CHAPTER 18

William James and G. Stanley Hall:

THE FOUNDING OF SCIENTIFIC PSYCHOLOGY IN THE UNITED STATES

It is always dangerous to talk of founders. It is the oversimplification of the great man theory of history. American scientific psychology came about in the way it did through the actions of numerous people in their individual and institutional capacities. Still, it is worthwhile to consider in some detail a few of the major figures about whom much of this activity centered. William James (1842-1910) and Granville Stanley Hall (1844-1924) were two such figures.

One could hardly find two more different individuals. William James was a mercurial individual, defying labeling. He was as organizationally naive as he was interpersonally magnetic. He was constantly looking for the possibilities in things and constantly being disappointed at the realities behind those possibilities. He was a man of great ideas, although often uninterested as to how those ideas related one to another. James founded no system of psychology although his ideas influenced the systems that were established during his lifetime. He drew his inspiration not from one individual or even from one movement, but from a combination of sources, and in a fashion that made it self-initiated. He knew of the developments in German experimental psychology; he assimilated some aspects, rejected others, but was guided by none. He showed similar independence regarding British associationism and French psychopathology. Despite all this, William James was and is considered the first great psychologist in the United States and father of scientific psychology here.

G. Stanley Hall was predictably unpredictable. He was given to great enthusiasms, and easily labeled in any one them. He was an excellent organizer but given to serious interpersonal blunders that would often negate all his careful organizing. He was very interested in the ways his ideas fit in the scheme of things but rarely carried his ideas and innovations beyond their initial stages. Hall consciously wanted to be the leader of American scientific psychology and felt great competitiveness with James for that position. He gave great support to the laboratory and the new scientific psychology and did everything a founder would be expected to do. He founded the major journal in the field, founded the national professional organization, and directed a major laboratory-oriented graduate program, just to name a few. Still, he is rarely discussed today and almost never as the founder of American scientific psychology. The "why" of this says a great deal about the early days of scientific psychology in America and will be considered later in this chapter. First, however, we need to consider the changes in American higher education that made much of what James and Hall were to do possible.

Influence of the German University System

In the United States between 1880 and 1895, psychology was transformed in a dramatic fashion.[1] By 1895 there were twenty-four psychology laboratories, three journals, and a flourishing scientific society, many of whose members were full-time psychologists. Only fifteen years before, none of this had existed. The new psychology had obviously arrived. The antecedents for these sweeping changes were to be found largely in the American system of higher education as was discussed in the last chapter. Another significant change had to do with the development of graduate education in the American university system. This development was greatly influenced by German graduate education.

Before the 1870's there was virtually no graduate education in the American college with the exception of medicine and law. The establishment of scientific schools, beginning with those at Rensselaer, Yale, and Harvard, helped to break this exclusion, although these schools were isolated within their colleges. From well before the American Civil War, students had begun going to Europe and particularly Germany for their graduate training.[2] Even in 1880 there were about as many American graduate students abroad as there were in all of the graduate programs in the United States.

The German universities were dominated by the idea of research. The professor had a considerable amount of freedom to work on problems of his own choosing. Within the limits of his field, he could choose to teach what he wished. The student was also free to study what and when he chose. Largely because of the effectiveness of their research, the German universities were the scientific centers of the world.

After the Civil War, a strong movement sprang up to extend the scope and improve the quality of university education in America. Three college presidents in the forefront of this movement were Eliot of Harvard (despite his bias against research), White of Cornell, and Gilman of Johns Hopkins; all were influenced by the German university system in the changes they introduced at their respective institutions. These three schools will figure prominently in the account that follows. In addition, Clark University, whose first president was G. Stanley Hall, was founded initially as a graduate-only institution and was avowedly modeled on European graduate schools. Stanford University and the University of Chicago were also to come into prominence as examples of the new trend. Meanwhile, a gradual reform and reorganization of the so-called graduate schools already in operation was taking place at such universities as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. These older schools had suffered losses of students, prestige, and the services of some of their able professors to the new graduate schools.

Reform began, as we saw in the last chapter, by replacing the fixed curriculum with an elective system. This resulted in an increase not only in the number of courses, but also in the number of departments. Most important of all was the establishment of graduate schools to take the place of the fifth year in residence that had previously led to the M.A. degree. Johns Hopkins, which began as a graduate school in 1876, was the leader in this field; it required an independent research project from each student.

In these changes psychology occupied a favored and strategic position. It was one of the new subjects introduced into colleges and universities from the German system.

As Albrecht reminds us, the last decade of the nineteenth century was a time of preparation; actual scientific advances came later.[3] Two individuals who helped psychology in America take its initial steps as a scientific rather than a philosophical enterprise were William James and Granville Stanley Hall. They were both transitional figures, moving psychology from what it once was, but not moving far enough to join what the field became, even in their own lifetimes.

William James

William James is certainly the most famous of America's philosopher - psychologists. His most famous work, The Principles of Psychology, wrought a fundamental change in the way psychology was approached in America, a transition between the mind - as - soul psychologies of the nineteenth century and the naturalistic, mind- as - experience psychologies of the early twentieth century.

Life and Interests

William James was born into wealth and privilege in New York City in January 1842.[4] Fourteen months later, his brother Henry was born, also in New York City. Their father Henry Sr., devoted himself enthusiastically to their education. He alternated between rushing them off to Europe because of his conviction about the "narrowness" of American schools and bringing them home because of an equally strong feeling that his children should be with their own kind. Extensive travel and sporadic schooling in the United States, England, France, Switzerland, and Germany followed for William and Henry and their younger brothers and sisters. They studied with tutors and in various kinds of schools, learning even more from the galleries, museums, and theaters they visited. Unlike the rigors that faced John Stuart Mill in having his education supervised by his father, they had a delightful, unsettling time with their kindly and enthusiastic father.

As befitted their very different personalities, Henry and William later disagreed flatly on the value of their schooling. William regretted its lack of discipline; he believed it had prevented him from developing an ability for orderly reasoning. Henry found it invaluable in stirring the free play of curiosity. Following the advice of his father who insisted that a hasty decision of one's life work would be wrong and "narrowing," William took years to decide on the work for which he was most fitted. He tried painting; he spent six months at the studio of William Morris Hunt in Newport, Rhode Island. He quickly realized his lack of promise.

In the autumn of 1861, at the age of nineteen, William enrolled at the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University; by now his choice of a career had been narrowed down to the sciences and philosophy. Despite his interest in chemistry, on which he concentrated first, William's teachers observed an impatience that drove him away from accurate and painstaking laboratory determination; this was prophetic of his distaste for such work throughout his life. He soon left chemistry for physiology, anatomy, and biology and enrolled in the medical school, even though he was already convinced that medical practice held no attraction for him.

