"The general statement that the mental faculties are class concepts, belonging to descriptive psychology, relieves us of the necessity of discussing them and their significance at the present stage of our inquiry"
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Wundt is doing something that looks like dry housekeeping but lands as a quiet power move: he cordons off “mental faculties” and treats them not as natural joints in the mind, but as bookkeeping categories invented by “descriptive psychology.” In one sentence he declines to litigate the classic faculty-psychology lineup (memory, attention, will) and, more importantly, deprives it of metaphysical glamour. If these faculties are “class concepts,” they’re useful labels for sorting experiences, not inner organs you can point to and declare foundational.
The intent is methodological triage. Wundt is building psychology as an experimental science, and the faculty tradition - inherited from philosophy and common sense - tempts you into endless armchair debates about what each faculty “really” is. By redefining faculties as taxonomic abstractions, he licenses himself to move on to what his project actually needs: measurable processes, relations, and conditions. The phrase “relieves us of the necessity” isn’t casual; it’s a rhetorical exit ramp, a way of telling the reader that certain venerable questions are now, for this inquiry, unproductive.
The subtext is a claim about intellectual maturity. Treating faculties as descriptive constructs implies that older psychology mistook its own categories for the mind’s structure. Wundt’s maneuver anticipates a modern suspicion: that many psychological “entities” are artifacts of language and classification. Contextually, it sits in late-19th-century psychology’s break from philosophical speculation toward laboratory method, where what you refuse to discuss is as revealing as what you measure.
The intent is methodological triage. Wundt is building psychology as an experimental science, and the faculty tradition - inherited from philosophy and common sense - tempts you into endless armchair debates about what each faculty “really” is. By redefining faculties as taxonomic abstractions, he licenses himself to move on to what his project actually needs: measurable processes, relations, and conditions. The phrase “relieves us of the necessity” isn’t casual; it’s a rhetorical exit ramp, a way of telling the reader that certain venerable questions are now, for this inquiry, unproductive.
The subtext is a claim about intellectual maturity. Treating faculties as descriptive constructs implies that older psychology mistook its own categories for the mind’s structure. Wundt’s maneuver anticipates a modern suspicion: that many psychological “entities” are artifacts of language and classification. Contextually, it sits in late-19th-century psychology’s break from philosophical speculation toward laboratory method, where what you refuse to discuss is as revealing as what you measure.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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