The Compromised Scientist: William James in the Development of American Psychology 9780231880107

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Chapter One. The Shifting Moment
Chapter Two. The Compromised Artist
Chapter Three. The German Connection: James and Hugo Münsterberg
Chapter Four. The Uncompromised Scientist: Edward Bradford Titchener
Chapter Five. Psychological Nationalist: James McKeen Cattell
Chapter Six. The Pitfalls of Parental Compromising
Chapter Seven. Accommodating the Boundaries of Consciousness
Conclusion: The Consequences of Compromising
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Compromised Scientist: William James in the Development of American Psychology

William James, c. 1905 from William fames, the Man and the Thinker Max Otto, et al. Reprinted courtesy of the University of Wisconsin Press.

by

The Compromised Scientist: William James in the Development of American Psychology Daniel W. Bjork

Columbia University Press New York 1983

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bjork, Daniel W. The compromised scientist. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. James, William, 1842-1910. 2. PsychologistsUnited States—Biography. 3. Psychology—United States—History. I. Title. BF109.J28B55 1983 150'.9'24 [B] 82-14690 ISBN 0-231-05500-5 ISBN 0-231-05501-3 (pbk.)

Columbia University Press New York Guildford, Surrey Copyright © 1983 Columbia University Press All right reserved Printed in the United States of America

Clothbound editions of Columbia University Press books are Smyth-sewn and printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.

for RKB

in all ways always

Contents Preface Chapter One: The Shifting Moment Chapter Two: The Compromised Artist Chapter Three: The German Connection: James and Hugo Münsterberg Chapter Four: The Uncompromised Scientist: Edward Bradford Titchener Chapter Five: Psychological Nationalist: James McKeen Cattell Chapter Six: The Pitfalls of Parental Compromising Chapter Seven: Accommodating the Boundaries of Consciousness Conclusion: The Consequences of Compromising Notes Bibliography Index

ix 1 15 39 73 105 127 145 163 175 201 213

Preface WILLIAM JAMES was a man with many faces, perhaps poses. An extraordinary versatility combined with a compassionate humanity, brilliant intellectual gifts, and outstanding scholarly accomplishment—the result was a most remarkable American and a major figure in modern intellectual history. If the following pages present a critical judgment on certain Jamesian qualities, they cannot detract from ineradicable genius. Whatever is written about James must forever stand in the background. Scholars have concentrated on James's place in the development of philosophy, in working out implications of his contribution to the broad sweep of modern thought. James has been portrayed as a pioneering pragmatist, a radical empiricist, and an early phenomenologist. He has also been depicted as one of the most significant American thinkers to apply Darwinism to psychology and philosophy. James has generally been praised as the philosophical warrier who dismantled the prepragmatic metaphysical edifice and as an "individualist" who fashioned a dynamic psychology that created a remarkable, empirical topography of human introspection. 1 But his intellectual contribution has not been the only attraction. Others have examined the heroic quality of his life. They have been particularly fascinated with his "psychic" or "spiritual" crisis in the late 1860s, one that brought deep de-

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spair and edged him toward suicide. The striking resurrection of his emotional and intellectual life from utter despondency has served as a model for salvaging a realistic intellectual optimism. Indeed, writers have increasingly emphasized James's broad representative quality, the capacity to be a barometer of critical characteristics in his culture and era. They have evaluated James not so much as a philosopher or evolutionary thinker but as a "symbolic" intellect immersed in the American scene, yet strangely both ahead of and behind it. 2 James will probably always continue to evoke interpretation. Even so, two recent preoccupations make a reconsideration of James timely. Historians have become interested in the "professionalization" of American life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; they are inquiring into the changing meanings of "role" and "career" as significant components of emerging modernity. 3 James, as a founder of American experimental psychology, was deeply implicated in the shift to professionalism, in altered role and career considerations. This perspective helps correct a common tendency to examine James's intellectual contribution outside of—or at least peripheral to—the forming professional context, a practice that characterizes James at center as simply a "psychologist" or a "philosopher" or a "pragmatist." James was more than a thinker, more than a symbol; he was a man who matured in the ambitious professional projects prevading not just the formation of a science, of universities, but of an age. Then, too, there is powerful contemporary awareness of the psychological and even pathological dimension in historical analysis. Since World War II scholars have sought and found an America gripped with anxiety, malaise, strain, unease, inner conflict, guilt, and paranoia. 4 The configuration of James's troubled inner life intersected with his America's growing preoccupation with novel role-playing and career opportunities. Professionalization and psychic troubles, modernization and mental turmoil came together in a most telling way in William James. For in resolving anxiety over career choice and then in playing his professional role as America's

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most famous founding scientific psychologist, James engaged in several kinds of compromises. It is the quality of these compromises that becomes the central theme of this book. 5 Keeping in mind the interrelated themes of personal crisis and professional awareness, I have tried to explore the development and, to some degree, the decline of James as a psychologist. What was the relationship between Jairtes's inner struggle and the flowering of his psychological vision, his pioneering psychological achievement? The primary object is not to analyze his psychology, or to show that his psychology was really a philosophy. Rather what is sought is a convincing explanation of James's emergence as an original and founding experimental psychologist. In this search I am inevitably concerned with the rise of professional New World psychology; for as James appeared as a psychologist at Harvard, so too did others join in the construction of a new science. Important questions arise: What were the relationships between James and his scientific contemporaries? How did he interact with associates who could also claim, if not original fatherhood of the discipline, at least outstanding parental contributions to both scientific psychology and professional consciousness? Which of James's psychological contemporaries best illuminated his place in the development of the profession? Which one defined the parameters of his psychological contribution, the power and weakness of his reputation, and even hinted at broad cultural implications and limitations in Jamesian psychology? Hugo Münsterberg of Harvard, Edward Bradford Titchener of Cornell, and James McKeen Cattell of Columbia are highlighted because they dissented from James's psychological and professional outlook. And yet they all shared an important American moment—the first generation of New World experimental psychology. None of the three retained James's long-lasting prestige, but all were giant American psychologists. Their differences with James were fundamental, which is perhaps why they are largely forgotten, except in the history of American psychology. Münsterberg, Titchener and Cattell—each in his own way—showed what

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the American mood, so interestingly refracted in Jamesian psychology, could never become. But they also presaged psychological directions and canons of professional style that upstaged James. They were " m o d e r n " in ways that James could never be. Their professional opposition not only places James in the shifting career context of emerging experimental psychology, in the arena of professional ambition and discovery; it also shows the difficulty James h a d in maintaining their scientific support for what he thought was truly "scientific" psychology. In dissent from Jamesian psychology all three, in different but converging ways, put the quality of James's scientific compromising and professional hedging in sharp relief. Any discussion of James as a psychologist w o u l d be unsatisfactory without accounting for his growing distaste for experimental, particularly "laboratory" psychology. After the publication of his masterwork, The Principles of Psychology, in 1890, his interest in psychology narrowed (he w o u l d have said expanded) to the exclusive consideration of psychic phenomena. Although James never reduced psychology to the study of the unconscious mind, h e focused on unconscious mental p h e n o m e n a — o r , as he preferred, the " s u b l i m i n a l . " James's increasing fascination with the psychological u n d e r world of m e d i u m s and weird religious experiences, with split personalities and the pathologic mentality, angered his psychological colleagues—including Münsterberg, Titchener, a n d Cattell. James was virtually alone among the major f o u n d i n g American psychologists to crusade enthusiastically for the scientific importance of m e d i u m s and psychic experience. Yet for all of James's path-breaking work in the psychology of the unconscious, his remarkable anticipation of Freud, a n d his sensitivity to pathological religious feeling, h e utterly rejected psychoanalysis. In examining James and the unconscious w e are led back again into the meaning of his emergence as a psychologist. A n d w e glimpse h o w James was compelled to distinguish his role as professional scientific psychologist from that of an authentic cultural barometer, a reliable weathervane of e n d u r i n g

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American traits. Those traits still embraced an American mysticism and moralistic individualism that stretched back to Emersonian transcendentalism and beyond to the Protestant Reformation, while they anticipated an optimistic New World psychotherapy, an American version of the unconscious mind. In James's reception of subliminal phenomena we are driven to consider yet again the quality of his compromising and the role it played in distinguishing psychological science from the demands of American culture. The Jamesian face that forms in the reflections of his compromises will, I hope, put some fresh wrinkles in the visage of a great and perpetually fascinating American. A continuing grant from the University of Alabama in Birmingham helped provide the wherewithal for this attempt to put James and his psychological fellows into fresh perspective. I would also like to thank the kind and helpful assistance of personnel at the Houghton Library and Harvard Archives, Harvard University; the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland; the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston; the Archives of the History of American Psychology, the University of Akron; the Yale University Library; the John M. Olin Library, Cornell University; the Nicholas Murray Butler Library, Columbia University; the Robert Hutchins Goddard Library, Clark University; the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions; the Boston Public Library; and the New York City Public Library. I am especially grateful to John A. Popplestone and Marion White McPherson, directors of the Archives of the History of American Psychology, and to Richard J. Wolfe, Rare Books Librarian at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, for helpfulness, encouragement, and patience when this project was just getting off the ground. A book is a product of revision; along the way an author gets vital critical assistance. Early drafts were much improved by David E. Harrell, David W. Levy, H. Wayne Morgan, James Gilbert, John Kleber, and Francis Gosling. Later ones faced the rigorous but always fair criticism of Vickie P. Raeburn and

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Michael M. Sokal. My debt to Raeburn for her continuing enthusiasm for the manuscript through several revisions was only matched by Sokal's uncommonly thorough and sensitive commentary. I am also indebted to James Tent for translating the Münsterberg correspondence, as well as to Debbie Givens for skillfully typing various revisions over several years. To my wife, Rhonda, who researched with me from idea to book, and who sustained and criticized when others could not, I can only say he is truly our William James.

The Compromised Scientist: William James in the Development of American Psychology

Chapter One The Shifting Moment it seems to me that psychology is Jike physics before Galileo's time, —not a single elementary Jaw yet caught a glimpse of. A great chance for some future psychologue to make a greater name than Newton's, but who then will read the books of this generation? Meanwhile they must be written. William James to James Sully on the eve of publication of The Principles of Psychology

IN 1842, the year William James was born, A n d r e w Jackson was aged but still alive. Thomas Jefferson had been dead only sixteen years. The Constitution of the United States was barely fifty years old. The War of 1812, the second war for American i n d e p e n d e n c e , h a d e n d e d with a belated but t r e m e n d o u s victory at New Orleans a scant three decades before. The Mexican War was still several years away, Texas was a nation, and California was in Mexico. Trails rather t h a n rails took hearty pioneers into " t h e great American desert" west of the Missouri a n d Sabine Rivers, while "manifest destiny" was emerging as the throaty cry of expansionists. Charles Darwin a young m a n of thirty-three, w o u l d not publish The Origin of Species for

2

The Shifting Moment

seventeen years. Sigmund Freud would not be born for nearly a decade and a half. And Ralph Waldo Emerson had not yet turned forty when his friend, Henry James, invited him to peek at his firstborn, William, temporarily housed in New York City's Astor Hotel. When James died in 1910 fifty years had passed since the American Civil War, almost 120 years since the adoption of the Constitution. The United States had not only fulfilled the continental promise of "manifest destiny" but had colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific; in three years the Panama Canal, proudly called "the great ditch," would connect the new American empire. One could now travel across the continent on steel rails, while the truly adventurous could hazard it on hard rubber tires and unpaved roads. Darwin had been dead nearly thirty years. Freud had just personally introduced psychoanalysis to Americans at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. John Dewey, in a sense James's philosophical successor as Emerson was his predecessor, was over fifty, had established the "Chicago School" of American pragmatism, and was settled as professor of philosophy at Columbia University. William James was a most striking example of a small group of prominent New World intellectuals whose lives bridged the America that passed from trails to rails. He lived during the momentous national transformation from laissez faire capitalism; he saw the exchange from an agrarian-village orientation to an industrial-urban one. He was a critical link between Darwin and Freud in American thought, carrying the thinking of the former into psychology and philosophy, while anticipating something of the latter in depth psychology. James stood between Emerson and Dewey, a pivot between the transcendentalism of the nineteenth century and the instrumentalism of the twentieth. He was a bridge between an age of waning idealism and an emerging one of professional science. James depicted passage from the intellectual perspective of one century to another. Janus-faced, he looked on two worlds, was a part of both and yet of neither. 1

The Shifting Moment

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When the James family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, within a year after the Civil War, the whirlwinds of transformation had not spared that traditional American college town. Deep-seated changes had been altering both the structure and the face of national life since the second decade of the nineteenth century, relentlessly effacing settled life-styles and expectations of stability. Earlier in the century, Boston and its environs had been inundated with Irish immigrants. After the Civil War waves of the so-called "new immigration" diversified the ethnic texture, as Italians, Jews, and blacks swelled the city's population. Cambridge escaped the full ethnic invasion that changed the shape of Boston, but she shared with her larger neighbor a sizable Irish minority and the distended urban ethnocracy was less than ten miles away. 2 In the 1880s Cambridge had two horse-car lines that ran parallel toward Boston for a short distance. One took gentlemen, ladies, and well-behaved children to their professions and diversions; the other served Irish workers and their often large and seemingly unruly families. Invariably "children learned that a Brattle Street lady and her Mt. Auburn Street washerwoman did not travel in the same vehicle." 3 Young William James and his family were part of the Cambridge intelligentsia. They knew which horse car to board. The point is not that James was a snob, but rather that the citadel of New World Anglo-Saxon propriety, America's premier university, and her first generally recognized scientific psychologist faced a new urban maze. 4 The lives of prominent Americans like James were often lived in the ambience of something even more fundamental than growing awareness of ethnic complexity, for they found themselves immersed in developments and perplexities which were symptomatic of revolutionary changes in the American economic order. The replacement of a relatively simple internal market economy with a corporate industrial one, a system that depended on factory production, created an enormous demand for cheap labor. The "new immigration" helped supply the demand and in doing so provided America with an unfamiliar social face. But James was

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The Shifting Moment

also to forge a new social face as a professional psychologist in the midst of a broad-based national transformation, even transfiguration. His sensitivity to intellectual change, the career choices he would confront, and the professional role he would take were all caught in the texture of one of the New World's most fundamental transitions: the shift to modernity. The shifting moment was a time of crisis, innovation, and compromise—and James was an unusually fascinating example of all three. The modern transformation in urban social composition required not only a huge factory labor force, but also science and scientific psychologists. Shifts in ethnic patterns, the enormity of social change, caused crises in the mental health of innumerable Americans. Massive mental dislocation became painfully apparent in the unprecedented maladies that raged during James's lifetime. The human mind seemed particularly problematical. The rise of institutions for the insane, the growth of psychiatry, and new receptivity to a host of psychologies were organizational and intellectual responses to new ills of the mind and nervous system which testified to extensive metamorphosis. 5 A few became aware of a connection between mental disorder and the frenetic life-style that was born of the modern welter. Physicians George Beard and S. Weir Mitchell linked an ailment called neurasthenia with the pellmell pace of the production schedules and demands of an urban, business-oriented America. 6 They found cultural explanations for exhausted nervous energy, widespread neurasthenic collapse. Middle- and upper-class Americans eagerly sought medical advice for the peculiar ailments the new society seemed to generate. 7 James was no exception; he suffered from neurasthenia all his adult life. In a sense James's chronic neurasthenia bore witness to his barometric temperament. It would perhaps have been incongruous for the father of American scientific psychology to have escaped mental and nervous disorder. There is poetic justice in the fact that the creator of America's most popular experimental psychology did not es-

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cape the ravages of America's most popular psychological illness. But if Beard and Mitchell warned against the dangers of nervous exhaustion, they pointed just as fervently to the advantages of nervousness. And James, despite chronic neurasthenia, fully concurred with the notion that nervous force was indispensable to achievement. 8 Neurasthenia served a society that was rapidly dismantling the values of a more traditional agrarian culture. Mental practitioners focused on both positive and negative aspects of nervousness and thereby provided a new forum for analyzing native strengths and weaknesses. Neurasthenia became an evaluative malady in an age that was losing touch with remembered standards of judging mental health. Scientific observations on nervousness, observations James never tired of making, helped define and perhaps even legitimate the mores of the Gilded Age.9 Self-diagnosis has often been an important American characteristic, particularly during times of profound cultural transformation and resulting confusion. 10 Interest in psychological problems, of which neurasthenia was a striking part, marked James's milieu. Psychological problems presented the opportunity to reorder and redefine mental reality. As an emerging modern world cast more and more doubt on traditional explanations of mind, articulate Americans searched for viable alternatives. Without the realization that urban-industrial conditions made redefinition of the mind urgent, that cultural change required psychological innovation, there could be no experimental psychology. Although the study of mental disorder was not synonymous with scientific psychology, both were developing new professional languages in response to the widespread necessity of developing new mental models. Psychologists were often compelled to distinguish their professional concerns from the purview of mental pathology. In so doing they sought order and demarcation in the profusion of mental inquiry that proliferated the late nineteenth century. And as we shall observe, James's attempt to define experi-

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The Shifting Moment

mental psychology, particularly his insistence that the underworld of subliminal consciousness, and even pathological mental forces, be treated as scientific psychology, troubled and often infuriated fellow psychologists. The refusal of a William James to separate mental maladies from experimental psychology encouraged others to do so. 11 Actually the rush to psychological awareness and redefinition had generated sizable momentum before the Civil War. By the 1800s the stern religious imperatives of the Puritan creed had been greatly relaxed. A liberal Protestantism thrived, one that increasingly emphasized the capacity of individuals to find salvation through good works, a doctrine their Puritan predecessors would have found heretical. Indeed, the old Adamic notion of the immutability of human nature was replaced with Lockean sensationalism, the belief that the mind absorbed experience through the senses. This was an experimental psychology that stressed the association of ideas and deemphasized the likelihood of a disembodied soul. The latter shift alarmed many American Protestant leaders, even though they participated in the new liberalized Christianity. To counter the threat to the soul they endorsed what became known as "faculty psychology" or mental philosophy, which came to be taught in the mid- and late-nineteenth century, often by college presidents, in American universities. Men such as Noah Porter of Yale and James McCosh of Princeton endorsed the psychology of the Scottish school founded by Thomas Reid and elaborated by Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown. Mental faculties such as attention, memory, and judgement were held to exist independent of experience. Faculties were compared to physiological functions such as circulation and digestion, but never derived from them. Although faculty psychology was certainly a university subject, it was not really "scientific" psychology. Not only was it considered a part of moral philosophy, it also had no way to measure or quantify various faculties; and, of course, it could not incorporate experimentally the physiological-mental developmental perspective of Darwin. 12

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Well before James's The Principles of Psychology applied Darwinism to fashion an evolutionary psychology, however, other "rumblings" of a scientific future emerged. In mid-century quasi-scientific psychologies attracted considerable attention. Phrenology grafted the authority of physiology onto faculty psychology with its study of skull configuration or "bumps" to indicate mental qualities and even character. And the vogues of animal magnetism, mesmerism, spiritualism, and mind cure captured public attention. James investigated a broad spectrum of "psychic phenomena" whose varied manifestations were to become his exclusive psychological focus; but they did not form the scientific structure of The Principles of Psychology. Even so, these "rumblings" persisted into the twentieth century. Their presence testified to the weakened ability of religion and metaphysics to explain mind. Perhaps they also bespoke a popular undercurrent of distraction, unease, and even yearning in a society whose traditional beliefs, including assumptions about the soul and mind, were in disarray. James would take brilliant advantage of the inability of religion and philosophy to articulate a convincing psychology. At the same time he participated in the American stampede toward the excitement and solace of parapsychology. 13 Truly scientific psychology awaited Darwin. The publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 was a great event in the history of science. An evolutionary view of the mind had been envisioned since antiquity and was periodically restated. The English thinker, Herbert Spencer, had presented a systematic picture of an evolving mind in Principles of Psychology (1855), a book James used as a text in his Harvard psychology classes. Unlike Spencer, however, Darwin seemed to present empirical evidence for reducing the imagined differences between animals and men. And as the great debate over the diminished differences showed, his theory cast fundamental doubt on the existence of a disembodied soul. The power of religion and philosophy to incorporate a believable psychology was radically undercut; and conversely, science's claim

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The Shifting Moment

for psychology was strengthened. Not all scientific psychologies pivoted on an evolutionary view of mind. But functional psychology in America—one encouraged by James—forged an explicitly evolutionary psychology. And faculty psychology collapsed under Darwinian pressure. 14 There were other discoveries that eroded belief in a mind that operated independently of physiological phenomena. In the mid nineteenth century important research on nerves and their relationship to more complex mental functions drew physiology and psychology closer together. Here the Germans were the innovators. Johannes Müller formulated a theory of the specificity of nerve energies—the notion that sensation was the result of energy emanating from within each nerve. Hitherto specificity of sensation had been traced to external stimulus. Hermann Helmholtz, once Müller's student, showed through experiments on frogs that the neurological processes beneath mentality could be measured and thus subjected to experimental control. Helmholtz maintained, in the face of popular belief in "vital force," that there was nothing mysterious about nerves; they, like other physical and chemical phenomena, were subject to the law of "the conservation of energy." This law posited that there was a limited supply of force in nature and that the quantity was unchangeable. An energistic hypothesis would be translated into the widespread assumption that psychic and nerve energy were also limited, a belief incorporated into Jamesian psychology. Other Germans, including Gustav Fechner, Ernst Weber, Wilhelm Wundt, and Helmholtz's Dutch friend, Franciscus Donders, founded what became known as "reaction-time psychology." By distinguishing between simple and complex mental reactions—between, for example, the reactions to stimulus and to choice—psychological descriptions could be refined. The method was to subtract the simple reaction-time from the more complex. The effect was to bring body and mind into a more direct relationship, one that could be quantitatively captured. Reaction-time psychology also undermined the credibility of a disembodied soul. 15 James was critical of those psychologists

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who concerned themselves too exclusively with reaction-time. Nonetheless, in order to bring the mind into a fresh relationship with the body (which, after all, was what scientific psychology did) "brass instrument" or reaction-time experiments depended on the continuing development of nerve physiology as well as Hemholtzian energy theory. James understood this and provided lengthy, if often critical, commentary on nerve behavior and mental reaction-time in The Principles of Psychology.16 Broad intellectual revolutions like the Darwinian one were only the most penetrating of a gallimaufry of imaginative intellectual and scientific discoveries that affected James and his America.17 It was, of course, an exciting scene as sciences that had not existed before the Civil War suddenly commanded attention. But the scientific sea was hardly settled; what constituted science and what did not was in great dispute. Nerve psychology, mental telepathy, and mind cure had one critical connection with more massive intellectual upheavals such as Darwinism: they all agreed that humanity required a new relationship with mind. William James's intellectual and emotional world shared this assumption; he attempted, often at great personal cost, to view the mind in a fresh context. All the while his America churned with transformations seemingly as diverse as changing ethnic patterns, ubiquitous mental illness, a demanding business ethic, and the discoveries of Darwin. Such diverse and broad-based change became in one sense indistinguishable from growing psychological awareness and discomfort: the gestalt of transformation bespoke an altered American condition, a shifting New World consciousness. Escalating anxieties, the search for cures, intellectual revolution, and the development of scientific methodology meant exceptional opportunities for the creative. A few would make significant contributions to the forming modernity, to its justifications and anxious criticisms. James did.18 James's European contemporary, Wilhelm Wundt, is generally given credit as the first academic scientific psychologist. Wundt not only outlined the scientific terrain for psychology

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in the Principles of Physiological Psychology (1874), he also established the first substantial psychological laboratory in 1879. Wundt maintained that psychology would become a science when trained observers could "introspect" the attributes of various states of consciousness; and that scientific introspection could be taught in the psychological laboratory. 19 James probably operated a small laboratory at Harvard in the late 1870s, but his apparatus was comparatively primitive; and he had only one student, G. Stanley Hall, working in the laboratory at the time he created it. 20 Wundt trained well over one hundred psychologists, including James's American contemporaries, Münsterberg, Titchener, and Cattell. During the 1880s Hall established a well-equipped laboratory at Johns Hopkins, as did Cattell at the University of Pennsylvania, Joseph Jastrow at the University of Wisconsin, and Edmund Sanford at Clark. The 1890s saw a psychological laboratory established at nearly every major American university. Over thirty were started, and they included Münsterberg's facilities at Harvard, Cattell's at Columbia, and Titchener's at Cornell. If the rise of the laboratory marked the coming of age of American scientific psychology, it was firmly entrenched by 1900. 21 Usually, but not always, a laboratory meant there was a graduate program in psychology. This insured an ample production of professional psychologists. Then also by the twentieth century, two professional journals, the Psychological Review and the American Journal of Psychology, were thriving. Journals published by individual universities ("house organs") also provided important publication and communication outlets. And a national organization, the American Psychological Association, had been a forum for professional exchange since 1892. 22 But to say that the professional structure of scientific psychology was in place did not necessarily mean that American psychology had matured, or that an American scientific psychology had found a consensus. Nor did the rise of psychology departments, journals, and an association point to the explanation for James's reputation as the original American exper-

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imental psychologist. For James's scientific reputation rested not on the founding of the first American laboratory but on his book, The Principles of Psychology.23 And even though there was no question that The Principles of Psychology was the most influential general late-nineteenth-century American work of psychology, it was not really the first book to incorporate European scientific psychology. That distinction belonged to Yale's George Trumbull Ladd, whose Elements of Physiological Psychology appeared in 1887, three years before James's magnum opus. 24 Ladd, however, never cleared his psychology of his own background as a Congregational minister; he could not approach James's literary virtuosity; and neither Yale nor Ladd's successor, Edward Scripture, had the stature of Harvard or James's successor, Münsterberg. What The Principles

of Psychology

did was to suggest the

unsettled scientific terrain of a new science. There was Titchener's "structuralism" at Cornell, and Titchener's insistence that the job of the scientific psychologist was to find the "structure" or "elements" of consciousness. There was James's "functionalism," which focused on the operational rather than the elemental character of the mind. G. Stanley Hall and James Mark Baldwin were fashioning a genetic or developmental psychology that concentrated on evolutionary psychosocial growth. Cattell was interested in the psychology of individual differences and in mental testing. After 1900 Münsterberg had a penchant for "applied" psychology, and its use to improve industrial efficiency and solve social problems. Münsterberg's student, Robert M. Yerkes, was moving rapidly toward a psychology of animal behavior. There was also a lively interest in pathological mentality, psychic phenomena, and the unconscious mind. James's big book was synthetic and catalytic. Its fourteen hundred pages surveyed psychological research and literature; it was eclectic rather than systematic, suggestive rather than dogmatic. And although James's functional psychology was clearly a major theme, it was, as it were, a book for all seasons, one apt to stimulate rather than end psychological discussion. 25 The Principles of Psychology pointed to

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The Shifting Moment

a paradoxical condition. The nineties would prove a decade of enormous disagreement as to what the proper subject matter of the new psychology should be; yet that contention continued amidst matured professional forms. But paradox could not obscure the fact that scientific psychology was as unsettled in its own way as the shifting social and economic environment. James's comment to the English philosopher, James Sully, in 1890 "that psychology is like physics before Galileo's time, — not a single elementary law yet caught glimpse of" would have rankled some, including Wundt and Titchener; nevertheless, The Principles of Psychology did not settle the scientific dust; it stirred it. And The Principles was not based on "laboratory" or "brass instrument" science, but on James's extensive reading of the emerging scientific literature. Wundt agreed, for after reading James's masterpiece he quipped, "It is literature, it is beautiful, but it is not psychology." 26 Between the late 1860s and the publication of The Principles of Psychology in 1890, James experienced a profound personal crisis and emerged, Wundt's comment notwithstanding, as America's founding experimental psychologist. He pioneered a profession even though his great work did not establish what was scientific psychology and what was not. In the early 1890s James relinquished control of the Harvard psychological laboratory he had founded, but had not developed. He went on to focus on the occult, the pathological, and the working out of a pragmatic and then radical empirical metaphysics. James became what many had maintained he was all along, a philosopher. Yet his great contribution to the American intellectual tradition was unquestionably The Principles of Psychology. His university reputation had been built in psychology, not metaphysics. At his death there was disagreement as to whether his genius lay more in philosophy or psychology.27 What was James, psychologist or philosopher? Perhaps the answer was to be found in James's transitional persona, in the changing complexion of his "compromised" career. G. Stanley Hall used another appellation to reveal the real James. Hall, in a review of The Principles, noted that "the author

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might be described as an impressionist in psychology. . . . His portfolio contains sketches old and new, ethical, literary, scientific and metaphysical, some exquisite and charming in detail and even color, others rough charcoal outlines, but all together stimulating and suggestive." 2 8 Whether knowingly or not, Hall had hinted at a resolution of his former professor's identity. For it was more than chance, more than temperament, and more even than the times that made William James into a psychologist.

James, s e l f - s k e t c h , c. 1866. Reprinted by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Chapter Two

The Compromised Artist There was something in William James which was profoundly opposed to the whole life of scholarship, whether teaching, research or the making of books. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James

It has sometimes crossed my mind that fames wanted to be a poet and an artist, and that there lay in him, beneath the ocean of metaphysics, a lost Atlantis of fine arts; and that he really hated philosophy and all its works, and pursued them only as Hercules might spin or as a prince in a fairy tale might sort seeds for an evil dragon, or as anyone might patiently do some careful work /or which he had no aptitude. John J. Chapman commenting on the death of his friend, William James

So it seems to me my mind is formed, and I can see no reason for avoiding the giving myself up to art. Of course . . . there remain other

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considerations which might induce me to hesitate,—those of utility, of duty to society, etc. All these, however, I think ought to be weighed down by strong inclination towards art, and by the fact that my life would be embittered if I were kept from it. William James to Henry James, Sr., 1860

A DRAMATIC EPISODE in James's life illustrated the force of the individual will and its power to change circumstance and promote a philosophy of action. The story has a legendary quality. Without it James was not nearly so heroic; with it his life became exemplary. James's dark personal moment was transcended with a brilliant metaphysical insight. A philosophical tour de force created intellectual daylight out of night. The effect made plausible the notion that James was a "buried philosopher"; his inner struggle was but preparation for metaphysical awakening. It led to the conclusion that James's psychology was best understood as a preliminary chapter in his inspirational pragmatism. 1 As the eldest son of the Swedenborgian mystic Henry James, Sr., as brother of novelist-to-be Henry Jr., and neurotic invalid, Alice, William was nurtured in an unusually talented and emotionally volatile family. Indulged by the elder James, who had inherited a fortune from the first William James of Albany, New York, the James children received a broad, unstructured liberal education. The family traveled in Europe where the children were tutored in the liberal arts and learned French and German. William developed an aptitude for painting. He studied later with the accomplished American artist William Morris Hunt, at Newport, Rhode Island. But his father did not want a painting career for William and suggested he pursue science. So in 1861 William abandoned his apprenticeship with Hunt and later studied under the renowned Swiss naturalist, Louis Agassiz, at Harvard's Lawrence Sei-

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entific School. In 1864 young James entered Harvard Medical School, and the next year he traveled on a flora- and faunacollecting expedition to Brazil. William thought highly of Agassiz and seemed to have a bright scientific future. However, he became ill on the Brazilian voyage; his eyesight failed; he developed back problems and suffered from depression. His health did not improve upon returning to Cambridge in 1866, and it was decided that a European trip would be therapeutic. But Old World spas failed to cure, melancholia lingered. In 1868 and 1869 he came to the brink of suicide. 2 Accounts of James's crisis and dramatic recovery often refer to his disguised autobiographical recollection of psychic collapse, of inner helplessness. As a young Harvard Medical School student, James occasionally visited a nearby mental hospital at Worcester. I went one evening into a dressing room in the twilight to procure some article that was there; when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them enclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. The image and my fear entered in a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and that I have never felt since. 3 Although James recalled this experience some thirty years after the event, it had undeniable power to evoke the image of a

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deeply troubled young man. And it was a striking, if belated, autobiographical introduction to the insecurity, despair, and intense self-analysis that gripped him in the late 1860s; just as it was an equally stunning counterpoint to the amazing recovery that followed. A psychic fault line, a spiritual Rubicon separated the "sick-minded" James from the "healthyminded" one. 4 An 1870 entry in his diary, one that has been frequently quoted, marked the heroic reversal, the triumphant end of despair. I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's 2nd Essay, and saw no reason why his definition of free will—the sustaining of thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts—need be the definition of an illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. For the remainder of the year I will abstain from . . . mere speculation . . . in which my nature takes most delight, and voluntarily cultivate the feeling of moral freedom, by reading books favorable to it as well as by acting. 5

By 1873 a renewed James, perhaps a reborn James, was able to accept an appointment as instructor in anatomy and physiology at Harvard. In 1878 he married Alice Howe Gibbens. He went on to write a great psychology and forge an American philosophy—pragmatism. His discovery of Renouvierian free will and his transformation of it into a philosophy of willful action were the dramatic antithesis to the former self-destructive introspection. A practical metaphysics saved James; it showed what he loved, what he was, and pointed to his inspirational significance. Here was an intellectual awakening, a metaphysical breakthrough that revealed a true philosophy need not be austere and abstract; on the contrary, James's "act of free will" was philosophy brought down to earth, brought into life. The idea that James's crisis and career vacillation can be explained by assuming that he was, at heart, always a philosopher made much sense. James was attracted to metaphysics. As he grew older, philosophy took more of his time. Certainly

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after the publication of The Principles of Psychology in 1890, with one major exception, his important publications dealt with pragmatism, pluralism, and radical empiricism. 6 Students of James have perpetuated the buried philosopher theme. Ralph Barton Perry's monumental The Thought and Character of William James (1935) set the interpretive pattern not only for viewing James as essentially a philosopher, but also for emphasizing the critical inspiration of Charles Renouvier in sparking James's recovery. Perry acknowledged James's artistic talent and gifts as a psychologist; he did not doubt, however, where the Jamesian essence, the vital center lay: "It is important to note two things; first the fact that he experienced a personal crisis that could be relieved only by a philosophical insight; and, second, the specific quality of the philosophy which his soul sickness required." 7 The fact that Perry himself was a philosopher, and for a time James's devoted young colleague in the Harvard Philosophy Depariment, strengthened the believability of Perry's account. 8 More recently others have reshaped the buried philosopher theme. Cushing Strout has suggested that James's psychic troubles needed to be interpreted in more direct reference to his father. The father-son relationship not only helped to clarify the 1860s depression, it also pointed to the necessity of accommodating these conflicts into an original philosophy. In 1968 Strout, drawing on Erik Erikson's "identity crisis" idea, argued that Henry James Sr. blocked William's career development. 9 The elder James was "an inner court of tribunal for William even after the late sixties." Before 1882, the year the elder James died, the philosopher in young James was only partially freed. Only after William was released from the guilt generated through an inability to accept the elder James's mysticism was he able to develop a secular pragmatism. 10 Later Strout elaborated the father-son vocational-philosophical struggle. James had forged "an ingenious compromise between his father's theological and mystical certainties and his own scientific learning and psychological sophistication." In crisis James "was forced to become his own therapist, his

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own pastor, his own philosopher." He stood between two cultural worlds, one of religious conversion and another of psychoanalytic therapy. These conflicting persuasions and Oedipal strains fragmented him into a divided self. Strout saw him balancing these disparities, healing the self, by becoming a philosopher of a pluralistic universe. "Pluralism," Strout concluded, "would be James's contribution to metaphysics, and in psychological terms pluralism of identity was the mark of his character." The flowering of an original philosophy that was psychologically relevant provided the capacity to juggle and compromise effectively the conflicts with Henry Sr. 11 Working more centrally on James the psychologist than on James the guilty son, S. P. Fullinwider provided a third variation of James's philosophical chrysalis. As with Perry and Strout, the point about James was that the depressed, introspective caterpillar emerged as the healthy metaphysical butterfly. Fullinwider argued that James's "melancholia" or "neurasthenia" was best understood as an existential "sense of unreality." To regain sanity James had to work out an intellectual posture that defeated his "subjective entrapment" and put "sting" back into the objective world. This was the task that occupied him from the 1860s until the publication of The Principles of Psychology. His effort to build a psychology that fought ennui, determinism, dehumanization—the hopelessness of "that shape am I"—was an existential battle. To put a selective consciousness in human psychology was not merely an intellectual decision; it was a desperate effort, a life-saving strategy, to strike out of a subjective trap that had skirted dangerously close to introspective insanity. James put his intelligence into the world again. Jamesian psychology, which had been slipping away toward subjective self-destructive impulses in the 1860s, regained connection with the objective world. The key philosophical contribution in James was existential rather than pluralistic or pragmatic. James's creative scholarship was really a road map for self-survival, an existential metaphysics. 12

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If m u c h of the writing on James has interpreted his life as a struggle to create an original philosophy, it has also returned time and time again to the critical crisis in the 1860s. Indeed, the question of William's health, both psychological and physical, has been a recent preoccupation in Jamesian scholarship. This literature has enriched appreciation of the sensitive connection between James and prevailing Victorian maladies. At the same time, however, attention to his illnesses has also promoted reconsideration of the buried philosopher explanation and its relationship with the 1860s crisis and attending vocational indecision. 1 3 The longer one looks at James in the recent interpretive perspective, Strout and Fullinwider included, the more difficult it becomes to see a simple heroic story of personal despair transformed into an inspirational metaphysics. It also becomes harder to depict the "real" James as a philosopher while the psychological James was merely the metaphysical one in the process of unfolding. The heroic transformation begins to appear to fulfill the demands of myth as m u c h as fact. The notion that James somehow " f o u n d " himself after youthful crisis was another variation on the American self-help, rags-to-riches legend. His dramatic moment, the self-doubt and metaphysical resurrection, also depicted a standard theme in Western Protestantism—personal struggle followed by heavenly redemption. James's trial and triumph fit neatly into American lore and Christian expectations, maybe too neatly. 1 4 Howard Feinstein has thoroughly reexamined James's psychic health and vocational vacillations. Like Strout, Feinstein emphasized the Oedipal factor, but from an intergenerational perspective. He traced William's inner difficulties, his career anxieties, to Henry Sr.'s unsatisfactory relationship with his own father, William James of Albany. Feinstein's conclusions, however, were noteworthy not only because he showed that the crucial conflict in the James family history was between Henry Sr. and his father, not between Henry Sr. and William; but also because the buried philosopher was re-

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placed with the buried artist. Feinstein subscribed to John Jay Chapman's suspicion that "beneath the ocean of metaphysics there was a lost Atlantis of fine arts" in James. 15 The first American William James, an immigrant from Ulster, made a fortune in real estate in the early nineteenth century by buying into the escalating land values that accompanied the development of the Erie Canal. He was a shrewd, hardworking capitalist who practiced an orthodox Presbyterianism. Unfortunately, he had trouble with his son, Henry, who refused to devote his life to carrying on the family business interests, and instead became committed to an antinomian Protestantism. To make matters more difficult, Henry lost a leg in an adolescent accident, making a conventional vocation less likely. In fact he never found what could be considered a "normal" career, and conflict between father and son was unabated and often bitter. A troubled inheritance, Feinstein believed, insured that Henry would continue to suffer both anxious hostility toward his father's worldly success, and remorse for not meeting paternal expectations. Henry became a prodigal son. The feeling that he was outcast, the failure to resolve the relationship with his father, even after the latter's death, was projected into the next generation—into the relationship between Henry Sr. and his son William James. 16 It was not, as Strout maintained, that William's contention with his father was essentially philosophical; that is, Oedipal conflict was not best characterized by his inability to embrace Henry Sr.'s Swedenborgianism intellectually. Rather, what confused and perplexed William was his father's inconsistency. Henry Sr. was not really an uncompromising Swedenborgian. He switched from a liberal Protestantism that joyfully absolved personal responsibility from sin, to a quasiCalvinism that assumed innate individual depravity. Such a theological swing was generally consistent with shifting moods of hostility and remorse toward the first William James. More importantly, it helped explain why Henry could never be satisfied with his own son's career choices. Mr. James was not only critical of William's desire to paint, but when he fol-

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lowed his father's wishes and chose science, the elder James belittled that choice. Finally when William embraced metaphysics because his father praised philosophy as the most elevated intellectual pursuit, Henry maligned William for not adopting the proper kind. 17 Since his father had never resolved lingering Oedipal and vocational problems, William was forced to cast his own career decisions in the vacillating wake of Henry's failures. Because Henry Sr. never satisfied paternal expectations, never found an acceptable career, it was less likely that William James would find psychic and vocational stability. Feinstein's intergenerational interpretation did not automatically discredit the James-as-always-a-philosopher theme. One could still maintain that a young William James, the James of the 1860s, was focused on philosophy, or at least more fundamentally drawn to philosophy than to art, medicine, or psychology. James may simply have matured into a natural philosopher, discarding the all-too-typical youthful vocational indecision. That conclusion, however, would require deemphasising of the pivotal 1860s crisis, as well as a down-playing of the Oedipal factor. Beyond the intergenerational explanation and yet closely aligned, Feinstein found another James. This one was indeed thwarted in career choice, but he had made a commitment earlier than Perry, Strout, or Fullinwider had believed, and it was not to philosophy nor even to psychology. Feinstein made James's interlude as a painter central to understanding his psychic crisis and his troubles with Henry Sr. In doing so he became the first to speculate carefully on the meaning of William's drawings. Moreover, he dated the onset of psychic troubles from immediately after James left Hunt in 1861. The others have emphasized the late 1860s. But his maladies began at the start of his scientific career in the Lawrence Scientific School, not on the Brazilian trip with Agassiz. 18 Actually, William continued to draw informally throughout the 1860s. His art was replete with ferocious imagery. He delighted in drawings that depicted animals de-

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vouring animals and men. The themes were dark, violent, naturalistic, and sorrowful. They made plausible, Feinstein thought, the idea that William had murderous wishes toward the elder James, wishes that were redirected inward. By forcing William to abandon painting, a profession that was personified in the surrogate father, Hunt, Henry Sr. pushed the son to murder his true self. Henry could not tolerate William's using a successful artist as a career model, particularly when Hunt's vocational success contrasted so vividly with his own failure.

