CHAPTER 20

Chapter 20

Angell and American Functionalism

Functional psychologies both predate and postdate the arrival of Titchener's structuralism. As we have seen in earlier chapters, functional psychology was concerned with mind in use, what the mind does for us. Functional psychology is as old as psychology itself. Aristotle was a functional psychologist, as was Descartes. The psychological thought that arose in America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, discussed in Chapter 17, also emphasized mind in use. Faculty psychologies, in their own way, are functional psychologies, since the faculties are the functions of the soul. William James was also functional in his approach. Functional psychologies, due to their emphasis on the use of mind, lent themselves readily to the practical and to the struggle to get ahead, which made them congenial to the practical American way of looking at things.

Functionalism

Functionalisms as considered in this discussion, are viewed as particular forms of functional psychology, twentieth century systems of functional psychology, particularly centered at the University of Chicago and at Columbia University. Functional psychology, then, is the generic form.

Titchener and his structuralists believed application was technology, not science and that teleology was unacceptable in a scientific psychology. To characterize functional psychology in terms of utility seemed to them tantamount to criticism. Titchener said that structuralism dealt with the IS of mind; functionalism dealt with the IS FOR. The functionalists, however, also held their discipline to be scientific. They did not view their study of the ways in which consciousness helps the individual adapt to the environment as any less scientific than biology. In the hands of James Rowland Angell, the Chicago school showed a partiality toward research on learning, perception, and similar processes; they were also interested in animal psychology, physiological psychology, and the psychology of individual differences. Functionalism went far beyond the constraints of Titchener's "normal, adult, human mind.

William James as a Functional Psychologist

Functional psychology has many forebears. In the modern era it was James who was singled out by Titchener as a typical functional psychologist in his 1898 article contrasting functional psychology with structural psychology.[1] Actually, James was too versatile to be easily labeled. Titchener actually adopted his terms structural and functional and their differentiation from an article by James that appeared in 1884.[2] James had attached no great importance to the distinction, however; and, in his Principles, James had relegated it to a footnote.[3]

In what sense was James a functional psychologist? In the Principles, James assimilated psychology into biology and treated thinking as an instrument in the struggle for life.[4] Mental processes were conceived of as activities. Mind was not an entity, but a functional activity of the organism. The biological survival value of mind was stressed; if consciousness had no value it would not have survived. James saw consciousness as useful because it intervened in the cause-effect sequence, resulting in the spontaneity and productivity of the mind. This particular view was accepted and elaborated on by John Dewey in his appeal to consciousness as part of the adjustive equipment of the organism, and Angell[5] used James's already familiar argument that consciousness is not present when it has no utility

John Dewey as a Functionalist

Charles Darwin had helped to prepare the way for functionalism by emphasizing adaptation, activities, and individual differences. Darwin, however, was not a teleologist. Such adaptation was merely a process, not part of some plan of perfection. Galton and Spencer continued this tradition, but added purposiveness to the positions of Darwin, each in his own way, the first emphasizing individual differences and the second, adaptation. Showing its evolutionary heritage, functionalism saw psychology as the study of how consciousness aids in the adaptation of the organism to its environment. Titchener, as we have already seen, criticized this position on the basis that adaptation of the organism to the environment was a biological and not a psychological subject-matter.

In the 1890's and early 1900's there were already in America kindred spirits to this view of mind-in-use. Such early psychologists as James McKeen Cattell and Robert S. Woodworth at Columbia, James Mark Baldwin at Toronto and later Johns Hopkins and, in some ways, G. Stanley Hall at Clark made use of the notion. While we will consider the Columbia group later in this chapter as an informal school of functionalism, the center of the formal development of functional psychology into functionalism was at Chicago.

Life of Dewey.

John Dewey (1859-1952) can be considered the first American functionalist.[6] Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont in 1859. He entered the University of Vermont at the age of 15. He studied philosophy there, which was largely the dominant Scottish realist philosophy. He also studied the writings of James Marsh, who had earlier been President of the University and who had helped introduce Kantian idealism to America. There he also encountered the evolutionary writings of Thomas Huxley. Dewey graduated in 1879 and, taught school for a couple of years. He returned to Vermont and the University of Vermont, where he continued his studies while teaching in a village school. After successfully getting an article accepted in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Dewey determined to become a philosopher.[7] He enrolled for graduate work at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1881. G. Stanley Hall was just establishing his laboratory there at the time. Hall was away during Dewey's first semester at Hopkins and Dewey took his courses from George Sylvester Morris (1840 - 1889), who was then teaching part of each year at Hopkins and part at the University of Michigan. Morris, also a native of Vermont, had studied with Trendelenberg in Germany and was, by the time Dewey met him, an enthusiastic promoter of the idealism of Hegel.[8] Dewey fell under Morris' spell. Dewey's dissertation was on Kant and it was very much in the spirit of George Sylvester Morris.[9] While Dewey would come under the influence of other thinkers, notably William James, he was fond of saying that Hegel "left a permanent deposit in my thinking."[10]