In 1865 he went with Louis Agassiz, that staunch opponent to Darwinism, to the Amazon as the start of a possible career in biology, but he soon found that he hated collecting. On his return he resumed his medical studies, interrupting them again to go abroad for two years, because he felt that he did not have the stamina to continue the arduous work. Indecision about a career was now complicated by a neurotic depression with insomnia, eye trouble, digestive disorders, very severe back pain, and other symptoms; these lasted for nearly five years. There was even some preoccupation with thoughts of suicide, but he managed to put them aside; he wrote home to his father in a carefully restrained fashion that "thoughts of the pistol, the dagger, and the bowl began to usurp an unduly large part of my attention; and I began to think that some change ... was necessary."[5] During this trip abroad he mentioned in a letter to a friend that he considered the time had come for psychology to be a science and that he had decided to do some work in it.[6] He also mentioned plans to go to Heidelberg to work with Helmholtz and Wundt, but, whatever the reason, he was to catch only a glimpse of them. His knowledge of their work attests to his general alertness to contemporary developments in psychology. This was in 1868, only eight years after Fechner's Elements had appeared.

In 1869, he returned to the United States to take his medical degree. It was obvious to William, to his friends, and to his family that he could not practice, since his back pain precluded standing for long hours. Laboratory work also was out of the question. He resolved that summer to continue to work in "psychological subjects."[7]

A philosophical crisis preceded the beginning of a partial recovery from his various ills. Feeling lost and alone, on occasion becoming panic-stricken in a world that seemed filled with evil, James read the evolutionary philosophy of Renouvier's Second Essay,[8] which persuaded him that there was freedom of the will, and that spontaneity is available to him who makes it so. James resolved that his " ... first act of free will shall be to believe in free will."[9] This apparently delivered him from the clutches of the strict determinism of Mill, Spencer, and Bain and opened up the way to his becoming a philosophical psychologist. Perhaps next to his father, Renouvier was the single most significant influence on James' philosophical thought. Meyers tells us that "James discovered in Renouvier a systematic outlook which contained practical guidelines for conduct -- exactly what he wanted and needed in his own philosophy. Renouvier connected elements of pluralism, moralism, phenomenalism, fideism, and theism in a way that appealed to James."[10]

In 1872, James accepted an offer from President Eliot to teach physiology at Harvard. By this time a gradual recovery of his health was taking place. In 1875, James gave his first course in psychology--on the relation between physiology and psychology; he thus moved closer to his now established goal. James never had instruction in psychology. As he put it, the first lecture he ever heard, he gave himself.

William James founded a psychological laboratory or sorts at Harvard in 1875. In retrospect, James himself was not sure whether it was 1874, 1875, or 1876, but the evidence found by Harper in the references cited[11] shows it was in 1875. One especially compelling item that Harper mentions is the report of the Harvard treasurer of that year, which cites an appropriation to James of $300, for use in physiology. Other evidence, including the nature of the 1875 course mentioned earlier, shows that the appropriation was for equipment for physiological psychology. The laboratory was located at Lawrence Hall. In 1876, James was advanced to assistant professor of physiology. G. Stanley Hall, about whom we shall be hearing presently, arrived as a student in that same year, and took his degree in 1878, although he did his work not in James' laboratory but in Henry Bowditch's physiological laboratory.

The year 1878 was notable for two events. First, James married Alice Gibbens, a Boston school teacher. She shared his interests and watched over him with untiring devotion. She, and marriage itself, introduced a certain amount of organization into his life that had not been present before. Sensitive and nervous as he was, however, it is hardly surprising that the five children that were born over the next several years occasionally got on his nerves. Moreover, the financial strain of a growing family led James to write a considerable number of popular articles and to give many lectures for the sake of the financial return they brought. The second event of 1878 was his signing of a contract with the publisher Henry Holt for a volume on psychology. John Fiske (1842-1901), a follower of Spencer and a member, along with James, of the Metaphysics Club had originally been approached to do the book but suggested James instead.[12] At the time James apologized to his publisher that he would have to take two years in which to write it.[13] He actually took twelve! The volume would become James' Principles of Psychology about which we will have more to say later.

In 1880 he was made assistant professor of philosophy, at Harvard, a department where psychology more properly belonged. He was admitted to the department but "not without opposition."[14] The thought of a physiologist teaching psychology infuriated some members of the department, who were quite content with the accustomed traditional philosophical treatment of that subject. Despite the lack of a major publication, James was advanced to professor of philosophy in 1885 and in 1889 his title was changed to professor of psychology.

His book was growing in connection with his classroom teaching. In the classroom, as in his writing and conversation with friends, James was charming; his presentation of his material was without obvious order. He was vivacious, so full of humor that one of his students interrupted him one day with the remark, "To be serious for a moment ..."[15] His picturesque language and vivid imagery were such that his students remembered them long after the more methodical lectures of others had been forgotten.

While it took twelve years for the Principles to appear as a whole, numerous chapters were published earlier as articles in journals and magazines of the day, which only increased the anticipation of his readers for the big book. In 1890 The Principles of Psychology finally appeared. James was scarcely original throughout, but the brilliance of his writing gave new life to old themes. The reviews hailed the book as an important contribution; it was a pronounced success. An observation made some years ago remains true; it is still read by persons who have no obligation to do so.[16] The criticisms offered tended to center on its "unsystematic" or "impressionistic" character. To call the Principles unsystematic does not mean that it is disorganized. In fact, it would sometimes appear that what was meant by this charge is that James did not follow the conventional ordering of topics. James believed that the proper starting point is experience as immediately given and as it flows in perception. Hence, unlike others before and after him, he did not start with sensations; for he believed that is not the way in which we experience.

Two years after Principles, James published the Briefer Course,[17] a condensation explicitly designed to serve as a textbook and to make both him and his publisher money.[18] For many years "Jimmy"--as the book became known in order to distinguish it from its parent--was used as a textbook, for it eliminated many of the digressions of the portlier "James."

Laboratory work was more of a symbol and never a habit with James, despite the rooms used for equipment when he was in the department of physiology and his mention of spending two hours a day in the psycho-physics laboratory that he started in 1885.[19] Both in the Principles and in other writings James took a disparaging view of laboratory psychology. In 1894 he commented that the United States was overstocked with laboratories.[20] In the Principles James offered the opinion that the results of laboratory investigation were not yet commensurate with the labor involved; in another well-known passage, he remarked that the psychophysical methods "could hardly have arisen in a country where natives could be bored."[21] Elsewhere he said that "... brass-instrument and algebraic-formula psychology fills me with horror."[22] In view of his attitude, it is not surprising that except for a study on the transfer of training, he did not contribute experimental results of any importance.