1Q

Nor could William's alternative career in science appease Henry, for "When [William] pursued science, he cultivated a skeptical frame of mind that threatened the religious belief that Henry held essential to life." 20 Renouvierian free will did not restore James to health, or relax the effect of his father's capriciousness. The philosophical awakening, the didactical power of the free-will recovery lost its pivotal place in James's life on two counts: it could not deflate the Oedipal anxiety as identified by Strout; and James's artist core made philosophical recovery secondary. Only when he became an instructor at Harvard, when he had transferred loyalty from a natural parent to an institutional one, was James "moved . . . beyond his father's reach." 21 Feinstein has provided an interesting alternative to the buried philosopher theme. By assuming that James was a painter forced into other less natural vocations, a different James materializes. This one was not as temperamentally impaired as his father; it was Henry who refused to accommodate himself to his son's career. William was not denied a philosophical vocation because he opposed Henry's Swedenborgianism. An Oedipal struggle between father and son raged, but its roots were one generation removed, anchored in unresolved relations between Henry Sr. and his own father. By 1861 it was likely that William James had found natural identity as an artist. A neurotic father was compelled to undo this choice and pushed his son into indecision, depression, and near self-destruction. The young painter found it necessary to

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make forays into science and philosophy, only to learn that these efforts also failed to please. Feinstein clearly puts the responsibility for William's 1860s crisis on the elder James. But James, as Strout showed, still had to forge a compromise between mysticism and science; between free will and determinism; between his father and himself; and between the one and the many. Feinstein, however, implied that these accommodations were misleading. The deeper Oedipal difficulty was the elder James's and the fundamental compromise was William's attempt to project a lost Atlantis of art into other media, into psychology and philosophy. William used an innate quality, love of art, a quality that his father refused to see realized in a painting career, as a strategic possibility, a latent plan for molding a satisfying profession. Psychology and metaphysics were instrumentalities for holding onto an artistic center. Career vacillation and flight into scientific psychology, the occult, and metaphysics were continuing strategies of effectively compromising his original urge to paint. At the same time these strategies allowed James to transcend his father's dissatisfaction, to counter it with an institutionally sanctioned power at Harvard that Henry could never possess. 22 If James was an artist who fashioned a psychological science and then a metaphysics, rather than a philosopher who developed a psychology into a metaphysics, the quality of his compromising changes. So does its timing. He did not have to await the Renouvier episode in 1870 to find inspiration; he did not have to await his father's death to forge a world view; he did not have to await middle age to form an effective merger between a pluralistic psychological identity and a pluralistic metaphysics. Logically, if James had demonstrated an artistic core by 1861, he would have begun to transform art into psychology in the 1860s. He did. Although James scholars, including Feinstein, have repeatedly delved into James's diary for evidence of his inner turmoil and recovery, they have not realized its potential as the initial creative projection of his artistic core. 2 3 Undeniably the diary exhibited a metaphysical awakening, one that could

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be used to show the emerging buried philosopher. Even so, the order of metamorphosis clearly began with plastic art, with the problem of interpreting sculpture. Fundamentally James struggled from a painter's perspective toward psychological vision, and the diary recorded the passage. Even on the level of visual impact, the painter in James refused to remain submerged. Between daily entries were interspersed informal drawings, mostly of female lips and eyes. 24 Indeed James cultivated the habit of combining commentary with free-hand drawing throughout the 1860s. Medical school class notes were laced with anatomical sketches, and letters to his parents during the Brazilian trip were embellished with pictorials of Indians and of animal life. 25 One is reminded of Leonardo de Vinci's artist-scientist synthesis, although James was to settle on a more literary presentation. William spent much of his late 1860s sojourn to Europe in Germany, where he boarded at Dresden with one Frau Spangenberg. From Dresden he periodically took therapeutic trips to a nearby spa at Teplitz, Austria. He first visited Dresden in the summer of 1867 and returned in the spring of 1868. It was during the second visit that he began the diary that shaped artistic sensibilities into an original psychology. The Dresden Gallery provided the catalytic setting. In the nineteenth century the great art museums of Europe attracted increasing attention. The opportunity afforded the public to view the great masters was more than simple diversion, for it encouraged the sensitive to indulge in art criticism; now it was possible to compare intellectually one art form with another under the same roof. More and more Americans traveled through Europe and made art appreciation stops in the great galleries of Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Dresden. James was one of many New World intelligentsia who traveled the museum circuit; in fact his psychological contemporary, James McKeen Cattell, also experienced something of an artistic awakening at the Dresden Gallery. 26 What fascinated James—at least what was recorded in his diary—was the juxtaposition of classical and modern sculp-

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ture in the same museum. His attention was drawn to the differences in these two forms. The second entry in April 1868 showed he was concerned about something else than poor health. "It struck me the other day," he observed, "that among the works of plastic art a division with respect to 'Weltanschauung' involved might be made between such as Raphael's and M. Angelo's on the one hand and those of the Greeks and Venetians on the other." He expanded on his hunch: The former points expressly and with consciousness on the part of the author to the existence of something ineffable beyond the picture, which it is the best function of the picture to make us feel; the latter doing something similar of course for the philosopher who looks at them from without, but executed by the artist with no such thought, but complete and rounded in themselves. Perhaps a scheme of criticism of works [in] the first class might be best formed on an analysis of the manner in which this indication of the ineffable is consciously to the author executed. 27

As young James sat and contemplated great art we can perhaps, imagine his feelings. Twenty-six, unmarried, troubled with back pain and depression, alone in a foreign country, he sat reflecting in a quiet museum. In a place devoted to the past, to art and its often conflicting modes, James may have been acutely sensitive to his own past, to his lost career as a painter, and to conflict with his father. The thoughtful mood may have generated questions. What did he wish to verbalize that he could no longer express as a painter? Just what was the "something ineffable beyond the picture"? The next day found him back at the gallery. He stood in front of "the collection of casts." And he searched, indeed strained to find, a satisfactory insight into the nature of art. "All I have written or may write about art is nonsense," he began; "Perhaps the attempt to translate it into language is absurd—for if that could be done what would be the use of art itself?" Or, to put the question into the context of the realization that he would never be a painter, what was the sense of trying to understand what the artist expressed when he

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could only do that by painting or sculpting? But James could not rest with having art speak for itself any more than he could continue to amble through life without a career like his father. "Yet I feel myself forced to inquire while standing before these Greek things what the X is that makes the difference between them and all modern things, and I clutch at straws of suggestions that the next day destroys." He considered "the bas reliefs battle with centaurs from the temple of appllo [sic]." They were wonderful for their "life, variety and knowledge how to sculpt" but they were "not so pure examples of Greek taste . . . as another big bas relief from Eleusis in the same room." This one depicted "3 standing figures—simply standing in their mellow mildness without a point anywhere in the whole thing." The uncluttered effect was marvelous. And he contrasted it favorably with nineteenth century sculpture: "This sobriety is the peculiar element—their things [Greek] are simple—ours [modern] are at best simplified." 28 James saw some virtue in contemporary work. He was much struck "by . . . [Ernest Friedrich August] Rietschel's group of the dead Christ and his mother—a remarkably respectable and successful thing." Yet, the effect was something less than true art. "As I glanced around it [the Rietschel] at the Greek things I saw instantly that one effect of the difference was that if the Madonna's nose were knocked off or her face gnawed away by the weather and if the Christ were mutilated the essence of the thing would be gone." By contrast, in classical sculpture disfiguration of a part did not disturb the whole. "It makes hardly any difference in the Greek things, the cause of their existence (I mean the idea of the artist) lies through them and can bear any amount of loss of small details and continue to smile as freely as ever." Was James suffering from the same defect as the Rietschel? Was he lamenting the fragmentation in modern perception, the loss of a shattered career? Was he seeking a psychological insight that reaffirmed classical unity and repaired a broken reality, a never-to-beregained wholeness? Was he seeking a "mellow mildness without a point anywhere," which could mend the schism

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with his father and restore his foundered artistry? James in fact did connect these attempts to find the essence of art directly with his apprenticeship as a painter. "I longed," he exclaimed, "for old [William Morris] Hunt to be there to hit off the thing [the Rietschel] in a few of his smiting sentences and put me on the track of its failure." He left the gallery perplexed, in a state of mixed discomfort and joy. "The experience there was painful from being so baffling, but yet so delightful." 29 The disparity between the classical and the modern, the urge to find "the idea of the artist" somehow was still with James when, a few days later, he attended a local performance of Hamlet. Here was alienation, the divided self, the depths of modern indecision and restlessness depicted in another art form. "God!" he exclaimed, "I never felt the might of it before. The endless fullness of it. How it bursts and cracks at every slam." The need to catch art in the act of examining it, of experiencing it, was stronger than ever. "Here again is the problem which I have had before me for the last few days. Is the mode of looking in life of which Hamlet is the expression a final one or only a mid stage on the way to a new and fuller classical one?" He seemed to be engaged in a Hamletesque struggle, a battle to articulate inexpressible emotions, an artist contending with unmanageable creativity. "The fullness of emotion becomes so superior to any possible words, that the attempt to express it adequately is abandoned, and its vastness is indicated by slipping aside into fancy, or counter sense. . . . So does action of any sort," he concluded, "seem to be to Hamlet inadequate and irrelevant to his feeling." 30 The next day James was "again to the Casts." This time he sat before the friezes of the Parthenon. "I felt like saying there was a good reason why the Moderns should give up the attempt to exhaust thought by expression [he crossed out feeling], while the Greeks did not; Good heaven! What could the Greeks not express." Then he returned to the Rietschel Christ and Madonna. "The thought of it tends to one point," he now observed, "it requires the spectator to put himself in a particular mood to be sympathetic, and so would as a constant com-

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panion be very aggravating." The friezes, however, "never have any point—the eye and mind slip over and over them, and they only smile within the boundary of their form." Greek art had no focus; it could "stand for anything in the scale of human being." 3 1 Classical art did not lift consciousness out of nature; modern art did. James could not know that one day his "stream of consciousness" psychology would describe the mind in a naturalistic context. He would never tire of cutting away the artificial, the abstract, the fragmentary. Modern art evoked this need. He expressed the divergence between classical and modern art forms psychologically. As James contemplated art in Dresden in 1868 he passed into his unique mode of psychological expression. Indeed, a critical assumption in fully developed Jamesian psychology was comparable to his insight into classical art: there was no point, no special dispensation or extracted quality about mind. In the seminal chapter of The Principles of Psychology, "The Stream of Thought," James remarked: "This chapter is like a painter's first charcoal sketch upon his canvas, in which no niceties appear." Like the Greek friezes there was "no point" about the way the mind perceived. "We must simply say that thought goes on." 3 2 As James looked at the friezes some twenty years earlier he already understood that "the eye and mind slip over and over them" and nothing more. This was the unbroken flow of consciousness. His memorable description of the stream juxtaposed the same troubling discontinuity of modern art, of false psychology, and the satisfying continuities of classical art, of a genuine psychology. Consciousness, then, 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. 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. 33

James's great creative moment in 1868 flowed out of an artist's sensibilities, a painter's instinct. It was almost as if he

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were still drawing. Now, however, his eye became a psychologizer; vision merged with insight, sight and mind became indistinguishable. It was genius, but genius American-style. Earlier in the nineteenth century Emerson had made the ego disappear into nature; he had become as a "transparent eyeball." Now James, perhaps Emerson's most representative successor, presented another disappearance act. Thought was lost in consciousness, in the "stream of consciousness." Or rather, the mind became an eye, a free-flowing camera, forging natural pictures that reminded one of an impressionistic landscape, a Monet of the mind. 34 By the middle of April 1868 James turned from the direct contemplation of art objects to a consideration of the way the great German romantics defined art. He spent the remaining months in Dresden reading Taine, Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe. He was interested in improving "on my mode of expressing the difference between simple being and expression the first day I went to the gallery." And improve the mode of expression he did! James now recognized that differences in art forms were psychologically given: "This may be a psychological question underlying questions of aesthetics. It strikes me that it probably is identical with the question of classical and romantic literature as well." 35 He was explicitly making unity versus fragmentation in art into an intellectual problem in psychological expression. He was working through a strategic opportunity to guide artistic urges into another medium, one that would eventually be scientifically and philosophically recognized, acclaimed, and criticized. As his psychological perception flowered so did the capacity to explore his psychic distress. He approved Schiller's attempt to "save men from the danger of annihilation which his ignorance would expose him to were he left wholly to the guidance of his reason." The key was to balance moral and natural man. Aesthetics was a critical factor in attaining this equilibrium. "The beautiful serves as mediator between the sensual man and the pure spirit and prevents either from being sacrificed to the other." Art appreciation helped release the

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sensual in a morally acceptable way. James had a "strong presumption in favor of the analogical 'canons' of art." The most regulated and orderly landscapes (like old French gardening) would give us most pleasure, as suggesting our power over nature. But the fact is that a wild free landscape provided it be peaceful is the most pleasing. Schiller thinks the independence of the different parts here . . . suggests our freedom; and although one does not give to this word Schiller's meaning, it is nevertheless a property of enormous practical importance to us. 36

The free will in James flowed as easily from aesthetics as from philosophy. An artistic analogy, a landscape scene, suggested an independent active consciousness. As he read Goethe, he applauded "the naif delight of an incessantly active mind." He was delighted in finding the "accidental and arbitrary in one sheaf." 37 The contemplation of art and literature brought James to a psychological and philosophical Rubicon almost two years before his famous encounter with Renouvier. In May 1868 James "came to a sort of crisis while listening to Miss H's magic playing and the Dr. and the Italian lady sing." He sensed that "the intuition of something here in a measure absolute gave me such an unspeakable disgust for the dead drifting of my own life for some time past." An aesthetic moment, a musical one, brought James closer to self-engendered action. "I can revive the feeling of drifting hereafter by thinking of men of genius. It ought to have a practical effect on my own will—a horror a wasted life can be such—and oh God! an end to the idle, idiotic sinking into Vorstellungen [imagination] disproportionate to the object." He knew what needed to be done: "Every good experience ought to be interpreted in practice. Perhaps actually we cannot always trace the effect, but we won't lose if we try to drop all in which this is not possible. Keep sinewy all the while." And to illustrate his intentions he ended the entry with angry scribbling. 38 This crisis was remarkably similar to the one that immediately preceded the Renouvierian awakening. In January 1870 James suffered "a great dorsal collapse" and deep mel-

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ancholia. "Today I about touched bottom, and perceived plainly that I must face the choice with open eyes." He was at Schiller's crossroad between natural and moral man: "Shall I frankly throw the moral business overboard, as one unsuited to my innate aptitudes, or shall I follow it, and it alone making everything else merely stuff for it?" He knew that he had been "cultivating the moral interest only as a means, and more or less humbugging myself." As in 1868 the solution was willful action: "now I must regard these useful ends only as occasions for my moral life to become active." James understood that moral ends were pragmatic, and should be so interpreted: "In themselves they [moral ends] are indifferent, symbolic, and may change with health and sickness, etc. But while they are what they are today, it is my duty." 39 How was this much different from his earlier "every good experience ought to be interpreted in practice"? James had grasped his active pragmatism in 1868; he was able to focus will on action. The capacity to look into his inertia and transcend it did not climax in 1870; it was restated. The diary charted James's stunning transfer of a painter's sensibilities into a "stream of consciousness" psychology and a pragmatic metaphysics. If there was a vital moment in James's intellectual development it was in April 1868, when he sat before the sculpture in the Dresden Gallery, and described psychologically the effects of the bas relief from Eleusis and Rietschel's Christ and Madonna. For he had in fact moved into typically Jamesian psychological description. The diary's great significance lay not in illustrating that James was a buried philosopher; rather it showed that he was a thwarted painter who through a series of crises and ponderings accommodated and transformed artistic urges into psychological and then philosophical expression. James did not fully recover from his illness, from lethargy, until he received an appointment from Charles Eliot to teach physiology and anatomy at Harvard in 1873. Those who regarded James as a philosopher maintained that he found this interim profession makeshift and unfulfilling. "Philosophy I

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will nevertheless regard as my vocation," James said, "and never let slip a chance to do a stroke at it." But this need to be a philosopher was not the essential James; he was fully aware of the necessity of controlling metaphysical yearnings. " I come to this decision to teach physiology and anatomy mainly from the feeling that philosophical activity as a business is not normal for most men, and not for me." Why was this so? He returned to the problem that had drawn him to classical art, to the difference between Greek unity and modern fragmentation, disfiguration and, hence, illness: "To be responsible for a complete conception of things is beyond my strength. To make form of all possible thought the prevailing matter of one's thought breeds hypochondria." In other words, his search to express intellectually the wholeness of art (to make art a problem in metaphysics) was terribly difficult; it was healthier to find completion in doing art than in defining it psychologically or philosophically. Nonetheless, he was compelled to try. "My deepest interest will as ever lie with the most general problem." The tension between the artist's achievement of unity and its intellectual impossibility exacerbated his illness. It had brought him to the edge of madness. " I fear the constant sense of instability generated by this attitude [the philosophical one] would be more than the voluntary faith I can keep going is sufficient to neutralize." Metaphysical probing, something his father had forced on him by denying him a career in painting inflamed "the dream conception, 'Maya,' the abyss of horrors, and would in spite of everything grasp my imagination and imperial [sic] my reason." 4 0 There was, however, a way to avoid "the abyss of horrors." a way to bypass the insanity that he slipped into when he tried to intellectualize the unity of classical art. A career in science would be an effective substitute, an acceptable compromise, James declared that "that gets reality for us in which we place our responsibility. And the concrete facts in which a biologist's responsibilities lie, form a fixed basis from which to aspire . . . to the mastery of universal questions when the gallant

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mood is on him." A scientific career was "a basis too upon which he can passively float and tide over times of weakness and depression." By 1873 James knew metaphysics demanded too much. "A philosopher has publicly renounced the privilege of trusting blindly, which every simple man owns as a right—and my sight is not always clear enough for such a constant duty." But in the transfer of an artistic vital center to psychological description he had found a way to hedge his metaphysical bets. "You can't divorce psychology from introspection," he announced prophetically. "As immense as is the work demanded by its purely objective physiological part, yet it is the other part rather for which a professor thereof is expected to make himself publicly responsible." James would take up the psychological quest without fully working through the philosophical challenge: "It is not necessary to attack the universal problems directly, and as such in their abstract form. We work at their solution in every way by living, and by solving minor concrete questions." 4 1 James applied the "concrete" brushstrokes of introspection to shape a deeply autobiographical and original psychology. He began the task as early as April 1868 and finished it in 1890 with The Principles of Psychology. But his foray into science was "strategic" rather than "natural"; James could not accept the personal consequences of a completely committed career in scientific psychology any more than he could in a search for a unified metaphysics. This was advantageous, of course, for if he had been allowed the "natural" painting career then we would have been denied a great psychology and a challenging pluralistic metaphysics. It was likely that James's creative genius did not allow him to rest in painting. The creative artist may often engage in a "fight with art." The creative struggle leaves the artist in danger of losing the self in the creation. Was this the "Maya" or "abyss of horrors" that James wished to avoid? We see James expressing himself by almost losing himself in the creative magic of his diary; and we see the paradox emerge in him: namely that when he finds himself, creates his psychology, he must find a way to separate

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himself from the creation and ultimately from The Principles of Psychology. James was involved in the double struggle of finding creative expression while avoiding total self-surrender and personal engulfment in the creation. The psychoanalyst Otto Rank has perceptively suggested what kind of compromise molds creative artists and, perhaps, molded James: This conflict of the artist . . . against the dynamism of his own work and finally against its actual accomplishment, finds a peculiar expression in modern artists. . . . This is the diversion of creation into knowledge, of shaping art into science and, above all psychology. . . . Here we are discussing . . . the half-way type, which, whether in the course of an ensemble of creation or even within the compass of a single work, passes suddenly from the formative artist into the scientist, who wishes—really cannot help himself—to establish . . . psychological laws of creation or aesthetic effect. 42

The artist's dilemma, not simply the buried philosopher, was at the root of James's 1860s creative compromise. Later art, science, and philosophy merged into the masterful creative whole, The Principles of Psychology. By the mid seventies James had begun a professional academic career. He participated in, perhaps led, the formation of an American science. The unique contribution that was his, along with the professional relationships he enjoyed, would be judged by contemporary scientists. And as we shall see, a compromised artist-scientist swam in troubled waters.

H u g o M ü n s t e r b e r g . Re printed courtesy of the Harvard Archives, Harvard University.

Chapter Three

The German Connection: James and Hugo Münsterberg I am a motor, need change, and get very quickly bored. William James, 1909

The more we spoil our attention and cultivate in ourselves the passive attitude which is drawn hither and thither by every changing event, the more we must become frightened by the real work of the world which does not allow us to shift. Hugo Münsterberg, 1910

A LARGE M A N w i t h a m a g n i f i c e n t Kaiser W i l h e l m m u s t a c h e s t e p p e d h u r r i e d l y f r o m a h o u s e o n W a r e Street i n C a m b r i d g e , M a s s a c h u s e t t s , o n a bright D e c e m b e r m o r n i n g i n 1916. F r e s h s n o w f r o m t h e n i g h t b e f o r e c h o k e d t h e streets a n d w a l k s as t h e H a r v a r d p r o f e s s o r struggled against a stiff w i n d . H e w a s d u e to l e c t u r e a n e l e m e n t a r y p s y c h o l o g y class at Radcliffe College at 9 A.M. It w a s t h r e e q u a r t e r s of a m i l e f r o m h o m e to class a n d o n arriving h e sat a n d r e s t e d w i t h h i s g r a d u a t e assistant,

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who noticed that the professor appeared exhausted. Nonetheless, as the bell sounded he walked into the classroom filled with young women and began lecturing. Not more than five or six sentences later, he suddenly turned florid, gasped, and fell heavily to the floor; there was nothing to be done, fiftythree-year-old German-born Hugo Münsterberg was dead. 1 An illustrious and controversial scholar, one who had inherited the Harvard Psychological Laboratory from William James in the 1890s and had later taken the chair of the Philosophy Department, had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Originally James's favorite psychological son, drawn to America and Harvard with great expectations of making Harvard's psychology program the best in America, Münsterberg eventually disappointed his New World mentor. Münsterberg's personality, metaphysics, and stand on psychic research put Jamesian thinking on review; his unbending devotion to what he considered the "duty" of a scholar in philosophy and psychology found a James who compromised the highest intellectual and scientific values for a shoddy relativism and an antiscientific mysticism. Münsterberg was born in the medieval city of Danzig. His father had been a prominent Jewish lumber merchant, his mother an avid painter and musician. Both died before he was twenty, a fact that probably contributed to Hugo's immense need to belong and to be approved in America. 2 In 1882 Münsterberg began an academic career that put him in touch with James. At the University of Leipzig he attended the lectures of the world-famous psychologist Wilhelm Wundt and received the Ph.D. in 1885. Then he studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg, perhaps on the advice of Wundt, who had taken a medical degree there. Münsterberg began teaching as a "Privatdocent" (unpaid instructor) at the University of Freiburg before completing medical studies at Heidelberg in 1887. And it was as a promising twenty-six-yearold holder of a Ph.D. and M.D. that he met James at the first International Psychological Congress in Paris in 1889. 3

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41

They had much in common. James, as we have seen, spent a critical period of his life in Germany, devoting considerable effort to studying German aesthetics. Young Münsterberg had acquired the artistic sensibility of his mother, Anna, who before her death had instilled in her son a lifelong appreciation for music, painting, and literature. As a youngster in the German Gymnasium Hugo excelled in the arts, reworking ballads, composing poems, and even writing a novel. While it was not true that Münsterberg really wanted an artistic career, he, like James, came to psychology with a strong aptitude for art. Perhaps as they became acquainted at the Paris Congress, James was reminded of his own past, one that was prejudiced toward art and only reluctantly moved toward science. 4 Then, too, James had lost both his parents earlier in the 1880s and had been deeply affected. It would not have been difficult to have empathized with a young man who, having lost both mother and father in the critical years of adolescence, had courageously gone on to find a career in psychology. 5 In any event there was a more immediate connection that drew them closer together. James was delighted when he came upon Münsterberg's Die Willenshandlung (Voluntary Action, 1888) which criticized Wundt for making the awareness of will dependent on the mental sensation of effort. Münsterberg argued that the sense of effort came from the muscles, not the brain, thereby drawing close to James's psychology, which stressed the corporal nature of thinking. Here was a brilliant young German psychologist who had not only set up a psychological laboratory at the University of Freiburg, but had also broken from James's psychological foe, Wundt. 6 During the late nineteenth century exceptional German scholarship was an important source of intellectual crossfertilization for American minds. Thousands of Americans studied in German universities between the end of the Civil War and 1900. 7 In psychology Wundt's laboratory at the University of Leipzig was unquestionably the fountainhead of psychological study throughout the world. The major first-generation

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psychologists in America—Münsterberg, Hall, Titchener, and Cattell—all received Wundtian training. All, that is, except James. 8 Wundt did not establish his psychological laboratory at Leipzig until 1879. When James was suffering and molding his psychological perspective in Germany in the late 1860s he intended to attend Wundt's lectures at Heidelberg, but illness intervened. He did, however, read Wundt and was well acquainted with the latter's psychology at the time of the Paris meeting with Münsterberg. 9 Wundt's psychology has mistakenly been labeled "structural" and opposed to James's "functionalism." Actually there was much that James and Wundt could agree on. Both felt that psychological reality was immediate experience and that careful introspection was the appropriate technique to inquire into the nature of consciousness. Both were uncomfortable with mind-body dualism as it was applied to psychological investigation. But the label "structuralist" became the American appellation for Wundtian psychology. And James—along with Edward Bradford Titchener, who was wrongly equated with Wundt—perpetuated the error. 10 Wundt was a victim of the fall of German idealistic metaphysics, with its emphasis on a nonmaterial "will." James was the leading turn-of-the-century American foe of philosophical idealism. It appeared to James that Münsterberg had developed a convincing psychological attack on disembodied mentality, which was tantamount to saying that a German, one who might export his talents to America, had attacked idealism at the jugular: Die Willenshandlung had shown the bodily origins of the ethereal world of idea, of apperception, of will. Paradoxically, "will," or the freedom of consciousness to move beyond the body's determinism, was a persistent theme in The Principles of Psychology.11 Münsterberg exorcised will in both James and Wundt. But in 1889 body bias in Jamesian psychology (we are sad because we cry, not vice versa) was the emphasis that seemed best to undermine what James considered to be the "fictiousness" and "artificiality" of German idealism. 12

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43

James had not only taken pains to show the superiority of a dynamic "functional" psychology to what he misconstrued as the Wundtian "structural" approach, he had also ridiculed another Wundt tradition. Wundt's reliance on the psychological laboratory was a large factor in his reputation. Students at Leipzig were autocratically assigned topics and compelled to spend long hours working with the instruments of mental measurement. Perhaps because of his own weak laboratory training and most certainly because he associated the Leipzig laboratory with a dry positivism that was just as artificial in its own way as was German idealism, James found more reason to criticize Wundt. Charles Judd, one of the most orthodox American Wundtians, recalled the attitude of the Leipzig laboratory toward James: Especially was there a very pronounced antipathy to James. James had done what was thought to be quite out of order; not only had he criticized Wundt but in some cases; as, for example in discussing the innervation theory—he had allowed his criticism to take the form of witty sarcasm. This was far too much. Not only that, but he indulged in that remark about patient laboratory work in a land where they did not know what it means to be bored. As a result diplomatic relations were promptly suspended. 1 3

In Die Willenshandlung Münsterberg had not only criticized Wundt's position on will, he had also railed at statistics-gathering empiricism as well. 14 Hence from James's view young Münsterberg had attacked the humbug of an artificial idealism as well as the excesses of a dry positivism. Münsterberg seemed to represent the correct psychological path between philosophy and science. Or, in our perspective, Münsterberg appeared to be a man who had incorporated elements of James's compromised posture: He was a German with artistic sensibility who had found psychological science; and he seemed to walk the same intellectual tightrope between idealism and positivism, at least when it came to psychology. Moreover, when they met at the Paris Congress, James was

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at an important juncture in his career. After nearly twelve years of hard work he had produced a classic. In 1890, with the publication of The Principles of Psychology, he was at the pinnacle of the young psychological profession in America. As G. Stanley Hall put it, "The cause of psychology in this country is more dependent upon you and your safe delivery of that book than upon anything else whatever." 15 And Radcliffe student Mary Whiton Calkins recalled, "I began the serious study of psychology" when "The Principles of Psychology was warm from the press." 16 James was receiving recognition as the founding father of American experimental psychology. Yet he had never really liked laboratory work and was fagged from the ordeal of sustaining writing. He told his publisher, Henry Holt, that his great book was "a loathsome, distended, tumefied, bloated dropsical mass, testifying to nothing but two facts: 1st, that there is no such thing as science of psychology, and 2nd, that W. J. is an incapable." 17 At the very moment of scientific triumph James wanted release from science. Indeed, self-deprecating comments to Holt suggested the return of the creative "Maya" or "abyss of horrors" that had threatened him in the late 1860s. Perhaps the fear of dehumanization, the revival of "that shape am I" anxiety was upon James again. Certainly it was possible that James's great creative strides in fashioning The Principles had threatened the loss of his identity in creative endeavor; hence the confusion of the book, "a loathsome, distended, tumefied, bloated dropsical mass" with "W.J. is an incapable." James's "fight with art" had produced a science. But now it was necessary to accommodate the demands that creative activity had pushed on him. James could not simply continue to sire an American science. He had reached another plateau in an evolving career, in the battle to express his artistic center and yet prevent himself from drowning in its creative pool. 18 And this time someone else could help. Hugo Münsterberg was an indispensable ingredient in James's move away from the science he had fathered. Besides, James now had institutional responsibility. He

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45

had begun a tradition of experimental psychology at Harvard; and although that tradition developed more as a consequence of his book than of laboratory work, he needed someone to direct the Harvard laboratory, someone unquestionably first class. Without an adequate replacement James would be less free to pursue developing interests in less scientific projects like metaphysics and psychic phenomena. There was really no American of sufficient scientific stature available. Cattell was in the process of moving from Pennsylvania to Columbia; Titchener was not yet well known; and Hall was settled at Clark. 19 James's discovery of Münsterberg seemed a professional godsend. As he explained to colleague Josiah Royce: "His indefatigable love of experimental labor had led him to an extraordinarily wide range of experience, he has invented a host of elegant and simple apparatus, his students all seem delighted with him, and so far as I can make out, everyone recognizes him to be, as a teacher, far ahead of everyone else in the field, whatever they may think of his published results." 20 Although Münsterberg first came to Harvard in 1892 as a visiting professor, it would not be until 1897 that he accepted a permanent position. During the early and middle 1890s James courted him as his replacement in the Harvard Psychological Laboratory. "Courted" is the proper verb; for as one historian of American psychology observed, the situation suggested a girl who was searching for her true love while the suitor tried various approaches to become the object of her affection. 21 Despite Münsterberg's good impression and his and James's mutually reinforcing attacks on Wundtian psychology, Hugo wanted a prestigious position in a German university. In experimental psychology that meant either Leipzig or Göttingen. And unfortunately for his prospects he had criticized both Wundt and Göttingen's laboratory experimentalist, Georg Elias Müller. 22 Moreover, there was little indication that being a Jew enhanced prospects for professional advancement. 23 The simple fact that Münsterberg would have preferred to develop his career in Germany than in America made

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James's courtship more difficult. It meant that the latter had to play on Münsterberg's ambition and vanity to achieve the desired result. James worked very hard to compromise Münsterberg's hope for success as a German psychologist. James used psychology to land a psychologist. It was possible to explain James's pursuit of Münsterberg in terms of an older scientist's desire for scholarly companionship. A young man, coworker, and already a highly accomplished scientist was to be more admired than manipulated. But James had ceased to be vitally interested in experimental psychology, and, as will be seen, in his zeal to find an ally against Wundt he had avoided facing, or at least emphasizing, Münsterbergian metaphysics he later found repugnant. Now, however, regardless of questionable long-term intellectual compatibility, James's future depended on being freed from laboratory psychology; he needed a scientist so that he could be released from science. William James was not simply a nice man. His pursuit of Münsterberg showed that James did not escape the aggressive personal dynamics that marked the Gilded Age. American professionalism was not simply part of the larger cultural transformation to a modern mode. The transformation was pervaded with scheming, ambition, and even deception. 24 Why should James escape this ethic? James's barometric persona also extended into the era's penchant for machination. He was not, at bottom, Machiavellian, but he was capable of ulterior motive and was not above guile. It was, after all, the era of "the great barbeque." And James was too multifaceted, too complex, and too much a man of his time and country to escape a saint. In successfully bringing Münsterberg to Harvard James used his stature to good advantage; he flexed his building professional muscle. Conversely, Münsterberg was at a different professional crossroad. A generation younger than James, mightily ambitious and endowed with an enormous capacity for work, "M" (as James often called him) was on the threshold of an outstanding career as a psychologist. 25 But whereas James had achieved professional fame Münsterberg could only believe it

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47

was within his grasp. In order to attain professional greatness he needed the proper university setting. His psychological laboratory at Freiburg was extremely popular, yet most German psychological laboratories were poorly funded. In America, and certainly at Harvard, he could expect strong financial support for experimental psychology. Then, too, James apparently fed Miinsterberg's impression of America as a land that refused to recognize limits; there was the romantic frontier spirit, great wealth, and Münsterberg had the typical youthful wanderlust. In comparison the Freiburg atmosphere seemed stifling and mediocre. Moreover, for the present, Münsterberg was unable to land the high-level German appointment that could deflate the vision of America as an exciting field for professional activity. 26 The fact was that even though Münsterberg was a rising figure in German psychology he had not yet arrived. Anxiety colored his ambition: he was professionally aggressive yet professionally vulnerable. James understood and acted accordingly. In 1891 when Georg Elias Müller, whose laboratory at Göttingen was second only to Wundt's, wrote a devastating review of Münsterberg in which he accused him of wild, hypothetical psychology, James protected him like an injured son: "There is something peculiarly hideous . . . when an established authority like Müller, instead of administering fatherly and kindly admonition to a youngster like yourself, shows malign pleasure in knocking him down and jumping up and down upon his body. Don't mind it! Don't be angry! Turn the other cheek! Make no ill-mannered reply!—and great will be your credit and reward." 27 Münsterberg responded bravely that Müller's criticism had "failed to arouse any deep feelings of outrage within me." But he betrayed wounded pride by refusing to challenge Müller with "the language of gutter snipe." 28 Here was career crisis; German scientific authority had depreciated Münsterberg's science. But American scientific authority offered support. As it became clearer that Münsterberg was interested in Harvard, James appealed to the desire for greatness to elimi-

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nate indecision: " W e could get younger men who would be safe enough, but we need something more than a safe man, we need a man of genius if possible. 2 9 Münsterberg retained reservations about leaving Germany; he was, however, increasingly looking to James for something more than scholarly companionship. " I scarcely need to assure you, my dear professor," he confided, "that it would be a special joy and honor to work at your side and under your protection." 3 0 James rejoined with seductive praise: " Y o u seem to me to be doing more to open out new vistas in psychology than anyone t o d a y . " 3 1 T h e n he emphasized his own experimental failing: " I have come to the settled conclusion that I was myself unfit to be director of our laboratory—a humiliating c o n c l u s i o n ! " 3 2 He also encouraged Münsterberg to drop his deferential posture. " M y dear Münsterberg," James scolded, "if you call me 'Verschater [Dear] Herr Professor' any more I shall refuse to speak to you when we meet and send your letter back u n r e a d ! ! " 3 3 When Münsterberg agreed to be visiting professor James continued to flatter at his own expense. " T h i s has been the best stroke I ever did for our University," he exclaimed. "It is an enormous relief to me to see the responsibility for experimental psychology in Harvard transferred from my feeble and unworthy shoulders to those of a man as competent as you. I shall proceed immediately to proclaim the news as an early ventilation and publication of it will decide many wavering students to come to us next y e a r . " 3 4 James had hooked his professional replacement in 1892, but it was five years before Münsterberg was securely aboard at Harvard. Despite his skill in enticing the young psychologist, Münsterberg still hestitated about the wisdom of permanently crossing the Atlantic. He had real fears about cultural dislocation, fears that betrayed an indelible German attachment. His most immediate anxiety was the language problem; he could read but not speak English. But James did not let this shortcoming interfere with his hopes to secure Münsterberg: " A t your age and with your facility I am sure the language won't trouble you after the first y e a r . " 3 5 He shrewdly

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used "M's" sense of cultural superiority to overcome a cultural disability: "The German brain always manages, in a couple of years to get along with a foreign tongue." 36 James was not, however, as sanguine about Münsterberg's English as he let on, for he told Josiah Royce, "he will be to our strength, if only he gets along with our language. . . . With Münsterberg's torrential flow of eloquence in his own tongue, he will have a fearful Hemmungsgefuhl [inhibition] when he tries ours." 37 James's suspicion was unfounded. Münsterberg mastered English with amazing speed and his elementary classes were soon drawing as many students as those of James, George Herbert Palmer, and Josiah Royce combined. 38 In any case learning English was not Münsterberg's fundamental qualm. Even the prospect of replacing America's most famous psychologist at America's best university could not obliterate a cultural distance that went beyond language. "I have . . . inner reservations," Münsterberg confessed. "I fear that in taking the American position, at Harvard I would become very one-dimensional because I will have to concentrate solely on the experimental side." In Germany he had been able to combine laboratory work with "aesthetic questions, the history of philosophy, etc." which furthered his "inner development." He was worried that "inevitably . . . onesidedness would grow." 39 Ironically, his artistic sensibility, a quality that had undoubtedly drawn James closer to him, threatened his successful adaptation to Harvard as a scientist. James was sympathetic with Münsterberg's cultural hesitations; he was wise enough not to challenge indignantly any implied criticism of the American environment. Indeed, James used reverse psychology and responded to Münsterberg's reservations with some qualified ones of his own. He hoped "that the shock of our bad streets and wooden houses will not be too great. Remember that the first weeks are always the lonely and unnatural ones, and that when work begins your whole feelings toward America will change." 40 To meet deficient New World conditions, James offered a practical suggestion: "I advise you if you have a good servant, especially

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a good cook, to bring her with you. Our servants are the weakest spot of our civilization—mostly Irish, illtrained, very independent, and able to ask enormous wages." These concessions notwithstanding, James was nevertheless quite candid in hoping for Münsterberg's permanent Americanization: "I think you ought to bind yourself for 3 years at least. . . though my own hope is that by the end of that time you will have become an enthusiastic Yankee and have forgotten your mother-tongue. " 4 1 James also tried hard to stabilize Münsterberg's reactions to America by anticipating them; he did not want his sensitive friend burned out on American life prematurely. If that happened he would still be burdened with the laboratory and the narrow responsibilities he loathed. After the newcomer expressed high enthusiasm for his new environment James, now abroad, confided, "The excitement of novelty won't last forever, I'm afraid that by springtime you may experience the sort of fatigue which you haven't been accustomed to feel in Germany." Münsterberg was cautioned that "over-stimulation and depressive reaction are the great evils of our otherwise interesting and on the whole beautiful climate." And he warned his young friend about getting overinvolved in Harvard faculty meetings as "they eat the very soul out of one with their tediousness and consumption of time. Keep clear of them as long as you can." James understood only too well the anxiety of career indecision but interpreted it lightly. He confessed, "I have laughed most heartily at your psychological description of yourself in the last days of April, 1892 [on the eve of Münsterberg's move] for I know just what the agonizing feeling of indecision is before one makes so important a venture." 4 2 Münsterberg's ambivalence about America did not abate with the 1892 appointment; he did not, as James wished, become an "enthusiastic Yankee." Between 1894 and 1897 " M " tried to decide whether America or Germany deserved his final loyalty. In 1894 he reacted to Harvard's offer of a permanent position: " T h e question which I have to decide today would be therefore, whether I will become American for lifetime or

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whether I remain German." He told James, "I like the university work here at Harvard very much, but that is not sufficient for such a decision. . . . My friends in Europe, " he explained, "insist that I live at first again some time in Germany before I decide to leave it for a life-time." James did not object; a leave of absence was granted in 1895 and Münsterberg was back at Freiburg. Nonetheless, he retained ties with Harvard and dutifully promised to supply colleagues "by mail from Europe with new experimental problems, ideas and propositions." 43 Now loyalty cut two ways. Nor did Münsterberg forget the Harvard laboratory. James would not let him: saddled with routine laboratory matters, he soon consulted his German connection. At one point James asked who should be chosen laboratory assistant. Münsterberg had definite opinions: "I should think [Ε. B.] Delabarre would be better than [Edmund] Sanford. Delabarre is your and my pupil and . . . in the tradition . . . while Sanford seems to get his ideas mostly from Hall." Hall had other interests than experimental psychology; he had gravitated toward a developmental approach that emphasized psychosexual changes in adolescence, thereby weakening the "brass instrument" preparation of his students. Even a rising talent like James Mark Baldwin, who had studied with Wundt and founded psychological laboratories at the University of Toronto (1889) and Princeton (1893), would not do. Baldwin was also drawn toward the evolutionary and genetic approach to psychology that fascinated Hall: "Baldwin's a better psychologist than Delabarre but no experimentalist. The laboratory ought not to be a psychological seminary only, where experiments become a shop for psychological technics and mechanical tricks." 44 Münsterberg was still concerned in the mid 1890s with the physiological explanation of psychological phenomena. This, after all, had been the emphasis he and James shared, and was "the tradition" he wanted to establish in the Harvard Psychological Laboratory. But "M's" concern for the experimental direction of New World psychology was also part of an underlying uneasiness

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with the role of intellect in American universities: Scientific life means there [America] nothing more than teaching and teaching means a way to earn a living and all institutions are controlled by that spirit. . . . A man who is not obliged to teach for making his money feels himself too good for that career. . . . The [Germans] have the idea to devote one's life to science and research and that just the best and freest men belong to universities.45 Such broad criticism reflected Miinsterberg's identification with the elitism of the German professor, with the deference the German public bestowed on university men. 4 6 It also showed concern with Harvard educational policy and a wish to mold it toward German standards. He registered distaste for two recent junior appointments to the Harvard Philosophy Department, C. M. Bakewell and James Lough. "Both have not published anything worth while or of any attention," he observed. "They are barely up to the standard of the Ph.D. and now they are instructors of a university department which has men like you and Royce." Worse, "If both are good teachers, they will be after some years assistant professors, finally full professors, and the more they teach the less they will publish, in short they will be . . . a type strictly opposite of all university ideals." Harvard was no place for mediocrity, nor for that matter was America. "If I return to America (or let me say directly, when I return to America]," he wrote James, "my chief work will be to fight against the school teacher as University man; the future of American science will depend on that point." 4 7 James agreed with Miinsterberg's support of rigorous standards, if not the underlying sense of German superiority. He concurred that "We at Harvard are going to suffer more and more, I think, from the new fellowships which are being founded in other institutions." Harvard would "get fewer good graduate students." Yet James was hopeful that "if a few men of genius spring up in the next generation, fifty years will see us perhaps in the very first rank." 4 8 Mutual desire for academic excellence, however, did not cancel an important difference

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in emphasis. James did not imply that some elemental cultural weakness blocked the advance of American science. Similar progressive hopes united them; underneath were profound cultural antipathies. By 1896 Münsterberg was pressed to come to a decision about the permanent Harvard appointment. President Eliot had urged James to consider other candidates in lieu of Münsterberg's continuing indecision. James clearly wanted the German; and his assessment of major American psychologists revealed a shrewd capacity to dismiss the New World competition. After telling Eliot that Münsterberg was "far and away, all things considered, the best of the field," James methodically eliminated the other candidates. Edmund Sanford with Hall at Clark was a "good and careful, but not original, experimentalist," while Lightner Witmer of Pennsylvania was "energetic, intelligent, but not heavy weight." Titchener had positive qualities. He was "very energetic and reputed a great success as a teacher," but unfortunately was also "quite a barbarian in his scientific [sic], and quarrelsome in the extreme." Joseph Jastrow at Wisconsin was "perhaps the most deserving" but a "narrowish intellect." Edward W. Scripture of Yale looked "shallow, and a complete barbarian" whose only virtue was great energy. James Angell at Chicago had a "fine mind and character," but was "too young to have shown his hand much yet." And Cattell was "very strong in all ways," except that involvement in editorial work would "arrest his laboratory action," and he was strapped to "his peculiarly arranged berth at Columbia." 49 James had taken great care to lure Hugo Münsterberg to Harvard and did not want to lose his catch, particularly to "barbarians" like Titchener and Scripture, who practiced a narrow, and seemingly Wundtian laboratory psychology. Besides, in the 1890s a German psychologist making his life work in America still had strong appeal. 50 Münsterberg could have stayed in Germany, but hoped for a loftier academic setting and higher rank. At Freiburg he held the rank of Extraordinarius, which was not the full professorship (Ordinarius) he desired. Wundt had generously, con-

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sidering "M's" psychology, recommended him for a position at the University of Zurich, left open by the death of positivist Richard Avenarius. But the expected professor Ordinarius was withdrawn and Münsterberg would not consider going to Zurich as Extraordinarius. To be rebuffed in the Old World helped him to gravitate toward the New. 51 Then, too, he had looked forward to the International Psychological Congress in Munich in the summer of 1896 as an opportunity to boost his cause. But the right men did not show up, including Wundt and James. The result was a meeting of what "M" called "second class character." 52 James, who as dutifully avoided professional meetings as Münsterberg attended them, wrote that he was amused by "A Berlin paper . . . which said that the psychological pope of the Old World, Wundt, and the psychological pope of the New World, James, were both distinguished by their absence." 53 Münsterberg, however, was disgusted with substandard professional drama in the heart of the beloved fatherland. He complained that even "Stanley Hall, [James] Sully, [Alfred] Binet and many others who announced papers did not come." 54 The appropriate German position had not arisen; professional interaction seemed at low ebb; and a professorship in the exciting American milieu awaited his consent. In March 1897 Münsterberg finally chose: "Now I am yours forever," he wrote James; "all my ships are burned. The University here [Freiburg] did its utmost to keep me. They offered me a better position. But it was nevertheless not just as I wished it, . . . so I declined here everything and accepted Harvard." 55 The German connection was finally consummated; James was formally free to pursue other interests. But there was a cost: Münsterberg's tenure at Harvard would prove to be a painful one not only for James and Harvard, but for Münsterberg himself. Münsterbergian anecdotes abounded. All alluded to his German background or academic elitism, which often were conflated. Students who ventured to his office were bidden to enter with a terse, "Come." Graduate students in psychology referred to him privately with a snicker as "the chief." Visitors

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to the Münsterberg home recalled that the living room was built on two levels, with the "Professor" invariably seated on the higher plane. 56 Münsterberg was astonishingly sensitive about how the public viewed his person. He reportedly refused to be included in a painting of the famous personages in the Harvard Philosophy Department—James, Royce, and George Herbert Palmer—which hung over the staircase in Emerson Hall. Münsterberg felt that aesthetics demanded he be in the center. For years a rumor falsely circulated that the empty chair in the painting had originally seated Münsterberg. 57 On one occasion Münsterberg was so outraged with the reception of an essay that appeared in Mind, that he threatened to stop publishing in English. He snobbishly considered "writing in English an act of courtesy to the English speaking world." And since he had been abused he would withdraw "my act of courtesy as I see that I am whipped and not welcomed in the house where I came as a guest." 58 Later the anecdotes ceased to be amusing tales about a blustering foreigner and became woven into the suspicion that he was a subversive. Münsterberg's unceasing attempts to promote a German-American scholastic alliance, his intercession into delicate early-twentieth-century diplomacy between the United States and Germany, and finally the hysteria of World War I changed him from a caricature into an enemy. When he died in 1916 he had all but formally resigned from the American university that in the 1890s had seemed the best hope for the progressive efforts of German-American science. 59 Fortunately James did not live long enough to see Münsterberg's tragic failure. He did, however, experience Münsterberg's wrath, a hypersensitivity to Germanness in what he called his "adapted" land. In 1899 Münsterberg became chairman of the Harvard Philosophy Department. One of his goals was the construction of Emerson Hall, a building that would house a greatly expanded psychological laboratory. When Emerson Hall was dedicated in 1905, Münsterberg took command of the ceremony like a German general. He presented a long, self-serving speech that annoyed Harvard dignitaries, in-

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eluding James. Overreacting to the forthcoming criticism he told President Eliot about a letter from James, "telling me that I ought not to have taken . . . part in a peculiarly Yankee affair." Münsterberg threatened to resign, insisting that a "born American ought to take my place at once." 60 Actually, James had been conciliatory. He explained to Münsterberg that it was predictable some would object to "a young man and a German" playing "the chief part in so peculiarly yankee . . . a ceremony." And he conceded, "I know your intentions have been the best and you have shouldered responsibilites which we older men have been too lazy to take up." 6 1 But Münsterberg saw chastisement, not wise counseling. Only Eliot's assurance that James had told him that he had judged Münsterberg "without having full knowledge of the circumstances" cooled his outrage. 62 Long before the Emerson Hall incident Münsterberg had publicly revealed his indelible Germanness. Two days before Christmas in 1900 he informed James of plans to write a book on "the Americans" which would help "destroy European prejudices about the New World." 63 The Americans expressed hopes for international cooperation, and a faith in an internationally sophisticated science that would upgrade American experimentalism. Yet the work showed that the prejudices of his European countrymen—the ones he hoped the book would help eliminate—were the basis for his insights; insights that pointed to the limits of intellectual compatibility with his American mentor. Those limits suggested the improbability of Münsterberg ever compromising his sense of German superiority to American conditions. At the same time Münsterberg began to glimpse a different James, one who would later be identified as the scientist-philosopher who had compromised both science and metaphysics. At the core of the American character Münsterberg saw a simple truth: "Whoever wished to understand the secret of that baffling turmoil, the inner mechanism and motive behind all . . . American forces, must set out from only one point. He must appreciate the yearning of the American heart after self

