearly that fame is not an advantage, but rather a disadvantage, and that in particular to flirt with the practical calls forth a mass of inquiries, correspondence, and studies which one would often be very glad to do without.� Therefore, as already indicated above, my practical ambitions have gradually been receding.� At present I am again turning toward philosophical problems, so far as other unavoidable tasks permit.