Many great thinkers in history believed that life consisted of both the material and immaterial, that the mind was separate from matter. Other people throughout history, known as “materialists”, believed that everything is made of matter. In nineteenth-century Europe, the Industrial Revolution caused many changes in Western culture and materialistic theories became dominant in man’s thinking. And it is in this view that we find the source of what troubles man and casts the longest shadows over his happiness and, indeed, his very survival.

One of these materialistic theories in modern times came from Charles Darwin who, in 1858, wrote Origin of Species, a book which explained a theory of evolution to show how life forms had gradually developed from common ancestors. His ideas were bitterly contested by religious scholars because they seemed to provide evidence for those who wished to deny the existence of a Creator or creative force in the universe. Naturally, this upset many other people who believed man was not merely a hairless ape. Still, Darwin’s ideas gained general acceptance and created the groundwork for another theory to take root.

It came from a German, a Professor Wilhelm Wundt of Leipzig University. In 1879, Wundt advanced the theory that man could be totally understood by studying material things only. He arrived at the notion that investigating the soul or spirit was a waste of time because a man could be studied in the same way that a frog or a rat is studied. According to Wundt, there was no nonmaterial part of man, no mind, no soul. In spite of the fact that Wundt never really proved any of his ideas, the school of experimental psychology was born.