It was while Dewey was still a graduate student at Johns Hopkins that he wrote on the new psychology.[11] Dewey's view as expressed in that article is indicative of his functional and teleological tendencies. The "New Psychology", Dewey wrote,:

...emphasizes the teleological element, not in any mechanical or external sense, but regarding life as an organism in which immanent ideas or purposes are realizing themselves throughout the development of experience. ...We can conclude only by saying that following the logic of life, it attempts to comprehend life.[12]

After receiving his doctorate from Johns Hopkins, Dewey received an appointment in 1884 to the department of philosophy of the University of Michigan where he would work until 1894. George Sylvester Morris, then solely at Michigan, was largely responsible for the call. Dewey followed the usual custom and taught psychology as well as philosophy; indeed, he published in 1886[13] a somewhat influential text titled simply Psychology which contained the philosophical presuppositions characteristic of his time. With the publication of William James's Principles of Psychology, however, Dewey changed many of his ideas on psychology. He was particularly influenced by James's notion of the "stream of consciousness." Later editions of Dewey's Psychology demonstrate the alteration in his thought.[14] Dewey did not consider in any of these editions that psychology could avail itself directly of the experimental method, however.[15] He believed that introspection was the primary source of information about psychological matters. Introspection, to Dewey, however, was

...a general power of knowing which the mind has, directed reflectively and intentionally upon a certain set of facts. It is also called internal perception; the observation of the nature and course of ideas as they come and go, corresponding to external perception, or the observation of facts and events before the senses. This method of observation of facts of consciousness must ultimately be the sole source of the material of psychology."[16]

Dewey's functional leanings are also evident in the title of the second chapter of his Psychology, "The Mind and Its Modes of Activity."

Dewey's period as a force in psychology and his identification with functionalism, however, coincided with his stay at the University of Chicago during the years 1894 to 1904. When he left Chicago for Columbia University in 1905, he no longer worked directly in the field of psychology, although he did utilize psychology in the larger educational and philosophical perspectives that later concerned him.

Dewey and the Reflex Arc

It was Dewey's paper of 1896 on the reflex arc concept that served to introduce the school of functionalism.[17] Just as James before him had attacked psychological atomism by demonstrating that simple ideas have no existential reality in the stream of consciousness, so Dewey found the same doctrine of elementism lurking in the reflex arc. He was searching for a unifying concept for mental life, and he considered the reflex arc, recently borrowed from physiology, a likely possibility. Despite its promise, detailed analysis led him to reject it for this purpose because of its "patchwork" qualities.The reflex arc was not made up of three separate elements: sensation, mediation and response, but a single, continuous conscious process. [18]

As Dewey saw it, a child's withdrawal of his finger from the flame, often given as the classical example of the reflex arc, does not tell the whole story of what is happening. After an experience of this sort, the visual perception of the flame, previously inviting to the child, is now permanently altered. The stimulus and the response of the burn-withdrawal reflex does not end with the withdrawal. It now serves as the stimulus for another situation that belongs to the same act, instead of being a new occurrence. Every reaction, Dewey argued, is a circuit. That is, adjustment is more than a response to a stimulus: it is a realignment within one's environment. The unitary act completes a circle from sensation through movement to a new sensation that arises out of that movement. Sensation as an "existence" and motion as a response do not account for the psychological facts, which form, not an arc, but a circuit. Dewey argued that reflexes, as well as other forms of behavior, should not be treated as artificial constructs by the abstraction of their sensory and motor phases. It is their significance for adaptation that is crucial. In this way Dewey was making a plea for function as the basis of psychological study.

Here we find two of the fundamental aspects that underlie Chicago functionalism, a wholistic rather than an elementistic representation of psychological activity and an emphasis on consciousness as an adaptive adjustment.

