German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, had definite militaristic ambitions at the time, and Wundt’s ideas laid the foundation for seventy years of attempts to solve Germany’s problems through warfare. After all, went the thinking, if a dog can be trained to salivate, a man can be trained to fight. It merely required that he become conditioned to different ideas about the value of human life. Experimental psychology began to amass data to support this view. One of Wundt’s students was the Russian psychologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, who demonstrated that if a dog salivated when a bell was rung then men could be conditioned like dogs. Pavlov’s work in the field of conditioning led to the attempted brainwashing of individuals and entire populaces, and, avidly utilized by both Lenin and Stalin for political ends in the then USSR, it helped spread communist rule over almost half the world. This was the “new” view of life. All is material. Man and all life rose spontaneously from a sea of ammonia. As man advanced into the twentieth century the traditional concepts of Soul and Spirit went the way of the horse-drawn cart and buggy whip.

Applying the principles of materialism to material things brought about remarkable increases in our scientific knowledge about the earth and the universe. The grave error, however, has been to apply these same materialistic principles to man himself. This is, in fact, the something, the basic source of the troubles in our modern era.