Beginnings

Before psychology had schools, it had to prove that it could exist: that something can be found out about the mind which is neither philosophy nor physiology. The three files in this folder are three answers to that one question — an institute, a self-experiment, a book.

Wundt gave the field a laboratory in Leipzig, a journal and its first training; Ebbinghaus showed on himself that even memory has a measurable curve; James wrote the work that sorted the century’s questions, and mistrusted the brass instruments of the laboratories at the same time.

For an archive of replication this folder is the touchstone from the other side: here lies the house’s oldest finding — and precisely it, the forgetting curve of a single subject, passed its repetition after 130 years.