James recognized that laboratory work was useful for psychology, but he wanted to be relieved of responsibility for it. In 1890 he succeeded in raising $4,000 for a psychology laboratory^.[23] The laboratory opened up the following year in Dane Hall. Herbert Nichols (1852-1936) who had recently received his doctorate from G. Stanley Hall was hired to run the laboratory, however, at least until a permanent director could be found. James had been impressed by the work of Hugo Münsterberg at the University of Freiburg. So he recommended that Münsterberg be offered the directorship of the new Harvard laboratory. The offer was made, Münsterberg accepted it, and the German assumed his new post in 1892. Unfortunately, Münsterberg never became for Harvard the leader in experimental psychology that James had hoped he would be.

The number of psychologists trained by James was surprisingly small. Few doctoral dissertations in psychology were completed under his sponsorship. Hall had worked with him in 1876-1878. From about 1890 onward he had some students who became psychologists, including James R. Angell, Mary W. Calkins, William Healy, Edward L. Thorndike, and Robert S. Woodworth. Their number may have been small, but all of them went on to achieve considerable prominence.

James' interests wandered far beyond the confines of laboratory psychology or even most philosophical psychologies. James grew up in an atmosphere of liberalism; topics such as abolition, homeopathy, and women's rights were freely and eagerly discussed, and often championed. When this is coupled with his father's devotion to the teachings of Swedenborg, which formed part of his son's experience, it is no wonder that James expressed a kindred interest in spiritualism. He found mediumship, clairvoyance, and so-called automatic writing carried on without the conscious cooperation of the subject as matters to be approached with an open mind. In the same spirit, he came to the defense of mental healers when they were under the attack of the medical profession. In 1882-1883 James met the Englishmen who were the founders of the new Society for Psychical Research, and when their friendships ripened, their cause became his. He was an eager student; he attended many seances, carried on an extensive correspondence, and published his findings. As usual, facts were what he wanted. He was interested not only in the problem of survival after death but also in psychic phenomena and the continuity they formed with those of hypnotism, hysteria, and multiple personality.

In the 1890s James came to be recognized as America's leading philosopher. His later work, after the turn of the century, on pragmatism and radical empiricism was his major philosophical contribution. The central theme of pragmatism is that the value of ideas must be tested by their practical consequences. Contrary to what was generally supposed, beliefs do not work because they are true; they are true because they work. This ambiguous usage of "work" was open to various criticisms that were not long in coming. Despite them, pragmatism was a popular success. These developments after 1900 , however, and had less impact in the development of psychology than did the James of the Principles of Psychology.

In 1909 G. Stanley Hall, president of Clark University, invited Sigmund Freud as one among many distinguished figures to a celebration in Worchester. James attended, and naturally met Freud. James already believed, of course, in the existence of a mental life of which the individual himself is not fully aware. Earlier, he had praised F. W. H. Myer's view of extra-marginal consciousness as the most important advance since James had begun the study of psychology.[24] The existence of mental events outside of awareness was a very intriguing fact to James, since it seemed such an unexpected peculiarity of human nature. There is, however, a tremendous gulf between Myer's subliminal consciousness and Freud's unconscious. Myer and others of similar interests were looking for subconscious feats; Freud was searching for unconscious motives. In keeping with his open mindedness and his desire to give everyone a hearing, James expressed the hope that Freud would push his ideas to their utmost limit, though he added that Freud impressed him as a man with fixed ideas and that he could make nothing of his dream symbolism.[25]

After talking about retiring for years, he finally did so in 1907. While intellectually vital and active, his health continued to decline. For the sake of his health, James went to Europe in the spring of 1910, but he did not slow down his pace sufficiently to reap any benefit. Despairing of any relief, he turned homeward to die two days after his return, late in August, 1910, at his country home near Mount Chocorua, New Hampshire.

William James is not remembered because of any organizational skill for psychology, for his founding of anything (with the possible exception of his informal laboratory at Harvard) or for his promotion of the field of psychology. James' great fame rests on his ideas and the possibilities they presented and for the magnificent way he expressed them. Those ideas, communicated through his Principles of Psychology, had he done nothing else, would have given James a major place in the history of American psychology.

James' Principles of Psychology

James's Principles with all its ideas and beautiful prose is often a source of frustration to present-day readers, particularly if they pick a chapter here and there to read without seeing the individual chapters in the context of the whole work. Even so, one hears the complaint that James seems to contradict himself. To some degree this is true. James wrote his book over twelve years and sometimes changed his mind on some issues later in the book without bothering to revise some positions at the beginning. However, what often seems to be contradiction, is not so at all, but due to a reading of a fragment of James' writing out of context. In reading the chapters in order, one can see more clearly what James was doing.

First, it is important to understand that James was writing a non-metaphysical psychology. This "naturalizing" of psychology was a bold move on James' part. James wrote of his decision to take the naturalistic approach in the Principles:

I thought that by frankly putting psychology in the position of a natural science, eliminating certain metaphysical questions from its scope altogether, and confining myself to what could be immediately verified by everyone's own consciousness, a central mass of experience could be described which everyone might accept as certain no matter what the differing ulterior philosophic interpretations of it might be.[26]

The "metaphysical questions" James was attempting to eliminate were several, but two in particular are of importance to the present discussion.[27] The first was faculty psychology, which was still dominant in American popular thought. It dealt with the mind as though it were a real unit-being, a soul, whose actions were its faculties. Faculty psychology was still perhaps the dominant view of mind in the average American. James produced the first successful secular psychology in America, a psychology in which the thought itself becomes the thinker.

The second position James termed "metaphysical" was that of the atomistic and associationistic psychologies, represented by the British empiricists from John Locke to the Mills and by the followers of Herbart on the Continent. Also included under the label were those who followed the experimental psychology of Wilhelm Wundt. To James, the elemental "ideas" of the associationists and the elementary sensations of Wundt's psychology, along with their concepts of productive synthesis, were no less metaphysical than the "mythological" faculties of the Scottish faculty psychologists or of Descartes' soul. James criticized the current elementistic psychologies as follows:

Most books start with sensations, as the simplest mental facts, and proceed synthetically, constructing each higher stage from those below it. But this is abandoning the empirical method of investigation. No one ever had a simple sensation by itself. Consciousness from our natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree.[28]

James carried out his plan in the first ten chapters of the Principles. He took what he called a positivistic stand, although it should not be identified with the views of either Compte or Mach. He appears to be using the term more generically as dealing with direct experience rather than interpretation.