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direction." 64 The loftiest self-direction was intellectual selfperfection, and the light of intellect in America was Boston, the least American of American cities. "The European, who after prescribed fashion lands at New York and travels to Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, and Niagara, and then winds up his journey in Boston, has the impression that he has already come back from the New World into the Old." 65 The quintessence of Bostonian intellect was "the elm-shaded college yard of Harvard," where there had been one fundamental sign of perfection from Puritan times to the twentieth century: "Existence got its sense and value only in ethical endeavor; self perfection was the great duty which took precedence over all others." 66 The trouble with the Puritan, however, was that "moral judgment leads always to the individual; neither in the physical nor in the psychical world can anything be found which has ethical value except the good will of the individual. . . . From this point of view," Münsterberg noticed, "science, poetry, and art have no objective value." That was critical because "the intellectual worker did not set out to perfect art and science, but aimed by means of art and science to perfect himself." Conversely, in "non-Puritan" Europe, "any great moral earnestness has been merely an episode in the thought of those nations, . . . because the desire for free initiative has never been a striking feature in their intellectual physiognomy." 67 An ideal world distinct from individual morality was quite different from one grounded in personal experience and individualistic morality. James, a great model of the American intellect, had indeed "aimed by means of art and science to perfect himself." More than that: James had saved himself in the contemplation of art and the creation of psychological science; that is, he had found personal identity in art and science and yet had prevented himself from being submerged into its objectivity, in its ideality. Here was a New World compromise that Münsterberg instinctively grasped, perhaps even had discussed with James as they established their relationship. But Münsterberg could

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never have viewed his life-task as a compromise between the duty to create art and science and to use them as means to preserve and foster the self. In fact, as his biographer has perceptively noted, Münsterberg could never project his personality into the creation of his psychology: he could never give, like James, the self a part to play in the scientific world. 68 Münsterberg's world view, in contradistinction to James's, was freed from personal constraints and compromise with the self. That such idealism failed to square with Jamesian thinking did not escape Münsterberg. "Even in so purely a scientific work as James's two-volume 'Principles of Psychology,' one finds such forcible and convincing turns of thought, so personal a form given to abstract facts, and such freshness together with such ripe mastery, as could only come from an American." 69 He continued with what was ostensibly a straightforward exposition of American thought, but what was actually a not-too-subtle criticism: "The American popular mind does not at all sympathize with the philosophical idea that individuality is only an appearance, and that we are all fundamentally one being. The American thinks pluralistically, and brings to his metaphysics a firm belief in the absolute significance of the individual." 70 Despite the critical tone, notwithstanding the slightly veiled repugnance toward compromising the objectivity of intellectual pursuit with self-fulfillment, Münsterberg made an accommodation of his own, one that embraced the contemporary progressive rhetoric which minimized fundamental divisions. Even though "the American still puts the higher value on the personal, the German on the over-personal," he concluded, "every day sees the difference reduced, and brings the two nations nearer to a similar attitude of mind." 7 1 Nevertheless, the hope for uniting what was best in both traditions, those qualities that James and Münsterberg both ostensibly endorsed, became a bitter reminder of unbridgeable distance. During the first decade and one half of the twentieth century, the heyday of American progressive expectations, Münsterberg found increasing cause for alarm. He had always made

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it clear that science and philosophy were distinct; psychological investigation was not metaphysical investigation. What increasingly concerned him was an American tendency to blur clear-cut division between the "causal" world of science and the "eternal values" of metaphysics. "The scientist does not ask," he maintained, "whether space and time and causality exist without exception. There cannot be anything in his world which is not included in forms of space and causality." 72 By firmly delineating the natural world as science's sole province, Münsterberg could characterize the scientific world as purely physical, psychology as wholly physiological, but at the same time incomplete. This enabled him to critique any so-called "science" that either put science out of the natural world, as psychic research did, or denied that beyond the natural world was a world of eternal values, as did materialism and pragmatism. Such an ontology enabled Münsterberg to divide the real neatly from the unreal, the ideal from the material. It provided an intellectual order that fitted more neatly into the class tradition of Old World society than into the shifting social melange he found in America. Indeed, to Münsterberg, the problem for progressive America was a problem in order. One needed to sort out what was science and what was philosophy. Once that was clear, science could "order" society, provide for progressive solutions to social injustices, inefficiencies, and dislocations. American science had a clear mandate to command, to order disorder. But Münsterberg was also trying to foster the lockstep discipline and resignation to social place that reflected his German background. The "Professor" had an obligation as a member of the academic elite to keep authority socially responsible. It was a mistake to dismiss Münsterberg as simply another muddy-headed romantic idealist. 73 James eschewed sharp divisions. He devoted considerable time during the last ten years of his life to discrediting any view that insisted on sharp discontinuities; he did not, as did Münsterberg, demand separate worlds for metaphysics and psychology. 74 With the completion of his career in experimental psychology, marked not only by the publication of The

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Principles, but also by the transfer of the Harvard Psychological Laboratory to Münsterberg, James was less apt to see congruence than incongruence in his German connection. When Münsterberg finished Grundzüge Der Psychologie (Basics of Psychology) in 1900 he dedicated it to James—probably more in gratitude than compatibility. By then James, as we shall see, had argued with Münsterberg over the validity of psychic phenomena and was absorbed with exceptional mental states and unusual religious experience. James was also more aggressively developing his pragmatism, becoming increasingly associated with those thinkers who were "revolting against formalism" in both German idealism and British empiricism. 7 5 Just as Münsterberg had revealed his essentially Germanic Old World origins by insisting on division and order, so too did James's refusal to see these distinctions as real expose the essential American in him. James's fascination with the mysterious nature of psychological experience, his practical metaphysics roughly depicted the New World traditions of nineteenth-century romanticism, and frontier practicality. William James was becoming a representative, even popular American intellectual; he stayed in touch with American values in a way that inevitably brought differences with Münsterberg to the forefront. James was flattered with the Grundzüge dedication but unsure about their "Geistesverwandtschaft" (spiritual kinship). His copy of Grundzüge was heavily annotated with critical commentary on the artificial distinctions pervading the book. He objected to "Münsterberg's fluent ingenuity along unreal lines of artificial obstruction"; and he winced at "unnatural and violent distinction." "How slickly does he skip from every trap!" Three years later he discussed the book with students and said, "Shall the direct dealings of our minds . . . consent to be first falsified and mutilated and then handed over to certain professionals called psychophysicists, who claim . . . that the universe in its entirety is their property?" 7 6 Now, in contradistinction to 1889 and the early 1890s, Münsterberg's psychology belonged in the enemy camp, with the

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artificiality of Wundt in Europe and Titchener in America. James saw another Münsterberg, just as Münsterberg was finding another James. Nor was their increasing incompatibility over intellectual matters the extent of conflict. James described Münsterberg's role in the management of the International Congress of Arts and Sciences at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition as "a case of pure love of schematization running mad." 7 7 Münsterberg proposed to organize the congress into the abstract categories—Normative, Historical, Physical, and Mental—that he had presented in Grundzüge. James's philosophical ally, John Dewey, criticized these categories as having nothing to do with the organizational needs of people. Münsterberg was making the cardinal error of not immersing his metaphysics in the real world. That was not only philosophically incorrect; it was, as perhaps both James and Dewey consciously recognized, un-American. 7 8 Münsterberg and James never severed personal ties, but with each passing year Münsterberg became more disillusioned and hostile. In Science and Idealism (1906) he sneered at "the new sophists who today call themselves . . . pragmatists, and who speak in our day again with picturesque and capitivating epigrams." Unfortunately, the pragmatists were "hardly aware of their vices. They feel proud of having nothing to do with absolute standards and eternal values. They feel the life but they lack the reason." 7 9 In a rare direct exchange James responded to Science and Idealism. Interestingly, he chose an aesthetic description that was remarkably similar to the Schillerian one he had recorded in his diary thirty-eight years earlier. I am satisfied with a free wild Nature: You seem to me to cherish and pursue an Italian Garden, where all things are kept in separate compartments, and one must follow straight-ruled walks. Of course Nature gives material for those hard distinctions which you make, but they are only centers of emphasis in a flux for me; and as you treat them reality seems to me all stiffened. 80

Münsterberg appreciated James's "philosophical letter" but could not countenance disorderly relativism:

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Yes the world of immediate experience is to me also a wild nature without grass and flowerbeds and plenty of weeds. But I think our life's duty makes us gardeners, makes us to unweed the weeds of sin and error and ugliness and when we finally come to think over what kind of flowers were left as valuable and we bring together those which are similar—then we have finally indeed such an Italian Garden as the world which has to be acknowledged as attainable.81 The world-as-garden metaphor expressed Münsterberg's hope for scientific and philosophical order. It was appropriate in an age forging order out of transition. Indeed, many Americans would have found a tamed nature more to their liking than James's wild variety. Others, however, sought release from the increasing controls a more ordered, scientific, modern America presented; these would have sympathized with the unfettered Jamesian vision. Moreover, both of these needs could and did arise in the same person. Here were two expressions of the American progressive perspective, beliefs that merged into a "progressive ethos" that alternated order and deliverance, release and control. 82 Earlier in his career, James had sought in science the professional and personal leverage that gave shape to artistic urges and moved him beyond the comparatively formless yet restrictive intellectual world of Henry Sr. From 1890, however, he had sought liberation from the professional world of American science he had helped to found. Münsterberg's position, his Italian garden, denied the second phase of James's career; Münsterberg implied that the switch from art to science was the only career possibility, the only true fulfillment for the intellect. James knew differently. His creative genius had assumed no unbridgeable division between art and science, he had moved from the one to the other with remarkable grace and insight. Münsterberg's "hard distinctions" were indeed "only centers of emphasis in a flux for me." Münsterberg's garden metaphorically limited James's creativity; it blocked his ability to seek originality in "wild nature." 83 James could have both creative release and control in the metaphor of a wild landscape. James could be a "progressive" without separating intellec-

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tual, scientific, and aesthetic concerns into closed compartments. Münsterberg could not understand that progressivism was fueled as much by the older mystical, open-ended midnineteenth-century laissez faire spirit as it was by the demands for order and scientific control. 84 The rift between them was never purely philosophical. Münsterberg was not, much as he sounded like it, just a German idealist. Nor was James simply an American pragmatist. Both had reputations as scientific psychologists. In their differing psychological perspectives the fuller breach becomes intelligible. We know that James turned away from experimental psychology after finishing The Principles of Psychology to an examination of abnormal psychological states. James had been concerned with mental aberration since the late 1860s, but only after 1890 did it engulf his psychological interest. 85 Münsterberg, by contrast, became more and more engaged in applied psychology as behavior control. There was no question that Münsterberg was the American pioneer in using psychology to solve social problems. 86 Psychology was a science to expedite practical improvements in everyday life. Münsterberg developed an early lie detector to secure legal justice; he fashioned vocational tests that industry used to find the appropriate employee; he devised a psychotherapy that eliminated certain mental abnormalities. 87 Münsterberg exorcised uncontrollable mental qualities from his psychology; he never recognized a Freudian "unconscious mind" and found no place for the free conscious initiative of any Jamesian "will." 8 8 These attributes might be considered in aesthetics, metaphysics, or religion; but they had no place in a scientific psychology. Münsterberg was particularly appalled when Americans confused depth psychology, psychic phenomena, and religious mysticism with scientific psychology. In an era trying to establish scientific credulity, such charlatanry undercut the labored, meticulous efforts of professionals to facilitate true progress. The rigid garden of his metaphysics applied to his canons for scientific psychology. Mysticism and mediums were one thing, psychology was quite another. Ex-

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perimental psychology and psychic hocus-pocus did not mix. 8 9 James's receptivity to "mediums" brought their scientific and cultural divergences to a head. Although James never unequivocally accepted the spirit world as real, he was not willing to dismiss the possibility. Beginning in 1885 with the medium Leonora E. Piper, James became involved in the investigations of the London Society of Psychic Research, an organization he headed in 1893. Over the years he attended dozens of seances, hypnotized several subjects, and was hypnotized at least once himself. 90 James was aware of Münsterberg's skeptical attitude. He wrote James McKeen Cattell at Columbia of Münsterberg's failure to give the psychic world a scientific chance: When I asked Münsterberg to come to Mrs. Piper he said "I am hypnotizable, and if I got such results as you relate, I should simply conclude that I had been hypnotized." And I said "then bring your wife and sit by, and see what she gets." "Oh no!" Münsterberg said, "I should never suffer my wife to go to such a place." I call that real sportsmanlike keenness for the new phenomena!91 In time, however, Münsterberg not only attended seances but became obsessed with exposing the Italian medium, Eusapia Palladino. "Madame" Palladino came to depict a notorious example of the dangerous American tendency to confuse trickery with science, to mistake physical dexterity for the nullification of causal laws. Münsterberg was compelled to demolish threats to legitimate science, to expose American susceptibility to the Palladinos. That meant writing another book on national traits. Münsterberg warmed to this task in American Problems (1910). "Every feature of our social life," he began, "shows an unwillingness to concentrate attention. Only that which can be followed without effort is welcome." The trouble was that "the more we spoil our attention and cultivate in ourselves the passive attitude which is driven hither and thither by every changing event, the more we must be frightened by the real work of the world which does not allow us to shift." Nervous

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restlessness was not simply endemic in American democracy; its ubiquitousness could be traced to "the predominance of the feminine mind in the shaping of national society." Female influence had become alarming: "In our age the woman is the head of the family, and the woman is the head of our social life: is the head of our art and literature, is the head of our intellectual culture and of our moral development." 92 The indictment of the American woman was significant not because it revealed Miinsterberg's sexism—in another instance he took a remarkably forward-looking stand—but because it connected sex to the disintegration of American intelligence, to a basic New World cultural weakness that prevented the triumph of scientific psychology, of progressive science. 93 In the Old World sexual roles as well as class lines were more clearly drawn. Münsterberg was reared to expect the home to be the "natural" environment for women, while politics and university life were the "proper" worlds for men. Women in positions of cultural leadership confused community goals, sapped social strength. He viewed society as an "organism" braced at its core by the family. When women focused their energies in the wider world the socialization process was undermined. With American women directing socialization at nearly every point, worse perpetually changing their minds, the ability of society, of science to secure order and progress disintegrated. Masculine scholarship, the maledominated university, could no longer orchestrate proper social and cultural development. 94 "The predominance of woman with quickly moving attention gives to the American life a general aspect of haste and nervousness, where every movement is quickly taken up and quickly forgotten, where fads and fancies are alternating with undignified rapidity, and where public discussion too often remains superficial and controlled by feeling." 95 James's terse, "I am a motor, need change, and get very quickly bored" nicely illustrated this unhappy national trait. And had Münsterberg known that James once visited a "mind-cure doctress" who told him that "my eyes mentally speaking kept revolving like wheels in front of each

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other and in front of my face, it was four or five sittings ere she could get them fixed," he would have had especially shocking evidence of the danger feminine susceptibilities posed for American science. 9 6 Since women were the most vulnerable to psychological fads and most " p s y c h i c s " were women, it followed that if Münsterberg could expose Madame Palladino, scientific credulity w o u l d gain. In a seance "every moment must suggest new tricks, and only a woman with unusual skill, unusual talent, unusual strength, unusual resourcefulness, and unusual ability to deceive and to mislead could go through these performances undetected for a single evening." 9 7 Palladino was "a great artist, and as a vaudeville show she might be at the head of the profession, but I do not see how she can overcome in any cool observer the feeling that it is trickery." There was something lurid, unladylike, and primitive in her performance. Science steadfastly opposed illusion; the "Madame" would not be an exception. Münsterberg reminded Americans how the Oriental women dance. They call it dancing when their feet may be standing quiet on one spot, and their hands may be quiet behind their backs. The muscles of the abdomen and of the chest are effective and can be just as well regulated to do as exact work as the hands and feet. Moreover, there would be room for a pair of bellows betweem arm and chest or between the legs, and such bellows in connection with the little tube system could quite well produce most of the phenomena. 9 8

Quite consistently with his physiological psychology, Münsterberg was explaining away a mysterious psychological state through kinetic, muscular activity. " S c i e n c e " triumphed, but not without the aid of some Münsterbergian chicanery; One week before Christmas 1909 at the midnight hour I sat again at Madame Palladino's favorite left side and a well-known scientist on her right. Finally, John [her control] was to lift the table in the cabinet. We held her hands, we felt both her feet, and yet the table three feet behind her began to scratch the floor and we expected it to be

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lifted. But instead there suddenly came a wildly, yelling scream. Neither the medium nor Mr. [Hereward] Carrington had the slightest idea that a man was lying flat on the floor and had succeeded in slipping noiselessly like a snail below the curtain into the cabinet. I had told him that I had expected wires to stretch out from her body and he looked out for them. What a surprise when he saw that she had simply freed her foot from her shoe with an athletic backward movement of the leg was reaching out and fishing with her toes for the guitar and the table in the cabinet. And then lying on the floor he grasped her foot and caught her feet with a firm hand, and she responded with that wild scream which indicated that she knew that at last she was trapped and her glory shattered." Whether the "well-known scientist" on the Madame's right was James is unknown. James did write his friend, the Swiss psychologist, Theodore Flournoy, who was also sympathetic with psychics, that he found "Eusapia's type of performance . . . detestable—if it be not fraud simulating reality it is reality simulating fraud." 1 0 0 And Münsterberg quickly came to James's defense when he was attacked by University of Pennsylvania psychologist, Lightner Witmer, for "exploiting the occult and mystical elements of his psycho-philosophical theories." Münsterberg's loyalty toward his American mentor, however, may have been as much a reaction to Witmer's attack on his own claims for applied psychology as a defense of James. 101 Münsterberg had been publicly skeptical of psychic phenomena since he wrote an article on "Psychology and Mysticism" in the Atlantic Monthly in 1899; one that James had described as "essentially childish." 1 0 2 Although Münsterberg would not attack James personally, his motive was lyrically revealed in Josiah Royce's clever jingle on Palladino's exposure ("The Search for Truth"): Eeny, meeny, miny mo Catch Eusapia by the toe If she hollers, then we know James's doctrines are not so! 103 What Münsterberg had come to realize was that William James personified both hopes and misgivings about America.

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James's scientific appearance and his mystical reality embodied the great paradox Münsterberg observed in American culture at large. James's fall from experimental to something dangerously close to fad psychology, and his retreat into relativisim, pragmatism, and radical empiricism were symptomatic: It showed the willy-nilly disintegration of American intelligence. Progressive goals in the New World had turned out to be mystical, not scientific. Psychology could improve and control human performance by cultivating standards, not by tolerating, worse encouraging, pseudo-psychological performances. True scientific progress and lofty intellectual accomplishment came by honoring clear distinctions between natural experience and eternal values, between hocus-pocus and expertise, between men and women. Only by keeping the Italian garden weed-free could the hoped-for merger between what was best in the German-American tradition be realized. Unfortunately, Münsterberg found himself in an American environment that found the weeds as attractive as the flowers, one that aspired as much to earthly diversity as to scientific control. The course of James's psychological career was a painful reminder of Münsterberg's initial fears about an unbalanced American mentality. Münsterberg had, through an irreducible cultural difference, discovered something fundamental about American life. The breakdown of form, the decompostion of Old World principles had coincided with the rise of distinctly American values and institutions. The process continued into the twentieth century; Münsterberg was confronted with the incongruous prospect of a psychological science trying to advance amid disintegrating scientific standards. Indeed, the collapse of standards was so culturally pervasive that it included sexual confusion, i.e., the feminization of American life. 1 0 4 Americans were in the vanguard of psychological science and yet refused to recognize the difference between psychology and charlatanry; they were idealistic but refused eternal values; they seemed progressive but refused to let science eliminate social problems; and they welcomed German expertise while

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rejecting German criticism. Science was not in a position to unify intellectual and cultural traditions unless American scientists embraced the authority of science. The man who had lured him to the New World, the one who represented the promise of professional psychology and German-American unity, was a dangerous mirage. Like Palladino, James embodied American follies ranging from individualism to relativism, to pragmatism, to mysticism. In exposing mediums, Münsterberg faced the full configuration of his estrangement from American reality, and from one of its chief representatives, sadly his former mentor. Münsterberg became an embarrassment to James not only because of his irrepressible German origins, but also because he exposed common naive progressive assumptions. The high hopes James had had for his German connection in the early 1890s were transformed into an object lesson in what divided rather than connected two traditions. Paradoxically, Münsterberg's intellectual rigidity, his desire for scientific control, testified to the durability of those qualities James hoped his Americanization would quell. Münsterberg's intransigency also pointed to what appeared as American compromises with German science and metaphysics, accommodations that were barometrically expressed in James's flight from experimental psychology, and in his aggressive pragmatism. Münsterberg's personal compromise, his transatlantic move to a land that could not accept Old World traditions of social order, university elitism, and philosophical idealism was unfulfilling. He had only served an American purpose: He had freed James from the institutional responsibilities that the creation of an experimental psychology entailed. James—the symbolic American—could pursue other creative endeavors, make other creative compromises. Worse, Münsterberg became a caricature of the sensationalism and faddism that he so vociferiously attacked; he became a controversial public figure, one subject to Harvard administrative censure for neglecting laboratory duties. 105 Despite the crucial fact that Münsterberg's applied psychology would become the most important American pro-

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totype of twentieth-century behaviorism, his career was subsumed into what he considered the counterproductive, and in my terminology "compromised," American scene. There was sardonic truth in Münsterberg's comment to his old mentor in 1909, "you know that I am always in perfect agreement with you, if you do not by chance talk pragmatism." 106 Münsterberg, like James, had pioneered a popular psychology—a fact that another major first-generation scientific psychologist did not fail to see.

Edward Bradford Titchener from History of American by A. A. Roback. Reprinted courtesy of Library Publishers.

Psychology

Chapter Four

The Uncompromised Scientist: Edward Bradford Titchener James's influence appears . . . to be His credulity and surely the reverse

in philosophy and psychology getting positively unwholesome: his appeals to emotion are of scientific. Edward Bradford Titchener to James McKeen Cattell, 1898

The function of Titchener's 'scientific' psychology . . . is to keep laboratory instruments going, and to provide platforms for certain professors. Apart from that it seems to me more unreal than any scholasticism. William James to Mary Whiton Calkins, 1909

EVEN NOW WITH interconnecting expressways and close proximity to urban places Ithaca, New York, seems isolated. The nearest interstate highway is twenty miles to the east and the New York Thruway is fifty miles north. Situated in the Finger Lakes region of western New York at the southern ter-

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minus of Cayuga Lake, Ithaca retains the charming introspection of a secluded college town. Down from the north along the lake the hustle and bustle of everyday affairs fades into a quiet world of wood and water somehow immune to twentieth-century progress. Suddenly the gray gothic-style buildings of Cornell University appear castle-like atop a hill, guarding Ithaca and the lake below. Here was a special place, an atmosphere not inappropriate for an intelligence divergent from the American mainstream. In 1892, the year Münsterberg first came to Harvard, a young Englishman, fresh from study with Wundt, was hired to head an embryonic psychology laboratory at Cornell. During the next thirty-five years Edward Bradford Titchener would accomplish something that neither James nor Münsterberg could: the creation of a psychological school that produced dozens of Ph.D.s and a tightly defined body of psychological knowledge. 1 It was, of course, true that numerous students learned their psychology from James and Münsterberg, identifying themselves with either or both as mentors. But James early relinquished ties with institutional experimental psychology, and Münsterberg pursued applied psychology and public life with such zeal that his connection with pure laboratory psychology at Harvard became tenuous. As a result their influence tended to be dispersed rather than compacted, their style more national, even international, than local. Graduate students studied with James and took scholarly direction from Münsterberg, but they studied under Titchener. Students did not simply take graduate work in psychology at Cornell. They were initiated into a psychological Order, even though later in their psychological careers they usually departed from Titchenerian psychology. 2 Titchener was born in Chichester, England, in 1867, the relatively poor descendant of a rich old southern English family. His father, John Bradford Titchener, spent time in America and fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War—perhaps an indication of a family inclination to embrace losing causes. The elder Titchener died while Edward Bradford was still a

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child. Titchener claimed that this loss touched him deeply. To a student who had just learned of his own father's death, he wrote: "I always envy people who have fathers, or have had them into adult life; I conceive of the father-son relation as a very special kind of friendship." His young friend was lucky to have had a father's help in establishing a marriage and "a good position." "Until one is thoroughly settled for oneself," Titchener explained, "it must be good to have someone responsible in the prior generation upon whom one can lean." 3 Ostensibly there was a professional father "in the prior generation" upon whom Titchener wished to "lean." He told the young animal psychologist, Robert M. Yerkes, that "James expecially owed it to American psychology I think, to take some interest, and to deal out praise and blame." Titchener lamented that "I have to give it [leadership] to myself . . . and I had nobody at any time of my life to come down on me with authority, and say this is good and this is bad." 4 But Titchener's early loss of a natural father, his reference to James's neglected parental duties, did not produce a professional orphan; Titchener was anything but an insecure, fatherless psychologist, if by fatherless one meant helpless, without will or direction. Titchener went out of his way to encourage father-son relationships with several young men, including Harvard-educated Robert M. Yerkes. He, in fact, became a formidable psychological parent, one who developed his own psychology and refused to adopt deferentially anyone else's psychological science. Indeed, as we shall presently see, Titchener tried hard to become the American psychological father. James was the outstanding New World psychologist who stood in the way. James was quoted and cited in Titchener's publications far more than any other first-generation American psychologist; allusions to Hall, Münsterberg, and Cattell were rare. Conversely, Titchener often included reference to his own students' psychological work. One must carefully separate the fate of Titchener's psychology in America from Titchener's objectives. There was no indication that Titchener ever asked James for parental advice. 5

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Titchener's psychological career before Cornell followed a familiar pattern. First undergraduate study in philosophy; then some exposure to physiology, biology, or medicine; and then on to Leipzig and Wundtian influence. There simply were not many first-rate places where one could study the new psychology in the 1880s. 6 He began with a scholarship to Malvern College and enrolled at Oxford in 1885, concentrating on philosophy. His last year of five at Oxford was spent as a research student in physiology with Burdon-Sanderson, who brought him closer to the new relationship between physiology and experimental psychology. Titchener became acquainted with Wundt's pioneering work, Physiologische Psychologie. There was, however, little enthusiasm for Wundt at Oxford: his metaphysics did not delight an English philosophical tradition that emphasized associationism and empiricism. Until quite recently historians of psychology have mistakenly assumed that because Titchener studied with Wundt, he was completely absorbed into the Wundtian tradition. Actually, Titchener's psychology retained a strong affinity with Lockean sensationalism; consciousness was filled with the elements it absorbed from the interaction between the sense organs and experience. Wundt believed that the cognitive processes arose from a process underlying consciousness; Titchener, like British associationist psychologists, was interested in describing only the contents of consciousness. 7 Moreover, Titchener was fundamentally closer to the positivism of Ernst Mach than to Wundtian science. Mach reduced science to descriptive experience. Metaphysics obscured and falsified scientific inquiry. Wundt, however, always appreciated the necessity of ordering and explaining scientific data philosophically. True science formed a unity that included both the reduced experimental data and philosophical explanation. For both Mach and Titchener explanation was more mythology than science. When it came to psychology, a description of the elements of consciousness was enough. 8 Nonetheless Titchener respected Wundt's belief that only carefully trained individuals could understand the nature of

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consciousness through introspection. 9 There were laboratory procedures and instruments that enabled one to find mental elements. Both Wundt and Titchener agreed that trained psychologists could discover important facts about the mind which philosophers could not. Then, too, in 1890 no one in the world had pioneered scientific psychology as Wundt had. Throughout his career, Titchener continued to associate himself and his psychology with Wundt. He was the first to translate Physiologische Psychologie into English. He wrote articles about Wundt. Wundt was cited in Titchener's books more than any other psychologist. 10 Likewise, the timing of Titchener's apprenticeship with Wundt was significant: Titchener learned the Wundtian experimental technique at the same time James was trying to land Wundt's brilliant young antagonist, Hugo Münsterberg. The Harvard psychological tradition was articulating the anti-Wundtian bias at the very moment Titchener was exposed to it. When students took psychology from Münsterberg and James they understood Wundt to be the psychological foe. Titchenerian psychology was different from Wundt's, but Cornell psychology students did not learn that Wundt was the enemy. 11 After he received the doctorate in 1892, Titchener wanted a teaching appointment at Oxford; he was never quite sure the decision to make his career in America was the correct one. 12 It was not that Oxford had refused him, but rather that the university took small interest in the new experimental psychology. Oxford did not have a chair in psychology until the 1940s!13 Opportunity knocked from another direction. At Leipzig Titchener found a companion in the young American Frank Angell. Angell had begun a small psychological laboratory at Cornell in 1891. When the new Leland Stanford University in California offered a better-paid position, Angell suggested Titchener for the Cornell post. From 1892 until his death in 1927 Titchener created and presided over a psychological empire at Ithaca. He would go back to Europe only once and to England never. "West of the Atlantic in psychology there was 'America'

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and there was Titchener" declared Harvard historian of psychology, Edwin G. Boring. As one of Titchener's outstanding students, Boring's statement certainly reflected the strong father-son relationship that Titchener inspired. It also ignored the excellent Midwestern departments in psychology and the varied institutional development that flowered during Titchener's lifetime. 14 Nevertheless, there was no question that former students thought him unique. Personality and teaching style combined unforgettably. Titchener always lectured properly attired, which meant in full-length Oxford gown. Heavily built, with a full beard adding to the massive effect, he never entered the classroom without first letting an assistant brush away ash that fell from only the best Havana cigars. Anecdotes implied that he practiced an aristocratic style at the university in backwoods western New York, one that Queen Victoria would not have faulted. On one occasion Cornell president Charles Kendall Adams invited Titchener to dinner but neglected to call personally. Only when a coach-and-four later delivered the invitation did Titchener condescend to go to dinner! Once he stopped graduate student Walter Bowers Pillsbury from carrying a small bookcase upstairs to the Cornell Psychological Laboratory. The professor explained that people might think Pillsbury was poor and so he offered to carry it himself. 15 Undoubtedly Titchener was affected and even something of a snob. But his demand for deference and decorum was incorporated into a model of scientific rigor that had few peers in the history of American psychology. He insisted that serious students read psychological literature in German and French rather than in translation. It was rumored that students not only took notes on everything he said but on the master's gestures as well. Yet students were taught more than to posture; he insisted on intellectual independence. Ph.D. candidates were to construct psychological experiments and proceed unaided. Boring remembered that he conferred with Titchener on his doctoral dissertation only twice—once when it was planned and once when it was approved. 16 This formality con-

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trasted with James's well-known spontaneity with students, a self-forgetful informality. Once, for instance, James was lecturing using a portable blackboard. He had difficulty keeping the class in sight and writing at the same time. After trying several different ways of propping up the blackboard, he finally lay full length on the floor, and continued to draw without breaking the continuity of the lecture. 1 7 Both James and T i t c h e n e r were unforgettable teachers, and both were often admired by former students; but Titchener's style suggested an ordering, a need for seriousness that diverged from James's naturalness, indeed almost blase attitude toward teaching and students. 1 8 Differences did not end in the classroom. Unlike James, T i t c h e n e r believed psychology was, by the end of the nineteenth century, a mature if still developing s c i e n c e . On the publication of T h e Principles of Psychology James remarked that " p s y c h o l o g y is in such an ante-scientific condition that the w h o l e present generation of them is predestined to b e c o m e unreadable old mediaeval lumber, as soon as the first genuine tracks of insight are m a d e . " 1 9 T i t c h e n e r would have disagreed emphatically. In correspondence about the nature of psychological s c i e n c e with James's friend, the clinical psychiatrist Adolf Meyer, T i t c h e n e r implored: " Y o u forget. . . that the scie n c e [psychology] w h i c h you are defining has a long history and has achieved its present status with i m m e n s e pains. Y o u seek to plunge us back into the obscurities and confusions of fact, and the reliance upon logic and reflective thought, w h i c h it has taken us centuries to t r a n s c e n d . " 2 0 He did not, as did James, view science as a " l i b e r a t i n g " i n f l u e n c e so m u c h as a " l i m i t i n g " one. S c i e n c e was simply a way to define clearly, without ambiguity, certain physical, biological, and psychological realities. As he explained to Meyer, " p s y c h o l o g y may . . . be narrow and useless; but, as a science, it has a definite field, and to extend or change the n a m e of the field is simply to invite c o n f u s i o n . " All psychologists were engaged in " t h e same sort of work . . . only . . . w i s h e s and expectations are different." In the end, " w h a t e v e r

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science does it begins by analyzing, and if psychology is to be science, it can do nothing else." 2 1 Titchener had no sympathy for James's tendency to blur the line between psychology and philosophy. Like Münsterberg he strictly separated metaphysics from science: "that teleology should oust the present principles of science is to me unthinkable." 2 2 The philosophers could split the proverbial metaphysical hairs as long as they wished; it had nothing to do with psychology. Truly scientific psychology was pure introspection. The psychologist established the conditions of consiousness—no more or less. Experimental apparatus had value because it helped the psychologist to be more precise in defining consciousness. Other sciences, such as physics and biology, were helpful parallel sciences. One could learn, for instance, that biology had defined three basic areas of investigation: morphology, function, and genesis. Psychologists investigated the structure, function, and psychogenesis of consciousness. And following the biological model, psychology had to determine structure before function and function before genesis. One could have a "functional" psychology, but only after the "structural" elements were firmly defined. These priorities, however, did not mean that Titchener was completely Wundtian. And James's—and other contemporaries—confusion of Wundt and Titchener as narrow-minded "structuralists" helped to create a misleading understanding that has persisted until very recently. 2 3 Although Wundt, Titchener, and James all used introspection to each it meant something different. Wundt believed that "practiced" observers could introspect certain basic elements or structures of consciousness. The psychological laboratory enabled the psychologist to do relatively simple reaction-time experiments to distinguish, for example, between motor responses and conscious attention. There were, however, distinct limitations to what experimental introspection could define in the mind. This was because Wundt believed that there were underlying cognitive processes that could not be understood through laboratory introspection. Hence Wundt

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expended great effort in developing a " f o l k " psychology that analyzed the psychology of language, values, and customs. 2 4 Titchener never admitted that there were underlying or inner mental processes that could not be described through experimental introspection. All cognitions could be treated as sensation-elements. Titchener greatly expanded Wundt's introspective method; he deepened or moved Wundtian introspection inward. In one sense James was closer to Wundt than Titchener was. He certainly believed that there were underlying "subliminal" mental operations that demanded other approaches than introspection. James would encourage "psychic research" as a technique to illuminate unconscious mental phenomena. And, like Wundt, he saw only limited use for laboratory reaction-time experiments. 2 5 But James also believed that the psychologist's fundamental task was to describe, not to explain, consciousness. 2 6 Both James and Titchener were greatly indebted to Mach's descriptive positivism, and they both, particularly Titchener, found the British sensationalism of John Stuart Mill intellectually compatible and psychologically suggestive. The British psychological tradition was introspective and seemed more scientific. The Leibnizian and Hegelian systems that attracted Wundt sacrificed description for explanation, science for metaphysics. 2 7 While Wundt was less reliant on introspection than James or Titchener, less inclined to develop a totally descriptive psychology, Wundt and Titchener were more systematic, more "structured" than James. The Principles of Psychology was eclectic; there was a psychology in it for virtually everyone. The same could not be said for either Wundt or Titchener. 2 8 Titchener maintained that psychology, like all true sciences, established the generalization from the instances; it was interested in the generalized mind or consciousness and not in various " m i n d s " or "individualized" mental contents. " I try to see things," Titchener wrote, "with myself so far as possible left out." 2 9 He would have nothing to do with the developing American trend to use psychology to study individ-

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ual differences. Also any psychology that read consciousness out of experimental considerations and emphasized nervousmuscular reactions or other biological matters was not psychology. Whereas James's Principles began with a chapter called "Functions of the Brain," Titchener's A Textbook of Psychology, after preliminary statements on scope and methodology, started with a section called "Sensation." 30 "Biology cannot legislate to psychology, any more than it can legislate to physics or ethics," Titchener observed.31 Neither did Titchener confuse experimental psychology with nascent behavioral psychology. He took great interest in corresponding with animal psychologist Robert M. Yerkes, and encouraged the animal mentality experiments of his student Margaret Floy Washburn, but he did not define their interests as scientific psychology. Only a carefully trained introspectionalist, like himself or one of his students, could make objective observations about consciousness. Monkeys could never become scientists. 32 James, by contrast, tried hard to keep the individual within his psychological world. "All things, . . . so far as they are intelligible at all are so through combination with pure consciousness of Self, and apart from this . . . nothing is knowable to us at all," he argued.33 The self was responsible for meaning, for the integration of a world view. If the self was fractured, dissociated, meaning was lost. James's deeply autobiographical psychology, his struggle to keep the self whole helped him to see the functional side of mentality. One introspected to find the use as well as the conditions of consciousness; one described consciousness in terms of use. But Titchener wanted to avoid "introspection through the glass of meaning." 34 The psychologist's task was to attend to sensation, not to meaning. James's long chapter on the self in The Principles of Psychology digressed into discussion of the physical stimuli presented in self, to the "social self" and on even to the "spiritual self." 35 In contrast, Titchener had virtually nothing to say about self in A Textbook of Psychology.36 The main point is that Jamesian psychology stressed a functional in-

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trospection, one that depended on a physiological foundation for mind on the one hand, and functional meanings for mental life on the other. For Titchener, those two emphases bypassed the heart of psychology, the true task of introspection: "a looking-within." 37 In one way Titchener's straight and narrow approach to psychology fitted his geographic and academic place. Cornell in the late nineteenth century was remote, both geographically and intellectually. Although the university had made tremendous progress in the 1880s under the dynamic president Andrew Dickson White, it followed Harvard's clear superiority and stood behind Yale, Johns Hopkins, and fast-rising Columbia, Princeton, and Chicago as well. Cornell was in the backwoods and yet near enough to Cambridge and New Haven to feel inferior. 38 Whereas a University of Michigan, a University of Iowa, or a University of Chicago carved higher education empires relatively free from east-coast preeminence, Cornell stood under the Harvard-Yale-Hopkins-ColumbiaPrinceton canopy. Titchener would not have the help of a prestigious university to catapult to psychological fame. Yet Titchener's presence at Cornell presented an opportunity to compete with the east-coast psychological elite. Harvard had James and Münsterberg. Johns Hopkins had James Mark Baldwin. Columbia had Cattell. Yale struggled with an aged George Trumbull Ladd and his laboratory successor, Edward Scripture. 39 Cornell did very well. Titchener produced fifty-six Ph.D.s, a feat only approached by Cattell at Columbia. 40 Titchener was unquestionably a primary force in the formation of American experimental psychology. More importantly, he was the most uncompromising force. Surprisingly, Titchener had little direct contact with James. They did not meet until 1909 at Worcester, Massachusetts, on the occasion of Clark University's twentieth anniversary and Freud's visit. James thought Titchener a great teacher but had little praise for his psychology. 41 "The function of Titchener's 'scientific' psychology (which, 'structurally' considered, is a pure will-of-the-wisp)," he wrote to Mary

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Whiton Calkins, "is to keep the laboratory instruments going, and to provide platforms for certain professors. Apart from that it seems to me more unreal than any scholasticism." His structural psychology was a fiction: "Is 'affection' an entity or an attribute? Has it three 'dimensions' or one? Can serious men take facts in these verbal ways? Bah!!" James scoffed. 42 At the 1894 American Psychological Association meeting at Princeton, New Jersey, a heated argument insued between Titchener and Yale's Edward Scripture about the attributes of a structural psychology. Over breakfast one morning James sarcastically suggested a solution of the disagreement to Princeton assistant professor of psychology, Howard C. Warren and psychologist, James Mark Baldwin: "Let them both react at a given signal; and the one whose reaction-time is longer shall be declared psychologically dead." 4 3 Titchener's psychology was as artificial as Wundt's. Although James did not mention Titchener and Wundt in the same breath, his opinion of Wundtian psychology was consistent with that of Titchener. "Poor Wundt!" James exclaimed, "He is only a make-believe strong man in his powers of execution." 4 4 And, "He oils his transitions and soaps all his conclusions on you by plausible a priori introductions that make you sick." 4 5 It was the artificiality of their psychologies that annoyed James. But beneath the familiar Jamesian objection to fictitiousness was a distaste for something else Wundt and Titchener shared. They had psychological systems; their respective psychologies carried a dogmatic security, an uncompromised consistency, an impersonal objectivity that his lacked. According to James, one could observe the mind perfectly well without erecting an intellectual edifice. A search for the elements of consciousness contradicted the dynamic, unbounded "stream of consciousness." James preferred a mental model that emphasized interaction between body and mind; he avoided physical-psychological parallelism. "It is to my mind quite inconceivable," he maintained, "that consciousness should have nothing to do with a business [the body] which it so faithfully attends." 4 6 There was a basic dualism

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in Titchener's thinking, a neatness, that James would not allow. He would certainly have challenged Titchener's belief that "any muddlement of the two standpoints [physical and psychological] is the death of scientific clarity." 47 Although James unequivocably rejected Titchener's elaborate search for the elements of consciousness, the latter was ambivalent about James's psychology. He required his students to read The Principles of Psychology. He gave great attention to James's theory of emotions, although it was not wholly uncritical attention.48 There are passages in Titchener that are remarkably Jamesian. James could have written, "Since the core of every emotion is a vivid feeling, we shall expect to find in emotion all the bodily manifestations of simple affection. We find, as a matter of fact, that every emotion brings with it changes in pulse, respiration, volume and muscular strength." 49 James had remarked that "if we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no 'mind-stuff' out of which the emotion can be constituted." 50 And he would tentatively have agreed that "There is no psychological evidence of a mind which lies behind mental processes. Introspection reveals no trace of it: Whenever we look inward, we find nothing but processes, of varying degrees of complexity." 51 Titchener was not even ashamed to use James's favorite metaphor: "The stream of consciousness is sometimes a mere trickle, sometimes a placid river, sometimes a torrent; or, in technical language, there are many different states of consciousness." 52 James would have winced, however, at Titchener's injunction that "the morphological study of mind serves, as no other method of study can, to enforce and sustain the thesis that psychology is a science, and not a province of metaphysics." 53 James agreed that introspection was essential to the scientific study of psychology; but it was not the only technique. The mind could be psychologically understood only if various approaches were undertaken. Reaction-time studies, brain and nerve physiology, psychic research, and metaphys-

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ical consideration of psychological reality were all within the purview of a scientific psychology. Moreover, a functional understanding of consciousness enabled one to introspect the mind's use, its dynamic nature as opposed to its static elements. He would have balked at Titchener's firm resolve not to put the scientific horse before the scientific cart: "There is . . . the danger that if function is studied before structure has been fully elucidated, the student may fall into . . . teleological explanation which is fatal to scientific advance." 5 4 And "elucidated" meant introspected through the analysis of mental sensation, without regard for any functional object in mental activity. For James, however, logic might dictate that structure be analyzed first, but structural psychology was intertwined with dynamic functional matters from the simplest to the most complex mental phenomena. " A field of consciousness, however complex, is never analyzed unless some of its ingredients have changed." 5 5 For Titchener, "the historical conditions of psychology rendered it inevitable that. . . psychological problems should be formulated, explicitly or implicitly, as static rather than dynamic, structural rather than functional." 5 6 Titchener's terse "life is short and science is w i d e " said a world about differences. 57 A functional psychology could incorporate more life; a structural psychology could locate more science. Both James and Wundt went outward into life, one into functional psychology and psychic research, the other into folk psychology. Titchener, however, went inward from Wundt and James, away from life and into what he considered true psychological science. James, like Titchener, eschewed teleology; but he felt that the danger lay more in an overzealous search for mental attributes, fictitious elements, than in describing the functional mind. Only Wundt considered the teleologic dimension to be necessary in fashioning a truly scientific psychology. 5 8 The divergences between Titchener's and James's psychologies were to be expected in an emerging science; they were important disagreements along the road, and in the trenches, aimed at establishing the content of modern psy-

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chology. James seemed more in step with the great intellectual revolutions of the era. He was a more complete Darwinian than Titchener. The dynamic functional, and evolutionary quality of Jamesian psychology was a vivid example of American science's adaptation to Darwin's perspective. James was comfortable with movement, transformation, and interaction. Titchener was not; his psychology, his rigorous introspection resisted taking functional-evolutionary standards as the sine qua non of what constituted scientific psychology. "Matter has become energy, mind has become the sum-total of mental processes, disease . . . the sum-total of symptoms," he observed. Evolution moved away from true science, swamped "in one of those waves of popular thought which sweep over countries from time to time . . . and the wave is strongest here in America." 59 Although Titchener accepted Darwinism as biology he did not apply it in any thoroughgoing way to psychology. By concentrating on capturing mental elements rather than charting psychological change, Titchener in effect became something of psychological fundamentalist. Yet it would be a serious mistake to see Titchener simply as a psychological reactionary opposed to the progressive James. Titchener's insistence that experimental psychology draw firm lines between science and life was also forwardlooking. He was conscious of engaging in "a battle between the principles of science, as they were built up by the men of the nineteenth-century, Darwin included, . . . and the principles of teleology, which have been adopted . . . by the biologizing psychologists." And he told Adolf Meyer something he might have said to James: "I shall use every weapon at my disposal to resist your revolutionary aims; I have not the faintest intention of allowing myself to be killed." 60 Whereas James argued that science and life were a reality of one piece, not to be artificially cleaved, Titchener saw that a scientific discipline, if it were truly scientific, had to be isolated from wider influences. This was characteristic of a narrow but rising scientific professionalism. And it was a trend from which James would increasingly disassociate himself, at the expense

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of being considered "unprofessional" by important psychological colleagues. In 1898 Titchener wrote another professional, Columbia's James McKeen Cattell, that "James' influence both in philosophy and psychology appears . . . to be getting positively unwholesome: His credulity and his appeals to emotion are surely the reverse of scientific." 61 As we shall see, James and Cattell had just had a squabble about psychic research in Science, a journal that Cattell edited. Titchener was an avid reader and occasional contributor to Science and had surely followed the James-Cattell disagreement. Titchener's disparaging comment on James looked like professional confidentiality. Was it not scandalous that a man of James's professional stature should be involved in something as unprofessional, unscientific as psychic research? A month after telling Cattell he was worried about the baneful effect of James's unscientific influence, Titchener contributed a short article that attracted James's ire. The James-Titchener controversy in Science was the only direct, publicly recorded debate between them. It clearly showed two psychologists most anxious to establish the proper purview and procedures for science at the end of the nineteenth century. And it would show that the matter of "uncompromised" scientific principles, the tenacity to pursue truth, whatever the consequences, was at the heart of scientific dispute. Titchener's article, "The 'Feeling of Being Stared At'," was not ostensibly about the psychic research that James, by the late 1890s, was so deeply involved in. Titchener simply wanted to establish a scientific understanding of why people were "more or less nervous" about being stared at, particularly when "their backs were turned." Titchener maintained that there were physiological reactions when attention was turned exclusively to one portion of the body, and claimed to have conducted "a series of laboratory experiments" that showed physiological reactions when the subjects turned their backs. He injected, however, an opinion that was to irritate James and spark their exchange. "If the scientific reader objects that this

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result [of his back experiments] was, therefore, a waste of time, I can only reply that they seem to me to have their justification in the breaking-down of a superstition which has deep and widespread roots in popular consciousness." James was implicated: "No scientifically-minded psychologist believes in telepathy." To set the record straight would aid psychological science for "the disproof of it [telepathy] in a given case may start a student upon the straight scientific path, and the time spent may thus be repaid to science a hundredfold." If a student wanted further proof that telepathy was scientifically bankrupt they could refer to "the brilliant work of [Α.] Lehmann and [F.F.C.] Hansen upon the telepathic 'problem'." 62 Lehmann and Hansen were two Danish psychologists who had published a lengthy article on "involuntary whispering" in Wundt's journal Philosophische Studien. They were interested in examining the veracity of thought-transference. Through an elaborate experiment, in which they set up concave spherical mirrors to record the slightest physiological evidence of whispering, they were able to test scientifically the genuine nature of thought-transference. Their experiments indicated that thought-transference was really a matter of chance, illusion, or, most probably, unconscious whispering.63 Their results reenforced Titchener's findings on "the feeling of being stared at"; science showed that there were nontelepathic explanations for telepathy. Lehmann and Hansen substantiated Titchener's belief that carefully controlled experiment proved that the mysteries of mental life did not point to an open universe of psychological improbabilities, but to a closed one whose limits could be discerned by careful science. James responded immediately. In the next week's issue, he questioned the unimpeachable authority of the Danish experiments. He referred Titchener to the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research and "Professor Henry Sidgwick's criticism of their results." Of course, the PSPR was largely receptive to thought-transference, and Englishman Henry Sidgwick was one of the founders of the Society for Psychic Research and James's intimate friend. 64 Lehmann and

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Hansen had published in Philosophische Studien, Sidgwick in PSPR; the ensuing Titchener-James debate seemed to confirm the Titchener-Wundt connection and the James-telepathy one. Two scientific paths, two psychological ways had crossed. James was unwilling to let the matter rest with Lehmann and Hansen. When scientific investigators came to contradictory conclusions it "leaves the phenomena still hanging, awaiting a positive interpretation from other hands. . . . I think that an exploded document [the Lehmann and Hansen study] ought not to be left with the last word," James exclaimed, "even for the sake of 'scientific psychology'." 65 Clearly James was aware that at issue was not only the veracity of thoughttransference, but also whether 'scientific psychology' was the last tribunal of psychological truth. After carefully considering Sidgwick's material in the PSPR, Titchener could not agree that Lehmann and Hansen were scientifically deficient. "Even if I granted all the contentions of criticism and report," he observed, "I should still see no reason to change the wording of my reference to Lehmann and Hansen." He wittily rejected James's judgment that their "article is 'exploded.'. . . I have tried to take up the position of an impartial onlooker; and, from that position, I have seen Professor James . . . handling the fuse, but I have not yet heard the detonation." 66 The tone of their disagreement had moved quickly toward polemics. It seemed that something more fundamental than Lehmann and Hansen was at stake. James was not about to let Titchener have the last word, metaphorically or scientifically: he insisted on finishing the demolition that Titchener had interrupted. As the explosion was so audible to me, . . . I was astounded at this hardness of hearing in my colleague; and, to make sure that I was not a victim of auditory hallucination, I wrote to Professor Lehmann to know what he himself thought of his conclusions, in the light of the criticisms in question. His answer, somewhat belated just arrives. He says: "Your own as well as Professor Sidgwick's experiments and computations prove, beyond a doubt, that the play of chance had thrown into my hands a result distinctly too favorable to my theory, and that the said theory is consequently not yet established."