James Rowland Angell

Without deliberate intention, the functional viewpoint became crystallized as a school. In some measure this came about through answering attacks made by critics of this viewpoint. When Titchener popularized the term "functionalism" by contrasting it with structuralism and criticizing it, James Rowland Angell (1869-1949), a former student of William James and Dewey's younger associate at the University of Chicago, accepted the challenge.[19]

Life of Angell

Angell was born in Burlington, Vermont in 1869.[20] His father was president of the University of Vermont between 1866 and 1871 and president of the University of Michigan from 1871 to 1909. James R. Angell received his undergraduate education at the University of Michigan between 1886 and 1890, where he studied botany. At Michigan, Angell met John Dewey. Dewey's Psychology, which had just recently appeared, was Angell's introduction to psychology. After receiving his bachelor's degree, Angell stayed on at Michigan during the 1890-91 working on a master's degree in philosophy. In 1890, when James's Principles of Psychology appeared, Dewey offered a seminar on the new book and Angell took the course. James and the ideas of the Principles would influence Angell for the remainder of his psychological career.

Angell decided on a career in psychology and went to Harvard to do graduate work during the 1891-92 school year with William James. After gaining his master's degree in 1892 at Harvard, Angell went to Germany for his doctorate. He hoped to work with Wilhelm Wundt, but Wundt's laboratory space was full. Instead, Angell went to Berlin to study with Hermann Ebbinghaus. It is said Angell did not like the laboratory work in Ebbinghaus's program and so, during the second semester he transferred to Halle and studied with Benno Erdmann, a philosophical psychologist. He was working on a dissertation on Kant's freedom of the will when he received a call to an instructorship at the University of Minnesota. Angell wished to marry and felt that he would not receive a better position even with a doctorate. Angell never received his official doctoral degree, but received numerous honorary degrees during the remainder of his life.

After a year a Minnesota, John Dewey, who had just been appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, brought Angell to Chicago as an assistant professor to take charge of the psychology curriculum. In 1904, when psychology became a department independent of philosophy, Angell became its head.

Both Angell and Dewey had been influenced by William James and it was only natural that they attempted to bring James's unruly psychology into some systematic order. This was important in the mid 1890's because of the threat being posed by Titchener and his highly organized and systematized structural psychology to the ideas of William James and of all functionally-oriented psychologies. Angell became the most visible opponent to the structural psychology of E. B. Titchener during the late 1890's and first decade of this century.

Angell's Functionalist Manifesto

In his paper, "The Province of Functional Psychology" and in his textbook of psychology Angell attempted to present the functional point of view. The University of Chicago was afterwards the major source from which functional psychologists came. It should be emphasized, however, that the Chicago functionalists argued that the heritage of functionalism was of such a broad nature that it was, properly speaking, not a school at all, and they expressly stated that it should not be identified with psychology as taught at Chicago. Despite this disclaimer, most psychologists were inclined to consider the Chicago psychologists sufficiently different from other psychologists and sufficiently similar among themselves to warrant classification as adherents to a particular school. In 1906, Angell's presidential address to the American Psychological Association was "The Province of Functional Psychology."[21] He brought together three conceptions of function that he considered acceptable to functional psychologists. 1) Functionalism is concerned with mental operations, the "how" and "why" of consciousness, as contrasted to the "what" of the psychology of mental elements. 2) Mind is a means of mediating between the needs of the organism and the environment. Consciousness, in accordance with the emergency theory of James, is utilitarian, since it serves some end. Because consciousness helps to solve problems, an interest in the applied fields of psychology flows naturally from an interest in it. 3) Functional psychology is a psychophysical psychology that requires that the in-body relationship be taken into consideration in psychology. The functional psychology is interested in studying mental processes as a means of adjustment; this in turn implies that the epiphenomenalistic solution, which holds mental activity to be nothing more than a useless by-product of brain action, is incompatible with functionalism. Other than this, no special psychophysical position is necessary. This article clearly spelled out the functionalist position, and in this sense was more important than Dewey's paper, which, though it showed a functionalist spirit in dealing with a particular psychological issue, did not explicate the conceptions of a functional psychology.