James' attacks in those first chapters were much bolder against the elementistic psychologies than on the faculty psychologies. He appealed throughout to his readers' own experiences. He comes to the position that the most basic experience is not sensation but thinking itself:

All people unhesitatingly believe that they feel themselves thinking, and that they distinguish the mental state as an inward activity or passion, from all the objects with which it may cognitively deal. I regard this belief as the most fundamental of all the postulates of psychology.[29]

He concluded that "the universal conscious fact is not 'feelings and thoughts exist,' but 'I think' and 'I feel' No psychology...can question the existence of personal selves." It is through this reliance on universal experience that James comes to the "cogito" of Descartes' famous dictum. Each person's own thought is the most basic fact of his mental life. James adds to these universal facts another: that consciousness does not present itself to us as elementary components but as a unitary flow. James concludes: "Consciousness...does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows."[30]

Thought, then, as it presents itself to us, is the starting point for James' psychology. He urged psychologists to accept this irreducible, unitary, and personal thought as "their ultimate datum on the mental side." James came this far with no metaphysical assumptions and no concepts but those directly observable in experience. He avoided all the problems surrounding the origin of thought. The associationists' theory of ideas as well as the constructionists' (such as J. S. Mill and Wilhelm Wundt) productive consciousness or creative synthesis became irrelevant for James' psychology.

The concept of the unitary nature of thought, once accepted, leads to another, the "stream of thought." Acceptance of the stream of thought, the correlation between brain action and thought, and the personal nature of thought all lead to James' presentation of the self and to the conclusion he had been working toward all along: that the thought itself is the thinker and that accessory concepts such as soul or faculties of soul are unnecessary for psychology.

The Stream of Thought

James demonstrated early in the Principles that thought is not a sensation, a collection of sensations, or an integration of ideas. Thought is an "undecomposable" whole, and no matter how complex the object of that thought may be, the thought is "one undivided state of consciousness."[31] These two aspects of thought, its personal nature and its undivided state, are of great importance to his psychology and are major bases on which rest the remainder of his psychological views in the Principles.

James' method led him to assume a dualism of thought and object in the Principles, although he later deserted this position in his pragmatism.[32] In his dualism, thoughts, according to James, deal with objects -- which may be of external origin or which may be other thoughts. He relegates the question of the genesis and constitution of thoughts to metaphysics, with one exception. Thoughts, however they come, are related to brain action. James, in typical style, cuts through the details of the mind-body problem and states in simple terms: "[The] bald fact is that when the brain acts, a thought occurs."[33] He had prepared his readers for the intimacy of brain and thought in the first pages of the Principles. If thought is the starting point on the mental side of existence, then, "definitely to ascertain the correlations of these with brain-processes is as much as psychology can empirically do."[34] The empirical connection of the processes of brain action with thought is, to James, the "ultimate known law." James uses the continuous nature of brain changes to support his contention of the unity and continuity of thought processes: "As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream."[35]

James describes the nature of thought as having five characteristics: "l) Every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness. 2) Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing. 3) Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous. 4) It always appears to deal with objects independent of itself. 5) It is interested in some parts of these objects to the exclusion of other, and welcomes or rejects -- chooses from among them, in a word-all the while.[36]

His emphasis on the personal nature of thought is clear, since "personal consciousness" is repeated in the first three of the five characteristics.

The second and third characteristics summarize aspects of James' unitary conception of thought. The process of thought was portrayed by James as a flow: "A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life."[37] James uses the terms "thought," "consciousness" and "subjective life" interchangeably.

While he once denied it, the stream of thought metaphor is at the heart of the psychology of James' Principles.[38] James even defined psychology as "an account of particular finite streams of thought, coexisting and succeeding in time."

It is within the context of the stream of thought that James differentiates between bare experience and its meaning, "acquaintance-with" and "knowledge-about." It is also in the stream metaphor that James describes the process by which thoughts come into being, rise, and pass away. Thoughts "pass," that is, they have a definite lifetime. As one thought "pulse" dies out, it is appropriated by a new one on the rise, becoming "known" by the new thought pulse. Thought is a continuously renewing process -- a necessity, if mental life is to be sensibly continuous -- and an essential concept as well for a naturalistic consideration of self as a process of thought rather than as an attribute of spiritual faculty.

The fourth characteristic, that thought appears to deal with objects independent of itself, is also important for a naturalistic self. James postulates a dualistic position, supposing two aspects, "mind knowing and the thing known and treats them as irreducible...."[39] Within this dualism, however, the dividing line between object and subject is not always clear. According to James, "thought may but need not, in knowing, discriminate between its object and itself."[40] The confusion between the object of the thought and the thought itself leads at times to the inclusion of external objects as part of one's thought and thus of one's self. This we will see again below in the section on self.

Self

The fifth characteristic of thought, that thought is interested in some objects of experience more than in others and selects among them, is at the basis of James' views on attention, reasoning, will and ultimately on self. Interest determines which parts of experience are noticed. According to James, "A man's empirical thought depends on the things he has experienced, but what these shall be is to a large extent determined by his habits of attention.... A thing may be present to him a thousand times, but if he persistently fails to notice it, it cannot be said to enter into his experience." The stream of thought is neither entirely free nor consistently flowing. It has its tributaries controlled by the nature of interest, another essential process for James' naturalistic view of self. James wrote about this great division of our personal worlds into "me" and "not me."

The altogether unique kind of interest which each human mind feels in those parts of creation which it can call me or mine may be a moral riddle, but it is a fundamental psychological fact. No man can take the same interest in his neighbor's me as in his own. The neighbor's me falls together with all the rest of things in one foreign mass, against which his own me stands out in startling relief.[41]

In the tenth chapter of the Principles, "The Consciousness of Self," James brings together the various conceptions he has built up in the earlier chapters, in particular those relating to the stream of thought. He begins with a definition of the "Empirical Self or Me," a definition clearly derived from his conclusions concerning the dividing line between object and subject. James tells us that: "In its widest possible sense...a man's Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank account. All these things give him the same emotions."[42] Self is a process of thought developed in the context of the stream of thought.

The Soul

James then moves to the question he has been leading toward through the previous nine chapter, but which he had "always shied from and treated as a difficulty to be postponed."[43] That question pertains to the "pure Ego," the substantial soul, its nature and role in psychological processes. James considers three theories of the ego in detail -- the spiritualist theory, the associationist theory, and the transcendentalist theory. He concludes that the substantial soul is unnecessary for "expressing the actual subjective phenomena of consciousness as they appear."[44]

James' reader has been prepared for this position in the earlier chapter. The replacement for the soul in this case has been the "supposition of a stream of thoughts, each substantially different from the rest, but cognitive of the rest and 'appropriative' of each other's content."[45]

At this point James admits that his reader does not accept his point of view by now, his arguments will never carry conviction. He charges that the substantial soul is a metaphysical concept unnecessary in psychological considerations: "As psychologists, we need not be metaphysical at all. The phenomena are enough, the passing Thought itself is the only verifiable thinker, and its empirical connection with the brain-process is the ultimate known law."[46] James tells his readers, "I therefore feel entirely free to discard the word Soul from the rest of this book. If I ever use it, it will be in the vaguest and most popular way."[47]

It should be noted that James does not attempt to undermine the ideas of readers who wish to hold on to some aspect of soul-theory outside of scientific psychology. "The reader who finds any comfort in the idea of the Soul, is... perfectly free to continue to believe in it; for our reasonings have not established the non-existence of the Soul; they have only provided its superfluity for scientific purposes."[48]

If James' reader is in substantial agreement with his position, then he or she is open to James' ideas for the remainder of the book. With such an acceptance James may now present the wide vista of mental life that earlier textbooks would have treated either in terms of the faculties of a substantial soul or in associationistic or transcendental terms. Through James' eyes, however, the topics take on an entirely different appearance. Faculty classifications such as attention, conception, comparison, memory, imagination, and the like are now treated objectively as derived from the stream of thought.

