Psychology: An Elementary Text-Book

Here is a book that essentially invented psychological science. Hermann Ebbinghaus, the man who first measured memory itself, who discovered the now-famous forgetting curve by memorizing thousands of nonsense syllables and testing himself obsessively, brings his experimental rigor to the task of explaining the human mind. Written in 1908, as psychology was still escaping philosophy's long shadow, this elementary text-book was designed to give college students a clear, rigorous introduction to the new science of mental life. Ebbinghaus traces the discipline's development from ancient philosophical speculation through his own experimental revolution, examining the relationship between brain and consciousness, the architecture of the nervous system, and the fundamental processes that govern learning and retention. Some of the details have been superseded by a century of research, but the passion for empirical inquiry that animates every page has not.