In 1904,[22] Angell wrote a textbook, titled Psychology: An Introductory Study of the Structure and Function of Human Consciousness. The book was concerned with both the structure and the function of human consciousness, as its subtitle attests. Functional solutions were sufficiently emphasized however to make clear what he meant by functional psychology. Angell saw the introspective study of consciousness as the principal method of psychological investigation, but it was not the analytical introspection of Wundt or Titchener. The type of introspection used at Chicago was more like that of James, a phenomenological description of ongoing experience. Angell's approach differed from that of Titchener also because he accepted the objective observation of the individual's actions as a supplement. He even allowed his students to do research on animals, although he required them to "introspect" for the animals, attempting to describe what was going on in their minds. Thus the study of behavior was explicitly accepted as a method of psychology, but was only secondary to the study of mental functions. Angell's functionalism emphasized the mind as a whole, not made up of atomistic parts. He opposed the view that the primary purpose of psychology is the analysis of immediate experience into its elements and their attributes.[23] There was room in Angell's psychology for the mentalistic findings of Wundt or Titchener's psychologies, but there was also room for objective methods.

Angell viewed mind as having three primary functions, knowing, feeling and doing, making his functionalism part of the line of functional psychological thought from Aristotle to James. Angell was not only influenced by James but also by the Darwinian evolutionary revolution. Angell's functionalism, however, was teleological. It emphasized mind in use. Like James. Angell believed that mind had survival value. If it did not, it would have dropped off in the evolutionary development. To Angell, consciousness, was a problem solver. This is clearly demonstrated in Angell's treatment of the lapsed intelligence theory of instincts. Walter Hunter summarizes Angell's theory as follows:

Consciousness appears (and appeared phylogenetically) when reflexes, instincts, and habits fail to solve the problem which confronts the organism. Consciousness aids in the solution of the problem and then, no problem existing longer at that point, passes on to other points of conflict in the organism's behavior. Where consciousness not in general a problem-solver, it would have no adaptive value and hence would not have survived as a function of the organism. Not only consciousness in general but consciousness in its various forms has an adaptive function....[24]

Angell held that instinctive behavior was originally conscious behavior. When an organism encounters a problem that past habits or instincts cannot solve, consciousness comes forth and seeks to resolve the problem. Once solved, if the situation is encountered again and again, the reliance on consciousness becomes less and less until the action becomes habitual and may no longer be conscious at all. Habits that are deeply ingrained into an organism may be passed on to the next generation by way of instincts.

This idea has its roots far back into Chauncey Wright and William James, and is indicative of the way in which Angell approached psychological problems. Much of Angell's "lapsed intelligence theory" lost respectability when Lamarckian evolutionary theory evaporated, but the remainder of the theory is rediscovered every decade or so by psychologists who do not know their history.

Angell effectively left the field of psychology in 1911 when he became an administrator at Chicago and later, president of Yale University. While he published in psychology only rarely after 1912, he aided the cause of psychology through his assistance to Robert M. Yerkes and his primate work at Yale and in his support of the Kinsey sex surveys. After retiring from Yale he became a top executive of the National Broadcasting Corporation.

Angell graduated many students during his academic career, including John B. Watson, Walter Hunter and Harvey Carr. While most of his students eventually moved toward behaviorism, they all strongly influenced the direction psychology was to take over the next fifty years.

Harvey A. Carr AND LATER CHICAGO FUNCTIONALISM

Harvey Carr (1873-1954) had studied at Chicago with Angell and was appointed to the department of psychology there in 1908, when John B. Watson left for Johns Hopkins. When Angell left Chicago, Carr took over as head of the department, a post he held until 1938. During this time he continued the Chicago functionalist tradition and became its primary spokesman.[25] He wrote a text,Psychology: A Study of Mental Activity[26] and a book on space perception,[27] both from the functionalist point of view. During Carr's years at Chicago about 150 psychologists received their Ph.D.s; and their later careers showed the influence of the functionalist spirit.

Carr helped to clarify the meaning of "functional," over which there had been considerable controversy.[28] A charge had been made that "function" had been used inconsistently by the functional psychologists.[29] It was argued that when was sometimes meant by functional were the mental activities, such as seeing, hearing, perceiving, and the like; at other times functional served to indicate use or service for some end, as when we speak of the function of a word. The functionalists, it was said, would apply the word function to an activity, such as breathing or digestion, and later use the word to denote the utility of an activity, as when it is said that oxidation of the blood is a function of breathing. This made it possible to speak of a function of an activity, in other words, of a function of a function, which critics of functionalism saw as an absurd confusion. In replying to this charge, Carr insisted that there is really no discrepancy because at a higher level of interpretation the two meanings are actually the same. The common identity of the two--process and end--is the mathematical meaning of function, as in the expression y = f(x); i.e., "y" is a function of "x." When a mathematician says y is a function of x, he is merely saying there is a contingent relation between them, but he does not specify the precise nature of that relation. Functional psychologists use the term the same way, whether they speak of process or end, act or structure, cause or effect. A contingent relation and a functional relation are synonymous. In this, Carr came very close to contemporary usage. The use of cause and effect, which Carr specifically mentioned as one of these functional relations, later led to statements that psychology is the study of functional or contingent relations between antecedent psychological events and their consequents. A considerable number of contemporary psychologists would subscribe to this definition.