James' Principles called an end, for all practical purposes, to the era of faculty psychologies and of psychologies that rest upon the assumption of the substantial soul. There was no major psychological work that followed James that made use of the substantial soul as a psychological concept.

James' naturalistic view of mind was, as E.L. Thorndike recalled, "news, and good news, to young students of psychology in the nineties and attracted to the further study of psychology some who would have avoided it like the plague if they had been introduced to it by Porter or McCosh or even by Ladd or Baldwin."[49]

He established a naturalistic psychology but one that did not require the analysis of the mental states into atomistic units such as elements. His holistic and phenomenalistic approach was the fundamental base on which American functionalism would be built.

Methods of Investigation

In terms of methodology, James expressed the belief that introspective observation must be relied on "first and foremost and always." James meaning of "introspection" should not be confused with the analytical introspection of Wundt, which was later brought to such a high state of development by E. B. Titchener at Cornell. James' introspection was "the looking into our own minds and reporting what we there discover."[50] Introspection to James was the description of common universal experience. What Wundt and particularly Titchener did was to analyze this complex common experience into microscopic parts. James considered analytical introspection of this sort to be based on abstractions, the result of discriminative attention. James' introspective method was a form of phenomenological description. It did not involve analysis but described experience as it appeared, phenomenally, in all its complexity and without theoretical presuppositions. Also, James' introspection was not necessarily the introspection of the laboratory. It was the empirical introspection of the philosopher, what would be referred to by later laboratory psychologists as "armchair psychology."

Although James appreciated the primacy of introspection in his psychology, he understood its fallibility. James concluded that "introspection is difficult and fallible; and that the difficulty is simply that of all observation of whatever kind."[51] The errors encountered through the introspective procedure are corrected by replication. Through generations of such introspection, later views correct earlier ones "until at last the harmony of a consistent system is reached."[52] This is the classic mode of system building of the sort exemplified by the British empiricists. "Such a system, gradually worked out, is the best guarantee the psychologist can give for the soundness of any particular psychologic observation which he may report."[53] James recognized, however, that such unrestricted, natural observation taken by itself was becoming a thing of the past --"the last monument of the youth of our science, still untechnical and generally intelligible, like the Chemistry of Lavoisier, or Anatomy before the microscope was used."[54]

James recognized the legitimacy of the experimental method. He saw it, however, as a supplement to the traditional introspective method of empirical philosophy. He gave rather grudging support to the experimental method, but roundly criticized proponents.

James also recognized the comparative method. The comparative method involves observing the behavior of animals, insects, children, and savages and gaining from those observations information relevant to civilized adult humans. Although he was no more sympathetic to it than to the experimental method. James saw the comparative method as a supplement to the introspective and experimental methods. James also included in the comparative method the results of questionnaires and similar anthropometric procedures, a method he predicted would become one of the "common pests of life."[55]

Within a decade after the publication of the Principles , James' type of introspection, description of experience in a natural and uncontrolled way, was replaced by the analytical introspection of the laboratory. The "laboratory blackgards," as James called them, were taking psychology in a direction he was unwilling to follow.[56]

Mind as Problem Solver

James insisted, as did Spencer before him, that the mind did more than passively adapt to the external environment.[57] The mind has a spontaneity, a selectivity of its own. Consciousness in the mind is causative; it intervenes in cause-effect sequences. James advanced the argument that the reality of the intervention of consciousness as causative is demonstrated by our more intense awareness of the functioning of consciousness when obstacles are encountered. When there are no obstacles and things run smoothly, consciousness tends to lapse and habit takes over. Consciousness, moreover, shows interest or attention. It is volitional as well as sensory. It selects and dwells upon some aspects of the experience to which it is open and rejects others. What is selected becomes vital and real; what is rejected becomes unimportant and unreal. Mind is an instrument drawing from the world whatever interests it. Persons differ in that they introspect identical situations in different ways according to their interests. This selectivity of consciousness, presumably due to the action of selective natural evolution, runs as a theme through the chapters of the Principles devoted to attention, conception, and discrimination and comparison, and is most explicitly stated in Chapter 5 when James argues against the conception of man as an automaton.

In this concept we see James following Spencer by inserting a teleologial thrust into mental events. In giving his support to this notion, James made consciousness, the mental events of the present moment, a problem-solver, a purposivistic function that James Rowland Angell would take as the fundamental principle underlying Chicago Functionalism. Angell would meld James' teleological principle of consciousness as problem solver with Chauncey Wright's process by which consciously willed processes reduce through repetition to habit and finally passed to future generations as dispositions. This would become for William James his Emergency Theory of Consciousness and for James R. Angell the Lapsed Intelligence Theory of Instincts.

Habit

Habit was treated by James as a matter of the functioning of the nervous system. Habit is due to the increased plasticity of neural matter, which makes it easier for repeated actions to be carried out. At the same time, habit lessens the need for attention to the activity in question. Moreover, habit has enormous social implications. James's account of habit is perhaps the most famous chapter in his book. It received separate publication many years later. He called habit "the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent."[58]

Emotion

James would have had us reverse the usual way of thinking about the emotions. The common sense view of emotions holds that perception gives rise to emotion. The emotion, then, brings about bodily expression. James, however, said that the bodily expression directly follows the perception of the emotion-provoking events. The feeling engendered is the emotion.

Common-sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be.[59]

For evidence he appealed to introspection; if all experiences of bodily symptoms, such as the heartbeat, the tensions in the muscles, and so on, are abstracted, there is nothing left to the emotion. Independently and almost simultaneously, Carl Lange,[60] in studying the circulatory system, reached the conclusion that feelings of vascular change are the essentials of emotion. Evidence has been brought to bear against the so-called James-Lange theory in the research that was almost immediately stimulated by their work. James's felicitous expression could and did lead to misunderstanding. When he said, "... we feel sorry because we cry, ... afraid because we tremble," he disregarded the fact that we can be sorry without crying and afraid without trembling. This does not alter the fact that some bodily process precedes and is the sensory source of the emotion; that, after all, is the essence of his theory. No one denies that emotions have physical causes, but modern research shows that they are caused by processes in the thalamic region of the brain, mediated through the autonomic nervous system. Nevertheless, James's theory did much to stimulate the research that established the organic basis of emotion.