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Then James implanted the literary knife where the Cornell psychologist was most vulnerable. "Professor Titchener, meanwhile, still hugging the exploded document, wanders upon what he calls 'the straight scientific path,' having it apparently all to himself. May the consciousness of his fidelity to correct scientific principles console him in some degree both for his deafness and for his isolation." 67 Here was an exchange that revealed double anxieties. Titchener was indeed associated in America with "the straight scientific path." By 1900 his "structural" psychology was being challenged by a host of functional, performance-minded psychologies. Titchener was professionally active, even though he had not joined the American Psychological Association. His correspondence with American psychologists was substantial and, of course, he was establishing a scientific tradition at Cornell. But Titchener's students were not following "the straight scientific path." Not one would perpetuate pure Titchenerian psychology. His polemical style and his reputation as a great teacher could not hide the fact that his psychology was being eclipsed. 68 In a sense Titchener's authority as a scientist was never secure in the American psychological soil. James had widespread New World, even European scientific authority. Nonetheless, his foray into psychic research had undermined his original credibility. He felt cast out of the scientific garden. Both men believed that they had sought the truth and, yet, had been unfairly repelled by psychological colleagues. Their disagreement can be put in the context of two psychological fathers who suddenly found themselves put out to psychological pasture. The debate sharpened their anxieties. And it may have been the "exploded" scientific status of both "structural" psychology and "psychic" research that fueled their sarcasm. 69 Titchener was willing to agree that "Lehmann has not 'established' his explanation of the Sidgwick results." "But Professor James," he noted, "need not have awaited the return mail from Copenhagen to wrest his admission either from Lehmann or from me." He was sure Lehmann had admitted as

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much " i n his original paper." This qualified concession, however, was not "the point at issue." What Titchener applauded was Lehmann's ability to lay "hold of a condition which had never been thoroughly investigated before, and trace its effects in experiments that were both ingeniously devised and rigidly controlled." For this high praise was apropos: "His paper is a model of scientific method; he has shown us how borderland questions are to be attacked, and proved that the 'ordinary channels of sense' have unexplored resources." And here Titchener might have stopped the dispute. He could not resist, however, turning upon James. "Professor James, apparently forgetting the first acknowledgement, Lehmann's admission that his findings were not established, affirms that the criticism has 'exploded' the theory! What is not proven is eo ipso, exploded!" He was not willing to keep James's oversight impersonal: "Is Professor James, then, ready to grant that his recent book on 'Human Immortality'—something which assuredly is not yet proven—is an exploded document?" They could not join hands and walk along the same scientific path. "If the alternatives before me are scientific isolation and companionship on these logical terms I prefer the isolation." 7 0 Their argument continued mainly through correspondence. Titchener was certainly having his wish that someone "come down on me with authority" fulfilled. "I must say that in my humble opinion," James rejoined to Titchener's defense of Lehmann, "you don't seem to reinstate the value of Lehmann's paper very effectively, and I have said as much in a still later letter to Science. This, however, I fear Cattell will not print, leaving you in the public eye with the unanswerable word." Technically James was right, the letter never appeared; but this was probably because Cattell simply tired of the debate. The dispute looked more and more like one between two displaced scientists who were embittered because the scientific community had passed them by. 7 1 James felt unfairly dismissed by the scientific establishment. "I seem myself telepathically to discern that, like all Scientists, you felt so absolutely sure that any criticism of te-

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lepathy must be essentially sound, that you didn't read the talk the other way with sufficient care." He conceded that "the experimental evidence for 'thought-transference' is lamentably poor in amount, and for the most part in quality, to serve as basis for admitting a phenomenon so subversive of our scientific beliefs." However, the crucial point was that telepathy was still something unexplained and should be treated as such: "that seems to me the attitude of truly 'scientific psychologists'." James's Harvard colleagues had not even been willing to consider seriously the best living case for telepathy, "Mrs. Piper, . . . who is absolutely inexplicable today." Royce had refused "to step from the next door but one into my house" to observe Piper; and Münsterberg feared being hypnotized. "No matter!" James concluded "truth will prevail." 7 2 James appealed to Titchener's sense of isolation, and to his vanity as a scientist who would have the good sense to take telepathy more seriously than a Royce or Münsterberg. If Titchener had really wanted James as a scientific father now was the golden opportunity. All he had to do was to agree to an open-ended science on the question of telepathy. James was not asking him to accept thought-transference, only to agree to the classic Jamesian view, the open-ended question, the outward-turning, ever-expanding world of psychological investigation. But Titchener was not going to join forces with a psychological outlaw, a man who would not recognize the proper boundaries of science; one who would illegitimately open questions that science could legitimately close. James was using his great reputation to throw into disarray scientific standards: " Y o u can't ask us to accept telepathy just because the great bulk of scientific people do not accept it." It was not simply that "the scientific people" were "onesided." "But I say that you are also onesided, only that it is a different kind of onesidedness. You are so possessed with the notion that there should be fair play, that you overestimate the unsportsman-likeness of the scientific men." Titchener turned James's defense of openness against him: "Fair play surely means open discussion,—not championship of one side." 7 3

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James, America's most prestigious psychologist, one with an international reputation, one with a great book, was whining about being misunderstood, an outcast. I rather resent the airs of martyrdom that psychical research puts on. You are perfectly free to work: you have a lot of big names on your side to back you up: your society is very flourishing. Suppose that Sidgwick and A. J. Balfour and the rest had done as much for psychophysics as they have for psychical research! Then there would be English laboratories worth the name. You really are not martyred, so far as I can see.—Take a parallel case. We are supposed to have freedom of thought here. But is there any single university in the States where a young instructor could avow himself, even quietly and not blatantly, as a Huxleian agnostic, without suffering for it? Would he have the career, and the recommendations, and all the pulls that an orthodox man has? Can one avow oneself an atheist as openly as one can avow oneself a Baptist or Congregationalist? There, it seems to me, there is martyrdom. But you do not lose case, or lose positions, because you take up psychical research. 74 The psychophysicist agnostic at Cornell had suffered far more by pursuing his straight and narrow science than had the expansive Protestant psychic researcher at Harvard. Titchener was suggesting that American psychological ground and prevailing New World norms were far more receptive to psychic research than James maintained. Feeling ostracized and being ostracized were two different conditions. James's sense of scientific isolation was a mirage; Titchener's scientific isolation was fact. In Titchener's outcry was the knowledge of an impotent psychology. But there was also the knowledge that martyrdom implied; an uncompromised devotion to principles regardless of practical consequences. How could James claim the same? Psychic research had taken root in American soil, the scientific outcry against it did not mean its demise. On the contrary, psychic research found American universities accommodating, if not overtly supportive. 7 5 James, Titchener implied, had sacrificed the principled, lonely, besieged citadel of science for the imagined alienation of a psychic research that actually had deep cultural support.

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Because Titchener pursued a scientific psychology that lost ground to others, he found that instead of nurturing a growing science he defended a waning one. To many professional psychologists, Cornell was synonymous with Titchener and meant reaction against innovation and scientific progress. 7 6 As American psychology became more functionally inclined, more oriented toward the individual, toward performance problems and applied psychology, Titchenerian structuralism became obsolete. James felt it was an atavism something left over from the dark ages of scientific advancement in psychology. Indeed, he once referred to Titchener as a scientific "barbarian." 7 7 But Titchener clung to a tenacious belief in his psychological science; he was alarmed about the proliferation of American psychologies and the emerging popularity of the functional approach. Interestingly he confided this fear to Robert M. Yerkes, the Harvard Ph.D. who had taken courses from James and studied with Münsterberg. Titchener had shown an interest in Yerkes's animal work; and although Yerkes deeply respected Münsterberg and had kind things to say about James, neither had really empathized with his research interest. Titchener's relationship with Yerkes, his appeal to the self-inflating notion that there were a few first-rate scientists fighting the plodding herd, needs to be understood within the context of Titchener's paternalism. Titchener as psychological outsider unquestionably believed in the straight and narrow scientific path. But his fatherly appeal to a younger, more professionally insecure psychologist suggested that he sought a personal intimacy that would approve his uncompromising science. 7 8 " Y e s , " he told Yerkes, animal behavior is like the functional standpoint—extremely in fashion. There is a new field opened for mediocrity: That is the real secret. As soon as a novel standpoint is announced or a new region or work opened, the rank and file rush in, because anything that they say or do will for the time pass muster: And it is contrariwise, deucedly difficult to get a hearing where the bulk of past work is great and the methods established. Let us keep our heads: that is the important thing. Work on animal behavior is decidedly important,

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and the functional standpoint is decidedly worth thinking through— my favorite expression, you see! But they are not the be-all and endall of 'scientific' psychology.79 Titchener was struggling to find allies for his cause. And in contrast to the battle for scientific martyrdom he had carried on with James, his tone with Yerkes indicated that he tried to rally troops for scientific truth. In 1904 Titchener organized a hearing for what he believed was truly experimental psychology. "Don't you think the time is ripe for a Society or Association of Experimental Psychologists?" he asked Cattell. Titchener "Didn't want to seem to be setting up an opposition to the Amer. Psych. Assn. But that is now firmly established; the men seem now, also, to have sorted themselves out pretty well into laboratory men and not laboratory men." "I want to have a society," he explained, "composed exclusively of men who are actually doing or directing experimental investigations; and I want to have the meetings always at laboratories; and I want to have demonstrations and the exhibition of working assemblages of instruments play a large part in the meetings." The proposed society would have "yearly conversations and would have nothing talked but experimental methods and experimental results." 8 0 Titchener sent a "circular" to members of the American Psychological Association asking for their opinions on the proposed society. Enough psychologists responded to indicate broad resistance to a new organization. Münsterberg's initial reaction was typical. "Really, I am unable to see what two psychological associations can do in this country side by side. . . . If you were to join the old association [APA]," he pointed out, "both companies would be made up from practically the same men." 8 1 The appeal of Titchener's proposal was weakened because he was not a member of the APA. It was also clear that many professionals perceived psychological science as a cooperative confederation of mutually reinforcing psychologies, rather than territory to be divided into

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laboratory and nonlaboratory sectors. 82 The APA embraced the operating assumption of corporate monopoly: namely, that competing organizations undermined business efficiency, promoted waste, and encouraged counterproductive conflict. Others were fearful of what Edwin Boring has called "Titchener's insistent regnancy." Titchener would quite simply dominate "the Society of Experimentalists." Regardless of which laboratory hosted the annual meeting, Titchener would always screen the invitation list. Women were excluded per se. And he tried to limit participation to what Boring called "generalized, human, adult, normal, experimental psychology." 83 There was no indication that James ever attended an Experimentalist meeting. Neither Harvard nor Columbia was represented at the first session that gathered at Cornell in April, 1904. However, some important American psychologists did show up. Charles H. Judd of Yale attended, as did Pennsylvania's Lightner Witmer, Clark's Edmund Sanford, Princeton's Howard C. Warren, and Michigan's Walter B. Pillsbury. Later many psychologists who were originally opposed participated. Both Münsterberg and Cattell hosted meetings at their respective universities. Even though Titchener continued to dominate his organization until his death in 1927, American psychologists seemed to take little offense. The Society of Experimentalists did not begin to compete successfully with the APA. And as a forum to insure the survival of the Titchenerian structuralism, it was an utter failure. 84 James's functional approach, however, despite the fact that James created no psychological school, flowered. Of course John Dewey helped to generate functional thinking at the University of Chicago, as he did with Cattell at Columbia. But Titchener's failure and James's success can be explained on several other levels. On the professional plane Titchener ignored a basic shift in American life, or at least refused to view it as positive. After the Civil War parochial America began to disintegrate. In business, politics, and education selfsufficient, insular organizations were being exchanged for socially dynamic and outward-looking institutions, ones that

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emphasized the market advantages of incorporation, interchangeability, and impersonal efficiency. It became more difficult to pursue traditions that did not respond to these trends. 85 Titchener tried. At Cornell he resisted attempts to merge disciplines; he refused to offer any psychology other than his own. Other psychologies could be studied only in the Department of Education! 86 "I am not at one with you," he once told Cattell, "in your various efforts to organize and centralize things." Since much of what passed for psychology in America was not science, Titchener opposed its introduction into his empire. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that Titchener was professionally isolated. He was in the thick of professional development. What was clear was that his science was isolated; it had not taken root in the American setting. His fight was not only anticentralization, it was anti-American. "I don't want an American psychology. Hence I don't want to see the American output too much organized. . . . We have a great deal too much Americanism already." 87 James was certainly no champion of centralization. Even though he was twice President of the APA and was active in the Society for Psychic Research he avoided the imperial outlook of a Münsterberg or Cattell. He, like Titchener, was loyal to a local university, to Harvard rather than Cornell. James did not, however, garrison his psychology against the onslaughts of interdisciplinary pressure. He had never, for example, tried to separate the study of metaphysics from psychology. And he did not dissociate his functionalism from the stirrings of the behavioral approach. 88 At the core of James's success was the irony that despite his cosmopolitan attitude, his contacts with internationally famous intellectuals, he had created a most American psychology. The Principles of Psychology was successful not only because it broke fresh scientific ground; it was popular because it projected basic Americanisms brilliantly. Not only was the functional, use-oriented approach to mind compatible with American practicality, it also reflected the transitional New World intellectual mood. For James in The

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Principles put the mind between the hard science of Darwinian biology and the quasi-mystical impressionism of psychic research. 89 James wanted an American psychology. He not only felt comfortable with intellectual transition, with an openended way-station mentality, he had also lived an inner creative compromise. James founded an American psychology, but he also was an American psyche. For psychology, i.e., science, had always been for James more of a strategy than an end, a style more than a finalized product. This mirrored the American attitude toward science. In the New World, far more than in the Old, science was viewed as instrumental, a means to progress, wealth, and power rather than an end in itself. 90 This contradicted Titchener's avowed purpose to pursue science for itself only, to approach it not in the spirit of accommodation, but of dogmatism. Then there was Titchener's personality. He, in contrast to James, did not get along with the major figures in the profession. This was perhaps because, in contrast to James's informality, Titchener was more completely a "professional"; he was never anything but an academic psychologist. The fact that his psychology was losing ground probably made him more disputatious. As we shall see, there was no love lost between Titchener and Cattell. He respected Münsterberg's abilities but confessed to Yerkes, "I can't like Münsterberg myself. His immense self-assurance, and his verbosity grate on me horribly." 91 They were far too similar and self-centered ever to get along. Titchener and Hall were friends, yet they argued incessantly over editorial policy in the American Journal of Psychology.92 Then, too, Titchener never established a personal relationship with James—there was only the meeting at Clark a year before James died. James, however, had befriended Hall, Münsterberg, and Cattell; and even though James squabbled with each, the personal tie was consummated. By all accounts James's personal touch was magic; he could, as his sister Alice quipped, "lend charm to a treadmill." Perhaps James's grace would have helped ease Titchener's sense of estrangement. But the question arises whether Titch-

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ener really wanted to be pulled into James's orbit. His own sense of psychological fatherhood, of standing alone against James and his crowd—which included Hall, Münsterberg, and Cattell—as a true scientist opposed to heresies of biologizing, mystifying, and individualizing psychology, fed ego demands for uniqueness. Hence when he told Yerkes, "I would have given a great deal, years ago, if James or Cattell had taken the trouble to write seriously to me," one must not automatically assume he meant it. Titchener enjoyed personal interest, he did "want immensely to join hands." But he felt more comfortable in a fatherly role, as with Yerkes. 93 The same, however, could be said of all the founders, who were an unusually cantankerous group and often fell out among themselves. Nonetheless, Titchener alone would build a psychological empire free of James's personal touch on his personality. And despite James's nice-man reputation and Titchener's exclusiveness both, in a way, faced each other as psychological fathers. At least Titchener considered James the only first-generation American psychologist worth much attention. The crux of Titchener's failure was not his anticentralist attitude or his controversial personality. His psychology simply lacked timeliness; it was remote from native cultural needs. It was as irrelevant as James's was relevant. Psychology was becoming useful in measuring individual differences, educating children, understanding links between men and animals, and even in increasing industrial productivity. The Principles of Psychology was a book that could inspire minds as diverse as those of educational psychologist Edward L. Thorndike and psychotherapist James Jackson Putnam. They and others gave James credit for inspiring work on practical problems of the mind. 9 4 But where was the vital connection between Titchener's psychology and immediate concerns in the American culture? What went on at Cornell had no bearing on using psychological techniques to upgrade education; it had nothing to do with making the mentally ill well; it had no application. Titchener was duplicating Augustine's error of

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worshiping God for God's sake. The Puritans had corrected that error in the seventeenth century; they made sure American religion had use. 95 Science had far too much utility in progressive America; it could well afford to ignore Titchener's scientific self-indulgence. Titchener pursued something far more esoteric than the practical application of psychology, or even scientific methodology. He wanted psychological truth. That meant finding the psychological temperament. Once, Adolf Meyer chided him for having so few students. "True enough," Titchener admitted, "I find the psychological temperament rare among my students . . . Of course I get but few to become psychologists." But who in the profession did? "Did James, for instance? Does Stanley Hall? Or [Edmund] Sanford? Or [Joseph] Jastrow? Or did [George Trumbull] Ladd? . . . Nobody goes into pure science as a profession," he reminded Meyer, "unless he happens to have the love of it irrevocably in him." 9 6 In a letter to Yerkes, Titchener explained through the voice of an undergraduate what he meant by "the psychological temperament." Significantly, he had the student put The Principles of Psychology in competition with his own An Outline of Psychology: Let me write off for you a criticism handed in . . . by one of my girl sophomores: it is one of the most encouraging things I have ever had. "I think that when you began to write the book you made up your mind not to say what is said in other text-books, but only what you could find in your own mind. If I want to read a book on psychology just to get information about the study, I prefer James, and not to read the Outline. But if I want to know whether what is said in the books is true, I would rather read the Outline, because it makes me introspect all the time. Sometimes things crowd into my mind and get muddled; but if I read on I generally come upon a sentence which tells me what line of introspection I am to follow out. . . . Sometimes I do not agree with you, and think that our minds are different; but I generally find something later in the book which makes me come around to your way of thinking. The book is not interesting to read, as James is, but it is more interesting if you ask yourself all the time whether the statements are true."

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"Of course, a man is likely to be biased in favor of a student who appreciates him!" Titchener admitted. "But, that apart, it looks to me as if this girl has the psychological temperament." 97 Here was an all too rare instance of a student not being misled by James's "appeal to the emotions." And its singularity not only underscored the indifference to Titchener's psychology, it also suggested that James, more than any other American, took one off the straight scientific path. There was a sense, however, in which Titchener's professional standards thrived despite the unpopularity of his science. The tough-minded science-in-a-vacuum approach came to be fashionable in the twentieth century. It was his insulated dedication to objectivity that gained credibility. Here he was far more "modern" than James, who almost made a vocation attacking the narrow, doctrinaire professionalism, while advocating the interdisciplinary attitude. 98 Ironically, the growing eclecticism of American psychology, the compromises with true science that bothered Titchener, also bespoke a growing specialization, the "empire" attitude toward disciplines. This perspective would increasingly claim objectivity and defend insular canons. The substance of Titchener's psychology died with him, but the form, the focus of his scientific gaze soon permeated professional scientific communities. James's intellectual tolerance notwithstanding, science would worship objective boundaries in the twentieth century much as the Jesuits did dogma in the Middle Ages.

James McKeen Cattell from fames McKeen Cattell: Man of Science, Vol. 2 of American Men of Science, edited by James McKeen Cattell and Jaques Cattell. Reprinted courtesy of The Science Press.

Chapter Five

Psychological Nationalist: James McKeen Cattell A great figure in American psychology has gone. In my opinion your father [fames McKeen Cattell] did more than William fames even to give American psychology its peculiar slant, to make it different from the German psychology from which it stemmed. Edwin G. Boring to Jaques Cattell on the death of his father, 1944

THE ANTIPATHIES BETWEEN James and Titchener and James and Münsterberg were rooted in something besides psychological and philosophical quibbles. They had another texture than divergences between functionalism and structuralism, a more formidable foundation than collisions between pragmatism and idealism. These divisions had an explanation that was deceptively simple: James was a native American; Titchener and Münsterberg were not. Intellectual disagreements aside, James had a legitimacy, a badge of authenticity, denied them. How would Cornell's master and James's successor have fared in the development of American psychology,

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in their relationships with James, if they had been born and nurtured in the New World? Not necessarily well. G. Stanley Hall was a native founding American psychologist, James's first student, and yet came to a parting of the ways with his mentor. 1 And Hall's psychology was not highly regarded by other experimentalists. 2 There was, however, another New World psychologist who had greater impact on the expansion of American psychological science than Hall; and one whose place in the young profession and relationship with James are worth exploring. There were striking similarities in the preprofessional backgrounds of Cattell and James. Both were eldest sons. Both grew up in relative affluence, in homes dominated by strong but nervous fathers with obsessive religious interests. William C. Cattell was a devout Presbyterian minister. He was a graduate of both the College of New Jersey at Princeton and the Princeton Theological Seminary. He moved to Easton, Pennsylvania, where he taught ancient languages at Lafayette College, later becoming president of the college. While in Easton he married Elizabeth McKeen, whose father owned the lucrative Warren foundry. Growing up in a family with both academic prestige and money boded well for young James McKeen's intellectual future. Indeed, like William James, young Cattell had the broadening experience of traveling and studying in Europe. He likewise developed an antagonism toward his father's religious beliefs, in this case toward Presbyterianism rather than Swedenborgianism. As an undergraduate at Lafayette College Cattell became attracted to Comtean positivism, and collided with paternal convictions. This conflict and the attending tension precipitated a psychic crisis in Cattell that bore remarkable resemblance to James's dark days in Germany in the late 1860s. Although Cattell's crisis took place in the early 1880s and he was half a dozen years younger, parallels abound. Both were stricken in Germany. Both suffered self-loathing and contemplated suicide. Both were fascinated with art in Dresden. And both sought intellectual guid-

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ance during their struggles; an authority that would resolve contradictions between religion and positivism, between art and science, between modernism and a classical past. 3 Cattell found inspiration from Hermann Lotze, a German philosopher who was trained as a physician and attempted to synthesize "the world of facts" with "the world of values." 4 Cattell eagerly attended Lotze's lectures at Göttingen. Lotze seemed to provide the metaphysical direction that Renouvier ostensibly gave James. Yet neither Lotze nor Renouvier ended their crises. In fact for Cattell, depression deepened under Lotze's influence. To combine facts and values into philosophical resolution was not the same as providing a living outlet, a day-to-day acting out of an intellectual answer. Just as James was unable to translate Renouvier's free will into an immediate solution for melancholia, so was Cattell unable to find in Lotze a practical cure for depression. 5 But both young men ultimately found relief in psychological careers. When they became actively engaged in American university settings, studying the new psychology, their crises eased. Although James was assistant professor of physiology at Harvard in the early 1870s while Cattell was a graduate student in physiology and psychology at Johns Hopkins in the early 1880s, their mental well-being improved markedly by studying the new psychology in America. Working with New World psychological science in a professional capacity provided the stimulus and structure that informal philosophical reflection in Germany could not. Cattell's inner recovery was not impeded by a professional setback in America nor his subsequent return to Germany. 6 He failed to obtain a doctoral fellowship from G. Stanley Hall, then director of the Johns Hopkins Psychological Laboratory. 7 Undeterred he went back to Germany, this time to receive psychological training from 1883 to 1886 under the great Wundt at Leipzig. While James was researching and writing what would become The Principles of Psychology, Cattell was trained under Wundtian tutelage as an expert in psychometrics, the experimental tech-

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niques of reaction-time psychology. Cattell was not just Wundt's first American student, Wundt probably considered him his best. 8 Ironically, Cattell's position as Wundt's favorite prepared the American to challenge Wundt's psychology. Wundt was so impressed with Cattell's experimental acumen that he made him laboratory assistant, thus affording the opportunity to experiment freely in laboratory technique. Wundt had investigated a generalized consciousness. The psychological laboratory was a place where a trained psychologist defined essential consciousness from motor sensory reactions to more sophisticated activities such as attention, discrimination, and perception. Cattell, however, would eventually build a psychology that emphasized deviations from a generalized consciousness. During his Wundtian apprenticeship Cattell's experiments showed that trained psychologists reacted differently to the same stimuli. 9 Later, as his career unfolded at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University, he compiled a science of psychological reaction, one recording the crucial variable of individual physiological and mental reactions. 10 James also kept the individual near the center of his psychology. Remove the self from Jamesian introspection and James's psychology became unfocused, lost intimacy. Although basic differences in psychological style differentiated James and Cattell, they shared a belief in the primacy of the individual in psychological investigations. This emphasis made it certain that both could not adopt a structuralist science of the mind. It was appropriate that James's psychology should be called "functional" by Titchener, just as Cattell would be credited with founding a "functional" psychology at Columbia. 11 Concentrating on individualistic psychological states and deviations from an imagined general norm meant that the changeable, dynamic mind was the proper matrix from which to draw scientific conclusions. In other words, the functional and individual became inseparable components of the same broad psychological persuasion, one that appealed to tradi-

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tional American belief in the sanctity of the individual and the efficacy of action. After completing the Ph.D. at Leipzig in 1886, Cattell went to England and worked with Charles Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, in the latter's laboratory at South Kensington. Galton was a pioneer in the application of mathematics to psychology; quantification was a tool to measure intelligence. Galton, not Cattell, first used and coined the concept of "mental testing." Galton was interested in Cattell's reaction-time experiments, and introduced him to quantification possibilities in laboratory psychology. Cattell idolized Galton and called him "the greatest man I have ever met." Not only did Galton acquaint Cattell with mathematical psychology, he also emphasized organic adaptation and development—the Darwinian factor in psychology. 12 A basic premise of The Principles of Psychology was the physiological-evolutionary origin of mentality. Although James stressed selective consciousness and defended free will, physiological Darwinism buttressed his psychology. His evolutionary physiology was the springboard for a functional "scientific" explanation of consciousness. 13 Without it James's psychology had few scientific credentials. Cattell also made the physiological integral to mental reaction. Although he never denied the mental in a strict behavioristic sense, the physical adaptation of the psychological was as critical to his psychology as it was to James's. 14 If American psychology was profoundly smitten with Darwin's impact, and if that impact translated in the 1880s and 1890s into a growing New World attraction to "physiological," "evolutionary," "functional," and "individualistic" psychology, then Cattell and James shared that Americanism. Cattell's stay in England, 1886 to 1888, had other important consequences. Officially he held an unpaid position as Fellow-commoner at St. Johns College at Cambridge. More importantly he became acquainted with the English intellectual aristocracy, an opportunity that provided entrance into a broad philosophical circle—one that included William James. 15 In

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1887 Cattell became a member of the prestigious Aristotelian Society; James was one of four American members when Cattell was inducted. Hence Cattell knew several prominent English thinkers who had met and corresponded with James. They included philosophers Thomas Ward, James Sully, George Frederick Stout, Aristotelian Society secretary Shadworth Hodgson, and Croom Robertson, editor of Mind. These men admired James and he returned their friendship along with regular contributions to Mind. Cattell presented several papers on the new psychophysics, which Mind published. 1 6 Although it was possible that Cattell's association with the Society and publications escaped James, such inattention was unlikely. As Münsterberg had observed, Mind was the foremost philosophical journal in the English-speaking world. Moreover, James corresponded frequently with Croom Robertson in the mid and late 1880s about, among other things, publications in Mind. 1 7 Cattell's name did not appear in this correspondence. Nevertheless, it was probable that James, who was still at work on The Principles of Psychology, did at least scan Cattell's contributions, which appeared in 1887 and 1888. The larger point was that here were broad-minded thinkers who were well aware that the late nineteenth century was an intellectual renaissance; they were willing to consider subjects as diverse as Darwinism, pragmatism, psychic research, and psychophysics. Both Cattell and James had their work recognized in this distinctive circle as pioneering accomplishments. 1 8 Münsterberg, as we have seen, had difficulties with Mind, and Titchener, although a native Englishman, was never taken into this select fold. In addition, it did not hurt Cattell's English reputation to present a series of Cambridge lectures on experimental psychology. Neither did his marriage to Josephine Owen, an Englishwoman who remained a faithful companion and laboratory helpmate until his death in 1944. 19 Although Cattell and James were never close and professional contention emerged, their common connections with English intellectual society suggested a significant, fundamental agreement. They both consciously identified with a

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growing reaction against what has been called the nineteenth century's "steel chain of ideas"; they participated in the AngloAmerican scientific protest against philosophical monisms. 20 Cattell reacted favorably to James's growing preoccupation with pragmatism. He was able to bring James to Columbia to lecture on pragmatism in 1907. Indeed, Columbia came to share with the University of Chicago a reputation for intellectual rebellion and innovation. John Dewey and Cattell, both former students of James's first student G. Stanley Hall at Johns Hopkins, were at Columbia for a time. Thus Cattell, James, and Dewey were intellectual insiders in the growing impetus of what would become twentieth-century liberalism. 21 Had James lived to see Cattell dismissed from Columbia during World War I for supporting conscientious objectors, he would undoubtedly have sided with Cattell against the university administration. 22 There was reason for James to have brought Cattell to Harvard in the 1890s as his laboratory replacement instead of Münsterberg. Cattell had challenged Wundt; he was recognized for superior laboratory expertise; and he shared a functional, physiological, and individualistic psychological perspective. Cattell had the advantage of being an American with a first-rate European education. Nevertheless, he was passed over, although James told Eliot he stood high on the list in 1895, if Münsterberg refused a permanent appointment. 23 Cattell's rejection of the Wundtian approach was not as wholehearted as James's or Münsterberg's. 24 Cattell made his scientific reputation strictly from experimenting with reaction-time problems. James had not only infuriated Wundtians with what they thought was a flippant rejection of their master, he also flatly refused to put reaction-time at the center of the new science. The problem of measuring different reactions when different individuals tried the same experiment made mathematics an indispensable tool in Cattell's psychology. James freely admitted that he was not drawn to mathematics; his impressionistic, literary approach to psychology was alien to Cattell's quantification methodology. 25 Beyond that, The

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Principles of Psychology included descriptions of subliminal or unconscious mental characteristics which he could not measure. 26 The philosophical scope in James's psychology, an awareness of the metaphysical implications of espousing this or that psychology roamed from the strict laboratory conditions Cattell maintained to procure "scientific" results. There was a quantitative modernism in Cattell that James avoided. Münsterberg had also eschewed a statistical approach when he brought laboratory expertise and physiological psychology to the Harvard laboratory. Perhaps James thought Münsterberg could more completely preserve and extend the major psychological tone, the physiological basis of The Principles of Psychology. Perhaps he felt that Cattell was too scientific. 27 There were, regardless of similarities, different emphases in their careers; emphases so divergent that they represented different psychological directions, temperaments, and professional contributions. During the 1880s James was teaching and writing a book at Harvard. In the same decade Cattell was totally absorbed in laboratory psychology, first as a graduate student at Leipzig, then as an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Cattell's intellectual development in England was broadening, but it did not mean he had abandoned the laboratory: he was working at South Kensington with Galton. While James synthesized the vast and constantly expanding scholarship from brain physiology, psychometrics, and mental pathology for The Principles of Psychology—attesting to the range of the emerging science—Cattell was working late into the night on reaction-time experiments. His children complained that they could not sleep for the noise. 28 Cattell was battling in the scientific trenches while James surveyed and interpreted the action. If a soldier could defer to a general, and on occasion Cattell did to both James and Wundt, he could also feel himself inside the profession in a way the great strategists could not. We know that James felt apologetic about his weak experimental background. Later, when Cattell himself was no longer so actively engaged in laboratory work, he asked James

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to review his own experimental, i.e. laboratory, contributions. "Your question seems devised by my enemies," James responded, "to expose my scientific nakedness." But he gave Cattell a list of "the only 'scientific' papers I ever published." There were only four: One on "the sense of dizziness in deafmutes" in 1882; another on hypnotism in 1886; and two in 1887 on "reaction time in the hypnotic state" and "the consciousness of lost limbs." "I published alot of psychological and philosophical articles prior to 1890," James recalled, "But the matter, and in many cases the words, went into my Principles of Psychology." Cattell wanted these data for his American Men of Science compilation. James sheepishly quipped that he hoped "that this information won't bust the 'Society.' " 2 9 Cattell's scientific contributions even as a student at Leipzig had more laboratory significance than James's lifetime output. With the help of a fellow graduate student and as Wundt's laboratory assistant Cattell produced a remarkable experimental record. Experiments included the influence of attention, practice, and fatigue on reaction-time; the time factor in such simple mental operations as discrimination, choice, and association; experiments on the inertia of the eye; and time taken to read letters, words, and phrases. He also devised a valuable improvement in the Hipp chronoscope, the standard laboratory instrument used to measure reaction-time. His gravity chronometer markedly improved accuracy. Wundt was so delighted that he immediately adopted the instrument, which eventually became standard laboratory equipment throughout the world. 30 In the South Kensington laboratory, Cattell helped Galton devise rudimentary "mental tests." He developed a dynameter for testing grip-strength performance; a reaction-time test for sound; a name-colors time test; and a letters-rememberedupon-hearing test. As a young professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Cattell continued to refine techniques. He became interested in measuring the stimuli rather than sensation. Importantly, the emphasis on stimuli took him further from

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Wundt, for stimuli are more clearly physical than sensational. Cattell was measuring physiological behavior, and using mathematics to calculate reaction to a given stimulus. He pioneered the psychology of stimulus and response. 31 Clearly this psychology was even more physiological and functional as opposed to mental and structural. Laboratory methodology aside, Cattell was operating within Jamesian and hence broadly American psychological parameters. Indeed, he was helping to define them. But Cattell was in the laboratory measuring while James was at home or in the library composing. Their broad participation in an "American" psychology did not prevent fundamentally different scientific careers, scientific experiences, from erupting into professional disagreement. Their professional disagreement, however, did not surface until Cattell had largely left the laboratory. During the late 1890s at Columbia he became more and more occupied with administrating psychological organizations and editing scientific publications. At the time James was giving up any pretense of pursuing experimental psychology, Cattell was actively gaining a reputation as the professional editor of American psychology and perhaps of American science. Between 1890 and 1910 Cattell founded (along with James Mark Baldwin) the Psychological Review; became the editor of Science and Popular Science Monthly; was president of the American Psychological Association; and edited the continuing compilation, American Men of Science. 32 And it was in his capacity as scientist-editor that Cattell and James engaged in an altercation over that old Jamesian fascination, mental telepathy. As we have seen, neither Münsterberg nor Titchener would admit telepathy had scientific legitimacy. The former had maintained that psychology could not endorse the hazy domain of psychic phenomena without confusing science with mysticism; the latter relegated telepathy to superstition and had more "scientific" tasks to consider. Confusion and superstition endangered the scientific progress well under way. James's receptivity to telepathy, given his great reputation,

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threatened to cast the real advances of psychological science into disrepute. Münsterberg had spoken out against the machinations of Mrs. Piper, and in the wake of "M's" antimedium activity, Cattell created more waves. Cattell was irked that the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research had charged that he did "not pay 'the slightest attention to psychical research ά la English Society, [he] taboos it throughout, but has never even read the reports and their experiments in telepathy.' " Cattell was not inclined to ignore a challenge, particularly one that impugned his reputation as a careful, thorough, fair-minded scientist. He took the opportunity as editor of Science to formulate a caustic reply, one that eventually focused on James's scientific influence and drew the latter's sharp response. To the allegation of inattention Cattell replied: "If this information were obtained by telepathy it does not increase my confidence in that method of communication." On the contrary, "it [is] exactly the thirteen volumes issued by the Society for Psychical Research that seems to me to prove the trivial character of the evidence for the heterogeneous mass of material taken under the wing of the Society." 33 Actually, Cattell had not been particularly antagonistic toward psychic research even though identification with reaction-time psychology, which concentrated on consciousness, seemed to put him in opposition. Cattell had even asked James four months earlier to publish a work on psychic phenomena. James, however, declined. "No book on Psychical Research, thank you!" he replied. "The times are not ripe." He advised Cattell "to leave that subject out of your series." 34 James's refusal to write a book on telepathy may have provoked the opening attack. It perhaps appeared that America's leading psychologist did not have enough confidence in telepathic evidence to add it to the scientific literature. In any case, Cattell quickly switched his ire in Science from the Society for Psychical Research to James. He remembered that James had written in Science several years before that it was not necessary to prove every case of telepathy genuine, only one: "If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you

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musn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white. My own white crow is Mrs. Piper." James was convinced that "In the trances of this medium, I cannot resist the conviction that knowledge appears which she has never gained by ordinary waking use of her eyes and ears and wits." 35 America's foremost psychologist had claimed telepathic veracity on the basis of one instance. Was that scientific? Had an obscure professor from a mediocre university generalized from such a meager sampling it might have been ignored. But this was the judgement of William James from Harvard. "It is Professor James who gives dignity and authority to psychical research in America," Cattell exclaimed, "and if he has selected a crucial case it deserves consideration." Cattell acknowledged that although most mediums had been proved "frauds" it did "not disprove the possibility (though it greatly reduces the likelihood) of one medium being genuine." So he was willing, in deference to the possible exception, to test the authenticity of telepathy on "the 'white crow' selected by Professor James from all the piebald crows exhibited by the Society." After reviewing "the great number of names and initials whose seances with Mrs. Piper are reported," Cattell could find reports from "only five well-known men of science." Of these five, two of whom were psychologically sophisticated, James Mark Baldwin and S. Weir Mitchell, Cattell discerned no support for Piper's genuineness. The editor of Science closed the case for James's "white crow" with triumphant doggerel: "Truly, 'we have piped unto you, but ye have not danced.' " 3 6 James responded with gusto. He reminded Cattell that "the scientific mind is by the pressure of professional opinion painfully drilled to fairness and logic in discussing orthodox phenomena." Unfortunately those sterling attributes did not extend into such "mere matters of superstition as a medium's trances." There the vaulted scientific mind "feels so confident of impunity and indulgence whatever it may say, . . . that it fairly revels in the untrained barbarians' arsenal of logical

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weapons, including all the various sophisms" that had been "enumerated" in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. Cattell needed an elementary lesson in logic: "If one wishes to refute a man who asserts that some A's are B's the ordinary rule of logic is that one must not show that some other A's are not B's—one must show him either that those first A's themselves are not B's, or else that no A possibly can be a B." James noted that the report asserted "that many of Mrs. Piper's trances showed supernatural knowledge." But Cattell picked out "five instances in which they showed nothing of the kind." You therefore wittily remark, 'We have piped unto you and ye have not danced,' and you sign your name with an air of finality as if nothing more in the way of refutation were needful. . . . If, my dear sir, you were teaching Logic to a class of students, would you, or should you not, consider this a good instance by which to illustrate the style of reasoning termed 'irrelevant conclusion,' or ignoratio elenchi, in the chapter on fallicies? I myself think it an extraordinarily perfect instance. 3 7

He had not finished. James objected to Cattell's inclusion of an observation from one of the five scientists that all he obtained from a sitting with Mrs. Piper were "but a few preposterous compliments." Cattell had left "unquoted the larger part of his report, relating the inexplicable knowledge the medium showed of the family affairs of his [the scientist's] wife, who accompanied him to the sitting. . . . I am not sure that the logic books contain any technical name for the fallacy here," James scolded, "but in legal language it is sometimes called suppressio veri, sometimes something still less polite." Softening a bit, he felt sure Cattell had "committed these fallacies with the best of scientific consciences." Nonetheless, they were "fallacies into which . . . you would have been in no possible danger of falling in any other sort of matter than this." He concluded with a charge sure to rankle the sensibilities of a professional scientist-editor who had a double obligation to be unfailingly fair. "In our dealings with the in-

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sane the usual moral rules don't apply. Mediums are scientific outlaws, and their defendents are quasi-sane. Any stick is good enough to beat dogs of that stripe with." James urged Science readers to "form a reasonable opinion" on the veracity of psychic research. This was far more scientific than deciding the issue on "the five little negative instances which you so triumphantly cull out and quote." 38 Cattell rejoined, "I gave my individual opinion, Professor James gives his, and I fear that our disagreement is hopeless." Obviously he could not have included the full six-hundredpage report from the proceedings on Mrs. Piper's sittings. The primary objective had not been to open the pages of Science to the issue of medium authenticity. "I wrote the note with reluctance," Cattell explained, "only because I believe that the Society for Psychical Research is doing much to injure psychology." James was not brought into the matter simply because he was interested in psychic phenomena. The crucial issue for Cattell was the case of professional influence: "The authority of Professor James is such that he involves other students of psychology in his opinions unless they protest. We all acknowledge his leadership, but we cannot follow him into the quagmires." 39 James recognized that telepathy was regarded as a litmus test for professional propriety. If a psychologist took one side he was scientific, another a mystic, a misfit, or both. During the Science spat James wrote Cattell to support fair play on Mrs. Piper but also to clear up what was science in American psychology. He recognized Cattell's own professional influence. In effect he spoke to the competing influences of two founding American psychologists. "I have read your brief retort [in Science] and live," James began. "Your state of prejudice is so absolute, that quite naively and unconsciously you perpetuate acts of insolence quite as remarkable as your lapses of logic." James resented being treated "as if I were some minor or child making a nuisance in the psychological neighborhood." 40 Several years earlier James had reacted ill-temperedly when Hall had claimed prior-

