Experimental psychology, as a separate field of scientific inquiry, is only a hundred years old. But it did not burst forth, fully formed, when Wundt “founded” the first laboratory at the University of Leipzig in 1879. Much earlier, experimental investigations of distinctly psychological problems had been undertaken by astronomers, physicists, and philosophers. These men were indeed the first to be confronted with the major question of whether psychological processes could ever be studied by experimental methods. Sensory physiology and psychology had already proved to be fertile fields for the experimentalist, but whether the “higher mental processes” (such as learning and memory, judgment, thinking) and such complex phenomena as motivation and emotion could also be probed by these techniques was doubted by many.