Instincts

James endowed the human organism with a generous number of instincts, more, in fact, than those of the lower animals. For the beginnings of his catalogue, he drew upon observations of children by Preyer, an embryologist and a pioneer child psychologist. But he went considerably beyond Preyer. He listed sucking, biting, crying, locomotion, and vocalization among the human instincts. They were the more specific forms of instinct, reflex - like in character; they stood in contrast to the broad generalizations sometimes offered as instincts, as when as instinct of self-preservation is postulated. This is not meant to imply that James did not list instincts more complicated than those just mentioned; he went on to include imitation, emulation, pugnacity, hunting, fear, acquisitiveness, play, curiosity, shyness, cleanliness, modesty, love, and jealousy.

According to James, we follow the dictates of instincts because at the time it seems the natural and appropriate thing to do. Every instinct is an impulse to action of some sort but not all instincts are blind or invariable. The sheer possession of many and contrary instincts means that with slight alterations of conditions, now this, then another impulse may be in the ascendant. Pugnacity and timidity, bashfulness and vanity, sociability and pugnacity are paired antithetical instincts that create conditions that make for variability in behavior since they mutually conflict with one another, and at a given moment only one or the other can be manifested. An additional factor making for nonuniformity of expression of instincts is that instincts may be inhibited by habits.

After the work of James, preparing catalogues of instincts became a popular pastime of psychologists, and considerable ingenuity was exercised in getting a complete and logically consistent classification. In today's perspective we consider this a self-defeating form of armchair theorizing because the concept of instinct leads itself to an explanation of behavior akin to that of faculty psychology--we fight because we have a fighting instinct. But in the time of James, appeal to instinct in the human species was a way of calling attention to man's biological heritage, a view that then needed defense. Man as an organism in a world of nature was being defended by an appeal to instinct.

Significance of James to Psychology

E.L. Thorndike, who was a student at Harvard in the 1890's, believed that the "influence of James on psychology means, essentially, the influence of The Principles of Psychology."[61] Often that influence was direct and immediate. John Dewey admitted that the major shift in standpoint among the editions of his own Psychology resulted at least partly from James' treatment of sensation in terms of the stream-of-thought metaphor. The influence of his thought is most immediately demonstrated in the development of American functionalism. Both Dewey and James Rowland Angell, founders of Chicago Functionalism, acknowledged the influence of James' psychological thought. Through Angell in particular, and his successor at Chicago, Harvey Carr, the psychological idea of James became a force in American laboratory psychology during the pre-behavioristic period.

Granville Stanley Hall

G. Stanley Hall was much more important in his role as the first organizer and administrator in American psychology than as a contributor to psychological research or theory.[62] This is not to say that Hall's research was unimportant, since many credit him with the beginnings of several important lines of investigation in psychology, including child study. In balance, however, his organizing has had the greatest impact.

Early Life

Granville Stanley Hall was born of English ancestry in 1844 at Ashfield, a rural hamlet in Massachusetts, the son of substantial, hard-working, pious farmers. His parents were unusual only in the extent of their education. His mother had attended the Albany Female Seminary, then one of the very few institutions in the East for higher education of women; and his father had saved his money from some years of farm labor to return to school. Both parents then taught school for several years.

After doing well in the local rural school, Hall "kept school" for a while himself. His mother had always wanted him to go to college, however, and he enrolled in Williams College in 1863.

At Williams, Hall studied philosophy with Mark Hopkins and found diversified interests such as associationism, the Scottish school, John Stuart Mill, and the theory of evolution. Without too much in the way of a call, he prepared for the ministry. Consequently, on graduation in 1867, he enrolled in the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. During his year in New York, he explored the city with zest, roaming the streets, visiting police courts, and attending churches of all denominations. He joined a discussion club interested in the study of positivism, visited theaters for plays and musicals, tutored young ladies from the elite of New York, visited a phrenologist, and generally had an exciting year.

One member of the faculty, a foreign-trained scholar who tutored him in philosophy, advised him to seek foreign study. Through the intercession of Henry Ward Beecher, the famous preacher, he received a loan of $500 for this purpose.

In the early summer of 1868 Hall sailed for Europe and made his way to Bonn. After studying theology and philosophy there, he moved to Berlin, where he continued his theological and philosophical studies. In particular he studied Aristotle which led him, like Noah Porter, George Sylvester Morris and Franz Brentano before him, to F. A. Trendelenburg's seminar in Berlin. Trendelenburg led Hall to an acceptance of all he could understand of Hegel's logic and was perhaps instrumental in Hall's decision to become a philosopher. Trendelenburg and Hegel also influenced Hall by strengthening his interest in historical progress and by emphasizing developmental conditioning in ideas and institutions. Ross tells us that Trendelenburg's ideas would enter gradually into Hall's mind over the next decade progressed.[63] Hall also worked under DuBois-Reymond in physiology; he studied physics, attended a clinic for mental diseases, and satisfied a wide array of other interests. Beer gardens, theaters, and some lighthearted romantic episodes helped to round out his German education.

It was not until 1871 that he returned home, heavily in debt and without a degree. He returned to Union Theological Seminary to complete his work for the ministry. He felt stifled there by the orthodoxy. He was not noted for his religious orthodoxy, but did manage to get his degree. He decided not to preach, however, which may have been influenced by the reception of his trial sermon before the faculty and students. After the sermon he went to the office of the president for criticism. Instead of discussing his sermon, the president knelt and prayed that Hall would be shown the errors of his ways![64] While looking about for a position, George Sylvester Morris helped him obtain a position as a tutor to the children of a New York banker. Hall spent two years in that occupation. While in New York, Hall became involved in a group of positivistic followers of Comte. The group was also interested in Herbert Spencer's thought. It was during that time that Hall tells us he had been "profoundly influenced" by Darwin, Spencer and John Tyndall, the English physicist and naturalist.[65] All of this radical thought led Hall to the belief that "Comte and the Positivists had pretty much made out their case and that the theological if not the metaphysical, stage of thought should be transcended."[66]

Hall's lack of orthodoxy made a college appointment difficult. Finally, however, Antioch College in Ohio, a western outpost of Unitarianism, gave him a post teaching English literature. Later he shifted to French and German and finally to philosophy. As was not unusual in small colleges he had many extracurricular duties--he served as librarian, led the choir, and took his turn at preaching. In his second and third years he managed to spend most of his time teaching philosophical subjects. He read the first volume of Wundt's Physiological Psychology immediately after its publication and decided to return to Germany to study psychology. He started out in the spring of 1876, but he got only as far as Cambridge, Massachusetts. Here he was met with an offer of an instructorship in English at Harvard. He took it, hoping for a chance to transfer to philosophy and psychology. His work in required sophomore English was monotonous and time-consuming, but he found time to work with H. P. Bowditch at the Harvard Medical School and to carry out in Bowditch's laboratory a study on "the Muscular Perception of Space," which he presented as a thesis for the doctorate in philosophy at Harvard in 1878. He also did work with William James, whom he got to know quite well. Hall received his degree in psychology upon recommendation of the department of philosophy. After his degree he immediately left for Europe.