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ity in establishing America's first psychological laboratory at Johns Hopkins. He showed comparable sensitivity to Cattell's attack on what he took to be his scientific seniority. 41 "You surely would not adopt that tone in regard to other differences of scientific opinion," he countered, "least of all where the adversary had 15 years firsthand acquaintance with the facts and you had never seen them." James may have not spent his psychological life in the "brass instrument" laboratory; still, there was no American psychologist who was as fully acquainted with psychic experience. James, not Cattell, was the experienced parent, the scientific instructor. "No! My dear fellow, it is as I say, all the virtues have to be drilled into us afresh in each special matter, and the day for psychical research has not yet come. Understanding the conditions, I don't care personally a rap for the treatment, or think the less well . . . of the treaters—yourself included." The future would decide the scientific fate of Mrs. Piper, not contemporary squabbles among psychologists. James did not doubt the outcome: "as you smile indulgently at me, so I, dear Cattell, at you. He smiles best who smiles last, and my prophetic soul is in no doubt about that." 4 2 A few days later James made even clearer what his "prophetic soul" meant by science. He wanted "to cast contempt on the word 'scientist', for which I have a dislike, though it is evidently doomed to acquire the rights of citizenship." He discounted Cattellian psychological methodology, particularly its effect on students. Cattell's stodgy, narrow-minded science "suggesting] the elementary measurements before the teacher's eyes as his own ideal seems to me to be little short of criminal." James loathed "the priggish sectarian view of science, as something against religion, against sentiment, etc." He wanted Science readers to be able to identify the "narrowness of the sort of mind that should delight in self-styling itself 'scientist', as it proceeded to demolish psychical research." 43 The clash between James and Cattell did not rupture personal relations. Several months later James spoke lightly of "our little tiff in Science . . . over Mrs. Piper." 4 4 He sent Cattell

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a hundred-dollar contribution from Harvard to the Psychological Review, though it may have been easier to appear magnanimous because coeditor James Mark Baldwin was a man James very much liked.45 After Baldwin gained control of the Psychological Review, James counseled Cattell on the latter's plan to start a new journal.46 James advised against the proposed venture because he "disliked duplication and scattering." 47 Nonetheless, Cattell helped establish the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Method. In 1907 at Cattell's bequest James came to Columbia and lectured on pragmatism. 48 They could agree philosophically and take diverging scientific paths. James continued to monitor Cattell's career as a scientific professional until his death. In 1909 he spoke out against a changed format for Popular Science Monthly. James was shocked to find that magazine "bound with wires instead of being sewed like any respectable self-respecting periodical with a circulation of less than 25,000. . . . Don't you think this is too low toned, blackguardly and infamous a thing for you as editor to be held responsible for?49 Cattell did not carry on the Science dispute, although Titchener, as we have seen, in a sense did. As Cattell got further and further involved in editorial projects he deferred to James's historical role in the development of American psychology, if not to his science. In 1903, while attempting to rank one thousand American men of science by merit, Cattell asked James's assistance. "If I send you on slips the names of American psychologists, would you consent to arrange them roughly in order of their work?" 50 In 1908 he dedicated a group of Columbia University essays in honor of James; the latter claimed it "the proudest moment in my life." 51 After James's death Cattell told Science subscribers that James was "the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands." 52 A year before his own death in 1944 he remembered a heroic James: "There is none like him, none, nor will be." 5 3 Cattell's admiring nod, however, did not mean that he acquiesced to James's science. Sweetness, wisdom, and uniqueness aside, he was quite certain that American psy-

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chology had a Cattellian scientific future. In 1927 Cattell had reason to reflect on the history of American psychology. The occasion was an address at the opening of a new psychological laboratory at Wittenberg College in Springfield, Ohio. It was also the first year that he alone, save Baldwin, survived as a pioneering American experimental psychologist; the first generation was gone—Titchener earlier that year, Hall in 1924, Münsterberg in 1916, and James in 1910. Cattell had the opportunity and occasion to assess the scientific past and future of American psychology. "The scientific man," he began, "is subject to administrative controls; he is no longer free; he must compromise with others and teach all sorts of students." Now he was "useful for the production of a large mass of routine work" rather than the development of "creative genius." Scientific progress was not a matter of "special creations" as much as "a gradual development from the time of the first experiment by the anthropoid ape." Yet the creative spark had been essential in building the living fire of science. Cattell admitted being inspired by the poet Shelley who encouraged thinking in terms of a "gradual scale of intensity, duration, connexion, periods of recurrence, and utility . . . which . . . might be measured." During his German years Wundt, who "was not himself a laboratory worker," allowed Cattell to test the former's creative psychological generalizations. The result was "the first psychological measurements of individual differences and the attempt to develop the useful applications of psychology." 54 After establishing the correct relationship between genius and science, between Wundt and himself, Cattell interpreted the early American psychological scene. He credited Hall and Johns Hopkins for building the first American laboratory, and the second in the world. Hall was no more a laboratory worker than Wundt: "Like James he was a man of literary genius swayed by the emotions, which are such a large part of life and as yet such a small part of our science." Nonetheless, Hall and "James were giants in the land, overtowering their descendants of a work-a-day world." And genius had thrived best

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at Harvard: "Where were James, Royce, and Münsterberg was the center of psychology." But the ceremonial bow to Cambridge greats was not an invitation that the new Wittenberg laboratory pursue the broad creative vision of the past. That era had ended over thirty-five years earlier "with the publication of James's Principles of Psychology in 1890, the opening of the laboratories at Harvard, Yale and Cornell in 1892, and the establishment of the American Psychological Association in the same year." With those events Cattell proclaimed "the earlier period of psychology may be closed." Nostalgia was not to be mistaken for science; even as the one remaining pioneer of the new American psychology, he would not lapse into doddering romanticism. "The few survivors may look back upon it as the golden age of our science, but that is doubtless due only to the presbyopia that obscures the vision of objects near at hand." He was certain that Wittenberg's "new laboratory . . . will become a new center for psychological teaching and research." 5 5 To have continued the genius of the psychological past would have compromised the science of the psychological future. Edwin G. Boring has written, "In some ways Cattell is a contradiction: his influence upon American psychology has been so much greater than his scientific output." 5 6 Although he wrote numerous articles based on original laboratory research, he never produced a book. During his tenure at Columbia, 1891 to 1917, fifty Ph.D.s were granted under his guidance. His two most famous students, Edward Lee Thorndike and Robert Sessions Woodworth, made important contributions to learning and behavioral psychology. Nevertheless, Cattell did not really start a psychological school as Titchener had at Cornell. 57 Rather, Cattell's "influence" rested on being "the man for his generation in America." 5 8 It was a particularized rather than a generalized timeliness that helped distinguish his influence from James's. The big book, The Principles of Psychology, was a milestone in the continuing American effort to distinguish native

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intellectual life from European. James's evolutionary and functional mind, his brilliant "stream of consciousness" descriptions of the mind's operation, and his effort to keep individual will in consciousness, were not only anti-Wundt; they comprised a broad statement of the American view and its relationship to scientific revolutions of the nineteenth century. The Principles of Psychology also stimulated a variety of new psychological approaches that crystallized into functional, behavioral, gestalt, and depth psychologies. James was America's psychological hub out of which radiated various specialized psychological spokes. Münsterberg, Titchener, and Cattell all recognized the radiation, and they all worried about the direction America's wheel of psychological science was taking. Cattell, however, even more than Münsterberg and Titchener, suggested the limits of James's influence in New World psychology, because he represented a more narrowly defined American psychological direction. Cattell's identification with the reaction-time of individual minds, with mental tests, with capacity psychology, and with statistical methodology was the major emphasis in laboratory psychology during the 1880s and 1890s. Cattell depicted more accurately than James the character of professional American psychology because he was not defining the broader American tradition. He was more scientifically American because he had no great, expansive, culturally authentic vision to defend. Thus, he would be remembered in the history of American science but largely forgotten in American cultural history. James, by contrast, had a path-breaking book that was as much an American expression of a truly transitional historical moment as a scientific catalyst. James could appeal to the retention of sentiment in science because he had dramatically captured New World values, ones that stretched back into the mid-nineteenth century, even back to Puritan New England, as well as ones that suggested the scientific future. James's interest in and sympathy for telepathy, for instance, projected a bias for backward-looking mysticism as well as hope for a future psychic science. He operated

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as both scientific professional and cultural symbol. Yet weak experimental training did not prevent him from taking a significant, if criticized, place in the history of science. But to say that Cattell was not a broad cultural hero did not mean he was culturally unimportant. Even though he could not embody the symbolically appealing worlds of the American past-present-and-future like James (who in American science did for that matter?), Cattell visualized the way scientific psychology could be used in the American future. He saw a practical application for his psychological science. In laboratories of psychology not only children but every one can be tested, and small defects or changes in the senses and faculties can be discovered. . . . Degenerations which escape common observation, and even the practiced eye of the physician, can be detected and measured by scientific methods. . . . Ultimately, we shall be able to determine what distribution of labor, wealth, and power is the best. Indeed, the measurements and statistics of psychology, which, at first sight, may seem remote from common interests, may in the end become the most important factors in the progress of society.59 In this prediction he was like Münsterberg, who also envisioned a practical psychology for solving social problems and achieving behavioral control. Cattell, however, had the nativeson advantage; and he emphasized quantification—a methodology that would take a commanding place in twentiethcentury American science. James had not shared Cattell's vision of a psychological future devoted to statistical procedures. He was temperamentally unequipped, too romantic, too psychologically undisciplined, too attuned to mystical possibilities. Cattell, however, could operate as an "insider" and have influence on the development of American psychology that James could not. The latter's general cultural significance, the catalytic book, weakened ability not only to participate in laboratory psychology, but also to represent the cultural application of laboratory psychology. James and Cattell pioneered a functional and individualistic psychology that Cattell moved

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toward a quantified destiny. Cattell defined and narrowed James's generalities. His contribution presented a clear scientific boundary beyond which the genius of The Principles of Psychology could not travel. Münsterberg and Titchener disagreed with James in fundamental ways, but neither could show as clearly as Cattell an American way of limiting James's psychology scientifically. American scientific psychology would not be simply a literary masterpiece, not in the 1890s and beyond. Cattell represented the American scientific psychological alternative to James's literary psychological Americanism.

Chapter Six The Pitfalls of Parental Compromising Pray agree; and help quench the

inconceivable

paltriness of spirit that seems to have shown its head for the 1st time in our American

Psychological World! William James to James McKeen Cattell, 1910

THERE WAS ANOTHER " A m e r i c a n " dimension in Cattell that James could not pursue, or at least chose to avoid. Cattell's attraction to promotional and organizational power was in step with burgeoning New World business and administrative development. These trends had gathered m o m e n t u m after the Civil War in a remarkable entrepreneurial expansion, one that climaxed in the full-flowering of corporate capitalism in the first two decades of the twentieth century. As one scholar has noted, Cattell's activities, particularly after the 1890s, m a d e h i m the "entrepreneur of [American] science." 1 While James became less and less identified with the "scientific" psychological establishment, Cattell became more and more immersed in it. His editorial activities on Science and Popular Science Monthly, the continuing American Men of Science

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project, as well as APA involvement made Cattell the king of native psychological boosterism and politicking. Münsterberg was also heavily involved in the whirligigs of organizational politics, but his German attachment gave preeminence to Cattell. Titchener, with the exception of the Society of Experimentalists, was more Jamesian in his attitude toward professional activities; he stayed clear of APA meetings and disliked centralization. 2 The divergent roads James and Cattell traveled in their involvement in professional organizations, in the development of scientific bureaucracy, reflected their fathers' work experiences. While Henry James Sr. never found an institutional outlet for his talents, William C. Cattell operated as a successful administrator-promoter for Lafayette College. 3 Doubtless James's aversion to Philistine professional activities and Cattell's ready willingness to pursue them reflected paternal patterns. Unlike their fathers, however, the sons had pioneered a professional science. Cattell had laboratory impact while James had a path-breaking book. And if one was comfortable within establishment science and the other was not, both—as well as other major psychological players—had significant roles to play as their common profession forged an identity; an identity not only in the substances of the various psychologies, but within organizational politics. It was not just James's flight from laboratory science toward psychic phenomena that distinguished his psychology from those of the other pioneers. How would a man of reputation, the American scientific psychological pioneer with large reputation, express the institutional dimension of his leadership? Although James was twice elected the president of the APA, he was never an active member and attended few meetings. In the late 1890s he had asked Charles Eliot to change his title from Professor of Psychology to Professor of Philosophy because he did not think psychology was "a big enough subject to be represented in the titles of two full professorships." 4 A strange request from the acknowledged father of American scientific psychology! Toward the end of his life he

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found membership in the National Academy of Sciences "rather childish." He told Cattell's patron, John Shaw Billings, that he appreciated "the distinction of being a member, but my use for it ends there, and my only relations with it till I die will probably be in the line of helping to hand out the distinction to other people." 5 James's reluctance to embrace scientific organization was consistent with a philosophy of pluralism, individualism, and openness; it was apropos in a thinker who embodied the New World laissez faire mood. 6 Yet his realization that a famous founding scientist would be called on to pass "distinction" to younger professional contemporaries suggested role-playing, of a kind that only a detached and, as it were, "ex" psychologist could manage. For even though James moved further and further from the straight scientific path and avoided professional involvement, he could not escape his parental duties. American psychologists would not let James retire even though they rejected his science. One interesting intrigue showed how James reluctantly assumed a professional function that brought native psychologists into scheming contention. It centered on the relationship of organizational development to professional prestige: who among major New World psychologists would be president of the proposed 1913 International Psychological Congress. Since the first Congress in Paris in 1889, these meetings had provided a forum for multinational contributions to the young scientific psychology. Although Americans had participated since the Paris meeting (James had attended), all the congresses had been held on European soil.7 By the 1900s there was sentiment that the affair should be held in America. It was not simply that younger psychologists like Münsterberg, Cattell, and Titchener wanted reputation, perhaps even the international kind that James and G. Stanley Hall had achieved. Their ambition was complemented by vaulting American nationalism. America's continuing rise as a world power after the Spanish-American War encouraged professional expression within international affairs. International competition

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was not simply for colonies; professional participation and leadership within a worldwide scientific community was part of the vigorous nationalistic mood.8 In 1909, within a year of James's death, American psychologists extended a proposal to host the 1913 Congress. Rather than settling the discontent the offer exposed underlying suspicions, festering ambition, and hurt feelings, which characterized an aggressive but still insecure American psychological community. And it projected James into the role of a paternal psychological figure who would try to find a compromise in the disputes of contentious psychological sons. James Mark Baldwin was responsible for getting James into the thick of the planning for the coming conference. Baldwin had founded two psychological laboratories at the University of Toronto and at Princeton before moving to Johns Hopkins, where he restored Hall's early laboratory. He was a prolific, if clumsy, writer, had originated a genetic psychology, and had produced the first American reference work on the new science, the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology. He also, along with Cattell, founded the Psychological Review. Late in 1909 Baldwin ostensibly resigned as professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins. He went briefly to Mexico and then to Paris, where he remained until his death in 1934. 9 In January 1910 Baldwin wrote James from Paris with the "view of discouraging the coming of the Inter. Congress of Psychology to the U.S. in 1913." He explained that "some Americans at Geneva [the site of the previous Congress] notably your friend Morton Prince, got up a petition to the Congress to select the U.S. instead of Budapest." The Americans at Geneva had picked himself and James "as the two Presidents"; they had also decided upon several vice-presidents including Titchener and Cattell. He told James that the Geneva group had designated himself as "President Effective" and James as honorary president, but that he preferred "you to be President Effective." Though Baldwin knew "that you too are not in love with congresses," he urged James to "identify yourself with the matter." 1 0

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But Baldwin withdrew from consideration for the active presidency. He wrote Titchener that since he was in Paris "it would be quite impossible for me, without local connections or position, to do effective work for the congress." And he reiterated his support for James: "I am writing James to whom I think the position belongs to count my place vacant." 1 1 Baldwin's resignation, however, probably had little to do with his inability to fight for American psychology on European soil, or with loyalty to James. He was ensnarled in the aftermath of an embarrassing scandal: Baldwin had been fired at Johns Hopkins for visiting a brothel. Baldwin explained to Münsterberg that he had mistaken the place for a "social club," but honest error or indiscretion, it ended his professional career in America as well as his suitability to be a congress president. 1 2 As Titchener saw it, a tainted American in a position of international psychological leadership meant that "psychology suffers, and American science suffers, and we are all a bit implicated." 1 3 When Baldwin stepped aside James became more deeply involved in the now problematical question of who would assume the presidency. It could not have happened at a worse time. During his last ten years James was seldom free from angina. By 1910 his condition had markedly deteriorated, and he planned what proved to be his last therapeutic trip to Europe. 1 4 On the eve of the journey, suffering severe heart pains, and saving his waning strength for a last philosophical book, James found himself acting as a political referee. A mortally ill professional parent was forced to find a formula for professional peace among ambitious and suspicious psychological sons. 15 The man who had abandoned professional psychology for the less scientific rigors of psychic research and metaphysical essay-writing was drawn back into the fray. History seemed unwilling to let him forget that he was, after all, the ancestral New World scientific psychologist. But James's presence in the developing imbroglio fired rather than quelled the emerging rivalry. James anticipated that the profession needed counsel. He

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wrote Cattell even before Baldwin's refusal became official: " i n the (probable) event of J. M. Baldwin's withdrawal from the presidency of the next Internat'l Congress of Psychology, the presidency would naturally reside with you and Titchen e r . " " I n no case could I possibly serve," he insisted. He was also pessimistic about the success of the congress: " I doubt whether many Europeans will come, I fear very few; and with our annual meetings [APA] I don't see why we need a second one in 1913 for ourselves." That misgiving aside one thing was certain: " I only wish you and Titchener to whom, however, I am not writing, to understand that I am out, as a possibility." 1 6 Unfortunately, James's " o u t " only worked to set Cattell and Titchener at odds. Cattell enclosed James's letter and wrote Titchener. He explained he had written James "urging him in as strong terms as I could, though not writing officially, to accept the presid e n c y . " Cattell appeared uninterested in seeking the office. "If James absolutely declines, then I favor offering the presidency to Hall and if he absolutely declines than to Ladd, but apart from these three men, I suppose that one of us would be the natural president." Having established the line of succession Cattell concluded "that the complication of the presidency is out of the w a y . " 1 7 He could not have been more mistaken; and given his professional aggressiveness, it is hard to believe that he was being completely truthful. When official word of Baldwin's unavailability reached James he assumed responsibility for equitably settling the question of the presidency. " T h e duty of taking the initiative in consequence of Baldwin's resignation seems to devolve ex officio on me as honorary president," he told Cattell. Baldwin had written "that I am now 'referee'; and [Walter B.] Pillsbury says that I am the man to decide the question of Baldwin's successor." Baldwin, whom Cattell disliked, was hardly in a position to transfer authority. Pillsbury, however, was President-elect of the APA. James accepted " t h e position sans phrase, and equally sans phrase am writing to ask Titchener if he will serve." "If he consents, as I hope he w i l l , " James

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continued, " I will send the slate to Geneva for ratification and the 'organization' will be irreproachably complete." 1 8 He immediately informed Titchener that he was the anointed. Like a modern Jacob he was deciding the future of psychological sons. " I am willing to be the predestined vessel of the Lord," James explained. "You or Cattell (I irreversibly am declining the active presidency, on acct. of health) are the natural replacers of Baldwin. On the whole I ask you first. Won't you serve? It will simplify things enormously if you will say yes, for against every other prominent person (except Cattell) some serious objection is sure to be urged." 1 9 A biblical Jacob James was not. He lacked the authority to quell contention between Cattell and Titchener for even one week. Five days after James's decision Cattell's disinterestedness had vanished. " I am sorry to write," he wrote to Titchener, "that I think it was not wise for James to offer you the presidency of the congress, and that it was not within his competence to so do." Cattell believed the "vacancy . . . should be referred to the psychologists of the country through the American Psychological Association." He was "sure that it would be our unanimous wish that James should be president"; and after James "the second choice would be Hall, with Ladd third." If for some reason the APA did not vote that way then "there are good men of the younger generation [although] I fancy it would be wiser to select an older man." As for Titchener's candidacy Cattell was blunt: "I myself should not vote for you if it were a matter of election, because I think that there should be no congress in America unless there is an American fit to preside over it, and because of your opposition to the American Psychological Association." Cattell admitted, " M y views may not be shared by others—obviously they are not by James . . . and if the majority of our psychologists believe that you would be the best president, I should certainly advise you to a c c e p t . " 2 0 In any case, Cattell was not willing to defer to James's initial selection. Cattell understood that Titchener was vulnerable to prevailing professional winds. Titchener's psychology was hardly

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the kind most native psychologists would have enjoyed parading as authentically American to visiting Europeans. But Cattell's objection to Titchener was essentially social: no Englishman who refused to join the APA should receive the social honor of the presidency. Titchener wanted Cattell's approval as well as James's; he had written James that his acceptance was contingent on Cattell's reaction. 21 In fact Titchener, despite his fearless defense of scientific standards, had felt an awed distrust for Cattell. "I always feel, when I am with him, that he has a better intellect than mine," he once wrote Yerkes. "But I also feel that he is absolutely unscrupulous on the moral side, a sort of Uebermensch, [demi-god] working callously for his own ends, devoid of sympathy and quite unreliable. I feel, when I am with him, that he is 'using' me, cat and mouse fashion." 2 2 Machiavellianism aside, Titchener sensed his social illegitimacy. Despite James's endorsement Cattell had reminded him that he was not really an American. Cattell immediately told James he did not acquiesce in a Titchener presidency, particularly one established without APA sanction. James was not happy. "I am sorry you don't feel satisfied. I yielded to the combined suggestions of Baldwin and Pillsbury, thinking that the initiative of one man (who in this case seemed to be 'officially' designated) is usually the best way out of a quandary." The APA was not the solution: "I think the machinery of the Association would . . . prove too cumbrous for any clear results." With Titchener out he doubted "whether either Hall or Ladd would have . . . a majority. I can see reasons for either being president; but I confess that Hall would go against my grain on account of his essential deviousness of nature and behavior." "Münsterberg," he thought, "would probably organize the Congress better than anybody; but he has also too many foes." Titchener had seemed appropriate. His "books have made him as favorably known in Europe, as his Cornell record had here"; he was, James believed, "an altogether unexceptionable man." James, however, now recognized that "his real rival in my eyes was you, not because you were one of the vice-presidents, but be-

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cause of your organizing power, and credit all over this land." 23 What James was also beginning to recognize was that playing referee was not as easy as he had hoped. Cattell's ambition was real enough. But there were questions of national suitability that complicated his task, made contention more likely and a compromise candidate harder to find. Shortly after writing Cattell, James received Titchener's withdrawal from the offer of the presidency. Apparently Cattell had sent James a copy of his own letter to Titchener: "Having read . . . the letter, I am not altogether surprised at your action, but C. is blunt as regards persons where he feels that his reasons are good, and I venture to hope that you will not grollen [grieve] too long." James took some of the blame. "What results," he admitted, "is that my rather naif [naive] scheme of cooking the slate, for approval abroad, without going outside of our committee appointed in Geneva, has shipwrecked inside the harbor, and appeal will have to be made to a larger body of deciders." An organizational rather than personal solution to a professional political problem would be wiser. Titchener must have winced when he heard the details. "Cattell had called here on his way to the Harvard Teachers' Association, and the result of our conversation has been something like this, with which I hope you may see your way to cooperate." There were four James-Cattell proposals: First, James would remain honorary president with "no duties." Second, "a large body of vice-Presidents" were to be named. Third, John B. Watson and A. H. Pierce were "to do the chores"; and last, "the initiative of preparing the slate for confirmation by the Association [APA]" would "come from us," i.e., James, Cattell, and Titchener. It meant that the President would be elected by the APA membership and that he would be one of the triumvirate or vice presidents. "Let us three be as harmonious as this pluralistic universe permits!" James urged. 24 The accord never came. Soon after the James—Cattell conference, Titchener wrote to Münsterberg explaining his role in the presidency problem. Titchener was writing Münsterberg because "Cattell tells me

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he has broached to you his new plans for the Congress, and that you have expressed your approval of them." The letter showed that Titchener had hardly been a passive pawn in the affair. " W h e n I heard about Baldwin," he related, "I supposed that Cattell and I were the only active members of the American Committee, —James holding only a passive place. I therefore resolved to take action." With Cattell's support he had written Baldwin "asking his resignation." He had also written " a letter, for Cattell and myself to sign, asking James [to] take the active presidency, and saying neither of us would take it [because] it seemed out of the question that either Cattell or myself should climb up on B's shoulders." Then James had said "it was his business to take the initiative." That initiative put "the presidency . . . between Cattell and me, and on the whole he had decided to offer it to me." Titchener hesitated but James "urged me strongly" to accept: "I finally wrote to James that, if he and Cattell were on reflection convinced that I was the most available man, I would take the position." Cattell, however, objected: "I was an Englishman; I was too young; I was not a member of the Association; James had no power after all." Titchener then wrote James refusing the Presidency. And now Cattell and James had suggested preparing a slate of vice presidents "and if James still declined to serve actively, the Assn. was to elect a president from the v i c e s . " 2 5 Titchener told Münsterberg he "could not take the responsibility of thus preparing a slate." Instead he "suggested to James that you, I and a couple of Canadians might, as aliens, be elected honorary vice-presidents; then James and Cattell could go ahead on their own account." But James "turn[ed] this proposal down." So "I have now suggested to James that we have recourse to a referendum; that Watson write to all members of the Assn. and to any outlying members of the Experimental Society, asking them to vote a clean slate of 12 vice-presidents and a president." If there was to be an organizational election of the president then experimentalists should be included. Titchener discounted the other scenario: "Cattell believes that, at the last minute, James will, if he is

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well, take the active presidency; I cannot myself believe this, as James has been most emphatic in all his letters to me." Besides, he noted, "his acceptance would be such an easy way out, and would save him as well as others such a lot of trouble, that I think he would have said yes already had he contemplated saying yes at all." The organizational way, of course, removed Titchener from any remote possibility of heading the Congress; APA membership overwhelmed the Experimental Society. Nonetheless, Titchener "fully recognis[ed] the force of Cattell's arguments, and I am now very willing indeed to stand out and let the country decide for itself." He only lamented not meeting "a big responsibility and duty that seemed to come my way." 26 James agreed to Titchener's proposal to present the members of the APA and the Experimental Society with a referendum asking them to vote on "a slate of 12 vice-presidents and a president." But he was still concerned that in all the bickering over the presidency, he would end up there. "I perceive on re-reading Titchener's letter," he replied to Cattell, 'that to my former reading of it a bad oversight is imputable." He had originally assumed that Titchener's use of "the word 'president' didn't abrogate my nominal presidentship; but it may be construed to easily do so, and that you so construe it." James did not want "to see my name anywhere where it doesn't stand for genuine work." The honorary president was demeaning enough. He prophetically suggested "that the real president . . . be elected by the Gods hereafter in some way unknown to me." "I confess I shuddered," he closed, "at the idea of both T. and you resigning and Hall or Ladd the only alternatives, for no one but myself seems to think of Münsterberg as available!" 27 James began to glimpse, his health aside, that he alone would be an acceptable active president, and it alarmed him. At the end of March 1910 James left for Europe hoping that the presidency matter would be resolved in his absence. The Experimentalist Society meeting the next month in Baltimore now became the natural place to finalize the problem.

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But not only was the presidency question not settled, the proposed congress was scuttled. There were growing fears that European scholars considered their American counterparts inferior and would only make the journey for the money. 2 8 Cattell was not quite ready to give up the battle and wrote Münsterberg that James was the last hope for the conference. Apparently he was the only American with sufficient prestige to attract a reputable European attendance. "I have written to James [that] if he will accept the presidency, I think we must go, if he will not, I presume that it will be necessary to abandon the business, though I must say that I shall do so with a feeling of considerable dissatisfaction." If James accepted Cattell felt "pretty sure that Titchener would come round." 2 9 Although ill and an ocean away, James was kept abreast of these developments. Edwin B. Holt, who had studied with both James and Münsterberg, but found the former more compatible, disclosed the outcome of the Baltimore meeting. 3 0 What was particularly interesting was Holt's unmitigated distrust of Cattell. Holt also thought Cattell had found a powerful ally in Münsterberg. He advised James that Cattell and Münsterberg were threatening to push either Hall or Ladd into the presidency, if their plan to "have the body of ex-presidents of the Amer. Psych. Ass. elect the president of the Congress is not put through." Ostensibly Cattell and Münsterberg were rivals but "their pretended opposition is clearly nothing but a ruse of which the true intent may well be guessed;—it is to produce a deadlock among the members of the Amer. Psych. Ass. whereupon a dark horse (Cattell or one of his creatures) will step into the presidency." If the congress were held Holt was sure it "will be picked to the bones by Cattell and his brood, and cannot possibly be a representative or respectable affair." He added "that this move against the Congress had not in any sense started with Titchener. We found him, on arriving at Baltimore, as limp as a rag, and ready to lick the dust, hold Cattell's train, and pass him his wig of office. 31 James tried a final time to bring the presidency issue to an agreeable conclusion. And it was Cattell he addressed. "Be-

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tween us all, things have got into a nasty little mess for which Baldwin, myself and you seem mainly responsible. Things would probably have run smoothly enough if either of 3 acts of ours had been different." First, Baldwin should have "never accepted the presidential office"; second, if "I had said I would step up on his evacuation"; and third, if "you had let my appointment of Titchener pass, and not insisted on votes being taken." But now the situation had, as Holt maintained, degenerated into a political brawl, with Cattell the ringleader. "I have received (or heard) letters from various psychologists which show a (to me) startling amount of pre-occupation with the paltriest personal politics and electioneering interests." James felt it was not yet too late to undo his earlier mistake. Such a step might be the only way to save the congress. "Reflection on the policy of withdrawal from the active presidency made me quickly feel that it would be very awkward nationally, to do so; so I wrote 10 days ago to Watson, offering to become a figure-head president, if that would assuage the tempest in a teapot." It was impossible to reconsider Baldwin or Titchener as presidential candidates. James would correct his earlier misjudgment and assume the active presidency, albeit an inert one. Cattell as "vice-president stork" would, in effect, assume practical leadership. 32 James realized that only his parental presence as active president, even if a gravely ill one, could quell the politicking. He regretted not having initially assumed the responsibility. Indeed, he now postured like a dictatorial monarch. "I wish I had never said I wouldn't play at President! If I can't preside when the time comes, I reserve the right to [elect] whomever I damn please to take the chair." The tired, disgusted founder of American psychological science pleaded with the professionally ambitious Cattell: "Pray agree, and help quench the inconceivable paltriness of spirit that seems to have shown its head for the 1st time in our American Psychological World." 33 This was James's last word on the affair; he had barely three months to live and his correspondence dwindled. Holt,

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however, continued to apprise him of the fate of the congress as well as of Cattell's machinations. Holt's report did nothing to abate James's fear about the continuing strife. He was both candid and sarcastic, to the point of parodying Cattell's name. "The International Congress no longer exists," Holt disclosed. "Cattle's private Congress may exist, but I for one am not participating." To Jet myself speak quite frankly, I don't see how you can possibly imagine that Cattle (this spelling saves an "1", spelling reform, and connotes as well as denotes my meaning) is going to let you appoint of your "royal caprice" the President of the Congress. That is precisely what you have once tried to do, by appointing Titchener; and how well did you succeed? Cattle so overwhelmed him with insult and billingsgate that he must resign at once. Do you suppose that C. will be more complaisant a second time, and that after he, C., has spent some considerable effort over the Congress?

In his zeal to expose Cattell's ambition, Holt could not help criticizing James's political naivete. "Of course if your royal caprice," he continued, "duly chastened by the first lesson, should think [it] wise to appoint Cattle, just, that gent would protestingly yet inevitably acquiesce." It boiled down to the fact "that either you or he will be acting president of the Congress, if it is held." For himself, Holt thought "the Congress no better than a house of lepers." With a last word he gently accused James of spreading the infection. "I am sad and discouraged that you find no course wise and proper save the very one that Cattle had dictated, and that plays inevitably into his hands." 3 4 By late August James was dead and so too, it appeared, the congress. It would be 1929 before the congress was finally held in America at New Haven. And Holt's prophecy of the despised "Cattle" assuming the presidency proved true. Had James's health held, had World War I not intervened, the scenario might have been different. The larger point was that James did play a role in American psychological politics long after he had ceased to be, in any active sense, an experimental psy-

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chologist. True, he had defended the scientific veracity of telepathy from the challenges of psychological orthodoxy in the 1890s; he had a stake in psychological interpretation even though he had left the laboratory. He had, however, assiduously sidestepped professional politics and involvement in organizational contention. 35 In 1910 he could no longer avoid the politics of organization. He was consulted; his opinion and position counted. And in the end he belatedly acted as a professional patriarch. A "professional" dimension emerged in a psychologist who paradoxically was thought to be "unprofessional." On occasion modernity may require charismatic parental leadership. When changed circumstances make organizational authority problematical or indistinct, symbolic authority can ease the loss of traditional guidelines. 36 The proposed International Psychological Congress presented American psychologists with a situation in which the "representative" or "symbolic" image of their profession was particularly important. A Titchener might head the Experimentalist Society or a Cattell head the APA without creating much confusion. After all, each was unquestionably professional, unquestionably qualified to lead the respective organizations. Disagreements might arise about personalities but not about fitting professional competence with organizational leadership. On the domestic, organizational scene William James was dispensable. Committees and conferences functioned adequately without his presence or leadership. But the prospect of an International Congress on American soil created a political vacuum and hence a need to evaluate professional reputations. The presidency issue centered on the question of who could most accurately represent American science while commanding respect and reputation enough to draw Europeans across the ocean. That James's choice of Titchener for president was greeted with ire was not surprising. Titchener, and for that matter Münsterberg, were unacceptable because they were not American enough. James, despite the fact that his science was suspect, was the only American with the appropriate repu-

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tation, the only psychologist who could step into the presidency without escalating conflict among more professional contemporaries. His parental presence, his symbolic image, was suitably parochial, i.e. American, and yet internationally respected. His status as an "ex" scientific psychologist made him even more desirable. 37 As Freud once illustrated, a dying or dead father could become stronger than one in the prime of life. The founding father, who in a sense was dead because no longer active professionally, could still be useful as a figure to hide the ambitions of anxious professional sons. Such a figure could even absorb the unconscious remorse they felt over replacing him. 38 A profession bristling with politics revealed underlying insecurities that belied the professional insistence on objectivity, on scientific impartiality. In an era of scientific strife, one in which scientific fathers were being overturned, appeal to a scientific ancestor could provisionally solve a leadership crisis. The congress created the difficulty; existing methods of determining professional leadership no longer sufficed. Professional psychologists eagerly dismantling psuedo-psychology on the one hand, and striving for international reputation on the other, were not above needing William James. He was in this sense the perfect "compromise" candidate. But James, until the very end, misinterpreted his role. He finally understood that only a Jamesian presidency could quell the storm. Even had he grasped leadership, however, death would have dictated the same result. Cattell, as Holt saw, would still have blocked Titchener and probably anyone else from stepping up after James died. And there was enough opposition to Cattell to prevent him, as Titchener said in reference to Baldwin, from climbing on James's shoulders. For Cattell the presidential plum must have been more pit than fruit. By 1929 all the contending professionals (with the exception of the scandalous Baldwin) were gone. And by then Cattell himself was without a university professorship and in a sense, like James, beyond the professional pale. 39

W i l l i a m J a m e s , c. 1 8 9 0 s . fie printed by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Chapter Seven

Accommodating the Boundaries of Consciousness It seemed as if the Gods in all the naturemythologies were holding an indescribable meeting in my breast with the moral Gods of the inner life. . . . The intense significance of some sort, if one could only tell the significance; the inhuman remoteness of its inner life, and yet the intense appeal of it; its everlasting freshness and its immemorial antiquity and decay; its utter Americanism, and every sort of patriotic suggestiveness. William James to Alice Gibbens James, 1898

THERE WAS ONE way in which James's psychological colleagues agreed that he had "compromised" scientific psychology. James was the only first-generation American experimental psychologist to incorporate the unconscious mind into his psychology. 1 Münsterberg, Titchener, and Cattell had each clashed with James over psychic research as legitimate science; each had drawn the scientific line where he believed the conscious mind ended and the unconscious one began.

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Münsterberg curtly dismissed the unconscious in three words: "There is none." 2 The German developed a psychotherapy that recognized mental abnormality, but ascribed it to a faulty environment. Psychotherapy was the applied psychology of eliminating bad habits, not of understanding and controlling the unconscious. 3 Titchener believed that experimental psychology described consciousness; there were not two kinds of mind. The unconscious was an excuse to indulge in pseudoscientific techniques. Freudian psychology, for example, was not psychology at all. Freud "theorises his facts by association"; psychoanalysis was only a matter of "mechanically transferring] from idea-symbol to idea-symbol." 4 As a young man Cattell had taken hashish and recorded the resulting mental states. Nonetheless, he never proceeded into depth psychology.5 Cattell's mental testing psychology relied on measuring individual differences. The unconscious could not be quantified and therefore was not experimentally useful. For James, the reaction of his colleagues toward the psychic world was disappointingly narrow. It was they, he believed, who had compromised experimental psychology; they had abandoned the scientific frontier for safer, stale psychologies. Why did James, alone among the major American scientific psychological pioneers, cultivate a deep interest in unconscious phenomena—or, as he preferred, "the subliminal"? It was not because he found psychoanalysis attractive. Freud was "a man obsessed by fixed ideas." James could "make nothing in my own case with his dream theories." 6 Freud was not the norm for psychology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; indeed, most American psychologists did not consider him a psychologist at all. Psychoanalysis and experimental psychology were two different investigations—and the former was not considered science. 7 The era's shifting scientific scene, however, underscored fundamental intellectual revolution; revolution that testified to the mind's problematical nature. Not only had Darwinism put severe strain on the traditional view of mind as spirit, but investigations into the unconscious suggested that there were unseen, powerful, and

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even ungovernable mental forces. These forces were often given quasi-religious significance as, for example, in the mindcure cult and in telepathic seances that conjured visitations from the dead. James's foray into psychic research had not simply brought him into dispute with academic psychologists. It underscored that "science" and "religion" were engaged in deep cultural and intellectual contention; and it illuminated James's "transitional" persona as a man who bridged, or at least tried to span the gap between, two rival ideologies. 8 While Münsterberg, Titchener, and Cattell delineated scientific psychology, articulated scientific boundaries, James, with the help of the unconscious, tried to find common ground for the subliminal between science and religion. In a sense this was the historic task of his pragmatism too. 9 James's fascination with the mental underworld paralleled his development as an experimental psychologist. Even though he did not become exclusively absorbed with psychology as psychic research until the 1890s, he had been interested in the unconscious since the 1860s. In the experience of creating his psychology he was compelled to go beyond conventional scientific psychology, beyond the Münsterbergian, Titchenerian, and Cattellian psychological fences. Nor would James be trapped by history any more than by science. He would become symbolic, an American who both embodied and transcended his times rather than one who simply participated in them. Here one met James's greatness, the undeniable fact that he achieved lasting fame. He had another task than simply to build a scientific psychology. His journey into the unconscious suggested a continuing search for the relationship between his psychology and his identity. And Jamesian identity had a destiny, a historical resonance, that distinguished him from his three scientific contemporaries. His discovery of the unconscious, the treatment of psychology as more than consciousness, shows the truth in Ralph Barton Perry's observation that "there was something in William James which was profoundly opposed to the whole life of scholarship." 10

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James began to examine the unconscious while convalescing in Germany in the late 1860s. While suffering from maladies ranging from backache to eye strain to severe depression, he investigated the mental underworld. Not only did he become familiar with writers such as Schiller, Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Balzac whose works assumed unconscious forces, he studied the contemporary literature on psychopathology and psychic phenomena. He read Henry Maudsley's Physiology and Pathology of the Mind (1867), an early work that considered childhood sexuality. He noted the "tumultuous states of mind in which ideas are dissociated" and became "the primordial fact of all varieties of insanity," after absorbing Jacques-Joseph Moreau's book on hashish. 11 "I reckon that every phenomena can be seen, if sight is sound, hanging by some sort of navel string to the Infinite womb," he wrote his Cambridge chum, Tom Ward. 12 And to his youthful philosophical combatant, the future legal giant Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., James confided that although poor health prevented his marriage, it saved him "from imminent maternal anxiety." 1 3 Before leaving Germany, he published a review of A. S. Liebault's Du SommeiJ, a study of hypnosis; and the following year he reviewed Epes Sargent's Planchette, a book about psychic phenomena. Hence during the period he contemplated art and forged a psychological perspective, James also opened his mind to the psychic world. James found his new identity as a psychologist not only as he studied sculpture at the Dresden Gallery, but as he suffered illness and read about mental abnormality. Like other pioneers in depth psychology James discovered the unconscious and underwent creative illness simultaneously. 14 In 1869, still ill, he returned to medical studies at Harvard. His interest in the unconscious did not abate. He resumed a close friendship with fellow medical student, James Jackson Putnam, who became the first New England physician to endorse psychoanalysis. 15 In 1870 Putnam traveled to Europe to study brain anatomy, and heard the expert on hysteria, Jean Martin Charcot, lecture at the Salpetriere school in Paris. Put-

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nam developed an interest in the perennial Victorian malady, neurasthenia; he eventually published a memoir on its rampant presence in his own family. William developed chronic nerve problems, as did members of the James family and many of their Cambridge and Boston acquaintances. 16 Putnam and James rendezvoused at their Keen Valley, New York, cabin in the Adirondack Mountains. Putnam's daughter, Elizabeth, remembered her father and James having long conversations about the psychic world at their hideaway. 17 By the 1870s James was well acquainted with aberration: he experienced it in himself, saw it in his family, studied it with a close friend, and had made the unconscious indispensable to his psychology· In the late 1870s, as Assistant Professor of Physiology at Harvard, James began work on the treatise that was published twelve years later as The Principles of Psychology. The book incorporated a thorough review of experimental "laboratory psychology"; but it also examined psychopathology, particularly such dislocations as split personalities and amnesia. In chapters on "The Consciousness of Self," "The Emotions," and "Hypnotism" he considered psychological matters that Münsterberg, Titchener, and Cattell found unrelated to scientific psychology. By the mid 1880s, James had discovered the medium Leonora Piper. He attended at least a dozen seances, urged his acquaintances to investigate her amazing powers for themselves, and tried several times to test her genuineness through hypnosis. 18 From the 1880s until his death in 1910 James was an active member of the Society for Psychic Research. For its part the Society showed great interest in James's work with Mrs. Piper. The Society's Proceedings frequently quoted James as a scientific authority who supported the "science" of psychic research. The Principles of Psychology was honored with a laudatory twenty-two-page review. And in 1893 James was named SPR president. 19 At the height of his psychological career, of his reputation as America's founding scientific psychologist, James chose to identify his psychology with those

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who explored the boundaries of consciousness. This was not an unthinking decision. James was careful about the organizations he joined. He did not enjoy institutional activity. Yet he purposely joined forces with those considered by most American experimental psychologists as a menagerie of quacks, pseudo-scientists, and frauds. We know that James had never liked laboratory work. He had brought Münsterberg to America to liberate himself once and for all from responsibility for "brass instrument" psychology. As the 1890s wore on, James not only became more deeply committed to psychic research, but also launched an investigation into strictly pathological mental states. In 1897 he delivered eight lectures at the Lowell Institute in Boston. They included talks on "Dreams and Hypnotism," "Hysteria," "Automatisms," "Multiple Personality," "Demoniacal Possession," "Witchcraft," "Degeneration," and "Genius." 20 Then the next year he had his Science squabble with Cattell and Titchener about the legitimacy of psychic research as science. The same year he defended the right of mind curers not to be licensed as physicians by the State of Massachusetts. 21 As the century drew to a close James had taken pains to associate himself not only with psychology as unconscious phenomena, but also with those who were perceived, rightly or wrongly, as the enemies of the scientific establishment. Such moves were consistent with James's reputation for open-mindedness and liberal sympathy for the underdog. They also, however, preceded an approaching psychic experience for James—another moment when, as in the 1860s, he was faced with the materials of his creativity. This time he showed an inner awareness of a historical role, a symbolic task. The journey after the publication of The Principles away from "science" toward the unconscious testified not only to James's restless artistic center, but to his indelible Americanism, to his cultural authenticity. The illness of the late 1860s came back in the late 1890s. The neurasthenia returned, and he developed angina. From the summer of 1898 until the end of his life James was more

