The early history of gestalt psychology is rather involved and for the purposes of this paper I will concentrate on one strand of its development, namely the one which is most commonly mentioned in texts and which is also the one with which I am most familiar. It begins with Ehrenfels, goes on to the Graz school with Meinong and Benussi, and then leads to Berlin with Wertheimer, Kohler, and Koffka. And in tracing this history I will deal principally with the relation of Ehrenfels to the Graz school and the relation of Graz to Berlin, neglecting some of the other figures like Buhler, G. E. Bliiller, Katz and Rubin who made important cont,ributions to the development of gestalt psychology.
Ehrenfels, the author of the paper on gestalt qualities (6), lived from 1859 to 1932. He was born in Vienna and in 1885 got his Ph.D. in Graz with the philosopher Alexius Meinong. I may mention here that I, too, got my degree with Meinong in Graz, though it was 35 years late< in 1920. Ehrenfels was one of Meinong's first students and I may have been the last to write a dissertation with him.
Ehrenfels must have been an interesting person, enthusiastic and emotional. He had musical and poetical talents. The composer Anton Bruckner tutored him in counterpoint. He was a passionate Wagnerite and even wrote texts for operas himself. He was a friend of Freud (10, p. 46) and wrote articles on sexual morals in which he advocated legalized polygamy (4).
His famous paper appeared in 1890, the year of James' Principles of Psychology. It was not an experimental paper, but it contained some observations and reflections about form perception which were stimulated by remarks of Ernst Mach.
It was in this paper that Ehrenfels pointed out that the experience of a melody does not simply consist of the sequence of experiences of single tones as it should be according to the then-prevalent atomistic theory of sensation elements. He insisted that there is another feature present beside the sensations-a feature that cannot be derived from them and which he called the gestalt quality.
Ehrenfels was partly an innovator, partly a conservative. He was an innovator in showing that the sensation theory could not take care of the gestalt phenomena, and he was a conservative in that he essentially accepted the old theory of sensation and only added a new part.
It is to be noted that in pointing out the existence of this aspect of experience he was not, satisfied with using phenomenological observation, but went beyond that and, following Mach, resorted to a kind of functional proof based on the fact of transposability. When one plays the same melody in different keys, the tone sensations change while the gestalt quality stays the same. According to the theory of sensations you could not have equality of the wholes with inequality of the parts. This argument of transposability rests on simple judgments of equality and inequality. The fact that he did not limit himself to the description of a number of examples of gestalt experiences but also used this more explicit proof, is probably *This paper ww prevented as an invited address before the Division of the History of Psychology at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association on September I, 1968. The manuscript was prepared with the help of NIMH grant 131 42-02.