Hall first studied at Berlin, where he did a considerable amount of work in physiology. In his second year he moved to Leipzig and became Wundt's first American student. Despite the enthusiasm with which he had looked forward to working with Wundt, the reality does not seem to have been to his liking. Hall attended Wundt's lectures and served as a subject in experiments but seems to have performed no research of his own in the laboratory. Instead he undertook a considerable amount of work in physiology, particularly in the physiology of muscles. He then went to Berlin to work with Helmholtz, only to find him immersed in physics. Nevertheless, he wrote James that he was disappointed in Wundt and had gotten much more out of Helmholtz.[67] Travel to educational centers followed; he had decided that the way to make a living was to apply psychology to education, though when he returned to the United States, he was without a job and had no prospects of getting one.

Meanwhile, he married a girl he had known from his days at Antioch whom he met again in Berlin, where she was studying art. They took a small flat in a suburb of Boston in September 1880. Things appeared bleak until a good fairy in the unlikely guise of President Eliot of Harvard appeared at their house with the request that Hall give a series of Saturday talks on education in Boston under the auspices of Harvard University. These talks, which were well attended, brought him considerable favorable publicity.

Johns Hopkins Years

On the strength of reports of his Saturday morning lectures, President Gilman of Johns Hopkins University invited Hall to Baltimore for a series of public lectures. In 1882 Hall arrived at Johns Hopkins, a school already celebrated for the beginning in 1876 of its bold experiment in higher education on the German plan. President Gilman had been having trouble finding just the right philosopher for his school; he wanted someone who would be both "modern" and favorably disposed toward science, but who would not offend orthodox religious sensibility. For a while there was considerable academic "in-fighting" involving Hall and the two other part-time appointments in a department for which only one professorship was planned. Both the other contestants, Charles S. Peirce and George Morris, were very eminent men in philosophy. Hall was a scientist, and Gilman wanted a scientist, but the scales tipped more in his favor because of his accommodating attitude toward religious orthodoxy. Hall wanted to dissociate psychology from religion, but he held no animosity toward his former field. He remained discreetly silent. In 1884 he was appointed professor of psychology and pedagogics.

After his professorial appointment, Hall immediately took steps to separate his work from that in philosophy; he arranged it in such a way that the Metaphysics Club, which had flourished before his time, died for lack of appropriate material for presentation.

In 1883, while still a lecturer, Hall set up laboratory equipment in a private house adjacent to the campus.[68] The next year he was given rooms on the campus. Hall's laboratory at Johns Hopkins opened in 1884, and is often said to be the first formally accepted psychological laboratory in the United States. But this claim is obscured somewhat because the university did not officially list it as a laboratory, in fact specifically refused to call it a laboratory, and its equipment was treated as private property. That was to Hall's later benefit, since he later took it with him to Clark University.[69]

Among Hall's students were James McKeen Cattell, John Dewey, Joseph Jastrow, William H. Burnham, and Edmund C. Sanford--all destined to become prominent psychologists. Cattell and Dewey, however, were only incidentally his students. Cattell was at Hopkins when Hall arrived and left shortly thereafter for Leipzig. Dewey's degree, though taken during Hall's professorship, was for work done under Morris. But Dewey did work in the laboratory and appreciated the significance of the "new psychology," The first Ph.D. in psychology at Hopkins went to Joseph Jastrow. Hall's own degree at Harvard had been awarded in psychology but this was in one sense an afterthought on the part of the philosophy department at the time of completion of the work. Jastrow had enrolled for a degree in psychology, so his was the first Ph.D. in psychology in the United States.

In 1887, while still at Hopkins, Hall established the American Journal of Psychology.[70] Its founding was entirely unexpected, though Hall had hoped to found a journal some day. A total stranger walked into his office, suggested he found a journal, and, then and there gave him a check for $500. It later turned out that his benefactor had confused experimental psychology with psychical research and he canceled his subscription in the second year of publication. This mistake is by no means as foolish as it sounds. The designation "committee on experimental psychology" was used by psychical research organizations as the name for their investigatory bodies. The American Journal of Psychology was the first English language journal to be primarily devoted to psychology. When Hall went to Clark University, he took the American Journal. He would remain its editor until 1921 when it went to Cornell University under E. B. Titchener's editorship.

Hall used his opportunity as editor and primary book reviewer to strike blows against the traditional American psychologies of the philosophical sort. He viciously attacked James McCosh's Psychology: The Cognitive Powers and Borden P. Bowne's Introduction to Psychological Theory. McCosh represented the last gasp of Scottish realist faculty psychology and Bowne was the Christian interpreter of Kant and idealism. Hall intended his new journal to be the standard bearer of the new psychology in America and to set itself against the philosophical psychology of the past.

Clark University

Hall was given the presidency of the soon to be established Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. A wealthy merchant, Jonas Gilman Clark, had decided to endow an institution of higher learning in his home town. Before the school actually opened, Hall had high aspirations for it, higher than could actually be realized. He embarked on a tour of the European educational centers. Hall's letters[71] from Europe addressed to Clark are filled with the ideas suggested to him by these encounters, discussion of the chance of persuading a distinguished scholar to come to Worcester, and the like. He planned to make Clark University a graduate scientific institute, modeled after the German universities and surpassing Johns Hopkins. Research was to be its task, education a necessary accompaniment.

Fortunately for psychology, President Hall had also made himself professor of psychology and continued to teach in the graduate school all during his time at Clark. He had also brought along Edmund C. Sanford from Baltimore to head the laboratory. William H. Burnham, another Hopkins student, was put in charge of pedagogics, which in this setting meant educational psychology and mental hygiene. Adolph Meyer, later the leading psychiatrist of his time, who was then at Worcester State Hospital, also gave lectures.

Hall's last publication within the conventional limits of experimental psychology (on touch sensitivity) appeared in 1887. His own work thereafter was nonexperimental in nature, but this limitation does not reflect his attitude toward the field and his faith in the advantage of scientific method. He eloquently and unequivocally defended laboratory work. His students saw him as the leader of the forces that would make psychology a science. There are many indications, however, that the laboratory was too far removed from life to meet his own personal interests. He was impatient with the slow plodding of laboratory work. Nevertheless, experimental psychology was still his vision of psychology, even though he realized that others would have to carry on the work.