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or less constantly concerned about his health. He convalesced in Europe from 1899 to 1901, again in 1905, and shortly before his death in 1910. His search for cure was bizarre but typical of the Victorian upper and middle classes. He tried electrical therapy and claimed "much relief from galvanizing my spine." 22 Painful Roberts-Hawley lymph-compound injections were endured to improve stamina, sleep, and digestion. He reported that the treatment resulted in "courage and aggressiveness replacing pusillanimity." 23 It has been argued that James used invalidism as a strategy to be idle when parental pressure or university duties became too intense. 24 But illness was also endemic to his remarkable creative starts. James often made his insightful breakthroughs when ill or in unusual states of consciousness. Another great "psychic crisis" or "spiritual moment" that James scholars have noted occurred in the summer of 1898, almost exactly thirty years after the Dresden experience. This time the scene was not an art museum in Europe but a primitive campsite in the Adirondacks. James was an avid hiker. As a youth he had explored the rugged Rhode Island coast during the period he was drawing for William Morris Hunt. In Europe, when health permitted, he loved to take long strolls in the countryside. In America the Keen Valley camp and the farm the James family purchased near Chocorua, New Hampshire, in the White Mountains provided splendid backpacking opportunities. James Jackson Putnam recalled William's enthusiastic ambling: "As a walker, he used to be among the foremost, . . . and it was a pleasure to watch his lithe graceful figure as he moved rapidly up the steep trails." 25 James's son Henry remembered that his father took stairs two and sometimes three at a time. And when the family buggy got into undulating terrain James would jump out and impatiently lead the horses over the next hill. 26 James not only preferred the wild garden of nature, he loved to tramp in it. In July 1898 James hiked to the top of New York's fivethousand-foot peak, Mount Marcy. Marcy stood near the Keen Valley cabin, and was the highest point in New York—a reg-

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ular objective for tourists from New England who annually converged on the area. James made the climb in five hours carrying an eighteen-pound pack. At fifty-five, a man with a sedentary occupation, who had neuralgia in one foot, should have chosen a less demanding trek. But as James wrote to his wife Alice, the experience that followed the climb made health considerations insignificant. After reaching the summit, he descended about one thousand feet, "about an hour's w a l k , " to Panther Lodge Camp, where that night he underwent " o n e of the most memorable of all my memorable experiences." It was an exceptionally clear evening. " T h e temperature was perfect either inside or outside the cabin, the moon rose and hung above the scene before midnight, and I got into a state of spiritual alertness of the most vital description." It was " a regular Walpurgis Nacht." His state became a gestalt of " t h e influences of Nature, the wholesomeness of the people around me . . . the thought of you and the children, dear Harry on the wave [his son Henry], the problem of the Edinburgh lectures, all fermented within m e . " James had recently been invited to deliver lectures on religious experiences for the University of Edinburgh. Here was a suggestive setting, an opportunity for creative insight. He wandered deeper into the woods, where the streaming moonlight lit up things in a magical checkered play, and it seemed as if the Gods in all the nature-mythologies were holding an indescribable meeting in my breast with the moral Gods of the inner life. . . . The intense significance of some sort, of the whole scene, if one could only tell the significance; the inhuman remoteness of its inner life, and yet the intense appeal of it; its everlasting freshness and its immemorial antiquity and decay; its utter Americanism, and every sort of patriotic suggestiveness, and you, and my relation to you part and parcel of it all, and beaten up with it, so that memory and sensation all whirled inexplicably together. . . . It was one of the happiest lonesome nights of my existence, and I understand now what a poet is. He is a person who can feel the immense complexity of influences that I felt, and make some partial tracks in them for verbal statement. James could not "find a single word for all that significance," and was left with " a mere boulder of impression." "Doubt-

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less," he concluded, "things in the Edinburgh lectures will be traceable to i t . " 2 7 Ralph Barton Perry made little of James's "Walpurgis Nacht." He described it as a "vivid experience" that illustrated " a less morbid" example of his "morbid traits." And since Perry was not interested in developing a pathological portrait, there was no reason to elaborate. 2 8 Then, too, because James related the experience to what became Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and that book was not particularly philosophical, Perry's neglect was understandable. More recently, however, Donald Meyer has suggested the creative motive in the experience. " A kind of disorganization" had occurred in which such disparate things as wife, son, America, Gods, nature, and so on "whirled" together. This "whirling," Meyer explained, was "potentially liberating" and became "the condition for illumination." And James counterpoised it against a "self-system dependent upon fixed forms, routines, habits and good order." Meyer rediscovered James's creative moment and related it to the delicate balance between the flywheel of habit and control as ego-preserving and the necessity of seeking personal release and deliverance through psychic activity. 2 9 James did, indeed, walk a kind of emotional-intellectual tightrope between preserving the self and drowning it in creative endeavor. In 1898 he faced another disorienting experience when this balance seemed endangered. His mind and emotions were thrown open to the tumbling effect of semiconscious or unconscious association. He sought out the creative possibilities in the frontier of consciousness. Moreover, he tried to articulate the meaning of the trance, tried to seize the source of his creativity, his greatness. When James said "I understand now what a poet is" he instinctively grasped the interrelationship among his artistic core, the unconscious, and his American persona. James was no longer engaged in transforming art into a scientific psychology. His flight from scientific psychology had climaxed in 1898 with the spat in Science against Cattell and Titchener and his stand against requiring medical degrees for faith healers. James next wrote a book on religion in which

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he empathized with mystic ecstasy and the inner agony of sick souls. In the boundaries of consciousness one found the subjective lives of famous religious figures such as Augustine, Bunyon, and Luther. James would, albeit in autobiographical disguise, put his "that shape am I" sick soul on review with other famous individuals who had suffered and sometimes transcended pathological mentality. 30 We do not know how James's psychological contemporaries reacted to The Varieties, but it would be safe to conclude that the book punctuated James's fall from psychological science. James did not simply embrace the mystical, the pathological, the unconscious. He tried to understand scientifically, not accept uncritically. Hence he cited depth psychologists as authorities on the pathological. "In the wonderful explorations by Binet, Janet, Breuer, Freud, Mason, Prince, and others," James exclaimed, "we have revealed to us whole systems of underground life,. . . buried outside the primary fields of consciousness." The symptoms of this "underground life" showed up in "hallucinations, pains, convulsions, paralyses of feeling and . . . hysteric disease of body and of mind." 3 1 He followed the authority of men with medical degrees who had ventured into depth psychology rather than laboratory psychology—men who took a psychological road closer to his own. While James deserted experimental psychology for what he once called "psychical research and other wild beasts of the philosophical desert," he never really abandoned what he believed to be science. 32 James did not rush beyond the boundaries of consciousness to become a mystic; he accommodated them to the perspective of science, even though that science would have been discarded by Münsterberg, Titchener, and Cattell. James kept the unconscious in scientific focus, at the same time as he extended it beyond orthodox scientific psychology. He was able to indulge his subliminal life without losing himself in its potential irrationality. Nonetheless, toward the close of his life he expressed a fear of being lost in an unconscious abyss. Again, the occasion was an unusual psychic state, one he called "the most intensely peculiar of my whole life." 33

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In 1910 James p u b l i s h e d the short essay " A Suggestion about M y s t i c i s m . " T h e topic w a s a dream, or rather dreams, that James e x p e r i e n c e d in February of 1 9 0 6 — d r e a m s that h e h a d i m m e d i a t e l y recorded. 3 4 In the s u b s e q u e n t article James said h e i n c l u d e d notes of t h e d r e a m s because h e m e a n t it "as a c o n t r i b u t i o n to t h e descriptive literature of pathological m e n t a l states." This t i m e h e lay in bed on the c a m p u s of Stanford University w h e r e h e w a s a visiting professor. "I w o k e at about 7:30 A.M., f r o m a quiet d r e a m of s o m e sort," h e related, " a n d w h i l s t gathering m y waking wits, seemed s u d d e n l y to get m i x e d u p w i t h r e m i n i s c e n c e s of a d r e a m of an entirely different sort, w h i c h s e e m e d to telescope, as it were, into t h e first one, a d r e a m very elaborate, of lions, a n d tragic." W h a t p e r p l e x e d James w a s " t h e a p p a r e n t mingling of t w o d r e a m s . . . s o m e t h i n g very queer, w h i c h I h a d never e x p e r i e n c e d before." T h e next night the c o n f u s i o n of d r e a m s c o n t i n u e d . He a w o k e f r o m heavy sleep " i n t h e m i d d l e of a dream, in t h i n k i n g of w h i c h I b e c a m e s u d d e n l y c o n f u s e d by the c o n t e n t s of t w o other d r e a m s that s h u f f l e d themselves a b r u p t l y in b e t w e e n t h e parts of the first dream, a n d of w h i c h I c o u l d n ' t grasp t h e origin." " W h e n c e c o m e these d r e a m s ? " h e asked. " T h e y w e r e close to me, fresh, as if I h a d just d r e a m e d t h e m ; a n d yet they w e r e far a w a y from the first d r e a m . " Here again w a s t h e " w h i r l i n g t o g e t h e r " in the p e n u m b r a b e t w e e n c o n s c i o u s a n d u n c o n s c i o u s m i n d of disparate yet s o m e h o w c o n n e c t e d phen o m e n a . James r e m e m b e r e d that one d r e a m h a d " a cockney a t m o s p h e r e " b u t " t h e other two w e r e A m e r i c a n . " O n e involved "trying on a coat"; " t h e other w a s a sort of n i g h t m a r e a n d h a d to d o w i t h soldiers." As d u r i n g h i s Walpurgis Nacht, James a t t e m p t e d to f i n d t h e i n n e r c o n n e c t i o n b e t w e e n dreams or trance elements: Each [dream] had a wholly distinct emotional atmosphere that made its individuality discontinuous with that of the others. And yet, in a moment, as the three dreams alternately telescoped into and out of each other, and I seemed to myself to have been their common dreamer, they seemed quite as distinctly not to have been dreamed in succession, in that one sleep. When, then? . . . I could no longer

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tell: one was as close to me as the other, and I seemed thus to belong to three different dream systems at once, no one of which would connect itself either with the others or with my waking life. I began to feel curiously confused and scared. . . . Presently cold shivers of dread ran over me: am I getting into other people's dreams? Is this a "telepathic" experience? Or an invasion of double (or treble) personality? Or is it a thrombus in a cortical artery? and the beginning of a general mental "confusion" and disorientation which is going on to develop who knows how far? 35 James's description of his disconnected and yet connected dreams had a curious historical echo. The fear, perhaps even terror, he sensed over the identity problem in the dreams seemed to reverberate with the same anxiety that had surfaced when he had momentarily confused himself with the epileptic in the Worcester mental hospital nearly forty years earlier. Both young and old James faced the obiliteration of self. "Decidedly I was losing hold of my 'self,' and making acquaintance with a quality of mental distress that I had never known before, its nearest analogue being the sinking giddy anxiety that one may have when, in the woods, one discovers that one is really 'lost.'" James had, in fact, been lost in the Adirondack woods in the summer of 1899, the year following his Walpurgis Nacht experience; but the sense of being lost was the sense of losing self, being abandoned by one's personal identity. "All was diffusion from a centre, and foothold swept away, the brace itself disintegrating all the faster as one needed its support more direly." James feared that the collapse of his identity might continue, even deepen in his next dream. " M y teeth chattered at the thought," he admitted. But he conquered his fear. He checked his watch and noticed it was "half-past twelve! Midnight." This simple fact "gave me another reflective idea." James was a heavy sleeper, he very seldom awakened from a midnight dream, so he would normally have no memory of them. His sleep had been very heavy when he awoke and that was the clue. "Dream states carry dream memories—why may not the two succedaneous dreams . . . be memories of twelve o'clock dreams of previous

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nights, swept in, along with the just-fading dream, into the just-waking system of memory?" "Why," James asked, "may I not be tapping, in a way precluded by my ordinary habit of life, the midnight stratum of my past experiences?" Now he "felt . . . as if I were in full possession of my anima rationalis." 36 He enjoyed another creative period after the dream experience. James composed the collected essays, which some believe to be his most important philosophical statement. 37 In the perspective of his continuing creative life the significant pattern was again the blending of psychic experience with confused identity, loss of self, with intellectual insight. James depended on these psychic shocks, revelations, and dreams. The three most notable, the ones he chose to record—the Worcester asylum episode, the Walpurgis Nacht, and the 1906 midnight dreams—illustrated the lifelong connection between expanding the boundaries of consciousness far enough to let new insights in, but not far enough to lose himself in pathological difficulties. James stayed sane. Fascination with psychic experience and his quarrel with "scientific" psychology should not obscure James's masterful strategy to stay poised between science and art, between the mystically appealing unbounded unconscious and the hazards of falling into its abyss. James had in fact always kept a moral lid on the unconscious. He had struggled with the moral question during the late-1860s crisis: "Shall I frankly throw the moral business overboard, as one unsuited to my innate aptitudes, or shall I follow it, and it alone, making everything else merely the stuff for it?" 38 The answer to that question was the famous Renouvierian free will, "The sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other presumably immoral thoughts." 39 James's moralism was an antidote to "the dream conception, 'Maya,' the abyss of horrors" and the anxiety that it "would in spite of everything grasp my imagination and imperial [sic] my reason." 40 James was fighting the unconscious at the same time as it had actually grasped his imagination. A tension had been established in the boundaries of

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consciousness that James never relinquished. And it was one that enabled him both to be creative and to save himself. Moreover, the tension allowed him to seek out an American unconscious, an American identity that moved beyond the comparatively colorless psychologies of his contemporaries. There was a symbolic poverty in the orthodox science of Münsterberg, Titchener, and Cattell. They were unable to present the dramatic and historically appealing tension that James's version of the unconscious presented. The Principles of Psychology offered readers a scientific version of the same moral struggle James had recorded in his diary. Here the battle was waged on neurasthentic ground. James used nerves as a biological prop to provide a new, scientifically relevant setting for the old question of whether to give in or fight back. The nerves and brain worked in tandem to fashion the emotional-intellectual resources that provided the volitional power for action and choice. "All nervous centers," James observed, "have . . . one essential function, that of 'intelligent' action. They feel, prefer one thing to another, and have 'ends'." 4 1 Individuals with nervous debilitation could never effectively develop the will to act because will issued from nervous activity: "There is no more contemptible type of human character," James autobiographically declared, "than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly deed." 4 2 Science had discovered that nerves organized their responses to stimuli along frequently traveled affective "roads," "tracks," and "paths"— words James often used to describe the organizational routing of nerve activity. These determined patterns could paralyze the will at the same time as their activity made volition possible. The secret was to "make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy." For this task the right habits needed to be cultivated: "The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work." 4 3 But then rather than indulge in a discussion of neu-

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rosis in will-less, habitless individuals, James preferred to moralize: "Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like letting go of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again." 4 4 Clearly James's psychological science, i.e., his physiological knowledge of nerves and habit provided scientific armor for the continuing struggle with "the abyss of horrors." James continued to emphasize the conflict between the deep-seated American need to release and yet control mental life. 45 It was, after all, a theme deeply seated in his own experience, indeed, in his survival and creative contributions. In 1908 he wrote a small book, The Energies of Men, which discussed the advantages of psychic release. "Our organism has stored up reserves of energy that are ordinarily not called upon," he observed, "most of us continue living unnecessarily near our surface." 4 6 The mentally ill person was isolated from this reserve. "In some persons this sense of being cut off from their rightful resources is extreme, and we then get the formidable neurasthenic and psychoasthenic conditions, with life grown into one tissue of impossibilities." 47 And he again autobiographically lamented the "victims of a chronic sense of weakness, torpor, lethargy, fatigue, insufficiency, impossibility, unreality, and powerlessness of will." 4 8 The key to health was to engage the willpower to perform daily and creative tasks; one had to discover "more usual and useful ways of throwing stores of vital energies into gear." 49 These vital energies presented a problem in the boundaries of consciousness. "One part of our mind dams up—even DAMNS UP!— the other part." 5 0 We need, James concluded, "a topography of the limits of human power." 5 1 He was asking for a metapsychology that defined the relationship between the conscious and unconscious minds, but he was still looking at the unconscious in moral terms. James wanted to keep a moral structure in the unconscious. That is, his "science" approached the problem of the boundaries of consciousness as much as a moral question as a scientific one. 52 He was compelled to, because

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his scientific psychology was at bottom identity-preserving. And James's identity partook of the New England-American tradition that had placed moral barriers, in the form of the Puritan creed, between man and potential New World irrationalities. 53 Neither Münsterberg nor Titchener nor Cattell really related the development of their careers as scientific psychologists to the moral problem of the human mind. Of course, Münsterberg used psychology as a technique to achieve progressive goals, among which was public morality. But basically Münsterberg was interested in social control, not the individual conscious. Indeed, his psychology went to great lengths to expunge the will that James so insistently preserved. Titchener found the question of meaning outside scientific psychology; and morality was eminently a question of meaning. Cattell, like Münsterberg, wanted psychology to build a better America. Yet the manipulative character of mental testing, the quantitative answers to psychological mysteries, methodically worked toward narrowing the psychologist's task. If one could reduce mentality to mathematical decisions, questions of morality would automatically be solved. The crucial distinction between James and his colleagues lay in James's insistent effort to keep psychology within the American tradition. That tradition was in fact undergoing readjustments, between the relationship of science to religion and between the relationship of the conscious to the unconscious mind. In the historical background lay the moral impetus behind New England settlement, the didactic American example as the hope for humanity. When James encountered the unconscious in Dresden, when he confronted the "utter Americanism" of his Walpurgis Nacht, and when he awoke, startled, from his midnight dreams in California he met the dissembling qualities of turn-of-the-century New World experience. America itself was facing an identity crisis in the shifting reality of intellectual and social-economic revolution. James, as an uncommonly sensitive cultural barometer, found

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himself at psychic crossroads, in spiritual crisis, and at the boundary of sanity and insanity. He moved from conscious to unconscious experience, from rationality to irrationality, and back again. But these excursions were incorporated into not only a psychology but also an American statement, a New World technique for redefining an altered notion of mind. It was suggestive that although James traveled often to Europe after he turned decisively away from laboratory psychology, he became a much more aggressive spokesman for "American" as opposed to "European" values, particularly moral ones. 54 Perhaps James realized that his psychology had to be welded to larger cultural tendencies. Perhaps his psychological colleagues sensed that he had his destiny, they theirs, and that automatically meant a parting of the psychological ways. Whatever the case, we know that Jamesian psychology, his notion not only of the "stream of consciousness" but also of an unconscious sea from which creative energies could be tapped, had great historical relevance. By pushing back the boundaries of consciousness, James kept nature contingent in an age that seemed bent on placing distance between the raw energies of mind and their controlled utilization. Münsterberg and Cattell best represented this trend. James's mind appeared natural, his efforts to keep the study of mind out of the laboratory, indeed, out of the university testified to his naturalism. A few months before his death, he gave a final judgment on psychic research. "Out of my experience," he noted, "one fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that is this, that we with our lives are like islands in the sea or like trees in the forest." "There is a continuum of cosmic consciousness . . . into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir." 55 This natural mind, however, did not extend the boundaries of consciousness beyond the moral fence. James's psychological explorations, his psychological science—from the 1860s to his death—retained scruples. The twists and turns between art, science, religion, and philosophy never left the moral road, never vacated the natural garden. There was

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a correspondence between personal identity and American identity, between James's creative posture and American expectations. And this was a key to his fame and lasting reputation. But it was also something that his psychological colleagues could not duplicate, as well as something "psychic" that science would ignore.

Conclusion: The Consequences of Compromising Experience, I believe, has . . . no inner duplicity; and the separation of it into consciousness and content comes, not by way of subtraction but by way of addition. William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism

WILLIAM JAMES REFLECTED a renaissance in American intellectual life, particularly in science and philosophy. He also participated in the advancing professionalism that marked the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American university. He joined with others who rejected the quasi-religious curriculum that had previously dominated higher education. A professionally conscious scientific psychology arose simultaneously with the decline of moral and faculty psychology; mental explanations were replaced with experimental methodology, the techniques for measuring consciousness. Scientific positivism, a laboratory perspective, was making the older mental models unacceptable. Just as the bureaucratic corporation displaced the individualistic entrepreneur, so too

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the new scientific professions jettisoned a less calibrated understanding of mind. An interesting ambivalence appeared in the forming modernity. The rising professions engendered a scientific atmosphere, but there was uneasiness over the decline of a more personal, morally aware world. James's Janus countenance looked both ways; he bridged shifting attitudes in the emerging scientific and professionally conscious context. He tried vigorously to save the individualistic-moralistic perspective within the confines of scientific psychology. But just as zealously he fashioned a functional mind that undermined the older one he attempted to salvage. James can be interpreted as a psychologist of moral individualism or as a prototype for behavioral psychology. He was in fact both. Few Americans have so singularly resisted the impulses that they helped create. James struggled through the undulating national experience in a telling way: immersed in the perplexity of the future undoing the past, his life and work provided a glimpse into the tension at the center of America's transitional moment. James's career, psychology, and world-view represented a significant American compromise in the face of widespread indecision about the appropriate society and science. For rather than embrace the scientific fanaticism that a full-fledged commitment to the future required, or grasp the romanticism that total commitment to preserving the past demanded, James hedged. He opted for safer probabilities, chose a hazier scientific future and a less identifiable past. In the act of compromise he expressed an American mood, projected an American defense against science, while becoming that science. Unlike Münsterberg and Titchener, James never saw a problem in the American culture that permanently alienated him. Just as America moved its agrarian past into an urbanindustrial future, so did James transport artistic creativity into professional science. He was unable to pursue the relatively unfettered life of a painter after the early 1860s. But the transit to another vocation, another intellectual climate, another era,

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put great strain on his psyche. The strains that had perpetuated his spiritual crisis in the 1860s had come dangerously close to overwhelming him. In crisis James suffered vocational indecision exacerbated by the elder James's own irresolution; but unlike his father, William found a historical setting, a professional arena that provided a solution. He transfomed a desire to paint into a desire to psychologize, transformed art into science as he exchanged the mood of one era for another. His artistic impulse passed from one medium to another, from one time to another. The professional university, the institutional scene of passage, was also the intellectual field of great expectations—a place of scientific renaissance. James achieved reputation as well as a kind of nonmaterial exhilaration as America's first scientific professional psychologist. He found the inner equilibrium and spiritual optimism at Harvard that he could not find in a "real" world devoid of professional opportunity. There James could participate in the wonderful discoveries that transformed psychology into an American science. He performed a professional service, became a famous American. James, however, was not comfortable with the displacement of an artistic temperament into science. The acclaim given The Principles of Psychology as the new American psychology was not sufficient reinforcement to continue the scientific pose. James passed over into the professional world, became disenchanted, and changed scenes. His expectations were only temporarily fulfilled, restlessness returned. A career as a professional psychologist no longer served to absorb the artistic urges. Other psychologists refined what James had begun. Various psychologies carried the scientific component of Jamesian psychology to diverse conclusions. James did not try to erase his scientific contribution. Growing disillusionment with experimental psychology and professional involvement never eclipsed his psychological legacy. He watched with parental pride as young contemporaries like Edward L. Thorndike, Adolf Meyer, and John Dewey refined and expanded his beginning. Nonetheless, he was ill at ease: profes-

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sional scientific psychology could not bury the artist. It was as if the creative compromise in the 1860s returned in the 1890s w h a t had been lost in accommodating art to psychology, offered u p w h a t was lost by reinstating the creative urge, his artistic root. James f o u n d another strategic opportunity to reshape the old tension, the struggle between art and science, between the past and the future, between his father and himself. The old vocational w o u n d had another expression. Other " w o u n d e d " Americans seemed to surround James in the 1890s. Insanity, neurasthenia, and telepathy presented not simply aberration but possibility. The contemplation of sculpture and romantic literature in Dresden had presented the opportunity to project art into science in the 1860s. Widespread madness, nervousness, and clairvoyance three decades later provided a fascinating field in w h i c h to apply science to art. James compromised one urge to fashion a scientific psychology, and t h e n his science accommodated the mental underworld. James was no more able to apply a dogmatic science to psychic p h e n o m e n a than he was able totally to submerge art in the science of The Principles of Psychology. In the 1890s James applied a self-consciously "scientific" psychological perspective to the boundaries of consciousness, to pathological mentality. The Varieties of Religious Experience tried to shed light on "sick souls." James explored variations of the inner turmoil that possessed him in the 1860s and still bothered him thirty years later. But n o w he could do it from the safety of a science that had helped resolve his earlier trauma, and from the professional stature, despite the criticism, that made h i m popular. James could view aberration, even the disguised autobiographical account of his 1860s crisis, from the protective professional perch. The Varieties of Religious Experience was as m u c h a statement of h o w science could accommodate misshapen artistic and mystical urges as The Principles of Psychology was art compromising with science. James w o u l d not, however, fashion after 1890 a science of mental irregularities. To have done so w o u l d have meant

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courting the "Maya," the abyss, and jeopardizing the bargain he had struck between art and science, between the idealism of his father and the materialism of the emerging world, between moral individualism and amoral professionalism. James preferred to examine the awful, the unchecked, the overcommitted, and the unmentionable from a descriptive rather than an explanatory observatory. There he could pragmatically explore the excesses of both impulse and science without binding himself to either. To have committed himself to one or the other would have meant escape from the paradoxical quality of his life. Moreover, it would have meant jeopardizing the balance between expressing himself in creative drive and losing himself, his identity, in that drive. For all their dissimilarity, Münsterberg and Titchener shared one fundamental and—from the Jamesian viewpoint— fatal characteristic: neither had grasped the essential American mood. They had not pursued intellectual compromise. For all of Münsterberg's practical psychology, for all the use-oriented behaviorism, he was an intractable idealist. Such bullheadedness encouraged the strains that preceded an early death, and almost certainly blocked successful accommodation to American culture. Münsterberg could not live with the incongruity, the paradox, and the eclecticism of the New World. There was too much disorder, conjuring, and mysticism. His mentor James had sacrificed American science to these American weaknesses. Ostensibly working for professional psychology and progressive ideals, James was really an occultist who championed a shoddy relativism. Münsterberg was taken in before he had found out; and when he did, knowledge of his adopted culture did not lead to calm understanding. Instead he participated in a popularization of an applied psychology that mocked scientific hopes. By trying to educate the American public to its deficiences he only ensnarled himself further in the public follies he deplored. Titchener remained an experimental psychologist, in his mind virtually the only American experimentalist. Ensconced in a psychological fortress at Cornell he resisted moving to-

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ward or away from anything that did not fit his scientific model. A unique introspective vision was internalized, elaborated, and never abandoned. The shifting American psychological sands, the "James tide" that Titchener feared, the Münsterbergian and Cattellian professional grandstanding, left him disappointed and yet somehow untouched. Titchener was a scientific orphan, a psychological giant who refused to get in step with an increasingly functional and performance-minded American psychology. James's characterization of Titchener as "a barbarian" in his science simply meant that Titchener was a scientist, interested only in identifying and defining the elements of consciousness and unconcerned about application or unconscious phenomena. Only Cattell incorporated, if only partially, James's view. By embracing the functional and individualistic approach to mind, by identifying himself with pragmatism, he too shared the New World scientific mood. Cattell also marched in full step with the organizational dimension of American science; he understood and grasped professional power. While James eschewed both mathematical science and professional politics, Cattell welcomed both. He became, as Boring saw, a more typical American psychologist than even James. James had more powerful cultural resonance, he expressed a backwardlooking as well as forward-looking Americanism, and his psychology was far more catalytic. But Cattell had the most timely science and the most auspicious politics. In fact all three of James's psychological contemporaries represented a tough-minded "modernity" rooted in the new scientific positivism. Their "objective" experimentalism and applied psychologies would prove much more representative of twentieth-century professionalism than James's literary functionalism and forays into telepathy. Despite historical importance James has very little to say to professional psychologists now. 1 But James's cultural significance survived his science. Perhaps Americans did not want a scientific psychology. They seemed to prefer one that was basically mysterious and

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susceptible to a variety of interpretations and changeable images. James was mood, mystery, and movement. Jamesian psychology simulated the New World spirit of transformation, of constantly shifting scenes. A dry positivism checked the wandering imaginative and enigmatic characteristics of American experience. After all, Americans had romantically refused to be "held" in traditional class structure, and they methodically overturned "settled" patterns of community life. James's inability to settle in science, his identification of the static with the unscientific, said more about American norms than about science. Titchener's unbending experimentalism was a particularly offensive reminder of scientific indifference. Was science to incorporate cultural values? Did science have continually to reflect prevailing cultural winds to be real? Or, did such relevance destroy the very conditions, i.e., the laboratory isolation, that made scientific objectivity possible? Since the new psychology emerged when culture itself was as problematic as the mind, these questions were especially pressing. James sensed that an objective psychology seemed culturally misplaced. Scientifically considered it discounted dramatic transformation and metaphoric expression. There was a blindness, an absence of psychological visualization in the straight scientific path that took the romance out of science and took American culture away from science. Psychological science, however, would not merely build on the Jamesian beginning; it erected an edifice on the reductive objectivity of a James B. Watson and a B. F. Skinner. The "art" in the human mind would not remain, as it did in James, inseparable from the science. By its very nature, Jamesian psychology could not be free from romance: little in it could be stated quantitatively or reduced to unquestionable clarity. Münsterberg, Titchener, and Cattell sensed the haze, the intellectual mist, the calculated effluvium in James. How could the founder of American scientific psychology become president of the London Society for Psychic Research? Their

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quarrels with James did not sound a general cultural alarm, but only recorded his descent out of science. Here was William James with his large reputation, his impact on students, upholding the fuzzy claims of telepathy; he championed the loss of distinction between the natural and the spiritual world. James was saying what could be seen could no longer be identified. He was blurring the line between what was normal and what was bizarre. There was, he said, no clear boundary between what was science and what was not. Jamesian psychology diminished scientific distances and left the mind with impressionistic immediate experience. James, as his psychic experience in the Adirondack^ in 1898 seemed to show, was returning psychology to nature, giving the New World back its original freshness, mystery, and shapelessness. The illusive quality in Jamesian thinking, the ability to sidestep predicaments, both psychological and metaphysical, typified the shifting transparency of his setting and time. He offered an emerging profession The Principles of Psychology, a mental model dependent on the unsettling propositions of evolutionary functionalism and dynamic metaphors like "the stream of consciousness," or "specious present," rather than on static, tangible "principles" that the title seemed to promise. Time after time in The Principles authorities were introduced, contributions noted, criticized, incorporated, or discarded. Both nonprofessional and professional psychologies were reviewed, the established mental architecture excised and then recast, a new mind suggested but not erected. The language of transformation emerged; the words forged a remarkable psychological pictorial. The word in James was presented with the science and ultimately stood in its place. Science was presented as the verbal process of describing mental movement rather than essentially a task of eliminating facade and identifying reality. No mental "facts" replaced the sine qua non of psychological flux and flow, even though the data appeared time and time again. Like the eyes the mind-cure doctress could not fix, James's psychology refused to rest. "Science" was outside the timeliness, the expression, that James

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presented. Science was portrayed as transformation, as a shape, not an element. James criticized "narrow" science from an art-turned-psychology perspective, one that caught and demolished anything dogmatically scientific in a net of kaleidoscopic language. Uncompromising science could not thrive in such a symbolic atmosphere. James's incessant wandering to Europe and back, his move from painting to science and on to telepathy and metaphysics were a biographical analogue to the texture of his thought. His career could not settle any more than his thinking could. He drifted through a series of poses. James projected his personality through crisis, career, and charisma. His persona was caught in the colorful language of his psychology, where the imagery produced a flowing psychological landscape that nonetheless preserved those indelible Americanisms, individualism and morality. At the same time he immersed those traditional qualities in the seemingly modern language of immediatism, contingency, and open-endedness and placed the whole package in the comfortable ambience of a generally conflict-free mental space. The result was a mind at once enduring and futuristic, one instinctively recognizing what was salvageable and what expendable. Just as James's psychology was rooted in physiology and proceeded to translate the mind as an essentially free and independent, forever unfixed shape; so too was James a loyal New Englander who wandered through careers and from place to place. Self-discovery and self-deception struggled against one another while they traveled in the same psyche. James appeared intellectually unattached, open, and fairminded, when at the center he was parochial, inescapably American; in short a superlative example of the native valuethreshold. Although a voyage of discovery, his psychology was also a confirmation of deep-seated American assumptions about place, past and era. Perhaps James did not see these contradictions—or at least consciously recognize them, for he was enormously sincere. 2 Nevertheless, when he approached frontiers that threatened ingrained national norms—like the

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boundaries of consciousness—he turned away, turned at precisely the point at w h i c h he w o u l d have had to p l u m b the sources of national and personal deception. His creative genius became as m u c h a quest for American identity, a New World vision, as an impartial search for truth. His unfixed countenance was a pose that enabled him to return to a f u n d a m e n t a l cultural authenticity. Where Münsterberg, Titchener, and Cattell looked for science in James they found suggestion; they f o u n d figurative language that hinted but did not explain, insights that often led off the scientific path, rather than showed. James had a voice in the development of scientific psychology but he could not be the science. His influence broke over the expanding New world science like a seductive melody that his three colleagues, in different but generally similar ways, tried to mute. But what was cacophony to science was h a r m o n y to the American presence that bridged the centuries. Americans listened to themselves in James and James listened to America in his psychology. James's American accommodations were expressed in several ways. He was a compromised artist. His artistic center, his urge to draw, had been creatively projected and transformed into psychological language. That language h a d incorporated the Darwinian view, recent physiological knowledge, as well as the n e w reaction-time psychology. The Principles of Psychology was eclectic science, but it nonetheless presented a functional m i n d and became an American scientific classic. James was also a compromised scientist. As Titchener perhaps best showed, James left introspective science for the emotionally appealing fog of psychic research. But t h e n to Titchener virtually all first-generation American psychologists, himself excepted, were compromised scientists, as they had refused to walk the straight-and-narrow psychological path. James, however, had a great reputation. A n d as the disputatious and abortive proposed Psychological Congress of 1913 showed, James was the only acceptable presidential candidate. He was the only suitable accommodation that incor-

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porated the contention-easing advantages of a worldwide scientific reputation with indisputable national credentials. Finally there was James's deeply held belief that experience did not yield any unalterable conflicts, any unshakable dualism: "Experience, I believe, has . . . no inner duplicity." 3 Each of his psychic crises or trance moments put the self in a vulnerable state, had made identity insecure in the face of the pathological, the mythological trance, the dream state. Here was the source of creative endeavor, but here was also blind irrationality opposing the integrated personality, the rational man. Here was inner duplicity, the unconscious against the conscious, the irrational against the rational. James recognized the tension and yet always avoided basing his psychological science or philosophy upon it. Indeed, the point was to construct a psychic or metaphysical space that eschewed boundaries between the rational and the irrational, between the mind and the body, between science and religion. Nothing in James was finalized except compromise itself. He would have preferred nothing finalized except openness. Yet it was an openness that saved the moral structure of consciousness, and preserved the self. These two kingpins of Americanism, morality and individuality, were the very ones, ironically, that his functional psychology worked to undermine. James's science attacked the New World values that his Americanism attempted to save. Here was the fault line in James's greatness, the duplicity in his contribution. His science pushed in one direction; his Americanism in another. He tried from the 1890s on to heal the breach. As he did, and as his psychological colleagues saw, he moved toward the boundless sea of psychic research, a psychological ocean that caught him up in a popular tide rather than a scientific one. So science went its way and James went his. He became a symbolic American, a representative intellect. His compromising preserved the American conviction that science, the self, and moral decisions were intertwined, never fundament a l opposed. Hence, James could close The Principles of Psy-

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chology with a sentence riddled with irony and yet expressive of the futility of seeking a scientific explanation of mind. "The more sincerely one seeks to trace the actual course of psychogenesis, the steps by which as a race we may have come by the mental attributes we possess, the more clearly one perceives 'the slowly gathering twilight close in utter night.'" 4

Notes Preface

1. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, emphasizes the pragmatic contribution; Bruce Wilshire and John Wild have found phenomenological philosophy in William fames and Phenomenology and The Radical Empiricism of William fames, respectively. For the evolutionary prespective see Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, pp. 1 2 3 - 1 4 2 ; Paul Boiler, American Thought in Transition, pp. 1 2 3 - 1 4 7 ; Cynthia Eagle Russett, Darwin in America, pp. 6 8 - 7 8 ; and Robert C. Bannister, Social Darwinism. 2. Perhaps the first to use James as a "symbolic" intellect was Donald Meyer, who saw him as a sophisticated representative of a galaxy of American optimists in The Positive Thinkers, pp. 2 9 - 3 1 , 8 3 - 8 9 , 2 1 2 - 2 1 9 , 3 1 7 - 3 2 2 . William Appleman Williams underscored James's laissez faire thinking in The Contours o/American History, pp. 3 4 1 - 3 4 2 . James B. Gilbert has recently explored James as a representative of America's profound confrontation with the "crisis of work" during late nineteenth-century industrial expansion: see Work Without Salvation, pp. 1 8 0 - 2 1 1 . 3. See, for instance, Mary D. Fumer, Advocacy and Objectivity. James is specifically placed in the emerging professional context by Burton Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism, pp. 3 1 8 - 3 2 1 ; and Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy, pp. 2 3 3 - 2 5 8 . 4. The anxiety theme has become so fashionable to recent scholarship that any attempt to list the outstanding examples would be unsatisfactory. Interestingly, however, each of the above-noted studies depicting James's symbolic quality and professional dimension emphasize cultural strain. See in particular Meyer, Williams, Gilbert, and Bledstein. 5. "Compromised" has a pejorative ring. It suggests surrender or concession, even weakness of character. But, if changed from past to present tense, it also means coming to mutual agreement. Here is the admirable quality of sacrificing selfish objectives for a social solution. In fact the word expresses the ambivalence about human motivation and behavior that arises in crisis and conflict. James's scientific psychological colleagues thought he had compromised scientific standards. In that sense the pejorative has historical authenticity. But James also engaged in psychic and intellectual compromising necessary for the projection of his genius and his role as a representative

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American intellect. These compromises were both personally and socially useful; compromise could be creatively productive. See Gordon W. Allport, "The Productive Paradoxes of William James."

1. The Shifting Moment

1. Gilbert has a perceptive account of James's doubleness in Work Without Salvation, pp. 1 8 0 - 2 1 1 . 2. The changing social and ethnic scene in the Boston area is described by Roderick A. Bushee, "The Growth of the Population of Boston"; Bainbridge Bunting, Hdiises of Boston's Back Bay, especially pp. 1 - 6 1 ; Stephan Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians; and Walter Muir Whitehill, Boston. 3. Barbara Miller Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants, p. 45. 4. For the limits of James's egalitarianism see George R. Garrison and Edward H. Madden, "William James Warts and All." For a view emphasizing his ethnic compassion see Larry C. Miller, "William James and Twentieth-Century Ethnic Thought." 5. There is a sizable literature on mental disorder in James's era. Interesting studies include David Rothman, The Discovery of the Asyl um; Gail Thain Parker, Mind Cure in New England; R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows; John Chynowth Burnham, Psychoanalysis and American Medicine; and Nathan Hale, Jr., Freud and the Americans. 6. George M. Beard, American Nervousness and Sexual Neurasthenia; S. Weir Mitchell, Wear and Tear and Fat and Blood. Also Charles E. Rosenberg, " T h e Place of George M. Beard in Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry." 7. John S. Haller and Robin M. Haller, The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America; Francis G. Gosling, "American Nervousness"; and John O. King, "The Ascetic Self." 8. See William James, The Energies of Men. 9. Haller and Haller, The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America, p. 42. 10. Perry Miller, Bernard Bailyn, and Gordon Wood have explored the self-diagnostic tendency: see The New England Mind; From Colony to Province, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, and The Creation of the American Republic, respectively. 11. Titchener and Cattell, for instance, both unsuccessfully tried to convince James that telepathy had no role to play in psychological science (see chapters 4 and 5). James was more cautious about admitting the unconscious into psychological theory before 1890 than after: see Howard Shevrin and Scott Dickman, "The Psychological Unconscious," particularly p. 421. 12. For faculty psychology see R. W. Rieber, "The Americanization of Psychology Before William James," in Rieber and K. Salzinger, eds., Psychology: Theoretical and Historical Perspective pp. 1 0 3 - 1 2 3 . Also useful for general intellectual atmosphere in the American University before James is Irving Bartlett, The American Mind in the Mid-nineteenth Century, especially p. 531. 13. Gardner Murphy and Robert O. Ballou, William fames on Psychical Research, and Moore, In Search of White Crows. 14. James R. Angell, "The Influence of Darwin on Psychology," and Edwin G. Boring, "The Influence of Evolutionary Theory Upon American Psychological Thought," in Stow Persons, ed., Evolutionary Thought in America, pp. 2 6 7 - 2 9 8 .

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15. For a sampling of Helmholtz's publications, including the conservation of energy paper, see Russell Kahl, ed., Selected Writings of Hermann von Helmholtz. Also useful is Everett Mendelsohn, "Physical Models and Physiological Concepts," and David Galaty, "The Philosophical Basis of Mid-Nineteenth Century German Reductionism." Reaction-time psychology—or "psychophysics" as it was often called— is discussed by S. S. Stevens, "On the Psychophysical Law." A good general discussion of developing mid- and late-nineteenth-century scientific methodology and its reaction to psychology is in Henryk Misiak, History of Psychology, pp. 4 6 - 6 2 . 16. See, for instance, the chapters on "Attention," "Conception," "Discrimination and Comparison," "Association," and "The Perception of Time" in William James, The Principles of Psychology, 1:402-642. 17. There is a vast literature on intellectual and scientific change in the nineteenth century. Outstanding examples include John Theodore Merz, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century; Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason; Erik Norenskiold, The History of Biology; William R. Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century; and Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious. 18. See Meyer, The Positive Thinkers, pp. 3 1 5 - 3 2 4 ; and Gilbert, Work Without Salvation, pp. 1 8 0 - 2 1 1 . 19. There has recently been something of a Wundt revival, with a flurry of favorable scholarship. See, for example, Wolfgang G. Bringmann et al., "Wilhelm Wundt 1 8 3 2 - 1 9 2 0 " ; Arthur L. Blumenthal, " A Reappraisal of Wilhelm Wundt"; David E. Leary, "Wundt and After"; Kurt Danziger, "The History of Introspection Reconsidered"; and R. W. Rieber, ed., Wilhelm Wundt and the Making of a Scientific Psychology. 20. Hall described the Harvard Laboratory under James as a "tiny room under the stairway of Agassiz Museum . . . with a metronome, a device for whirling a frog, a horopter chart, and one or two bits of apparatus" (quoted in A. A. Roback, History of American Psychology, p. 129). See also Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall, pp. 6 2 - 6 6 ; and Robert S. Harper, "That Early Laboratory of William James'." Typescript in Harvard Archives, Harvard University. 21. James McKeen Cattell, "Early Psychological Laboratories"; C. R. Garvey, "List of American Psychological Laboratories." For a very early contemporary description see the set of notes in the American Journal of Psychology (1980), 3 : 2 7 5 - 2 8 6 . 22. Wayne Dennis and Edwin G. Boring, "The Founding of the A.P.A."; Samuel W. Fernberger, " T h e American Psychological Association." The early Proceedings for the A.P.A. were recently reprinted in the American Psychologist (1973), 2 8 : 2 7 7 - 2 9 2 . 23. Boring, "Masters and Pupils Among the American Psychologists." Also see Ray Over, "The Durability of Scientific Reputation," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, (1982), 1 8 : 5 3 - 6 1 . 24. For Ladd see Eugene S. Mills, George Trumbull Ladd. 25. For example, Margaret Floy Washburn, who studied with both Titchener and Cattell, said that nonetheless, "the influence of James's Principles was strong." Although Washburn disapproved of his emphasis on the occult, she thought his descriptive analytical approach superior to the Wundtian "compounding" synthetic one. (See Carl Murchison, History of Psychology in Autobiography, 1:339-340.) Cattell's student Robert S. Woodworth remembered, "I possessed myself of James's Principles soon after its publication and was much stimulated by it" (ibid., p. 364). And James Rowland Angell, who had studied with a systematic John Dewey before entering Har-

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1. The Shifting Moment

vard graduate school, said he was "swept off my feet" after "I encountered the Principles." Angell recalled that "To read Wundt . . . after a session with James, was an anticlimax which disturbed one's equilibrium. . . . The complete lack in James of anything which could be recognized as system was highly disturbing" (ibid., 3:22). 26. Quoted in Arthur L. Blumenthal, Language and Psychology, p. 238. 27. Philosophers did not always believe that James's primary contribution came in metaphysics. See, for example, Bertrand Russell's comment as quoted in Gay Wilson Allen, William fames, p. 494. Neither did James's colleague George Santayana: see Character and Opinion in the United States, pp. 6 4 - 9 6 . 28. Hall, in American Journal of Psychology (1891), 3:585.

2. The Compromised Artist

1. This conclusion was a major assumption of the first and still definitive work on James, Perry's The Thought and Character of William James. Perry was looking for the philosopher in James. In two volumes and 721 pages he arranged a multitude of correspondence, interspersed with often perceptive interpretation; interpretation clearly aimed at illustrating the development of the philosopher James. All of James's early career vacillation, his psychology, his forays into religion and psychology, led to the final original philosophy. As Perry remarked in the foreword, "In the last and most productive period of his life [1906-1910] James made a sustained effort to produce a metaphysics and to give a systematic form to his philosophical thinking." All else was preparatory to the publication of Pragmatism, Essays in Radical Empiricism, and A Pluralistic Universe. 2. The young William James is well covered in Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 1 - 3 3 2 ; and in Allen, William James, 3 - 1 7 0 . 3. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 1 5 7 - 1 5 8 . It has recently been suggested that James was frightened by an image of masturbatory insanity. Masturbation was commonly considered to be a cause of insanity in the nineteenth century. His "that shape am I" imagery was almost a perfect match for the French painter Jean Etienne Dominique Esquirol's plate, Des maladies mentales considöröes sous les rapports mddical, hygi^nique et mädico-legal; see Sander L. Gilman, "Seeing the Insane." 4. There was a curious autobiographical ring to The Varieties of Religious Experience in which James not only related the terror-provoking incident, but also a general interest in what separated the pathological from the normal. In the late 1890s James was again suffering severe neurasthenia, and had experienced another spiritual awakening (see The Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 1 2 7 - 1 6 5 , and chapter 7). 5. William James, Diary, April 20, 1870, WJP. 6. The major exception was The Varieties of Religious Experience. 7. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 1:323. 8. Perry began teaching philosophy at Harvard in 1902, interestingly just at the time that he believed James's philosophical writing came to maturity. He was a pallbearer at his mentor's funeral in 1910. 9. Erik Erikson remarked that the climax of career crisis in "a young man's life may be reached when he half-realizes that he is fatally over-committed to what he is not" (Young Man Luther, p. 43).