Chicago functionalism was significant in that it brought American functional thought into some degree of order. It was never as organized or as coherent as Titchener's structuralists. It gave a scientific legitimacy to many of James's ideas and connected them closely with biology. John B. Watson's behaviorism can be seen as a logical extension, with some major revisions, of the Chicago formula.

Columbia Functionalism

Clear-cut, self-conscious allegiance to their school of thought did not characterize the functionalists as it did the structuralists. Psychology at Columbia University, represented by James McKeen Cattell was also sympathetic to a functionalist point of view without being narrowly identified with it. The psychologists at Columbia during the first two decades of this century emphasized mind-in-use, however and sought experimental means of investigating psychological processes.

James McKeen Cattell

If Columbia functionalism had a leader, it was J. McKeen Cattell (1860 - 1944). In the course of an after-dinner speech, James McKeen Cattell[30] once told the story of his boyhood visit to a phrenologist. After inspecting the bumps of his head, the phrenologist proceeded to describe his characteristics, all but one of them were laudatory--according to the phrenologist, Cattell suffered from a deficiency in will power! The eruption of laughter from his friends that greeted his remark seemed to surprise Cattell. In point of fact, many of Cattell's major characteristics centered on this salient trait. Dogged determination, unflagging energy, and resistance to domination by those with what he considered undeserved authority seem to have characterized this American psychologist and scientific statesman.

Cattell's Early Life

James McKeen Cattell, encountered earlier as Wundt's self-appointed first assistant and as a student at Johns Hopkins during G. Stanley Hall's time there, was born in 1860 in Easton, Pennsylvania, where his father was a professor of classics and later president of Lafayette College.[31] There, in 1880, Cattell took his bachelor's degree. His undergraduate interests were chiefly literary, but these interests changed, and he followed the usual custom of graduate study abroad, going to Göttingen and to Leipzig to study philosophy under Wundt. After a paper in philosophy had won him a fellowship at Johns Hopkins for the years 1882-1883, he returned to the United States, just at the time Hall was organizing his laboratory. In the laboratory Cattell started research on the time taken for various mental activities. This research reinforced his desire to become a psychologist, so he returned to Leipzig the following year. It was on his return to Leipzig that he announced to Wundt that he would be his assistant.[32]

Indications of his independence and firm convictions appeared early. Contrary to the usual custom of being assigned a problem by Wundt, Cattell worked on his own problems in reaction time. He also became convinced that the introspective efforts directed toward fractionation of the reaction time into perception, choice, and the like, then gospel in Wundt's laboratory, was something he could not carry out and which he doubted others could. The situation reached the point where he did some of his experiments at his lodging rather than in the laboratory, since Wundt would not permit subjects in his laboratory who could not profit from introspection.[33] Though somewhat strained, relations between them never reached a breaking point. Wundt and Cattell did agree on the value of the study of reaction time. In Cattell's eyes it was a valuable tool for the study of the time necessary for mental operation and especially for the investigation of individual differences. As early as 1885,[34] Cattell published a paper on the exposure time necessary before perception of colors, letters, and words. It concluded with a discussion of what he called a matter of "special interest," the individual differences he had obtained. Cattell worked prodigiously during the Leipzig years of 1883 to 1886, publishing nine research papers before the next year was out. Studies on the influences of stimulus intensity upon reaction time (1885), the time of word perception (1886), and the association time for various categories (1887) were typical subjects of his research.

After taking his degree at Leipzig in 1886, Cattell divided the next two years between the United States and England. On one side of the Atlantic he taught at Bryn Mawr College and at the University of Pennsylvania and on the other, worked in Galton's laboratory in London and lectured at Cambridge.

Cattell found in Galton a kindred spirit--"The greatest man whom I have known."[35] Contrary to the opinion sometimes expressed, his interest in individual differences, as we have seen, had made itself apparent before his contact with Galton. In fact, his research into individual differences was begun in America before he went to Leipzig. From the tone of his writings, the most specific reason for his interest in variability was the climate of the times in the United States.

