in all mental causality linkages and accompanies mental development from its first to its consummate stage." Wundt formulated this creative synthesis, which today would also be described as the principle of emergence in system theory, as an essential epistemological principle of empirical psychology – long before the phrase the whole is more than the sum of its parts or supra-summation was used in gestalt psychology. The Principle of relational analysis (context principle). This principle says that "every individual mental content receives its meaning through the relationships in which it stands to other mental content." The Principle of mental contrasts or reinforcement of opposites or development in dichotomies. Typical contrast effects are to be seen in sensory perceptions, in the course of emotions and in volitional processes. There is a general tendency to order the subjective world according to opposites. Thus many individual, historical, economic and social processes exhibit highly contrasting developments. The Principle of the heterogony of purpose (ends). The consequences of an action extend beyond the original intended purpose and give rise to new motives with new effects. The intended purpose always induces side-effects and knock-on effects that themselves become purposes, i.e. an ever-growing organisation through self-creation. In addition to these four principles, Wundt explained the term of intellectual community and other categories and principles that have an important relational and insightful function. Wundt demands co-ordinated analysis of causal and teleological aspects; he called for a methodologically versatile psychology and did not demand that any decision be made between experimental-statistical methods and interpretative methods (qualitative methods). Whenever appropriate, he referred to findings from interpretation and experimental research within a multimethod approach. Thus, for example, the chapters on the development of language or on enlargement of fantasy activity in cultural psychology also contain experimental, statistical and psychophysiological findings. He was very familiar with these methods and used them in extended research projects. This was without precedent and has, since then, rarely been achieved by another individual researcher. Philosophy Wundt's philosophical orientation In the introduction to his Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie in 1874, Wundt described Immanuel Kant and Johann Friedrich Herbart as the philosophers who had the most influence on the formation of his own views. Those who follow up these references will find that Wundt critically analysed both these thinkers' ideas. He distanced himself from Herbart's science of the soul and, in particular, from his "mechanism of mental representations" and