James Rowland Angell

After several years of delay, I am attempting to comply with the request of the editor of this series and set forth something of my life and intellectual history, as I believe it to be, even though I find it difficult to suppose that such a statement will possess any significant value for others.

While I gave some 27 years of my life to teaching and research in the field of psychology, the last 17 years have been almost wholly preoccupied with educational work of an administrative kind, which fact has compelled me to abandon any pretense of active participation in the development of my science. Any account of my life as a psychologist is accordingly already ancient history. If it has any enduring value, it will be for the light it may throw on an interesting and critical period of American psychology with which I was actively identified.

I was born May 8, 1869, in Burlington, Vermont, where my father, James Burrill Angell, was President of the University of Vermont. He had previously been Professor of Modern Languages at Brown University and had also edited the Providence Journal for six years. As is well known, he subsequently went to Ann Arbor, where for 38 years he was President of the University of Michigan. It was there that I grew up, went to school and to college. My maternal grandfather, Alexis Caswell, after a brief career as a Baptist minister, was Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at Brown, later President of the University, and one of the charter members of the National Academy of Sciences. My interest in educational and scientific matters has therefore some possible hereditary background, although in the direct line I do not know of any men prior to my maternal grandfather who had followed the learned professions. Certainly my earlier male ancestry on both sides had for some generations been New England farmers, men of ability and thrift, who enjoyed the confidence and respect of their fellows. On my father's side my first male ancestor, Thomas Angell, came into Rhode Island with Roger Williams in 1636. Like some hundreds of thousands of other American citizens, I am, on my mother's side, a descendant from Mayflower ancestry. Peregrine White, the first white child born of the Mayflower stock, was an ancestor. My only

( 2) brother, Alexis Caswell Angell, was a highly successful lawyer, for a time a judge on the Federal Bench, lecturing periodically in the University of Michigan Law School, and for many years widely regarded as the leader of the bar in the City of Detroit. My sister married a Professor of American History, Andrew C. McLaughlin, for some years Chairman of the Department of History in the University of Michigan and for a still longer period head of the corresponding department at the University of Chicago, and sometime President of the American Historical Association. My only son, James Waterhouse Angell, has for some years been Professor of Economics in Columbia University. It thus clearly appears that my domestic environment has been largely academic.

In 1894 I married Marion Isabel Watrous of Des Moines, Iowa, who had been a fellow student at the University of Michigan. A son and a daughter were born to us, both of whom are married and with children of their own. My wife died in 1931 and I subsequently married Katharine Cramer Woodman, who has made my life one of great happiness. Her warm and friendly interest in students and their problems has won her a position of remarkable influence and appreciation in the Yale community.

I was the youngest of three children, my sister being six years my senior and my brother twelve. The home life was very simple and wholesome, although my father's position, coupled with my mother's abounding natural hospitality, resulted in the presence in the house of innumerable guests, many of them members of the faculty who would drop in for luncheon or dinner. Persons of distinction coming to the University on official errands of one kind and another were, in the early years at least, almost certain to be entertained in our home, for the hotels in the town were in those days rather impossible. These circumstances gave me opportunity from early childhood to see and meet many cultivated people from whose conversation I inevitably derived a certain kind of education, and I cherish not a few interesting memories of outstanding figures in the world of letters and public affairs, e.g., Canon Farrar, Mathew Arnold, Andrew White, Grover Cleveland, and many others of equal interest.

Both my parents were devoted Christians and the atmosphere of the home was distinctly religious. Until I was half grown, family prayers were regularly conducted by my father, generally after breakfast, and I grew up accepting religious exercises as a normal part of

( 3) life. It was therefore a natural thing that in my early adolescence I joined the Congregational Church which my parents attended. Throughout my high school years I was thrown intimately with boys and girls, many of whom were active in the Student Christian Association in which I also took part. In college these religious activities somewhat lessened, as I was not much attracted to the men who directed them, but my interest in religious issues remained definite. While not pious, I was recognized by my mates as being identified with the religious portion of the community.

When I was four, I barely survived an attack of scarlet fever, which cost me the hearing of one ear and seriously sapped my vitality. Some years later, I suffered from recurrent attacks of malaria, so persistent a curse in the early history of southern Michigan. As a result, I suspect, of these mishaps, I was not very robust and the effect upon a rather oversensitive nervous organization was to render me somewhat timid and unassertive. There are tales of my being a mischievous child, but I can verify no episode which suggests more than the normal pranks of a lone youngster in a large household-and I was practically on my own, for my brother and sister were too much my elders to be companions in any intimate sense.