In 1888, Cattell was appointed professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. This was the first professorship in psychology, not only in the United States, but in the world. Before him, psychologists had been appointed to the department of philosophy. With Cattell's appointment, the field of psychology had the recognition of its independence from the older discipline. The practice of naming professors of psychology spread rapidly, and before the beginning of the twentieth century there were a considerable number of them. Cattell founded a laboratory at Pennsylvania in 1887, but it was not until 1889 that an adequate laboratory was opened.[36] Although not the first in the country, it did have the distinction of being the first to introduce undergraduates to the methods of experimental psychology.

In 1891 Cattell moved to Columbia University as professor of psychology and administrative head of the department; he was also charged with the task of administering the work of anthropology.[37] His rapid rise on the American psychological scene is evident: at twenty-eight, he was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania; at thirty-one, the chairman of the department at Columbia; at thirty-five, president of the American Psychological Association; and at forty, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences--the first psychologist ever so honored.

Meanwhile, Cattell continued to be active in research. In a paper published in 1890 in Mind, the British journal, he coined the term "mental tests"[38] in describing a battery of tests administered to students at the University of Pennsylvania. As distinguished from Binet's later more complex tasks, these involved elementary operations. The basic tests of this series were dynamometer pressure, rate of movement, sensation areas by means of the two-point threshold, just noticeable differences in weight, reaction time for sound, time for naming colors, bisection of a line, judgment of times, and memory span for letters.

At Columbia, Cattell continued his testing program with largely the same sort of tests. After collecting data from several entering classes, an analysis of the results was made by Wissler in 1901.[39] Correlations of the individual test scores with academic class standings were found to be inconclusively low, as were the inter-correlations among the scores of the tests themselves. In sharp contrast, academic grades in the various subjects and overall academic standing were substantially correlated with each other. Results with specific sensory-motor tests, likewise showing negligible correlations with other measures, also emerged from Titchener's laboratory at Cornell.[40] It began to appear that the available psychological tests were relatively useless as predictors of ability. Further exploration along the lines suggested by these studies tended to dwindle. Binet's results, which would later dominate, had yet to be appreciated in the university setting.

In the spirit of the earlier work of Galton, but with vastly improved methodology, Cattell also carried on studies of the nature and origin of scientific ability, using the method of the order of merit. This method is applicable to any set of stimuli capable of being ranked according to some criterion, such as the relative brightness of shades of gray, the problem he first investigated.[41] It could be and soon was applied to such problems as the relative appeals of pictures or of colors. A number of judges would be asked to arrange the items to be evaluated in order of merit. The average ranking for each item was then calculated and a final rank order obtained.[42]

This method was applied by Cattell to the relative eminence of American psychologists in 1903.[43] For obvious reasons, the actual names associated with specific ranks were not published immediately. It was not until 1929 that the order of names was released. Rank number one went to William James, while the next five ranks went to Cattell, Hugo Münsterberg, G. Stanley Hall, J. Mark Baldwin, and Edward Bradford Titchener.

Later Life

In further developing the method of order of merit, Cattell asked men acknowledge to be competent in each of the various scientific fields to rate their colleagues in order. Those emerging at the top of the lists for each science were given a star in the Biographical Director of American Men of Science, a source book that emerged from this work. Through the seventh edition the starred men were asked to select the new men for the directory, a technique not followed in subsequent editions. To this day, the directory in its successive editions is a basic reference book, comparable to a specialized Who's Who. Though originating in a purely scientific study, its practical value has been considerable.

In 1895, Cattell acquired from Alexander Graham Bell the weekly journal Science, which had been having financial difficulties. In its publication, Cattell sought and secured the help of leading scientists throughout the country. After overcoming the financial difficulties, Science became the leading general scientific publication in the United States and in 1900 was made the official organ of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Cattell and other American psychologists, including James,[44] had decided that the American Journal of Psychology was functioning primarily as a house organ for the staff of Clark University and some of their associates. Accordingly, in 1894 in collaboration with J. Mark Baldwin, Cattell founded a rival journal, the Psychological Review.[45] In his hands this journal grew into an entire series of journals. Editing a weekly and managing journals takes time, and Cattell's personal research productivity began to drop off.

Robert S. Woodworth and Edward L. Thorndike and joined him at Columbia not long after his own arrival and were associated with him for many years. The separation of psychologists at the College and Graduate School from those at Teacher's College, where Thorndike did his work and where Cattell did some of his teaching, fortunately had not yet happened. It was only later that 120th Street, separating Teacher's College from the main campus, became "the widest street in the world."

