Karl Stumpf, the German psychologist and philosopher, was born in Wiesentheid, Bavaria. He studied law at Würzburg, but under the influence of Franz Brentano his interests turned to philosophy and psychology. In 1868 he took a degree at Göttingen, under Rudolf Hermann Lotze, with a dissertation on the relation between Plato's God and the Idea of the Good. In 1869 he entered the Catholic seminary in Würzburg, where he studied St. Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics. A year later, having lost his faith in orthodox Christianity and having abandoned the idea of becoming a priest, he left the seminary and became docent at Göttingen, where he taught for three years. His acquaintances included the philosopher and psychologist Gustav Fechner, who used Stumpf as a subject for his experiments in aesthetics.

Stumpf's passionate fondness for music motivated his pioneering research in the psychology...