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179

10. Cushing Strout, "William James and the Twice Born Sick Soul." 11. Cushing Strout, "The Pluralistic Identity of William James," also "The Unfinished Arch." 12. S. P. Fullinwider, "William James's Spiritual Crisis." Also note Gilman, "Seeing the Insane," especially pp. 8 8 1 - 8 8 4 . 13. Gay Wilson Allen's 1967 biography was the first full life of James since Perry. Allen was more concerned with William's continuing neurasthenia and domestic relationships than with the substance of his philosophy. Other efforts to reassess the significance of his mental and physical health include King, "The Ascetic Self," especially pp. 3 9 7 - 4 7 3 ; Howard M. Feinstein, "Fathers and Sons;" and Gilman, "Seeing the Insane," especially pp. 8 8 1 - 8 8 4 . The traditional view, however—that of seeing James as essentially a philosopher—has not necessarily approved of the recent emphasis on James's health. Morton White wrote a devastating review of Allen's biography in which he warned against psychologizing philosophical thinking. White maintained that Allen avoided or muddled James's philosophical complexities (see Pragmatism and the American Mind, pp. 31-40). For White's view of James's place in the American philosophical tradition see his Science and Sentiment in America, pp. 1 7 0 - 2 1 6 . 14. Donald Meyer depicts James as a pivotal American intellectual who espoused the regeneration themes that occupied many Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. James sought to keep the will and fortitude of the Puritan heritage and yet find contemporary release and self-expression. Meyer does not call James a thinking man's Horatio Alger; he does, however, correctly see that his emphasis on will and self-deliverance put him in sympathy with the "healthy-mindedness" of the liberal Protestant tradition. Yet James also presented an older Western Protestant theme, the enduring tension between despair and regeneration, between sick-minded and healthy-minded Protestantism. See Meyer, The Positive Thinkers, pp. 1 3 - 1 7 , 3 1 5 - 3 2 4 ; also Parker, Mind Cure in New England, pp. 1 - 2 1 , 5 1 - 6 8 . 15. John J. Chapman, "William James," in The Selected Writings of John J. Chapman, Jacques Barzun, ed., p. 203. Feinstein, Fathers and Sons, pp. 1 5 4 - 2 3 3 . 16. There was a prolonged litigation over the will, and although Henry's father died in 1832, he did not receive a substantial amount until 1846. The traditional account has Henry inheriting, without strain, a life of ease (see Austin Warren, The Elder Henry James, p. 21). There was contention between the children, and a real question as to whether Henry would get any money. His father had specified to trustees that in order to be compensated Henry would have to engage in a productive life (see Feinstein pp. 5 8 - 6 2 ) . 17. Henry charged William with materialism, but William fought back and argued that Henry had embraced pantheism. In another sense it was an argument that pitted a theological metaphysics against a scientific one. In still another it was William's struggle to establish vocational independence (Feinstein, pp. 3 9 5 - 4 0 6 ) . Henry once remarked that William was "much dearer to my heart for his moral worth than for his intellectual" (quoted in Jean Strouse, Alice fames, p. 57). 18. Feinstein points out that Perry ignored William's comment to President Charles Eliot, his first teacher at Harvard, that his illness began when he abandoned painting for science (p. 227). See Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 1:207.

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19. William's closeness to Hunt threatened to drive a wedge between father and son. For an interesting discussion of William's apprenticeship with Hunt as well as the growing pressure from Henry to abandon painting, see Feinstein, pp. 1 8 8 - 2 3 3 . Henry suffered fainting spells for which William may have felt responsible as long as he continued to pursue art. See also Feinstein, "An Application of the Concept of Identification," p. 147. 20. Feinstein, "Fathers and Sons," p. 411. 21. Ibid., p. 464. 22. Feinstein does not argue that William did not have metaphysical or scientific capacities. But he presents a strong case for the theory that they represented compromises in dealing with the fundamental situation, i.e., that Henry blocked an artistic career (pp. 1 5 4 - 3 4 1 ) . Lewis Feuer maintains that a number of creative scientists who suffered psychic wounds awaited "strategic" moments to make their contributions: see Einstein and the Generations of Science, pp. 2 9 5 - 3 1 1 . 23. Although Feinstein shows that the Renouvier episode has clearly been overemphasized he did not exploit it to underscore William's artistic center (Feinstein, "Fathers and Sons" pp, 3 2 8 - 4 3 0 ) . 24. He also used art to record the loss of his cousin, Minnie Temple. James simply penned a crude gravestone, added a cross, and dated it March 9, 1870 (Diary, March 9, 1870, WJP). A number of pages have been torn from the diary. Whether or not they were drawings is conjectural, but their absence suggests personal significance. 25. Of course, medical students were encouraged to make notes more explicit with drawings. For an account of his Brazilian adventures, as well as a sampling of the drawings, see Carleton Sprague Smith, "William James in Brazil," in Charles Wagley et al., Four Papers Presented in the Institute for Brazilian Studies, pp. 9 7 - 1 3 8 . 26. The nineteenth century saw awakened interest in creating an American art. Ironically, this meant increasing contact with European salons and galleries: see Lillian B. Miller, Patrons and Patriotism; Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society; and Neil J. Meredith, Toward a National Taste. Cattell, however, unlike James, was to make no emotional-intellectual projection of artistic sensibilities into creative endeavor. Where art was the catalyst for creativity in James, it was emotional appreciation only for Cattell: see Michael M. Sokal, ed., An Education in Psychology, pp. 28-29. 27. Diary, April 10, 1868, WJP. 28. Ibid., April 11, 1868. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., April 13, 1868. 31. Ibid., April 14, 1868. 32. James, The Principles of Psychology, 1:225. 33. Ibid., 1:239. 34. For the movement of art from the representative and visual to the mental, from the eye to the mind, see H. Wayne Morgan's excellent discussion of American modernism in New Muses, pp. 1 4 5 - 1 8 2 . 35. Diary, April 1 8 , 1 8 6 8 , WJP. It was noteworthy that during this period William corresponded with his brother, Henry, about aesthetic questions. See Perry, The Thought and Characterof William James, 1 : 2 6 0 - 2 7 3 . Perry saw that "James's aesthetic experience was fused with the problem of his health." But he did not see this moment

3. The German Connection: Münsterberg

181

as a critical intellectual awakening: beauty was "a refuge from too much thinking" (Ibid., 1:273). 36. Diary, April 27, 1868, WJP. 37. Ibid., May 1, 1868. 38. Ibid., May 22, 1868. 39. Ibid., February 1, 1870. 40. Ibid., April 4, 1873. James's reference to "Maya" was close to the imagery of terror he disguised autobiographically some thirty years later in The Varieties of Religious Experience as a "Peruvian mummy." 41. Diary, April 4, 1873. 42. Otto Rank, Art and the Artist pp. 3 6 5 - 3 9 2 , especially 387. Of course "art" is not supposed to be only creative and "science" only derivative. Rather there was an art-to-science creative continuum in James; and the continuum was characterized by tension, compromise and transformation.

3. The German Connection: James and Hugo Münsterberg

1. Conversation between Harold Burt and Sidney Pressey, November 26, 1966, Arps Hall, Ohio State University. Interview by John A. Popplestone, Tape, Archives of American Psychology, Akron University, Akron, Ohio. The graduate assistant was Harold Burt. 2. See Phyllis Keller, States of Belonging, pp. 1 9 - 2 0 . 3. We now have an excellent biography in Matthew Hale Jr.'s Human Science and Social Order. See also Hale's "Psychology and the Social Order: An Intellectual Biography of Hugo Münsterberg"; and Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy, pp. 1 9 6 - 2 1 4 . For the James-Münsterberg relationship Perry is still valuable: The Thought and Character of William fames, 2 : 1 3 8 - 1 5 4 . Margaret Münsterberg's Hugo Münsterberg is a daughter's perspective. 4. Matthew Hale, Human Science and Social Order, pp. 1 1 - 2 5 . 5. The death of Hugo's mother apparently pushed him toward a deeper involvement in aesthetics. His poems suggested self-engulfment, delusions of omnipotence conflicting with deep insecurity. His father counterbalanced a desire to plunge into art with a command to work. His father's death made the duty to work more dominant, yet he could never quite control the need to overcompensate through work and egotism for the loss of his mother. See Keller, States of Belonging, pp. 9 - 2 0 . 6. But James was less comfortable with a physiological view of the mind than Münsterberg. See Matthew Hale, Human Science and Social Order, pp. 3 9 - 4 0 . 7. Note Charles Thwing's, The American and the German Universities, pp. 4 0 43; and Thomas N. Bonner, American Doctors and German Universities, pp. 3 9 - 4 0 . 8. For an interesting if laudatory account of the Leipzig atmosphere, by an American Wundtian who was critical of James because he had escaped Leipzig training, see Charles H. Judd's recollection in Murchison, A History of Psychology in Autobiography, 2 : 2 1 3 - 2 2 1 . See also "In Memory of Wilhelm Wundt, by His American Students," Psychological Review (1921), 2 8 : 1 5 2 - 1 5 8 . 9. James's first mention of Wundt was in 1867, when he was in Berlin. "It seems to me that perhaps the time has come for psychology to begin to be a science. . . . I

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am going on to study what is already known, and perhaps may be able to do some work at it. Helmholtz and a man named Wundt at Heidelberg are working at it, and 1 hope I live through the winter to go to them in the summer." William James to Thomas Ward, about November, 1867(?), as quoted in Henry James, ed., The Letters of William James, vol. 1. Illness, however, prevented him from studying with Wundt. And while ill James, as we have seen, created his own psychological perspective. 10. Wundt and James also agreed that there were legitimate differences between experimental and a more human socially oriented psychology; both argued for an intimate relationship between psychology and philosophy; and both had careers that moved from the experimental toward the philosophical. See Leary, "Wundt and After," p. 237; and Blumenthal, " A Reappraisal of Wilhelm Wundt," p. 1082. 11. See, for instance, the chapter on "Attention," in which although James admits that much of what passes for attention is automation, there is still voluntary attention. " T h e whole feeling of reality, the whole sting of excitement of our voluntary life depends on the sense that in it things are really being decided" (The Principles of Psychology 1:453). 12. This was the famous "James-Lange" theory of emotions first stated by James in "What Is an Emotion?" It later appeared in expanded form as chapter 25 in volume 2 of The Principles of Psychology. C. Lange was a Danish physiologist who published a similar view in 1887. 13. Murchison, A History of Psychology in Autobiography, 2:267. 14. Matthew Hale, Human Science and Social Order, pp. 2 2 - 2 3 . 15. G. Stanley Hall to William James, April 7, 1890, WJP. 16. Murchison, A History of Psychology in Autobiography, 1:31. 17. William James to Henry Holt, May 9, 1890, as quoted in Perry, The Thought and Character of William fames, 2:46. 18. The reviews of The Principles of Psychology in the early 1890s, as well as letters from psychological and philosophical friends, left little doubt about the epochal quality of James's publication. See Perry, The Thought and Character of William fames, 2 : 9 1 - 1 1 1 . To have plodded in a laboratory he never really enjoyed was unthinkable. In fact, from the early 1890s on James was famous. Yet he was still creative and needed another form of expression. 19. William James to Charles W. Eliot, February 21, 1895, CEP. 20. William James to Josiah Royce, June 22,1892, as quoted in Perry, The Thought and Character of William fames, 2:141. 21. A. A. Roback, William James, pp. 2 0 2 - 2 0 3 . 22. For German psychological laboratories in the 1890s see William O. Krohn, "Facilities in Experimental Psychology at the Various German Universities." For Münsterberg's antipathy toward Wundt and Müller see Matthew Hale, Human Science and Social Order, pp. 2 1 - 2 5 . 23. Until recently it was assumed that Münsterberg left Germany because Wundt was anti-Semitic and therefore blocked his professional advancement. Wolfgang G. Bringmann and William D. G. Balance have challenged that view: they unearthed a letter in which Wundt recommended Münsterberg for a position at the University of Zurich in 1896. But the new psychology at Zurich hardly had the prestige of that at Leipzig or Göttingen. See American Psychologist (1973), 2 8 : 8 4 9 - 8 5 0 . The standard view is in Roback, History of American Psychology, p. 194. 24. In this regard it is interesting that scholars were quick to point out how Mark

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Twain typified much of the Gilded Age ethic he often satirized. Twain's disastrous business ventures, his unchecked capitalistic impulses are contrasted with his sensitive social conscience. But James, who also depicted the ambivalence of Victorian transformation, is simply cast as "moral" or "individualistic." His professional stature, as opposed to Twain's freelance status, may have protected him from realistic character assessment. For motive in Twain see Van Wyck Brooks, The Ordeal of Mark Twain, and Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain. 25. Münsterberg was, perhaps, overburdended by genius. Edwin Boring described his mind as "too original" (A History of Experimental Psychology, p. 421). 26. Matthew Hale perceptively observes that Münsterberg combined a vision of unbounded American energy, its vaunted work ethic, with a German hope for historical progress. As early as 1893 Münsterberg expected America to develop toward a dynamic German Kultur: Human Science and Social Order, pp. 5 0 - 5 1 . 27. William James to Hugo Münsterberg, July 8, 1891, WJP. Müller's review was of Beiträge zur Experimentellen Psychologie, vols. 1 - 3 in Göttingsche Gelehrte Anzeigen (1891), 1:394, 396, 428. Müller had criticized the work for overhypothesizing and referred to it as "unbearably trivial" (see Matthew Hale, Human Science and Social Order, 24). 28. Hugo Münsterberg to William James, July 28, 1891, WJP. 29. William James to Hugo Münsterberg, February 21, 1892, WJP. 30. Hugo Münsterberg to William James, March 7, 1892, WJP. 31. William James to Hugo Münsterberg, August 27, 1892, WJP. 32. Ibid., May 15, 1892. 33. Ibid., August 24, 1892. 34. Ibid., May 3, 1892. 35. Ibid., February 21, 1891. 36. Ibid., May 15, 1892. 37. William James to Josiah Royce, June 22, 1892; quoted in Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2:141. 38. Matthew Hale, Human Science and Social Order, p. 50. 39. Hugo Münsterberg to William James, April 12, 1892, WJP. 40. William James to Hugo Münsterberg, August 24, 1892, WJP. 41. Ibid., April 1 9 , 1 8 9 2 . The Harvard Philosophy Department went to great trouble to see the Münsterbergs successfully settled. On one occasion, Selma, Hugo's wife, came upon a "great big rat in the butler's pantry." Josiah Royce promised to "procure a ferret to kill the rat." Mrs. Münsterberg remarked, "after he had explained to me that a ferret is an animal, I had secretly serious misgivings that a ferret and a rat in the house might be more trouble than having a rat alone." Fortunately for the peace of the Münsterberg household, Royce could not find anyone in Cambridge who knew how to obtain a ferret. " T h e choreman's efficiency did away with the rodent." Selma Münsterberg, "Old Memories," p. 333. 42. William James to Hugo Münsterberg, November 24, 1892, WJP. 43. Hugo Münsterberg to William James, September 14, 1894, WJP. 44. Ibid., January 24, 1892. 45. Ibid., June 8, 1896. 46. Hugo Münsterberg, American Traits from the Point of View of a German p. 87.

47. Hugo Münsterberg to William James, June 6, 1896, WJP.

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48. William James to Hugo Münsterberg, September 2, 1895, WJP. 49. William James to Charles W. Eliot, February 21, 1895, CEP. 50. For the appeal of German scholarship in the United States see Jürgen Herbst, The German Historical School in American Scholarship. Also useful are Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins; Thwing, The American and the German Universities; Laurence R. Veysey, The Emergence of the American University. 51. It is still not clear why the appointment was denied. See William D. G. Balance, "Frustrations and Joys of Archival Research," and Matthew Hale, Human Science and Social Order, pp. 5 1 - 5 5 . 52. Hugo Münsterberg to William James, September 7, 1896, WJP. 53. William James to Hugo Münsterberg, September 2, 1896, WJP. 54. Hugo Münsterberg to William James, September 7, 1896, WJP. 55. Ibid., March 19, 1897. 56. Conversation between Harold Burt and Sidney Pressey, November 26, 1966, Arps Hall, Ohio State University. Interview by John A. Popplestone, Tape, Archives of American Psychology, Akron University, Akron, Ohio. 57. See the Harvard Alumni Bulletin (February 1950), 58:384. 58. Hugo Münsterberg to William James, November 5, 1899, WJP. 59. For Münsterberg's sometimes amusing yet essentially futile attempts to promote German Kultur, German-American scholarly cooperation, and diplomatic understanding see Matthew Hale, Human Science and Social Order, pp. 8 7 - 1 0 5 , 1 6 4 183; and Keller, States of Belonging, pp. 5 5 - 1 1 8 . 60. Hugo Münsterberg to Charles W. Eliot, December 28, 1905, CEP. 61. William James to Hugo Münsterberg, December 27, 1905, HMP. 62. Charles W. Eliot to Hugo Münsterberg, December 29, 1905, CEP. 63. Hugo Münsterberg to William James, December 23, 1900, WJP. 64. Hugo Münsterberg, The Americans, p. 3. 65. Ibid., p. 349. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid., pp. 3 5 4 - 3 5 6 . 68. Matthew Hale has an excellent discussion of how Münsterberg eliminated "self" from his applied psychology: Human Science and Social Order, pp. 1 0 6 - 1 6 3 . 69. Münsterberg, The Americans, p. 463. 70. Ibid., p. 552. 71. Ibid., p. 611. 72. For a concise argument for keeping "science" and "ideals" in separate ontologies see Hugo Münsterberg, "Psychology and History." 73. Münsterberg's idealism never checked his firm belief that historical reality was social reality, and social reality was subjected to psychological control. See Matthew Hale, Human Science and Social Order, pp. 7 0 - 8 6 . 74. James's most cogent statement on the folly of dividing ontologies comes from the Hibbert Lectures delivered at Manchester College, Oxford, in 1909 and published in Essays in Radical Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe. 75. See Morton G. White, Social Thought in America. 76. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2 : 1 5 0 - 1 5 1 . 77. William James to Tom Ward, July 31, 1904, as quoted Ibid., 2:151. James's irritation with Münsterberg may have been festering even before the turn of the century, for James remarked, "My dear Münsterberg, I am unable to know what you mean

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185

by my changed social attitude toward you for the last six or seven years" (William James to Hugo Münsterberg, December 28, 1905, HMP). 78. In fact from 1903 until James's death both Dewey and James recognized that they were the leading spokesmen for the American pragmatic movement. In 1904 James favorably reviewed Dewey's Studies in Logical Theory, which attacked the kind of logical a priori categories Münsterberg proposed at St. Louis (see Psychological Bulletin (1904), 1:445; Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2 : 5 1 4 533; and Matthew Hale, Human Science and Social Order, pp. 9 3 - 9 7 ) . 79. Hugo Münsterberg, Science and Idealism, pp. 2 7 - 2 8 . 80. William James to Hugo Münsterberg, June 28, 1906, WJP. 81. Hugo Münsterberg to William James, July 1, 1906, WJP. 82. Clyde Griffen, "The Progressive Ethos," in Stanley Coben and Lorman Ratner, eds., The Development of an American Culture, pp. 1 2 0 - 1 4 9 . 83. James quite literally went into wild nature time after time as an exercise in renewal. He regularly visited mountain retreats in New York and New Hampshire and was an avid backpacker and camper. Münsterberg spent his vacations in more sedate Swampscott and Clifton, both near civilized Boston: Matthew Hale, Human Science and Social Order, pp. 5 0 - 5 1 . For a discussion of James's creative trance in the Adirondacks in 1898 see chapter 7. 84. Münsterberg made the same oversimplified assumption about progressivism that much recent scholarship has made. Its impulse was not as exclusively "modern," "social," or "scientific" as it seemed. See, for example, Samuel Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency; Samuel Harber, Efficiency and Uplift; and Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order. For a corrective that shows Jacksonian individualism and midnineteenth-century revivalism also fueling twentieth-century reform see Griffin, "The Progressive Ethos," pp. 1 2 0 - 1 4 9 . 85. James, of course, continued to study metaphysics as his psychology became more and more estranged from laboratory psychology. 86. Matthew Hale, Human Science and Social Order, pp. 1 4 8 - 1 6 3 , 1 8 4 - 1 8 8 . 87. For instance see Münsterberg, On the Witness Stand; Psychology and the Teacher; and Psychology and Industrial Efficiency. 88. Münsterberg's fullest statement on the interrelated irrelevancy of " w i l l " and the "unconscious" was Psychotherapy; note also Matthew Hale's interesting treatment of Münsterberg's "Psychologies of Commitment" in Human Science and Social Order, pp. 1 2 6 - 1 4 7 . 89. It was important that Münsterberg's use-oriented or applied psychology did not really develop until after 1900. Conversely his experimental psychology was quite compatible with James's until then. But as James became more enamored with psychic phenomena and Münsterberg with performance psychology, the original agreement was obscured: see Charles B. Bliss, "Professor Münsterberg's Attack on Experimental Psychology." 90. For James's interest in the mental underworld see Murphy and Ballou, William James on Psychical Research; Moore, In Search of White Crows; and Perry, The Thought and Character of William fames, 2 : 1 5 5 - 1 7 2 . 91. William James to James McKeen Cattell, January (?), 1898, JMCP. 92. Hugo Münsterberg, American Problems pp. 1 6 - 1 9 . 93. For a discussion of feminization and American values see Barbara Welter, "The Feminization of American Religion: 1 8 0 0 - 1 8 6 0 , " in O'Neill, ed., Insights and

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Parallels, pp. 3 0 5 - 3 3 1 . Jean Strouse has recently observed that a shortage of males in New England after the Civil War made possible alternatives other than "woman's work" in the home, p p . 8 7 - 8 8 . Münsterberg had tried unsuccessfully to get Harvard to grant a Ph.D. to psychologist Mary Whiton Calkins: see Charles W. Eliot to Hugo Münsterberg, October 31, 1894, HMP. 94. Matthew Hale, Human Science and Social Order, pp. 6 3 - 6 9 . Münsterberg's defense of Mary Whiton Calkins's academic aspirations never weakened his belief in a male dominated university. In effect he wanted Calkins as Harvard's "token" female psychology Ph.D. See note 93 above. 95. Münsterberg, American Problems, pp. 2 0 - 2 1 . 96. Henry James, ed., The Letters of William fames, 1:261. 97. Münsterberg, American Problems, p. 132. 98. Ibid., p. 136. 99. Ibid., pp. 1 4 2 - 1 4 3 . 100. James went on to explain to Floumoy that "The gentleman who seized her foot was a stranger to M-g, and none of the company knew what had happened till after the sitting was over, when he informed M-g and one or two others. M-g tells everybody . . . that this man was his employee, acting by his direction! In point of fact he was one of the guests whose payment made it possible for Carrington to invite M-g gratis. M-g is indeed a 'fumistic' as you say" (William James to Theodore Floumoy, April 9, 1910, WJP). 101. Lightner Witmer, Psychological Clinic (1909), 2 : 2 8 9 - 2 9 9 . 102. Hugo Münsterberg, "Psychological Mysticism." 103. The jingle is an undated sheet in the James-Royce correspondence, WJP. 104. In Psychology and Social Sanity, Münsterberg lashed out at a new sexual freedom that blurred distinctions between the sexes. The consequence would "not consist in men being chaste like women, but in women being immoral like men" (p. 44). 105. By mid 1916 Münsterberg was so estranged from the Harvard administration and many faculty members that he stopped attending faculty meetings. See Matthew Hale, Human Science and Social Order, pp. 1 7 3 - 1 7 4 , 1 8 0 - 1 8 3 . 106. Hugo Münsterberg to William James, March 17, 1909, WJP.

4. The Uncompromised Scientist: Edward Bradford Titchener

1. Between 1892 and 1927 Titchener produced fifty-six Ph.D.s, more than any other American psychologist over a comparable period. As yet there is no biography of Titchener. But see Edwin G. Boring, "Edward Bradford Titchener"; Grace K. Adams, "Titchener at Cornell"; and Rand B. Evans, "Ε. B. Titchener and His Lost System." 2. For example, Margaret Floy Washburn developed an animal psychology; Walter B. Pillsbury and Edwin G. Boring moved toward the functional position and wrote histories of psychology; and Jay Paul Gilford developed a quantitative methodology. 3. Edward Bradford Titchener to Walter S. Hunter, July 15, 1907, EBTP. 4. Edward Bradford Titchener to Robert M. Yerkes, March 3, 1907, EBTP. 5. One of Titchener's students perceived Titchener and James as the two giant first-generation American psychologists. But Titchener took James's psychology more seriously than James took his: see Walter Bowers Pillsbury, "Titchener and James."

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187

6. In the late 1880s there were only two well-developed European experimental psychological laboratories, Wundt's at Leipzig and Georg Ε. Müller's at Göttingen. In America there was James at Harvard, G. Stanley Hall at Johns Hopkins, James McKeen Cattell at Pennsylvania, W. L. Bryan at Indiana, and Joseph Jastrow at Wisconsin. 7. Thomas H. Leahey, " T h e Mistaken Mirror." 8. Danziger, " T h e History of Introspection Reconsidered," pp. 2 5 4 - 2 5 5 . 9. Ε. B. Titchener, "Wilhelm Wundt." 10. Richard J. Anderson, " T h e Untranslated Content of Wundt's Grunziige der Physiologischen Psychologie." 11. Margaret Floy Washburn, for example, remembered the young Titchener as " a brilliant young man who would give us the latest news from Leipzig rather than one to be heard for his own sake" (see Murchison, A History of Psychology in Autobiography, 2:340. 12. He felt, perhaps, that he could also have carved a psychological empire at Oxford if he had not come to America. "When I had the choice between creating my subject at Oxford, with no chance of a laboratory, and coming here I came here. I am not even yet sure whether this action was cowardly or brave, foolish or wise." Edward Bradford Titchener to Walter S. Hunter, October 29, 1909, EBTP. 13. Oxford did not have a psychological laboratory until 1936. 14. Boring recalled, "I decided to accept insults and arbitrary control from Titchener in order to retain the stimulus and charm of his sometimes paternal and sometimes patronizing friendship." (see Murchison, A History of Psychology in Autobiography, 4:33). For psychological laboratory development in the Midwest and West see Garvey, "List of American Psychological Laboratories." 15. Boring, "Edward Bradford Titchener," p. 495. 16. Ibid. 17. Henry James, ed., The Letters of William James, 2:16. 18. See, for instance, Edmund B. Delabarre, Edwin D. Starbuck, and Roswell P. Angier, "Students' Impression of James," Psychological Review (1943), 5 0 : 1 2 5 - 1 3 4 . 19. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2:114. 20. Edward Bradford Titchener to Adolf Meyer, September 19, 1909, AMP. See Irving Kirsch, "Psychology's First Paradigm." 21. Edward Bradford Titchener to Adolf Meyer, September 19, 1909, AMP. 22. Ibid., September 25, 1909. 23. For short expositions of Titchenerian "science" see Ε. B. Titchener, "The Postulates of a Structural Psychology"; Michael J. Hindeland, "Edward Bradford Titchener"; and Evans, "Ε. B. Titchener and His Lost System." Titchener's fuller statements on his science include An Outline of Psychology and Experimental Psychology. See also Leahey, "The Mistaken Mirror." 24. See Herman K. Haeberlin, "The Theoretical Foundations of Wundt's Folk Psychology," in Rieber, Wilhelm Wundt and the Making of a Scientific Psychology, pp. 2 2 9 - 2 4 9 ; and Danziger, "History of Introspection Reconsidered," especially pp. 244-249. 25. One interesting parallel was the importance of volition in both Wundt and James. James tempered his volition in the determinism of physiological reaction and habit, Wundt in the belief that will arises from impulses or drives. Both found, for instance, that attention could not be fully explained through reaction-time experiments. In his chapter on "Attention" in The Principles of Psychology James quoted

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extensively from Wundt, and not to the letter's great disadvantage (see The Principles of Psychology, 1:402-458). See also Kurt Danziger, "Wundt's Theory of Behavior and Volition," in Rieber, Wilhelm Wundt and the Making of a Scientific Psychology, pp. 94-108. 26. The opening sentence of The Principles of Psychology sets forth the descriptive rather than explanatory task of psychology: "Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and their conditions" (1:1, my italics). 27. It was important that both James and Titchener moved introspection away from its close identification with "brass instrument" psychology. They admitted a more "intensive," less laboratory-oriented, introspective analysis than Wundt. This was always the case with James and increasingly so with Titchener. Wundt kept experimentally observable mentality carefully limited and at the same time expanded linguistic, social, and philosophical mental explanations. See Kurt Danziger, " T h e Positivist Repudiation of Wundt"; idem, "The History of Introspection Reconsidered," especially pp. 2 5 0 - 2 5 4 ; R. W. Rieber, "Wundt and the Americans: From Flirtation to Abandonment," in his Wilhelm Wundt and the Making of a Scientific Psychology, pp. 1 3 7 - 1 5 1 . 28. Although Wundt and Titchener failed to maintain viable psychological "schools," each fostered a tradition based on systematic laboratory instruction. James's influence was his book; and what was gleaned from it lay in the eye of the beholder. That left interpretive possibility open and doctrinaire transmission closed. See Edward L. Thorndike, "James's Influence on the Psychology of Perception and Thought"; and Edwin G. Boring, "Human Nature vs. Sensation." 29. Edward Bradford Titchener to Adolf Meyer, October 17, 1909, AMP. 30. James, The Principles of Psychology, 1:12-80; Ε. B. Titchener, A Textbook of Psychology, pp. 4 6 - 2 2 4 . 31. Edward Bradford Titchener to Adolf Meyer, September 25, 1909, AMP. 32. Titchener, An Outline of Psychology, expecially pp. 1 - 7 5 . 33. James, The Principles of Psychology, 1:362. 34. Edward Bradford Titchener, "Structural and Functional Psychology," Philosophical Review (1899) 8:291. He wanted to avoid "the Stimulus Error," the confusion of sensation with stimulus. Stimulus was taken broadly to mean both stimuli and their objects, or meanings. See Mary Henle, "Did Titchener commit the Stimulus Error?" Later, Titchener gradually moved closer to a meaning psychology: see Rand B. Evans, " T h e Origins of Titchener's Doctrine of Meaning." 35. James, The Principles of Psychology, 1:291-401. 36. Titchener, A Textbook of Psychology, pp. 5 4 4 - 5 4 7 . Of course, this deemphasis was consistent with Titchener's belief that psychology was the study of a generalized, not an individualized, mind. 37. Edward Bradford Titchener, A Primer of Psychology, p. 27. 38. Morris Bishop, A History of Cornell, pp. 1 - 9 0 , 2 5 4 - 3 5 0 . Andrew Dickson White, who was president of Cornell 1 8 6 6 - 1 8 8 5 and began to professionalize the college, "dreamed of Yale or Harvard" as a boy. 39. Harvard's leadership in the "professionalization" of philosophy helped it to retain prominence in psychology. Unlike Titchener and others, James and Münsterberg were also "professional" philosophers. See Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy, pp. 1 2 9 - 1 3 9 . 40. Cattell had fifty Ph.D.s during his tenure at Columbia.

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189

41. James wrote Charles W. Eliot that Titchener was "very energetic and reputed a great success as a teacher" (William James to Charles W. Eliot, February 21, 1895, CEP). 42. William James to Mary Whiton Calkins, September 19,1909, quoted in Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2: 123. 43. Murchison, A History of Psychology in Autobiography, 1:457. 44. William James to Carl Stumpf, September 21, 1891, quoted in Perry, The Thought and Character of William fames, 2:175. 45. Ibid., December 20, 1892, p. 2.181. 46. James, The Principles of Psychology, 1:136. 47. Edward Bradford Titchener to Adolf Meyer, September (?), 1909, AMP. 48. He thought James overstated the case for the physical origin of emotions (Titchener, A Textbook of Psychology, pp. 4 7 1 - 5 0 4 ) . Students were also required to read Hermann Ebbinghaus, Oswald Külpe, and Wundt (Titchener, An Outline o/Psychology, p. vii). 49. Titchener, An Outline of Psychology, p. 234. 50. James, The Principles of Psychology, 2:451. 51. Titchener, An Outline of Psychology, p. 358. 52. Titchener, A Primer of Psychology, p. 73. 53. Titchener, "The Postulates of a Structural Psychology," p. 454. 54. Ibid., p. 453. 55. Ibid., p. 495. 56. Ibid., p. 453. 57. Titchener, "Structural and Functional Psychology," p. 297. 58. Kurt Danziger, "Wundt and the Two Traditions of Psychology," in Rieber, Wilhelm Wundt and the Making of a Scientific Psychology, pp. 73-86; and Danziger, "The Positivist Repudiation of Wundt," pp. 2 0 5 - 2 3 0 . 59. Edward Bradford Titchener to Adolf Meyer, September 25, 1909, AMP. 60. Ibid. 61. Edward Bradford Titchener to James McKeen Cattell, November (?), 1898, JMCP. 62. Edward Bradford Titchener, "The 'Feeling of Being Stared at'." 63. For a careful if critical discussion of Lehmann and Hansen see Henry Sidgwick, "Involuntary Whispering Considered in Relation to Experiments in ThoughtTransference." 64. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2:156. 65. William James, letter, Science (December 30, 1898), 8:956. 66. Edward Bradford Titchener, letter, Science (January 6, 1899), 9:36. 67. William James, letter, Science (May 5, 1899), 9 : 6 5 4 - 6 5 5 . 68. Indeed, the polemics and inflated reputation were, perhaps, indications that Titchener's psychology was isolated and unusually vulnerable: see Danziger, "The History of Introspection Reconsidered," p. 256. 69. At about the time of the Titchener-James Science exchange Harlow Gale of the University of Minnesota showed that besides James and himself few American professors gave prime lecture time to telepathic matters. Indeed, the attitude of most was distinctly hostile: Harlow Gale, "Psychical Research in American Universities." 70. Edward Bradford Titchener, letter, Science (May 12, 1899), 9:686. William James, Human Immortality.

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71. William James to Edward Bradford Titchener, May 2 1 , 1 8 9 9 , EBTP. From the beginning Cattell oversaw Science with a firm hand: see Michael M. Sokal, "Science and James McKeen Cattell." 72. William James to Edward Bradford Titchener, May 21, 1899, EBTP. 73. Edward Bradford Titchener to William James, May 28, 1899, WJP. 74. Ibid. 75. Titchener implied that since American culture was receptive to telepathy, American universities were too. He was mistaken: see Gale, "Psychical Research in American Universities." 76. Although James's friend Adolf Meyer was more psychiatrist than psychologist, he said openly to Titchener what others undoubtedly said among themselves. "Psychology," Meyer declared, "is larger than your favorite field of work" (Adolf Meyer to Edward Bradford Titchener, October 23, 1909, AMP). 77. William James to Charles W. Eliot, February 21, 1895, CEP. 78. It may, however, have been more than intimacy that Titchener wanted. Rand Evans, who has studied Titchener intensively, observed that Titchener made frequent use of his students' theses, dissertations, and papers to support his own psychology. See Evans' note in "The Origin of Titchener's Doctrine of Meaning," p. 338. 79. Edward Bradford Titchener to Robert M. Yerkes, September 7, 1907, EBTP. 80. Edward Bradford Titchener to James McKeen Cattell, December 8, 1903, JMCP. 81. Hugo Münsterberg to Edward Bradford Titchener, January 30, 1904, EBTP. 82. See, for instance, Howard C. Warren to Edward Bradford Titchener, January 27, 1904; Edward A. Pace to Edward Bradford Titchener, February 4, 1904; Joseph Jastrow to Edward Bradford Titchener, January 25, 1904; James R. Angell to Edward Bradford Titchener, January 18,1904; and Edmund Sanford to Edward Bradford Titchener, January 8, 1904; all in the EBTP. 83. Edward G. Boring, "The Society of Experimental Psychologists: 1 9 0 4 - 1 9 3 8 , " p. 410. 84. Ibid., pp. 4 1 1 - 4 1 2 . 85. Several exemplary studies show how difficult it was for "individualism" and "localism" to contend with massive modernization. See R. Jackson Wilson, In Quest of Community; Wiebe, The Search for Order; Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism; and Gilbert, Work Without Salvation. 86. Bishop, A History of Cornell, pp. 3 9 4 - 3 9 5 . 87. Edward Bradford Titchener to James McKeen Cattell, June 17, 1904, JMCP. 88. Gordon W. Allport, "William James and the Behavioral Sciences." James befriended Edward Lee Thorndike and even let him keep the chickens he was experimenting on in the James household: see Murchison, A History of Psychology in Autobiography, 3:264. 89. This was another variation of the creative attempt to stand astride both art and science: Allport, "The Productive Paradoxes of William James," particularly p. 112.

90. See Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought, pp. 3 1 8 - 3 4 3 . 91. Edward Bradford Titchener to Robert M. Yerkes, June 2 7 , 1 9 0 8 , EBTP. Titchener had criticized Münsterberg even before the latter came to Harvard. He had remarked that "Dr. Münsterberg has the fatal gift of writing easily—fatal especially in science, and most of all in a young science where accuracy is the one thing needful"

5. Psychological Nationalist: Cattell

191

(Edward Bradford Titchener, "Dr. Münsterberg and his Experimental Psychology," Mind (October 1891), 16:594). 92. Titchener and Hall bickered over whose students would publish in the A. J. P. At one point, Titchener thought Hall was purposely avoiding the inclusion of experimental papers and threatened to resign: see Louis Wilson to Edward Bradford Titchener, June 16, 1898. EBTP; and Ross, G. Stanley Hall, p. 241. 93. Edward Bradford Titchener to Robert M. Yerkes, January 11, 1907, EBTP. 94. James led Putnam toward psychoanalysis and Thorndike toward behavioralism. See respectively Nathan Hale, Jr., James Jacks on Putnam and Psychoanalysis, p.67; and Geraldine Joncich, The Sane Positivist, pp. 89-96. 95. See Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. 96. Edward Bradford Titchener to Adolf Meyer, October 30, 1909, AMP. 97. Ibid., May 2, 1907. 98. James attacked narrow-minded professionalism in his essay, "The Ph.D. Octopus," pp. 1-9, as well as in his fight against medical licensing for spiritualists and mind-curers. For a defense of Jamesian "breadth" in professional psychology see Benjamin M. and Dorothea D. Braginski, Mainstream Psychology.

5. Psychological Nationalist: James McKeen Cattell

1. Their feud began when Hall claimed to have developed the first psychological laboratory in America: see Ross, G. Stanley Hall, pp. 2 4 2 - 2 4 6 . 2. Edward L. Thorndike, for instance, referred to Hall's book Adolescence: Its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex Crime, Religion and Education as being "chock full of errors, masturbation and Jesus" (see his review in Science (July 29, 1904), 23:142-145). 3. There is yet no full biography of Cattell, but Michael M. Sokal has made by far the best progress toward one: see "The Education and Psychological Career of James McKeen Cattell"; and Sokal, ed., An Education in Psychology. Also useful are sketches in Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, pp. 5 3 2 - 5 4 0 , Roback, History of American Psychology, pp. 3 3 5 - 3 4 0 ; and the New York Times obituary, "Dr. Cattell Dead: Scientist Editor," January 31, 1944. Cattell refused to contribute to Charles Murchison's A History of Psychology in Autobiography, as he felt reminiscence about the relationship of his own affairs to psychology was unscientific: note Michael M. Sokal, "The Unpublished Autobiography of James McKeen Cattell." 4. Sokal, The Education and Psychological Career of James McKeen Cattell, p. 43. See also idem, ed., An Education in Psychology, pp. 7 - 8 , 2 9 - 3 0 . 5. Cattell, like James, read Schiller, Goethe, and Lessing. At the Dresden Gallery he was spell-bound by Raphael's "Sistine Madonna." Like James he seemed to be searching for a way to transfer emotional sensibilities into science. Lotze lectured on psychology and his philosophy had a physiological component. See Sokal, ed., An Education in Psychology, pp. 2 - 3 , 7 - 8 , 2 8 - 2 9 . 6. Cattell also had some unprofessional help along the road to his recovery. He used hashish frequently in 1882. Interestingly, he liked to measure its effect on his reaction-time. There is no evidence, however, that he was addicted (ibid., pp. 5 0 53).

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7. John Dewey got the fellowship, and Cattell believed that "Dr. Hall has not acted honorably towards me" (quoted in ibid., p. 77). Hall had enthusiastically praised Cattell to his face. See Ross, G. Stanley Hall, p. 140. 8. Sokal disagrees with the prevailing legend that Cattell was unusually aggressive (ganz amerikanisch) toward Wundt. Cattell supposedly informed Wundt that he needed an assistant, himself: Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, p. 533. Cattell and Wundt got on well; the latter referred to him as a "colleague." Their good relations probably encouraged other Americans to study with Wundt, who was often seen as condescending to New World psychologists: Sokal, ed., An Education in Psychology, pp. 1 0 - 1 1 , 174. 9. The initial experiments at Leipzig were done in Cattell's room at a boarding house with the help of a classmate, Oskar Berger: Sokal The Education and Psychological Career of fames McKeen Cattell, p. 137. 10. For a detailed presentation of Cattell's developing expertise in the psychometrics of individual differences see Ibid., pp. 1 3 3 - 2 4 8 , 3 0 6 - 3 2 2 , 3 6 2 - 4 6 2 ; and Sokal, ed., An Education in Psychology, pp. 9 6 - 1 0 5 . 11. See Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, pp. 5 5 9 - 5 6 6 . But Cattell did not emphasize the individual until after he had studied with Wundt: Sokal, ed., An Education in Psychology, pp. 1 3 2 - 1 3 5 , 2 2 2 - 2 2 3 . 12. Cattell, however, did not purposely go to England to work with Galton, although he knew of his work as early as 1883: Sokal, ed., An Education in Psychology, pp. 2 1 8 - 2 2 3 . 13. For example, see Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, pp. 1 2 3 - 1 4 2 ; Boiler, American Thought in Transition, pp. 1 2 3 - 1 4 7 ; and Russett, Darwin in America, pp. 6 8 - 7 8 . 14. Cattell absorbed the Darwinism of Galton, but he was also influenced by Charlton H. Bastian's The Brain as an Organ of the Mind. Bastian connected reaction time to ingoing nerve stimuli. At one point Cattell even considered studying neurology after discussions with English neurologists John Hughlings Jackson and David Ferrier: Sokal, "The Education and Psychological Career of James McKeen Cattell," pp. 2 1 9 233; and Sokal, ed., An Education in Psychology, p. 194. 15. Sokal ed., An Education in Psychology, pp. 218-221; see also Noel Gilroy Annan, " T h e Intellectual Aristocracy," in J. H. Plumb, ed., Studies in Social History, pp. 2 8 7 - 4 4 1 ; and William Irvine's delightful Apes, Angels, and Victorians. 16. James McKeen Cattell, "Critical Notices"; Cattell, "The Psychological Laboratory at Leipzig"; Cattell "Mental Tests and Measurements." 17. For instance, see William James to Croom Robertson, August 29,1886; Croom Robertson to William James, August 29, 1886; William James to Croom Robertson, September 2 5 , 1 8 8 6 : all in Perry, The Thought and Character of William fames, 1:601606. James became a subscriber to Mind shortly after the first issue appeared in 1876. James joined the Aristotelian Society and the "Scratch Eight" club in 1882 ( 1 : 5 9 6 597). 18. Shadworth Hodgson wrote Cattell and asked him to read a paper before the Society on Psycho-physical Research in 1886: Sokal, "The Education and Psychological Career of James McKeen Cattell," p. 263. Leslie Stephen, perhaps the most prestigious member of the intellectual aristocracy, referred to James as a "clever fellow." (Perry, The Thought and Character of William fames, 1:607). In fact as Michael Sokal has suggested, psychologists were something of "scientific celebrities" (Sokal,

5. Psychological Nationalist: Cattell

193

ed., An Education in Psychology, p. 218). 19. Cattell had first met Miss Owen when she was visiting Leipzig in May 1886. She began helping him with experiments even before they were married. For a discussion of her role as helpmate, see Sokal, "Science and James McKeen Cattell." 20. White, Social Thought in America. 21. Cattell got Dewey the job at Columbia, but Cattell was never liked by the Columbia faculty: see Veysey, The Emergence of the American University, pp. 3 8 2 438, particularly pp. 394-395. 22. Cattell engaged in a power struggle with President Nicholas Murray Butler to increase faculty involvement in university government. The feud between Butler and Cattell lasted twenty-five years and did not help the latter's chances for survival in the war emotions of 1917. See William Summerscales, Affirmation and Dissent, pp. 72-102; James McKeen Cattell, Memories of My Last Days at Columbia; Carol S. Gruber, "Academic Freedom At Columbia University"; and Sokal, ed., An Education in Psychology, pp. 331-333. William James was an active anti-imperialist at the turn of the century. 23. William James to Charles W. Eliot, February 21, 1895, CEP. 24. See James McKeen Cattell, "In Memory of Wilhelm Wundt." 25. James once exclaimed, "Yes I am too unsystematic and loose! B u t . . . I permitted myself to remain so deliberately, on account of the strong aversion with which I am filled for the Humbugging pretense of exactitude . . . that has prevailed in psychological literature" (William James to James Ward, November 1, 1892, quoted in Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2.96). Although Cattell was a quantifier he was not, however, particularly adept at mathematics: Sokal, ed., An Education in Psychology, p. 338. 26. For fascinating examples see James's chapters on "Consciousness of Self" and "Hypnotism" in The Principles of Psychology, 1:291-401 and 2:593-616. 27. He was criticized for overquantifying by other experimentalists. Münsterberg aimed an attack at Yale's Edward W. Scripture for supporting the psychology of measurement as the great hope for American education, but he was attacking Cattell's quantification as well. See Hugo Münsterberg, "The Danger from Experimental Psychology," and James McKeen Cattell, "Professor Münsterberg on 'The Danger of Experimental Psychology.' " Also note Titchener's student Guy M. Whipple's criticism, "Reaction-time as a Test of Mental Ability," and Titchener's own commentary that reaction-time experiments did not allow time for introspection: "Anthropometry and Experimental Psychology." By 1904 Cattell had stopped researching in reaction-time psychology as his approach to mental testing had clearly failed: Sokal, "The Education and Psychological Career of James McKeen Cattell," p. 585. 28. Cattell's dedication to his experiments was extreme and even foolhardy. On one occasion he was interested in finding the effect of electric shock on reaction-time. Cattell volunteered to stand in a pail of water while current was run from twentyeight gravity cells to terminals on various parts of his body! (Sokal, "The Education and Psychological Career of James McKeen Cattell," p. 444). 29. William James to James McKeen Cattell, January 15, 1902, JMCP. 30. Sokal, "The Education and Psychological Career of James McKeen Cattell," pp. 1 5 6 - 1 5 8 .