Founding of the American Psychological Association

It was Hall's idea to institute the first scientific organization of psychologists, the American Psychological Association, which was founded in July, 1892.[72] He issued the invitations, arranged for a meeting in Worcester, and in general dominated the proceedings. Almost as a matter of course, he was elected the first president. It was at this first meeting that the scientific character of the organization was established. It is impossible after all these years to determine just who was present, but apparently ten to eighteen psychologists were there.[73] James was in Switzerland, but was included in the twenty-six charter members who received invitations. The first annual meeting was held later the same year. After considerable controversy over the years, it has broadened it functions to include the application of psychology and the advancement of its professional status while maintaining its original scientific goal.

Hall's Competition with James

Hall seems to have been vying with William James in the 1880's and 1890's for the leadership of American psychology. In the late 1880's he seemed to be destined to be the "founder of American experimental psychology." His productive laboratories at Hopkins and Clark Universities were far ahead of most others of the time. His founding of the American Journal of Psychology and his founding of the American Psychological Association were all acts of the leader of a new discipline. With the publication of James' Principles of Psychology, however, the tide appears to have gone against Hall. Perhaps because James did not threaten his junior colleagues in American psychology by trying to be the leader, they gathered around him to use his position and reputation for their own purposes. Hall would find that the American Psychological Association would be taken away from him within two or three years and put in the control of James' followers. Hall would lose interest in the APA and seldomly attended meetings thereafter. There was an attempt by some of James' followers to dictate to Hall how he should run the American Journal of Psychology and, even though Hall attempted to accommodate them, they founded the rival journal, the Psychological Review. In many respects, American psychology even past the first decade of the twentieth century was split between Hall's followers and those of William James.[74]

Child Study and Developmentalism

A guiding prescription for Hall was developmentalism as expressed in evolutionary theory, which had interested him since his student days at Williams and was only strengthened during his European travels. Hall's thinking concerning a whole host of psychological topics was guided by the conviction that the normal growth of the mind occurs as a series of evolutionary stages. Pursuing this aim, he turned to the psychological study of the child through the use of questionnaires, a procedure he had learned in Germany. In fact, in 1881, before leaving Boston for Baltimore, Hall had a chance at research in the Boston school system. In this study, entitled, "The Contents of Children's Minds," and in subsequent studies, he unearthed a considerable body of miscellaneous information about children's thinking on a variety of subjects.[75] By the end of 1915, 194 questionnaires had been developed and applied by Hall and his students. The topics included anger, dolls, crying, the early sense of self, fears, foods, religious experience, death conventionality, mathematics, superstitions, and dreams.

These studies created great public enthusiasm at the time and led to the founding of the so-called child-study movement. Large numbers of parents and teachers turned to the task of applying and interpreting questionnaires. All over the world they uncritically and dogmatically reported their superficial excursions into child development. The sentimentality and general wooliness of the movement led to a reaction against it, both within psychology and from various sectors of the public, and in a few years it disappeared. Nonetheless, the concept of psychological development had been firmly established through this work. The child-study movement served to bring home forcefully the importance of the empirical study of the child, while through its very excesses it made for an increased critical evaluation of research.[76]

In 1893, Hall had founded at his own expense the Pedagogical Seminary (now the Journal of Genetic Psychology), to which he and his students contributed a large share of the articles. For some years this journal was the chief outlet for research in child study and educational psychology.

It was in his huge work entitled Adolescence that Hall stated most completely his particular recapitulation theory of development.[77] He offered the conjecture that in his individual development, the child repeats the life history of the race. For instance, the level of the primitive man is repeated when the child plays at cowboys and Indians.

Attitude Toward Psychoanalysis

Hall was one of the first Americans to become interested in psychoanalysis. The twentieth anniversary of Clark University in 1909 was celebrated with a series of conferences, including the famous visit of Freud and Jung to the United States at Hall's invitation. This invitation was a courageous step in view of the suspicion and dislike that Hall knew to be directed at the whole psychoanalytic movement.[78] Hall, however, cannot be called a Freudian. He was an eclectic, cheerfully borrowing from Freud what he was as useful and equally without malice accepting that contradicted Freud.[79] He could admire Freud, but he wanted to go beyond the "psychology of sex." As his letters show, he could never understand why Freud was so intolerant of eclectic borrowing.[80] Freud, of course, saw this behavior as unforgivably inconsistent. Hall maintained his interest in psychoanalysis throughout his life although in his later years he expressed himself much more negatively about it. In the last conversation that Cattell had with him, Hall expressed himself puzzled over why academic psychology so vehemently rejected psychoanalysis.[81]

Some clues as to Hall's stature can be gleaned from the opinions of a large sample of psychologists who were solicited in connection with a commemorative statement about him.[82] Despite the veil of adulation that clouds such ceremonies, it is clear that he was primarily a source of stimulation for others, opening up for them areas of study and research. As Titchener put it at about the same time, "He sought to inspire and I tried to train."[83] They shared the goal of research; their difference was in the means used, not in the end sought. A psychologist who worked with Hall at Clark spoke of Hall's conviction that psychology should not set limits for itself and of his desire, "to build the top of the mountain first."[84]

Hall remained throughout his life an intensely agile thinker with boundless enthusiasm for often contradictory views on practically everything. He was a founder so intent on his pioneering that he almost always moved immediately to his next adventure, leaving for others the task of tidying up. He, himself, wondered if his life had not been a series of fads or crazes.[85] He said that Wundt would rather have been commonplace than brilliantly wrong.[86] One suspects that Hall would have reversed the statement for himself.

G. Stanley Hall was versatile and broad in his interests, a pioneer in many areas of psychological endeavor. A considerable number of the psychologists polled considered him to be the pioneer in studies of childhood, adolescence, senescence, and human genetics. Of these, the stimulation he gave to child psychology is most important. In a sense Hall made a gospel of childhood. he lifted childhood to a new plane of importance, focusing on the child as a child, and studying him for his own sake.

An all - pervasive developmental allegiance characterized his work. His adherence to a dynamic rather than a static attitude and some appreciation of unconscious mentalism was apparent, but neither was integrated into an overall view in any systematic fashion.

Summary

William James and G. Stanley Hall were two individuals who greatly influenced scientific psychology in America at its beginnings in the late nineteenth century. James's influence was primarily one of ideas, particularly those expressed in his Principles of Psychology. Perhaps James's greatest contribution to American psychology was his clear separation of mind from soul and the resulting secularization of psychological concepts of mind. Hall's contribution was primarily organizational, reflected in his founding of the American Psychological Association and the American Journal of Psychology. James remained primarily as a philosopher, always preferring the contemplative model of traditional philosophy to the methods of the research laboratory. Hall, while he did little direct experimentation himself, emphasized laboratory work whenever possible. Both James and Hall were finally left behind in the fast-moving changes that were revolutionizing the psychologies of the twentieth century, yet they both played major roles in directing those changes in their early phases.
References