I attended the public schools of Ann Arbor, graduating from the high school in 1886 and proceeding to the state University, where I received my A.B. degree in 1890. Just prior to entering high school, I was for a year and one-half in China, where my father was sent as United States Minister at the head of a Commission appointed to negotiate a treaty, as was successfully done, which should control the immigration of Chinese laborers into the country. This event inevitably broke into my formal schooling, but it resulted in a trip around the world and in innumerable interesting experiences on which I place a very high value for the broadening and enriching of my outlook on life. Not the least of these were concerned with impressions of distinguished persons whom I saw and to whose conversation I listened with attention and interest. For example, Sir Robert Hart, for years the great administrator of the Chinese customs, was a frequent visitor at the Legation in Peking, and, thanks to my friendship with his son, Bruce, a lad of about my own age, he gave me a Korean pony, which I rode all about Peking during my stay.

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From the time of my earliest memories, I was absorbingly interested in athletic sports and games of all kinds and, until I was perhaps half through college, there was never a moment when I would not rather play baseball, or football, or tennis, than do anything else whatever. School seemed to me to be a necessary evil whose value was grotesquely overestimated by my parents and other adults. I was a fair student, but rarely worked hard enough to make consistently high grades. In everything having to do with reading and writing, I excelled most of my mates in the earlier grades, perhaps because of superior home surroundings. Geography and spelling were relatively easy for me, because I had an excellent visual memory. Arithmetic bored me profoundly, and I gave it the least possible attention compatible with passing the tests necessary for promotion. I was fond of music and made a feeble attempt to master the piano, but unwillingness to practice faithfully left that achievement seriously incomplete.

When I got into the high school, Orin Cady of the University School of Music Faculty organized a boys' orchestra in which I learned to play a clarinet. Later a band was formed and I greatly enjoyed both experiences, learning a good deal about orchestration and musical construction, which I should otherwise have missed.

In the high school, I followed the conventional classical course, with Latin four years, mathematics three years, and Greek two years as the central core of the curriculum, with history, English, modern languages, and science as fillers. Thanks to egregious loafing the first year, in order to indulge my penchant for sports, I got off to a wretched start in Latin and algebra. The second year was heavily shadowed by the poor record of the first, but then I pulled myself together and by really hard work succeeded in graduating with an "A" diploma, which meant, as I recall it, that for the last two years of the course I succeeded in maintaining on a scale of 100 an average of 90, with no marks below 85. This won me a place on the commencement program and sent me to college without qualifications of any kind.

I came under only one brilliant teacher in the school, though many of the staff were thoroughly competent and, with more earnest students than I, achieved excellent results. Judson Pattengill was a born teacher, and from the first day in his classroom Greek became to me a fascinating study, which I pursued with equal enthusiasm

( 5) under Walter Miller, later on for many years Professor and Dean of the Graduate School in the University of Missouri. Although I generally received high marks in it, I found the English teaching dull and uninteresting. The modern languages I got nothing of and the only science was a little botany. The time-consumption involved in physics and chemistry made these subjects difficult to combine with the classical curriculum. Unhappily there was no general biology and no earth science.

When I got to college I went on with the classical course, but after my freshman year I began to have opportunity for election and seized the earliest opportunity to get into logic and psychology. The logic which was based on Jevons' well-known little book interested me, though it did not greatly excite me. But the psychology (Dewey's recently published text) instantly opened up a new world, which it seemed to me I had been waiting for, and for the first time I felt a deep and pervasive sense of the intellectual importance of the material I was facing. My previous studies had at times stirred me, notably my Greek, and especially Homer, but I had never before encountered anything which seemed to afford me the sense of grasp, insight, and mastery in a subject intrinsically of crucial significance. With that experience began my real intellectual life, which ultimately led me on into my profession.

I at once started to elect work in the philosophical department---ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and Hegel's logic under John Dewey, British philosophy under Williston Hough, general history of philosophy under James H. Tufts, and most rewarding of all in the year following my graduation, which I spent as a graduate student at Michigan, a seminar with Dewey in William James's freshly published Principles of Psychology. That book unquestionably affected my thinking for the next 20 years more profoundly than any other.

