In reality, structuralism and functionalism were more like each other and different from modern mainstream psychology in that both were free-willist and anti-materialistic, and both considered the proper study of psychology to be the mind:

Wundt:

“Mind,” “intellect,” “reason,” “understanding,” etc., are concepts... that existed before the advent of any scientific psychology.  The fact that the naive consciousness always and everywhere points to  internal experience as a special source of knowledge, may, therefore, be accepted for the moment as sufficient testimony to the right of psychology as a science... “Mind,” will accordingly be the subject to which we attribute all the separate facts of internal observation as predicates.  The subject itself is determined wholly and exclusively by its predicates.

James:

There is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and... we call that stuff “pure experience.”

Both Wundt and James were empiricists, and considered their psychologies experimental.  Neither liked the  rationalistic systems prevalent in the philosophy of their day -- such as Hegel's grand system.  However, neither  were anything like what most people understand as experimentalists today, because neither of them were  materialists or reductionists.

Wundt on materialism:

If we could see every wheel in the physical mechanism whose working the mental processes are accompanying, we should still find no more than a chain of movements showing no trace whatsoever of their significance for mind...  (All) that is valuable in our mental life still falls to the psychical side.

James’ friend and teacher Peirce on materialism:

The materialistic doctrine seems to me quite as repugnant to scientific logic as to common sense; since it requires us to suppose that a certain kind of mechanism will feel, which would be a hypothesis absolutely irreducible to reason -- an ultimate, inexplicable regularity; while the only possible justification of any theory is that it should make things clear and reasonable.

And Mary Calkins*, one of James' students, on James' view of introspection:

From introspection he derives the materials for psychology. "Introspective observation," he expressly asserts, "is what we have to rely on first and foremost and always...."

As for the historical influential differences between Wundt and James:  While Wundt focused on the introspection of consciousness, James focused on behavior in environment.  This focus would lay the groundwork for a behaviorism that James would scarcely recognize.

It would be nearly a century before research psychology would come back from a long sojourn in materialistic,  reductionistic, quantitative, physiological, behavioristic methods to something Wundt and James would recognize as  psychology!

* Mary Whiton Calkins was one of the first female students of psychology, as well as the founder of the psychology program at Wellesley.  She studied under James and Munsterberg at Harvard, but was not given the PhD she richly deserved -- because she was a woman!  After she died, students appealed to Harvard to grant her the PhD posthumously.  They turned her down again.  Shame on Harvard!

Sources:

Blumenthal, Arthur L.  (2001) A Wundt Primer:  The Operating Characteristics of Consciousness. Chapter Four in Reiber, Robert W. and Robinson, David K. Wilhelm Wundt in History: The Making of a Scientific Psychology.  Kluwer Academic Publishing.

William James (1890). The Principles of Psychology. As presented in Classics in the History of Psychology, an internet resource developed by Christopher D. Green of York University, Toronto, Ontario. Available at http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin4.htm

Calkins, Mary W.  Autobiography of Mary Whiton Calkins, in Murchison, Carl. (Ed.) (1930). History of Psychology in Autobiography (Vol. 1, pp. 31-61). Worcester, MA:  Clark University Press. [quoting James, Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, pp. 225 ff.]

© Copyright 1999 and 2000, C. George Boeree