Gustav Fechner

James didn't create this concept in isolation.

He built upon key 19th century pioneers like Gustav Fechner, the founder of psychophysics.

In 1860, Fechner introduced the concept of the limen, the Latin word for threshold.

He suggested that mental energy acts like a wave.

When psychological activity rises above the threshold, it enters conscious awareness.

It began with so lowly a performance as judging by lifting which of a pair of weights was the heavier and plotting endless series of just observable differences.

It culminated in the psychophysics of Fechner, a strange fusion of a mystic and an exactist described by James as the patient whimsies of a dear old man to whom belongs the imperishable glory of setting psychology on the wrong tack.

Wundt's experimental explorations of the mental structure grew to comprehensive proportions.

They placed psychology on the academic map.

Such psychology, practiced as it were in vitro, has fallen short of clarifying the nature of perception in everyday life, much as did the old nerve-muscle psychophysiology fall short of explaining behavior in everyday life.

Both have been monumentally useful in their place.

The names of Weber, Fechner, Wundt, Titchener, Hecht, and Crozier are safely ensconced in any respectable psychological hall of fame.

But their work, like the work of the nerve-muscle men, is only a beginning.

Much has been said in the past decade concerning the tendency of pedagogy, following the footsteps of medicine, to pass beyond the purely speculative stage and base its conclusions on the positive results of experimentation.

Physiological and experimental psychology, which, from Weber and Fechner to Wundt, has become organized into a new science, seems destined to furnish to the new pedagogy that fundamental preparation which the old-time metaphysical psychology furnished to philosophical pedagogy.

Morphological anthropology applied to the physical study of children is also a strong element in the growth of the new pedagogy.

but in spite of all these tendencies, scientific pedagogy has never yet been definitely constructed nor defined.