In the later portion of my college course, I began to think of pursuing medicine, with a view to specializing in problems relating to the brain and nervous system, but weak eyes, from which I had suffered the tortures of the damned from early adolescence (sequelae, as I always believed, of my childhood illnesses, for nowhere else in the family had such a defect appeared), compelled me to forego the arduous microscopic work which was, and still is, an essential feature of medical training. The law did not interest me, the ministry pre-

( 6) -sented intellectual obstacles which were increasingly grave, business was entirely out of my horizon, and I was steadily drawn to the possibility of an academic and scholarly career. My great doubt was whether I had sufficient ability to make a respectable record in that calling. Oddly enough, the economic aspect of the issue, which later cost me so much anxiety, never entered my mind. This fact, perhaps better than any other, shows how little the power and lure of money entered into the serious consideration of the people among whom I grew up. That some of them were very generous and others very stingy was matter of universal small-town knowledge and comment. But there was no great wealth in the place, almost no serious poverty, and money gave no one prestige. The evidences of wealth, when I encountered them in the homes of the rich in other communities, often filled me with a mild contempt and distaste rather than envy. I particularly disliked the flavor of sycophantic domestic service. My father's house was adequately staffed with servants, but I felt that they were all persons and not mere servitors, an attitude which was doubtless stimulated by the violent individualism of the English woman, Kate Martin, who was my nurse throughout my childhood.

With the encouragement of John Dewey, I remained, as I have above remarked, for a year of graduate study at Michigan, taking a master's degree with philosophy as my major and economics and American history as my minors, writing a thesis on imagery, with a study of the varieties of it disclosed in a group of nineteenth-century English poets. During this period, I greatly increased my obligations to Dewey and to Tufts, both later to be my colleagues for many years at the University of Chicago. For my intellectual awakening, for many basic elements in my subsequent habits of thought, and for endless kind and helpful acts in later years, I am under the deepest obligation to John Dewey, whose simplicity of character, originality, and virility of mind brought him the unqualified affection, admiration, and devotion of thousands of students.

On Dewey's recommendation, and with my parents' consent, I went from Michigan in 1891 to study in the Graduate School at Harvard under William James, Josiah Royce, and George Herbert Palmer. Santayana, of whom I had not heard, was there as a young instructor just coming over the philosophical horizon. I had not at the time decided whether to make philosophy or psychology my

( 7) predominant interest. It so fell out that my year's work was fairly divided between James and Royce, Palmer having no formal courses into which I could expediently enter. A seminar of Royce in Kant was extremely illuminating and very taxing on time and energy. A general lecture course of his on metaphysics I attended as an auditor, with much less profit. I entered a seminar with James devoted to abnormal psychology and gave a large part of my time to miscellaneous work in the newly established laboratory which James, with great relief, had turned over to Herbert Nichols to run. In the seminars I met a number of brilliant and interesting students, with many of whom I established life-long friendships. Charles M. Bakewell, later my colleague at Yale, Alfred L. Hodder, Arthur H. Pierce, Dickinson S. Miller, Sidney E. Mezes, Alfred Buck, later my assistant at Chicago, and many others were in the number. Their presence constituted an invaluable asset in the atmosphere of the place. I enjoyed a peculiarly intimate contact with James by virtue of his turning over to me for study and digest the great mass of documentary material which had come to him in connection with the effort of the American Society for Psychical Research to secure exhaustive and reliable information regarding abnormal psychic experiences of normal individuals ---especially so-called veridical hallucinations. This fact not only gave me a first-hand sense of the character of the evidence underlying belief in these phenomena, but it also put me in direct contact with one of the most inspiring and spiritually beautiful human beings I have ever known. If the result was not important for psychic research, it was of the utmost importance for my development and my devotion to a noble person whose friendship was warm and intimate as long as he lived.

Toward the end of the year, the Department suggested that I remain another year as understudy to Dr. Nichols in the laboratory. But I had decided that, if my father would send me, I would more wisely go abroad for further study. At first I considered England, having in mind especially the opportunity of working under Edward Caird in Kant, but closer knowledge of the conditions at the British universities made it clear that an itinerant graduate student would not find it very easy to secure the opportunities desired, and, as I was also eager to work in Wundt's laboratory at Leipzig, I decided to go to Germany. It had furthermore been my desire to study for a time with Hugo Münsterberg in Freiburg, but before my plans

(8) were complete, Münsterberg was invited to go to Harvard and that part of my program accordingly came to naught. As a result of my seminar work with James, I was keen to see something of Krafft-Ebing's work in Vienna, Bernheim in Nancy, and Charcot in Paris, where Ribot and Binet also attracted me. Flournoy in Geneva was likewise a man whom I felt a desire to meet. Obviously such an ambitious plan could not be brought to a conclusion in a single year and it was highly uncertain how long I could stay abroad. I was reluctant to submit my parents to further expense and besides I wanted to be married. As so often occurs in human affairs, what finally happened was quite different from what I had thought of.