During the years Cattell was at Columbia, more "psychologists-to-be" studied at Columbia University than at any other institution in the United States. By and large, Cattell gave his students freedom to advance on their own; he was available for guidance, but he stressed independent work.

He insisted on a similar independence for himself, arguing that a professor's time, if spent within his areas of competence, should not necessarily be devoted solely to the university and its students. He established his home on a hilltop near Garrison forty miles from New York, coming to the university only on certain days of the week. Later he equipped a laboratory and an editorial office in his home. To some extent this served to free him from the interruptions of university life.

Relations with the university administration became strained. He believed that many decisions that were being left to university administrators were properly matters for faculty decision. He not only raised his voice in pursuit of the aim of faculty participation, he also helped to found the American Association of University Professors. During the years of World War I, Cattell wrote a letter to members of Congress protesting the sending of conscientious objectors into combat duty. This unpopular and personally disadvantageous position was one from which he could not in good conscience desist, so he stood by his position. The president and the trustees judged his action to be treason and on this ground dismissed him from the University. Cattell sued for libel, and the case was settled several years later by his receiving a large annuity. In effect, however, his university career was over.

Many of Cattell's most important activities thereafter continued to be, in the best sense of the word, promotional in character. His numerous presidential addresses were often concerned with the growth and the current status of psychology.[46] He also served as a spokesman for psychology to the other sciences in the United States, as his editorships show. He did not hesitate to criticize and to advise in print universities, philanthropic agencies, the Carnegie Institution, and the National Academy of Sciences. He vigorously defended the growth of applied psychology, and psychology as a profession. As early as 1904, he predicted that there would eventually be a profession of psychology as well as a science of psychology.[47] In a similar spirit he organized the Psychological Corporation in 1921 in order to promote the application of psychology.[48] This corporation has grown considerably; it has used its profits to support other research, and it continues to play an important role in professional psychology. Cattell remained active as an editor and senior citizen scientist until his death in 1944.

Cattell was never given to theoretical writing. He was not a systematist but a researcher. He remained in research for some years of his life, thereafter maintaining a respect for research and an ability to criticize it. His interest in individual differences was instrumental in his working for psychology as a profession as well as a science. His bent toward administration and editing places him among that small group of men who gave the beginnings of psychology in the United States its characteristic flavor. His wholehearted devotion to both puristic and utilitarian prescriptions did much to advance both. It also served as a living example that they were not irreconcilable attitudes to hold simultaneously.

Robert S. Woodworth AND DYNAMIC FUNCTIONALISM

Younger than Cattell, Robert Sessions Woodworth (1869 - 1962) was also more eclectic. Woodworth was strongly influenced early on by G. Stanley Hall and William James. He had been introduced to psychology as an undergraduate at Amherst College by one of the older American philosophical psychologies. After graduating, he came upon William James's Principles and was stimulated by James's ideas. He did his graduate work at Harvard beginning in philosophy and working with both William James and Josiah Royce. His interests, however, turned to psychology. Woodworth's education took a very long time. He worked not only in philosophy and psychology at Harvard, but worked in physiology with Sherrington at Liverpool and with Cattell at Columbia. He joined the faculty at Columbia in 1903 and remained there for most of his career, except for 1912 when he spent a year with Oswald Külpe, who by then had moved from Würzburg to Bonn.[49]

Woodworth's contribution to the functional school is his dynamic psychology. In Woodworth's book, Dynamic Psychology, published in 1918, he described psychology as embracing both the older tradition of introspection and the newer one of behavior.[50] The use of "dymanic" is misleading, since Woodworth's psychology had little in common with the dynamic psychologies of Freud or other psychoanalysts. It was, in fact, a functionalism dealing with what Woodworth called "the workings of the mind."[51] Edna Heidbreder, who received her degree from Woodworth, described his dynamic psychology, as "a modest, matter-of-fact, unaggressive system..."[52] Woodworth was attempting to find a middle ground between the orthodox introspectionistic psychologies on one side and the burgeoning behavioral psychologies on the other. Woodworth tells us:

It is agreed on all sides that psychology studies processes. What the behaviorist observes, and what the introspectionist observes, both come down to process, sequence of events. Structure we observe only in the figurative sense in which a complex process may be said to have structure. We are concerned with antecedents and consequents, cause and effect, stimulus and response, the combination of factors and similar dynamic relations.

