Helmholtz’s Contributions

Although Helmholtz was an empiricist in his expla- nations of sensation and perception, he did reflect the German Zeitgeist by postulating an active mind. According to Helmholtz, the mind’s task was to create a reasonably accurate conception of reality from the various “signs” that it receives from the body’s sensory systems. Helmholtz assumed that a dynamic relationship exists among volition, sensa- tion, and reflection as the mind attempts to create a functional view of external reality. Helmholtz’s view of the mind differed from that of most of the British empiricists and French sensationalists because they saw the mind as largely passive. For Helmholtz the mind’s job was to construct a work- able conception of reality given the incomplete and perhaps distorted information furnished by the senses (Turner, 1977).

Although Helmholtz did postulate an active mind, he accepted the empirical explanation of the origins of the contents of that mind. In his expla- nations of sensation (the mental event that results from sensory stimulation) and perception (sensa- tion plus unconscious inference), Helmholtz was emphatically empirical and unequivocally scientific. He showed that nerve transmission is not instanta- neous, as had previously been believed, but that it is rather slow and reflects the operation of physical processes. More than anyone before him, Helmholtz showed with experimental rigor the mechanisms by which we do commerce with the physical world— mechanisms that could be explained in terms of objective, physical laws. Although he found that the match between what is physically present and what is experienced psychologically is not perfect, he could explain the discrepancy in terms of the prop- erties of the receptor systems and the unconscious inferences of the observer. No mystical, unscientific forces were involved. Helmholtz’s work brought physics, chemistry, physiology, and psychology closer together. In so doing, it paved the way for the emergence of experimental psychology, which was in many ways an inevitable step after Helmholtz’s work. For an excellent discussion of Helmholtz’s contributions to modern science and of the cultural climate in which they were made.