31. Cattell was the first to move from the "psychology of stimulus and sensation" characterized by Fechner and Wundt to the American "psychology of stimulus and

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response." Cattell removed the German "sensation" and substituted "error of observation" that later became a "response." See Edwin G. Boring, "The Stimulus Error," and Sokal, "The Education and Psychological Career of James McKeen Cattell," pp. 401-402. 32. For a sketch of Cattell's editorial ventures and his stormy relationship with Baldwin, see Sokal, "Science and James McKeen Cattell," and Roback, A History of American Psychology, pp. 1 7 1 - 1 7 3 , 1 7 5 - 1 7 9 . 33. James McKeen Cattell, letter Science (April 15, 1898), 7:534. 34. William James to James McKeen Cattell, December 2 1 , 1 8 9 7 , JMCP. But James may have been aware that Cattell criticized telepathy in 1893 and thus was reluctant to publish with him. See James McKeen Cattell, "Esoteric Psychology." 35. Cattell, letter, Science (April 15, 1898), 7:534. 36. Ibid. 37. William James, letter, Science (May 6, 1898), 7 : 6 4 0 - 6 4 1 . 38. Ibid. 39. James McKeen Cattell, letter, Science (May 6, 1898), 7 : 6 4 1 - 6 4 2 . 40. William James to James McKeen Cattell, May 8, 1898, JMCP. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. William James to James McKeen Cattell, May (?), 1898, fragment of a letter, JMCP. 44. Ibid. Later in his career Cattell would attack the integrity of anyone who disagreed with him. I am indebted to Michael Sokal for pointing out that Cattell's compromising spirit was still alive in the 1890s. 45. There is no evidence that James and Baldwin had any significant disagreement. For an account of the Baldwin-Cattell struggle to control Psychological Review see Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, p. 531. Baldwin spoke affectionately of James in Between the Wars, 1:62. 46. William James to James McKeen Cattell, December 5, 1903; and Ibid., December 8, 1903, both in JMCP. 47. Ibid., December 12, 1903. 48. James first delivered the lectures at the Lowell Institute in Boston in November and December 1906. After the Columbia presentations in January 1907, the lectures were published as Pragmatism: A New Name for some Old Ways of Thinking. 49. William James to James McKeen Cattell, April 3, 1909, JMCP. 50. James McKeen Cattell to William James, May 23, 1903, JMCP. James responded by eliminating Cattell and himself for "obvious reasons." His top ten American psychologists were "Münsterberg, Baldwin, Hall, Ladd, Scripture, Titchener, Thorndike, Calkins, Sanford, [and] J. R. Angell" (William James to James McKeen Cattell, June 10, 1903, JMCP). Cattell hinted that James would stand at the head of the list when his survey was completed. He spoke of "no. 1 . . . [as] a great genius, who has an international, and will have a posthumous reputation" (James McKeen Cattell, "Statistics of American Psychologists," p. 314). Number 2 was later to be revealed as Cattell himself: James McKeen Cattell and Jaques Cattell, eds., American Men of Science, 2:1269ff. 51. James McKeen Cattell, ed., Essays Philosophical and Psychological in Honor of William James. William James to James McKeen Cattell, August 5, 1908, JMCP. 52. James McKeen Cattell, "Our Psychological Association and Research."

6. The Pitfalls of Parental Compromise

195

53. Cattell, " T h e Founding of the Association and of the Hopkins and Clark Laboratories," Psychological Review (1943), 50:62. 54. Cattell, "Early Psychological Laboratories." 55. Ibid. 56. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, p. 532. 57. See Edna Heidbreder, "Functionalism," in David L. Krantz, ed., Schools Of Psychology, p. 37. 58. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, p. 532. 59. Cattell, "The Progress of Psychology," Popular Science Monthly (1893), 43:779.

6. The Pitfalls of Parental Compromising 592.

1. Sokal, "The Education and Psychological Career of James McKeen Cattell," p.

2. Titchener was the only major trail-blazing American psychologist not to serve as president of the A.P.A. Hall was the founding president in 1892; James held the office twice, in 1894 and 1904; Cattell once in 1893; and Münsterberg once in 1898. Unlike Cattell and Münsterberg, James was not active in the A.P.A. council and did not hold other A.P.A. offices. For an impression of the professional involvement of James, Münsterberg, Cattell, and Titchener see Fernberger, "The American Psychological Association," pp. 6 7 - 6 8 , 8 4 - 8 5 ; Boring, "The Society of Experimental Psychologists, 1 9 0 4 - 1 9 3 8 , " pp. 4 1 0 - 4 2 1 ; and Thomas M. Camfield, "The Professionalization of American Psychology." 3. When William C. Cattell was inaugurated as president of Lafayette College in 1863, that institution's endowment was under $90,000. By 1890 the senior Cattell had built that figure to over $800,000: Sokal, "The Education and Psychological Career of James McKeen Cattell," pp. 1 3 - 1 6 . 4. William James to Charles W. Eliot, June 10, 1897, CEP. 5. William James to John Shaw Billings, December 19, 1908, JSBP. 6. For James as an intellectual who symbolized the laissez-faire attitude, see Williams, The Contours of American History, pp. 3 4 1 - 3 4 2 . 7. See Rand B. Evans and Frederick J. Down Scott, "The 1913 International Congress of Psychology." There is an excellent commentary on the psychological congresses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, pp. 7 4 9 - 8 6 9 . See also James McKeen Cattell, "An International Congress of Psychology in America." 8. The rising American consciousness of the connection between internationalism and national pride is well discussed in H. Wayne Morgan, Unity and Culture. 9. For Baldwin see Ronald H. Mueller, "The American Era of James Mark Baldwin"; Mueller, "A Chapter in the History of the Relationship Between Psychology and Sociology in America"; John M. Broughton, "The Genetic Psychology of James Mark Baldwin." Also useful is R. Jackson Wilson's chapter on Baldwin in In Quest of Community, pp. 6 0 - 8 6 ; and John W. Petras, "Psychological Antecedents of Sociological Theory in America." 10. James Mark Baldwin to William James, January 2 3 , 1 9 1 0 , WJP. See also Evans and Scott, "The 1913 International Congress of Psychology," pp. 7 1 1 - 7 1 2 .

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11. James Mark Baldwin to Edward Bradford Titchener, February 8 , 1 9 1 0 , EBTP. 12. James Mark Baldwin to Hugo Münsterberg, February 16, 1910, HMP. 13. Edward Bradford Titchener to Hugo Münsterberg, March 5, 1910, HMP. 14. For a sensitive account of James's sad last voyage see Allen, William James, pp. 4 6 9 - 4 9 4 . 15. Successful professional "fathers" must possess an aura that inspires loyalty by removing themselves from petty tasks. They then maintain the posture of wise sages or referees who adjudicate the squabbles of less far-seeing professional sons. A model study discussing this process is Paul Roazen, Freud and His Followers. We know from Cattell's American Men of Science survey that James had the required fatherly prestige. Note also Samuel W. Fernberger, "The Prestige and Impact of Various Psychologists on Psychology in America." 16. William James to James McKeen Cattell, February 10, 1910, JMCP. 17. James McKeen Cattell to Edward Bradford Titchener, February 24, 1910, JMCP. 18. William James to James McKeen Cattell, March 3, 1910, JMCP. 19. William James to Edward Bradford Titchener, March 3, 1910, EBTP. 20. James McKeen Cattell to Edward Bradford Titchener, March 8, 1910, EBTP. 21. Ibid. 22. Edward Bradford Titchener to Robert M. Yerkes, December 12, 1908, RMYP. 23. William James to James McKeen Cattell, March 9, 1910, JMCP. 24. William James to Edward Bradford Titchener, March 12, 1910, EBTP. 25. Edward Bradford Titchener to Hugo Münsterberg, March 17, 1910, HMP. 26. Ibid. 27. James McKeen Cattell to William James, March 21, 1910, WJP. 28. Cattell later explained, "There had been difficulties in the way of obtaining the attendance of European men of science, the psychological distance westward being much larger than eastward." He remembered that European psychologists "were [not] prepared to pay the traveling expenses of foreign members, their general attitude at that time being that we could supply the money and they would supply the science." (Cattell, "An International Congress of Psychology in America," p.188.) 29. James McKeen Cattell to Hugo Münsterberg, May 3, 1910, HMP. 30. Although he was once a Münsterberg student, Holt found him overbearing. Later he said in print that the German was an "unconscionable liar" (see Edwin B. Holt, The Freudian Wish and Its Place in Ethics, p. 38). The negative reference was made in a barely veiled case study; see also Matthew Hale, Human Science and Social Order, pp. 1 1 8 - 1 1 9 , 1 8 0 - 1 8 1 . 31. Edward B. Holt to William James, May 1, 1910, WJP. 32. William James to James McKeen Cattell, May 21, 1910, WJP. 33. Ibid. 34. Edwin B. Holt to William James, June 21, 1910, WJP. 35. Interestingly, James achieved the Presidency of the A.P.A. after he left experimental psychology. He had in effect found "symbolic" rather than political leadership: Fernberger, "The American Psychological Association," pp. 6 7 - 6 8 , 8 4 - 8 5 . 36. See Max Weber, On Charisma and Institution Building, S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., pp. 4 8 - 6 5 . For more recent statement of Weber's insight that modernity needs the symbolic authority of charismatic personalities see Peter J. Lamour, "DeGaulle and the New France."

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37. See John K. Winkler and M. D. Bromberg, "A Psychological Prima Donna," in their Mind Explorers, pp. 146-183; and Boring, "Masters and Pupils Among the American Psychologists." Although James enjoyed an increasingly "symbolic" reputation, it should be emphasized that his reputation was based on some real experimental accomplishment. He was not strictly an "arm-chair" psychologist. 38. Sigmund Freud, "Totem and Taboo," The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey, 13:143. 39. Cattell, however, remained heavily involved in other professional activities: see Michael M. Sokal, "The Origins of the Psychological Corporation"; Sokal, "Science and James McKeen Cattell"; and Carl P. Duncan, "A Note on the 1929 International Congress of Psychology."

7. Accommodating the Boundaries of Consciousness

1. G. Stanley Hall pioneered adolescent psychology and wove unconscious mental energy into his psychology. But Hall was not considered an experimentalist; his "genetic" psychology was more presumptive than empirical. See Ross, G. Stanley Hall, expecially pp. 368-394. 2. Hugo Münsterberg, Psychotherapy, p. 125. 3. Matthew Hale, Human Science and Social Order, pp. 126-136. 4. Edward Bradford Titchener to Adolf Meyer, September 19, 1909, AMP. It should be noted, however, that after 1909 Titchener's psychology dealt increasingly with the fringes of consciousness: see Evans, "The Origins of Titchener's Doctrine of Meaning," p. 341. 5. See Sokal, ed., An Education in Psychology pp. 50-51. The use of hashish to heighten awareness of conscious rather than unconscious mental phenomena was not uncommon: see Charles Richet, "Poisons of Intelligence." Edmund Delabarre, who studied with both James and Münsterberg, used the drug extensively. See Ε. B. Delabarre and John A. Popplestone, "A Cross Cultural Contribution to the Cannabis Experience." James himself experimented with mescal: see Henry James, The Letters of William fames, 2:35-37. 6. William James to Theodore Flournoy, September 28,1909, WJP. It is sometimes assumed that James was receptive to psychoanalysis. The oft-repeated "I hope that he [Freud] and his disciples will push it [dream-theory] to its limits" is deceptive. In the same communication James referred to Freud as "a regular hallucine." At the same time he felt that psychoanalysis would "add to our understanding of 'functional' psychology which is the real psychology" (William James to Mary Whiton Calkins, September 19,1909, as quoted in Perry, The Thought and Character of William fames, 2:123). James never endorsed a sexual etiology of the unconscious: see Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 13-14; Norman Cumeron, "William James and Psychoanalysis," in Max Otto et al., William fames, the Man and The Thinker, pp. 55-82. James, however, did have important impact on others who became analysts. See Barbara Ross, "William James: A Prime Mover of the Psychoanalytic Movement in America," in George E. Gifford, Jr., ed., Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy and the New England Scene, pp. 10-23. 7. Psychology was regarded as the study of the "mind," but James wanted psychology based on a broader understanding of human nature. Titchener's comment to

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Adolf Meyer illustrated the difference: "What do you want with psychology anyway?" he asked. "You deal with the whole man, the psychophysical organism" (Titchener to Meyer, September 19, 1909, AMP; see also Barbara Ross, "William James: A Prime Mover of the Psychoanalytic Movement in America," p. 13). It should be noted, however, that experimentalists attended the Clark conference of 1909, including Titchener and Cattell: see Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall, pp. 3 8 6 - 3 9 4 . 8. For an excellent study of deep cultural contention between science and religion see Paul Carter, The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age. Note also Meyer, The Positive Thinkers, pp. 2 9 - 3 1 , 3 1 5 - 3 5 5 ; and Strout, "The Pluralistic Identity of William James," pp. 1 3 5 - 1 4 9 . 9. Ralph Barton Perry assembled James's writings that illustrated the pragmatic search for common ground: see William James, Essays on Faith and Morals. See also Perry's chapter " T h e Defense of Pragmatism" in The Thought and Character of William James, 2 : 4 6 9 - 4 9 3 . 10. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 1.442. 11. William James, Diary, undated (probably late 1868), WJP. 12. William James to Tom Ward, May 24, 1868, quoted in Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 1:227. 13. William James to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., May 15, 1868, quoted Ibid., 1:275. 14. See Henri Ellenberger's analyses in The Discovery of the Unconscious, pp. 2 1 5 - 2 1 8 , 6 7 0 - 6 7 3 ; and "La Maladie Creative." 15. Nathan Hale, Jr., James Jackson Putnam and Psychoanalysis, p. 67. 16. James Jackson Putnam, A Memoir of Dr. James Jackson. William's sister Alice spent much of her life an invalid and younger brother Robertson was an alcoholic. Henry James Jr. suffered nerve complaints: see Nathan Hale, Jr., "James Jackson Putnam and Boston Neurology," in Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy, and the New England Medical Scene, pp. 1 4 9 - 1 5 4 . 17. Elizabeth Putnam Mclver, "Early Days at Putnam Camp," unpublished manuscript, JJPP. 18. See Murphy and Ballou, William James on Psychical Research, pp. 3-18; Moore, In Search of White Crows, pp. 1 3 3 - 1 5 6 . 19. See review by F. W. H. Meyers. 20. James's Lowell Lectures in late 1896 were based on a set of notes on "Genius, Insanity, and Neurasthenia" and on "Hysteria" (unpublished manuscripts in WJP). In this period he also reviewed a number of works dealing with weird psychic phenomena: see his reviews of Edmund Paris, "Hallucination and Illusion," in Psychological Review (1895), 2 : 6 5 - 6 7 ; John L. Nevius, "Demon Possession and Allied Themes," in Psychological Review (1895), 2 : 5 2 9 - 5 3 1 ; and Arthur Pierce, "Subliminal Self or Unconscious Celebration?" in Psychological Review (1896), 3 : 6 8 2 - 6 8 4 . 21. James testified on the behalf of mind curers and spiritualists at the State House in Boston: See Henry James, ed., The Letters of William James, 2 : 6 7 - 7 2 . 22. William James to Theodore Flournoy, August 14, 1901, WJP. 23. Ibid., September 16, 1908. 24. John Owen King argues that James used his hypochondria as both an excuse for periodic laziness and a means for self-contempt. Illness became a strategic necessity in encouraging intellectual production. It was a way both to explain failure and to promote better performance (see King, "The Ascetic Self," pp. 4 0 1 - 4 0 8 ) . Howard M.

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Feinstein also has some interesting observations on the uses of illness in the James family: see "Fathers and Sons," pp. 3 0 2 - 3 7 6 . 25. Quoted in Elizabeth Putnam Mclver, "Early Days at Putnam Camp," unpublished manuscript, 19, JJPP. 26. Henry James, ed., The Letters of William fames, 1:25. 27. Ibid., 2 : 7 5 - 7 8 . 28. Perry, The Thought and Character of William fames, 2 : 6 7 6 - 6 7 7 . 29. Meyer, The Positive Thinkers, pp. 3 1 8 - 3 2 0 . 30. James, The Varieties o/Religious Experience, pp. 1 5 7 - 1 5 8 . See also Strout, "The Pluralistic Identity of William James," pp. 1 3 5 - 1 4 9 . 31. James, The Varieties o/Religious Experience, p. 230. 32. William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe, p. 330. Originally from A Pluralistic Universe, first published in 1909. 33. William James, Collected Essays and Reviews, p. 506. 34. William James,"A Suggestion about Mysticism," reprinted in Collected Essays and Reviews, pp. 5 0 0 - 5 1 3 . See also Saul Rosenzweig, "Erik Erikson on William James's Dream." 35. James, Collected Essays and Reviews, pp. 5 0 6 - 5 0 7 . 36. I bid., pp. 5 0 8 - 5 1 0 . 37. James published Pragmatism in 1907 and A Pluralistic Universe and Meaning of Truth in 1909. Essays in Radical Empiricism appeared posthumously in 1912. See Rosenzweig, "Erik Erikson on William James's Dream," p. 258. 38. William James, Diary, February 1, 1870, WJP. 39. Ibid., April 30, 1870. 40. Ibid., April 10, 1873. 41. James, The Principles of Psychology, 1:22-23. 42. Ibid., p. 125. 43. Ibid., p. 122. 44. Ibid., p. 125. 45. Griffin, "The Progressive Ethos," pp. 1 2 0 - 1 4 9 . 46. William James, "The Energies of Men," p. 8. 47. Ibid., p. 13. 48. Ibid., p. 24. 49. Ibid., p. 25. 50. Ibid., p. 36. 51. Ibid., p. 38. 52. This can be seen implicitly in his handling of the "sexual question" in The Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 1 3 - 1 4 . See also Howard Davis Spoerl, "Abnormal and Social Psychology in the Life and Work of William James." 53. Among the fine scholarly works describing the didactive force of New England history are Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province; Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, expecially pp. 3 - 1 7 9 ; and Sacvan Bercovitch, American Jeremiad. James's Puritan conscience was particularly evident in such essays as "The Moral Equivalent of War" and "The Will to Believe." 54. At the end of the 1890s James was critical of American foreign policy and became an anti-imperialist. But convalescing in Europe from 1899 to 1901 his correspondence waved the flag. "God bless America in general! We don't know what the word corruption means at home . . . compared with the . . . organized corruptive

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geniuses of monarchy, nobility, church, army that penetrate the very bosom of . . . the people in all the European states" (William James to Francis R. Morse, September 17, 1899, quoted in Henry James, ed., The Letters of William James, 2:102). For more examples of his patriotic mood see Ibid., 2:92-162. bb. William James, "The Confidences of a 'Psychical Researcher.' "

Conclusion

1. For a recent view of two psychologists who regret James's faded scientific significance see Braginsky and Braginsky, Mainstream Psychology, pp. 104-105,187. 2. It should be underscored that James's self-deception, his changing poses, did not mean that he was essentially Machiavellian. There was too much New England conscience, too much nervous sensibility, for such a hard-headed attitude. Nevertheless, his Janus stance between forward-looking and backward-looking perspectives could make vacillation and contradiction appear Machiavellian. 3. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe, p. 9. 4. James, The Principles of Psychology, 2:688.

Bibliography Manuscript Collections WJP William James Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Cambridge, Mass. CEP Charles W. Eliot Papers, Harvard University Archives. Cambridge, Mass. HMP Hugo Münsterberg Papers, Boston Public Library. Boston, Mass. EBTP Edward Bradford Titchener Papers, John M. Olin Library, Cornell University. Ithaca, N.Y. JMCP James McKeen Cattell Papers, Library of Congress. Washington, D.C. RMYP Robert M. Yerkes Papers, Yale University Library. New Haven, Conn. AMP Adolf Meyer Papers, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. Baltimore, Md. GSHP G. Stanley Hall Papers, Robert Hutchins Goddard Library, Clark University. Worcester, Mass. JJPP James Jackson Putnam Papers, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine. Boston, Mass. JSBP John Shaw Billings Papers, New York Public Library. New York, N.Y.

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Index "Abyss of horrors," see "Maya" Accommodation, see Compromise Adams, Charles Kendall, 78 Adirondack Mountains, 149, 151 Agassiz, Louis, 16, 23; see also Brazil American Journal of Psychology, 10, 99 American Men of Science, 113-14, 127; see also Cattell, James McKeen American nervousness, 4 - 5 ; see also Neurasthenia American Problems, 64 American progressivism, 58-59, 62, 86, 185n84 American Psychological Association, 10, 84, 96-97, 114, 122, 128, 132-33, 135-36, 138; leadership in, 195n2 Americans, The, 5 6 - 5 8 American scientific psychology, professionalization of, 10-11 Amnesia, 149 Angell, Frank, 77 Angell, James, 53 Animal magnetism, 7 Animal psychology, 11, 82, 95; see also Yerkes, Robert M. Applied psychology, 11, 74, 95; see also Münsterberg, Hugo Art: American interest in, 180n26; on art-to-science creative continuum, 181n42; see also James, William, as an artist, 23-36, 106-7 Associationism, 76

Atlantic Monthly, The, 67 Augustine, 100, 154 Automatism, 150 Avenarius, Richard, 54 Bakewell, C. M., 52 Baldwin, James Mark, 11, 51, 83-84, 114, 116, 120-21, 130, 142; career and psychological contributions, 130, 195n9; resignation from Johns Hopkins, 131-32; role in proposed International Psychological Congress of 1913, 130-34, 136, 139, 142 Balfour, A. J., 94 Balzac, Honore de, 148 Beard, George, 4 - 5 Behavioral psychology, 70, 82, 98, 109, 164 Billings, John Shaw, 129 Binet, Alfred, 54, 154 Boring, Edwin G., 78, 97, 105, 122, 168 Boston, 3, 57 Brass instrument psychology, 9, 51, 150; see also Laboratory psychology Brazil, 12, 23, 26 Breuer, Joseph, 154 British empiricism, 60 British sensationalism, 81 Brown, Thomas, 6 Bunyun, John, 154 Burdon-Sanderson, J. S., 76 Buried philosopher, 21, 36

214

Index

Calkins, Mary Whiton, 44, 73, 83-84 Calvinism, 22 Cambridge, Massachusetts, 3, 17, 39, 83, 122, 148 Cambridge University, 109-10 Cattell, James McKeen, xi-xii, 10, 26, 42, 45, 53, 64, 73, 75, 88, 92, 96, 9 8 100, 127, 129, 145, 147, 149, 153-54, 160-61, 168-69, 172; American Men of Science, 194n50; behavioral control through mental testing, 124; controversy in Science with James, 114-20; dismissal from Columbia University, 111; Dresden art experience, 191n5; as editor, 114; education of, 106-10; experimental contributions, 112-14; influence on American psychology compared with James's, 122-25; marriage of, 110 (see also Owen, Josephine); member of Aristotelian Society, 110; mental testing psychology, 193n27; as organizer, 127-28; philosophical liberal, 110-11; professional career compared with James's, 128; psychic crisis of, 106-7; psychological insider, 124; psychological past and future, 120-24; psychology compared with James's, 111-12; publication in Mind, 110; reaction-time experiments, 193n28; rejection of Titchener as president of proposed International Psychological Congress of 1913, 1 3 3 34; relations with Baldwin, 194n45; relations with Galton, 109; relations with Wundt; 107-09; role in proposed International Psychological Congress of 1913, 132-42; on unconscious mind, 146 Cattell, Jaques, 105 Cattell, Josephine Owen, 193nl9 Cattell, William C., 128 Carrington, Hereward, 67 Chapman, John J., 15, 22 Charcot, Jean Martin, 148 Chicago School, 2; see also Pragmatism Chicago University, 53, 59, 83, 97, 111 Chichester, England, 74

Chocorua, New Hampshire, 151 Civil War, 3, 9, 74, 97, 127 Clark University, 2, 10, 45, 53, 83, 99 College of New Jersey, 106; see also Princeton University Columbia University, 2, 10, 45, 53, 64, 83, 88, 97, 108, 111, 114, 122 Compromise, 69; definition of, 175n5; see also James, William: as compromiser; compromising of; vocational identity of Comtean positivism, 106 Conservation of energy theory, 8; see also Helmholtz, Hermann Cornell University, 74, 77, 83, 91, 94, 97-98, 100, 105, 134, 167; psychological laboratory of, 78, 122 Corporate capitalism, 127 Danzig, 40 Darwin, Charles, 1 - 2 , 6, 9, 87, 109 Darwinism, ix, 7, 9, 87, 99, 109-10, 146; development of Darwinian psychology, 7 - 8 , 109 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 26 Degeneration, 150 Delabarre, Ε. B., 51 Demoniacal possession, 50 Depth psychology, 63, 154; see also Unconscious mind Dewey, John, 2, 61, 97, 111, 165 Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, 130 Die Willenshandlung (Voluntary Action), 41-43 Divided self, 29 Donders, Franciscus, 8 Dresden, Germany, 30, 106, 151, 160, 166; Dresden Art Gallery, 26, 33, 148 Dualism, 84-85 Du Sommeil, 148; see also Liebault, A. S. Dynameter, 113 Edinburgh, Lectures, 152; see also Varieties of Religious Experience, The Edinburgh University, 152

Index Electrical therapy, 151 Elements of consciousness, 11, 85; see also Titchener, Edward Bradford Elements of Physiological Psychology, 11; see also Ladd, George Trumbull Eliot, Charles W., 33, 53, 56, 111, 128 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 2, 31 Emerson Hall, 5 5 - 5 6 Emersonian Transcendentalism, xiii Empiricism, 76 Energies of Men, The, 159 Erie Canal, 22 Erikson, Erik, 19 Essays in Radical Empiricism, 163 Ethic change, 3 - 4 Evolutionary psychology, 8, 176nl4 Experimental psychology, x-xi, 51, 7 9 83, 96-97, 146, 165 Faculty psychology, 6 - 7 , 176nl2; collapse of, 8 Fechner, Gustav, 8 Feinstein, Howard, 21-25 Feminization, 68, 185-86n96, 186nl04; see also Münsterberg, Hugo, on American women Flournoy, Theodore, 67 Free will, 18, 24; see also James, William, on free will Freiburg University, 41, 50, 53-54; psychological laboratory of, 47 Freud, Sigmund, xii, 2, 63, 142; psychology of, 146; visit to Clark University, 83 Fullinwider, S. P., 20-23 Functionalism, 11; see also James, William, functionalism (functional psychology); Functional psychology Functional psychology, 42-43, 80, 91, 95, 98, 105, 108-9, 114, 124, 168; compared to individualized psychology, 108-9; compared to introspective psychology, 8 5 - 8 8 Galton, Francis, 109, 113 Genetic psychology, 11, 51, 130; see also Baldwin, James Mark; Hall, G. Stanley

215

Genius, 150 German-American scholastic alliance, 55 German Idealism, 42-43, 60; see also Münsterberg, Hugo, philosophy of German psychological laboratories, 47 German Romantics, 31-32 Gibbens, Alice Howe, 18, 145 Gilded Age, 5, 46 Goethe, 31-32, 148 Göttingen University, 45, 107; psychological laboratory, 45, 47 Gravity chronometer, 113 Greek sculpture, 27-28, 30 Grundzüge der Psychologie (Basics of Psychology), 60 Hall, G. Stanley, 10, 11-13, 42, 44-45, 51, 53-54, 75, 99-101, 106-7, 111, 121, 129-30, 132-34, 137; psychology of, 51; review of The Principles of Psychology, 12-13 Hansen, F. F. C., 8 9 - 9 0 Harvard Medical School, 17 Harvard Teachers' Association, 135 Harvard University, 10-11, 16-17, 2 4 25, 33, 40, 45, 48, 50-54, 57, 69, 7 4 75, 83, 93-95, 97, 107, 112, 116, 120; philosophy department, 19, 55; psychological laboratory, 12, 40, 45, 51, 60, 122 Healthy-minded, 18, 179nl4 Heidelberg University, 40 Helmholtz, Hermann, 8 - 9 Hipp chronoscope, 113 Hodgson, Shadworth, 110 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 148 Holt, Edwin B., on Cattell's professional politicking, 138-40, 142 Holt, Henry, 44 Hunt, William Morris, 16, 23-24, 29, 151 Hypnosis, 93, 148-50 Hysteria, 148, 150 Identity, see James, William, vocational identity of

216

Index

Identity crisis, 16-36; see also James, William, vocational crisis of Individualism, ix, 164, 167; see also James, William, individualism of Individualistic psychological states, 108 Individualistic psychology, 109, 124, 168 Influence, see James, William, influence of; Principles of Psychology, The, influence of International Congress of Arts and Sciences, 1904, 61 International Psychological Congress of 1889, 40-41, 43, 129 International Psychological Congress of 1896, 54 International Psychological Congress of 1913, see Proposed International Psychological Congress of 1913 International Psychological Congress of 1929, 140, 142 Introspection, ix, 10, 35, 83, 85; recent scholarship on, 188n27; Titchenerian, Wundtian, and Jamesian introspection compared, 80-83 Ithaca, New York, 73, 77 James, Alice (sister), 16, 99 James, Alice Howe Gibbens, 18, 145 James, Henry, Sr., 2, 16, 21-25, 34, 62, 128, 165, 167; inheritance of 179nl6; relations with William James, 19-25; relations with William James of Albany, 21-23 James, Henry 151-52 James, Henry, Jr., 16 James, William, ix, 1, 6 - 7 , 9, 12, 40, 44-45, 74, 129; aesthetics of, 31-32, Americanism of, 98-'99, 109, 122-25, 150, 152-53, 160-62, 171-73, 1 9 9 200n54; angina of, 131, 140, 150; antiscientific romanticism, 168-74; Aristotelian Society member, 109-10; on art—classical and modern, 26-30, 34; as an artist, 23-26, 151, 164-66; attitude toward scientific distinction, 128-29; autobiographical sketch, 1 7 -

18 (see also Varieties of Religious Experience, The); birth of, 2; Brazilian trip, 17-23; bringing Münsterberg to Harvard, 46-54; as buried philosopher, 16, 21, 36, 178nl; California dreams, 154-57, 160; career of, 12-13, 19-36; compared with Cattell, 106-12, 114, 122-25, 128; compared with Münsterberg, 59-62; compared with other founding psychologists, 105-06, 145-47, 160-62, 167-70, 172; compared with Titchener, 78-79, 8 5 88; compared with Wundt, 42, 54, 182nnl0, 11, 187-88n25; comparing abilities of American psychologists, 53; as compromiser, x-xii, 19-20, 69-70, 130, 167, 172-73, 175, 176n5; compromising of, xii-xiii, 16-36, 5 7 58; contempt for science, 119; contribution to modernity, 9; controversy with Cattell, 88, 114-20; controversy with Hall, 106, 118-19; controversy with Münsterberg, 41-43; controversy with Titchener, 88-94, 189n69; creation of his psychology, 57-58; creative illness, 148; cultural significance, 168-74; Darwin's influence on his psychology, 87; decision to study physiological psychology, 34-35; diary, 18, 25-26, 35, 61; quoted from diary, 18, 27-35; discovery of psychological expression, 30-31; drawings of, 2 3 24, 26; in Dresden, 26-33; evolutionary psychology, 8, 109; existential battle of, 20; experimental psychology of, 8; experimental publications of, 112-13; expsychologist, 129, 142; on free will, 18; on Freud, 146, 197n6; functionalism (functional psychology), 11, 42-43, 97, 168-70; Harvard Psychological Laboratory, 10, 46, 177n20; historical milieu, 2 - 5 ; historical reputation of, 120-22, 162; identity, American, 58; identity crisis,

Index 156-58, 160; identity, historical, 147; individualism of, ix, 164; influence of, 11-13; interest in philosophy, 3 4 35; introspection of, 80-81, 108, 188n27; invalidism as a strategy, 150; "Maya," 34-35, 167; metapsychology, 159; mind curers, on licensing of, 150, 153; moralism of, 164; on moral mind, 159-60; naturalism of, 161; on nerve behavior, 158-59; nervous illness and neurasthenia of, 4 - 5 , 149-51, 179nl3, 198nl6; as a New Englander, 171-72, 200n2; Oedipal conflict of, 19-25, 62; as paternal psychologist, 130, 196nl5; pathological mental states, 150; philosophical liberal, 110-11, philosophy of, ix, 12, 16; president of the APA, 98, 128; president of the proposed International Psychological Congress of 1913, 138-39; as professional psychologist, 128-42, 165; psychic crisis of, ix, 17-18, 26, 151-53, 161; on psychic energy, 1 5 8 59; on psychic phenomena, 7, 63-66, 115-20; on psychic research, 92-93, 98, 147, 149-50, 154; psychology of self, 82-83; on reaction-time psychology, 8 - 9 , 83-84; relations with Henry Sr., 19-25; role in proposed International Psychological Congress of 1913, 129-42; scientific reputation of, 11; stream of consciousness, 29-31; as symbol, x, 2, 4, 69-70, 124, 141, 147, 160, 171, 173, 175n2; theory of evolution, 42, 182nl2; on Titchener's psychology, 83-84, 93; on unconscious mind, 148-49, 154, 159; Varieties of Religious Experience, The, 178n4; vocational crisis of, 18-36, 178n9, 165; vocational identity of, 12-13, 18-36; Walpurgis Nacht, 151-53; on wild nature, 61-63; on will, 63, 159; on Wundt's psychology, 84, 1 8 1 82n9 James, William of Albany, 16, 25

217

Janet, Pierre, 154 Jastrow, Joseph, 10, 53, 101 Johns Hopkins University, 83, 107, 111, 130; psychological laboratory, 107, 119, 121, 130 Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Method, 120 Judd, Charles, 43, 97 Keen Valley, New York, 149,151 Laboratory psychology, 10, 51, 112, 123, 149; see also Brass instrument psychology Ladd, George Trumbull, 11, 83, 101, 132-34, 137 Lafayette College, 106, 128 Lawrence Scientific School, 16-17, 23 Lehmann, Α., 89-92 Leibnizian and Hegelian systems, 81 Leipzig, University of, 40-41, 43, 107, 109, 112; laboratory, 4 2 - 4 3 Lessing, Gotthold, Ε., 31 Liberalism, 111 Liebault, A. S., 149 Lockean sensationalism, 6 London Society for Psychic Research, 64, 89, 98, 115-16, 118, 149, 169 Lotze, Hermann, 107 Lough, James, 52 Lowell Institute Lectures, 150 Luther, Martin, 154 McCosh, James, 6 Mach, Ernst, 76, 81 Manifest Destiny, 1 - 2 Masturbation, 178n3 Maudsley, Henry, 148 "Maya," 34-35, 44, 157, 159; see also James, William, psychic crisis of Mediums, 6 3 - 6 4 Melancholia, 20, 107 Mental health in the nineteenth century, 4 - 6 Mental pathology, 11 Mental philosophy, 6; see also Faculty psychology

218

Index

Mental telepathy, see Telepathy Mental testing, 109 Mental testing psychology, 146 Mesmerism, 7 Meyer, Adolf, 79, 101, 165 Meyer, Donald, 153, 179nl4 Michelangelo, 27 Michigan University, 97 Mill, John Stuart, 81 Mind, 55, 110 Mind cure, 7, 65; licensing of, 150 Mitchell, S. Weir, 4 - 5 , 116 Moreau, Jacques-Joseph, 148 Müller, Georg Elias, 45, 47 Müller, Johannes, 8 Multiple personality, 150 Munich, see International Psychological Congress of 1896 Münsterberg, Anna, 41 Münsterberg, Hugo, xi-xii, 10-11, 44, 46, 74, 77, 80, 83, 95-100, 105, 1 1 0 12, 114-15, 121-24, 128-29, 134-36, 138, 141, 147, 149, 150, 154, 160-61, 164, 167, 169, 172; on AmericanEuropean cultural differences, 56-58; on American individualism, 56-57; Americanization of, 48-54; American nervousness, 64-65; on American philosophy, 58; on American science, 52; on American women, 65-66, 185—86n93, 186nl04; anecdotes of, 54-55, 183n41; on applied psychology, 63, 69-70, 185n89; comparison of German and American teaching and research standards, 5 1 52; critique of pragmatism, 61-62; death of, 39-40; decision to come to Harvard, 46-54; difficulty with the English language, 48-49; disillusionment with American values; 68-70; distinction between science and philosophy, 58-59; education of, 40-42; effect of Jewish heritage on his career, 45-46, 182n23; elitism of, 52, 54-56, 59; on Emerson Hall dedication, 55-56; idealism of, 184nn72, 73; on laboratory psychology, 51; on mediums, 64-67;

personality of, 181n4, 183n25; philosophy of, 59; on The Principles of Psychology, 58; on psychic research, 40, 59; psychology compared with James's 41-43; psychotherapy of, 63; publications of, 41; relations with James, 40-41; on unconscious mind, 145-46; World War I and, 55; on Wundt and Wundtian psychology, 4 1 - 4 3 Münsterberg, Selma, 183n41 Mysticism, 63-64 National Academy of Sciences, 129 Nerve behavior, 158-59 Nerve psychology, 8 - 9 Nervousness, see American nervousness; Neurasthenia Neurasthenia, 4 - 5 , 20, 159, 166 New Immigration, 3 New Haven, Connecticut, 83 Newport, Rhode Island, 16 New World values, see James, William, Americanism of Occult, 12; see also Psychic phenomena; Pathological mentality Origins of Species, The, 7 Outline of Psychology, An, 101 Owen, Josephine, 110 Oxford University, 76-77 Palladino, Eusapia, 64, 66-67, 69; see also Münsterberg, Hugo, on mediums Palmer, George Herbert, 49, 55 Paris, see International Psychological Congress of 1889 Pathological mentality, 12 Pennsylvania University, 10, 45, 53, 67, 97, 108, 112 Perry, Ralph Barton, 15, 19, 23, 147, 153 Phenomenology, ix, 7 Philadelphia, 57 Philosophische Studien, 8 9 - 9 0 Physical-psychological parallelism, 84 Physiological psychology, development of, 8 - 9

Index Physiologischen Psychologie (The Principles of), 76-77 Physiology and Pathology of the Mind, 148; see also Maudsley, Henry Pierce, A. H., 135 Pillsbury, Walter B., 78, 97, 132, 134 Piper Leonora E., 64, 93, 115-19, 149 PJanchette, 148; see also Sargent, Epes Pluralism, 20, 58; see also James, William, philosophy of Popular Science Monthly, 114, 120, 127 Porter, Noah, 6 Positivism, 43, 76, 106, 163, 168-69 Pragmatism, ix-x, 12, 16, 18-19, 33, 68-70, 105, 110-11, 147, 168, 185n78 Prince, Morton, 130, 154 Princeton Theological Seminary, 160 Princeton University, 6, 51, 83, 97; psychological laboratory, 130 Principles of Psychology, The, xii, 7 - 8 , 19-20, 30, 35-36, 42, 44, 59-60, 63, 79, 81-82, 85, 98-101, 107, 110-13, 122-23, 125, 149-50, 158, 165-70; influence of, 11-13, 44, 177-78n25 Principles of Physiological Psychology, 10; see also Wundt, Wilhelm Proceedings of the Society for Psychic Research (PSPR), 89, 115, 117, 149 Professional associations: see American Psychological Association; Society of Experimental Psychologists Professionalization, x - x i , 10-11, 46, 87-88, Chapter Six Professional journals, 10; see also Psychological Review; American Journal of Psychology Progressive ethos, 62 Proposed International Psychological Congress of 1913, 129-42, 172, 195n7 Psychic phenomena, 7, 11, 63, 115-20, 128, 148, 166; see also James, William, on psychic phenomena Psychic research, 59, 88, 94, 99, 110, 114-20, 131, 154 Psychoanalysis, 2, 146, 148; see also Freud, Sigmund Psychoasthenic, 159 Psychogenesis, 80, 174

219

Psychological Review, 10, 114, 120 Psychological temperament, 101-2 Psychology: professionalization of, 1 0 11; scientific development of, 13-14; see also Applied psychology; Functional psychology; Introspection Psychometrics, 107 Psychopathology, 148; in The Principles of Psychology, 149 Psychophysics, 94, 110, 112 Psychotherapy, xiii, 146 Putnam, James Jackson, 100, 148-49, 151 Radcliffe College, 39 Radical empiricism, ix, 12 Rank, Otto, 36 Reaction-time psychology, 109, 111-14, 177nl5; development of, 8 - 9 Reid, Thomas, 6 Renouvier, Charles, 18-19, 24-25, 32, 107, 157 Rietschel, Ernest Friedrich August, 2 8 29, 33 Roberts-Hawley lymph compound, 151 Robertson, Croom, 110 Royce, Josiah, 45, 49, 52, 55, 67, 122 Saipetriere School, 148 Sanford, Edmund, 10, 51, 53, 97, 101 Sargent, Epes, 148 Schiller, Friedrich, 31-33, 61, 148 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 148 Science, 88, 92, 115, 118-20, 127, 150, 153; see also James, William: controversy with Cattell; controversy with Titchener Science and Idealism, 61 Scientific method, 92 Scientific Positivism, see Positivism Scientific psychology, 25; history of, 6 13 Scottish School, 6 Scripture, Edward, 11, 53, 83-84 Sexual roles, 65-66; see also Münsterberg, Hugo, on American women Sick-minded, 18, 179nl4

220

Index

Sick souls, 154, 166 Sidgwick, Henry, 89-91, 94 Skinner, Β. F., 169 Society of Experimentalists, 97; see also Society of Experimental Psychologists Society of Experimental Psychologists, 96-97, 128, 136-38, 141 Spencer, Herbert, 7 Spiritual crisis, ix; see also James, William, psychic crisis of Spiritualism, 7 Split personalities, 149 Stanford University, 77 St. Louis Exposition, see International Congress of Arts and Sciences, 1904 Stout, George Frederick, 110 Stream of consciousness, 30-31, 33, 84, 161, 170; see also James, William, discovery of psychological expression Strout, Cushing, 19-24 Structuralism (Structural psychology), 11, 42-43, 80, 91, 105, 108, 114; see also Titchener, Edward Bradford, structuralism of Stuart, Dugald, 6 Subliminal, x, 146-47; see also Unconscious mind Sully, James, 12, 54, 110 Swedenborgian, 16, 22, 24, 106 Taine, H„ 31 Telepathy, 89-90, 92-93, 114-20, 166, 168 Textbook of Psychology, A, 82 Thorndike, Edward Lee, 100, 122, 165 Thought and Character of William fames, The, 19; see also Perry, Ralph Barton Thought-transference, 89, 93 Titchener, Edward Bradford, ix-xii, 10, 12, 42, 45, 53, 61, 105, 110, 114, 121, 123, 128-30, 145, 147, 149, 153-54, 160, 164, 167-69, 172; anecedotes on, 77-79; anti-Americanism, 98-99; appointment at Cornell, 77; A Textbook of Psychology compared with The Principles of Psychology, 82; on Cattell, 134, 138; controversy

in Science with James, 88-94; Darwinism of, 87; education of, 7 6 77; founding of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, 96-97; on introspection, 80-81, 188n27; on Münsterberg's personality, 98, 190n91; paternalism of, 74-75, 9 5 96, 99-100, 190n78; as a professional, 102; role in the proposed International Psychological Congress of 1913, 130-39, 141-42; on psychic research, 93-94; on psychological elements, 80-81; on psychological science, 79-83; on psychological temperament, 101-2; on his scientific isolation, 91, 94-95, 98-102; on his use of James's "stream of consciousness," 85; structuralism of, 11, 85-88, 95, 97; teaching style, 7 8 79; on unconscious mind, 146 Titchener, John Bradford, 74 Toronto University, 51; psychological laboratory, 130 Unconscious mind, Chapter Seven, 11, 63, 154 Varieties of Religious Experience, The, 153-54, 166 Walpurgis Nacht, 151-53, 155, 157, 160 Ward, Thomas, 110, 148 Warren, Howard C., 84 Washburn, Margaret Floy, 82 Washington, D.C., 57 Watson, John B., 135-36, 169 Weber, Ernst, 8 White, Andrew Dickson, 83 White Mountains, 151 Will, 159; see also Free will; James, William: on free will; on will Wisconsin University, 10 Witchcraft, 150 Witmer, Lightner, 53, 97 Wittenberg College, 121-22 Woodworth, Robert Sessions, 122 Worcester, Massachusetts, 17, 83 Wundt, Wilhelm, 8 - 1 0 , 12, 40, 46, 61, 76-77, 80-81, 84, 86, 107-8, 111,

Index 1 1 3 - 1 4 , 121; introspection of, 8 0 - 8 1 ; on The Principles of Psychology, 12; psychological laboratory, 10, 4 1 - 4 3 , 53, 182n22; psychology of, 9 - 1 0 , 4 2 43, 45, 108

221

Yale University, 11, 53, 83, 97; psychological laboratory, 122 Yerkes, Robert M., 75, 82, 9 5 - 9 6 , 100 Zurich University, 54