Psychological dynamics is not limited to the study of feeling, emotion, conation and muscular and glandular action. We study also sensations as dependent upon their stimuli, we analyze out the various factors in the perception of depth or distance, we examine the process of learning, and formulate laws of association or recall. The whole subject is permeated with dynamics.[53]

Woodworth's "system" of dynamic psychology was never widely held as a formal position, but it was indicative of the increasing tendency toward eclecticism as a response to the competing claims of orthodox introspectionism and radical behaviorism.

Woodworth also made another major contribution to psychology, his Experimental Psychology.[54] Published in 1938, it included many of the classic methods as did Titchener's Manuals but also the new methodology involved in human and animal psychology that had emerged since Titchener's volumes were released. That book, with its revision with Harold Schlosberg in 1954, became the methodological bible of students of psychology from its publication through the 1960's. It played the same role for today's senior psychologists that Titchener's Experimental Psychology had played for Woodworth's contemporaries. A notable contribution was Woodworth's popularization of the terms "independent variable" and "dependent variable" in talking about experimental causality.[55]

Also, Woodworth's Contemporary Schools of Psychology was one of the first attempts to gain perspectives on the systematic psychologies of the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries. First published in 1931, it went through three revisions, the last appearing with a co-author, Mary R. Sheehan in 1964.[56]

Edward L. Thorndike and Connectionism.

E. L. Thorndike (1874 - 1949) was also at Columbia during the first two decades of this century and played a role in what we are calling Columbia functionalism. Although in the Teachers College, rather than in the Department of Psychology, Thordike also put forth a psychology that could be called functionalist. Thorndike's connectionism is so closely identified with the emergence of behavioral psychology, however, that he and his positions will be discussed in Chapter 22.

Columbia had many individuals in psychology who contributed in one way or the other to functional, behavioral or applied psychology, including Carl Warden (1890 - 1961) in comparative psychology, and Albert T. Poffenberger ( ) and Harry Hollingworth (1880-1956), both in areas of applied psychology.

Overview.

By 1930, Harvey Carr said he dared not list functionalists by name lest some he considered to fall within its scope be "rudely shocked."[57] It is probable that a large number of psychologists of the first three decades of the century who thought of themselves simply as "psychologists" (with the exception of the Titchenerians) were closest in spirit to functionalism.[58] This, however, was a functionalism much more slanted toward behavior than even Woodworth intended, because, as Chapter 22 will discuss, the latter half of these three decades saw the appearance and eventual domination of behaviorism.

In the clash between the structuralism of Titchener and the functionalisms of Angell and Carr's Chicago and Cattell's Columbia, the American psychologist had a clear-cut choice between different prescriptive patterns. The psychological categories of structuralism were contents and of functionalism were activities. Structuralists held fast to the purist prescription while functionalists tended to be more at the utilitarian end. Structuralists, while many did quantitative work, were more likely to observe the qualitative prescription, while functionalists tended to be much more quantitative. Structuralism was solidly molecularist and functionalists were more likely to be molarists. While both structuralism and functionalism made use of contentual subjectivism, it was functionalism that made the most use of contentual objectivism until the coming of behaviorism which would, in time, dominate the American psychological scene.

The two schools came to agree, however, on the importance of the experimental method on the investigation of psychological problems. Both the structuralists and functionalists contributed to the laboratory or at least experimentation as the central approach to the psychological enterprise.

Summary

Functionalism arose as an attempt to systemize the often nebulous functional psychology that dominated the American psychological scene in the 1890's. It had as major influences the new biology of the Darwinists, the vestiges of the older American psychology of function and the rich but sometimes mercurial ideas of William James. Reacting to the real and present danger of Wundt's and Titchenerian elementism, John Dewey and particularly James R. Angell, attempted to form the crux of functional psychology into an experimental psychology that had no need of analysis into elements and which dealt with the psychological functions of knowing, feeling and doing. Chicago functionalism was teleological in its conceptions, viewing consciousness as a problem solver and thus having survival value. Angell made use not only of conscious experience but also of behavioral events as well. In so doing, Angell laid the groundwork for the coming of behaviorism.

Functional psychology also was dominant at Columbia University during the academic lifetime of James McKeen Cattell. Less of a "school" than Chicago functionalism, Cattell and his colleagues such as Robert S. Woodworth influenced legions of Columbia Ph.D's toward an experimental, functional psychology which would blend, almost imperceptibly with later behaviorism.
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