Early in the summer of 1892, I sailed to Hamburg and went at once to Braunschweig, where more than 40 years earlier my father hid gone, and as a member of the household of Pastor Sachs had received instruction in German from his daughter Fräulein Sachs. Arthur Pierce, whom I had come to know well at Harvard, and I found quarters with a Captain Breithaupt and under the teaching of Fräulein Agnes and the kindly ministrations of the Breithaupt family my ear and tongue finally accommodated themselves to the vagaries of the German language, so that when, in the Autumn, I was ready to attend university lectures I found no difficulty in following them and no very serious difficulty in expressing myself, although my conversation on topics other than philosophy and psychology tended to run aground on limitations of vocabulary, which were most exasperating to me and convulsingly amusing to my auditors. I should perhaps add that I had had a couple of years of German in college, but without acquiring any ability to use the language as a spoken tongue.

When I went to Leipzig and called upon Professor Wundt and Professor Külpe, to both of whom I had letters of introduction from my cousin, Frank Angell, who had a few years previously taken his doctor's degree with Wundt, I was most hospitably welcomed, but to my great disappointment confirmed what I had by rumor earlier learned, that the laboratory was full and that I could not secure the advantage of anything but the general lecture courses. As I had already familiarized myself with Wundt's Grundzuge which constituted the substance of the general lectures he was then giving, it did not seem to me that I could employ my time to the best advantage by remaining there, especially as there were no lectures being offered

(9) in philosophy which appealed to me. Regretfully therefore I turned my steps toward Berlin, where Ebbinghaus and Paulsen were lecturing, the former on the principles of psychology (material which later took form in his admirable book) and the latter on ethics and Spinoza. Dessoir, a young Privatdozent, was beginning his lectures on aesthetics. Dilthey, Lasson, and others were to be heard on general philosophical subjects. I gave my chief attention to Paulsen's courses, reading extensively in psychology, although the eccentricities of the University of Berlin Library made precarious any possibility of confident planning. The collection was grossly defective in contemporary English, French, and American books and periodicals and the method of access to books has too often been lampooned to justify any repetition. It would, however, be difficult to exaggerate its inconvenience.

Paulsen was by far the most finished lecturer I heard in Germany and an altogether charming person to meet. I count my contact with him as one of the particularly bright spots of my year in Germany. Ebbinghaus, for whose work on memory I had great respect, was not so interesting a lecturer and I had no opportunity for the direct contact which I enjoyed with Paulsen. I went occasionally into the lectures of the other eminent scholars then at the University and was especially impressed by Helmholtz, whose monumental works on vision and audition I already knew reasonably well. Between the semesters I travelled rather widely, going to Munich, Nuremberg, Strassburg, Stuttgart, Prague, Vienna, Trieste, Venice, Rome, Naples, Florence, Geneva, and Paris, spending nearly a month in Geneva where I exchanged French and English lessons with a young Swiss student.

I had decided to spend my second semester at Halle, hearing Benno Erdmann on psychology and working with Professor Hans Vaihinger in Kant. I presented myself as a candidate for the doctor's degree and wrote a thesis on the treatment of freedom in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason compared with that in the Critique of Practical Reason. My thesis was accepted and returned for rendition into more acceptable German, when I received from the University of Minnesota an invitation to come at once as instructor in philosophy and psychology, at a salary of $1500. To accept the post meant leaving almost at once, for the institution opened early in September and, in the fortnight remaining, I could not possibly accomplish the necessary final

( 10) preparation for my examinations in my major---philosophy---and my two minors---economics and English literature---at the same time revising the form of my thesis. A little earlier President Eliot had offered me again a minor instructional position at Harvard, but at a considerably smaller salary than that proposed at Minnesota.

I was in deep perplexity as to what course to pursue; the prospect of a doctor's degree from a German University of high standing was not lightly to be dismissed. The opportunity to begin my professional career at Harvard had certain obvious advantages, but a living wage in a reputable institution was also not to be cast aside too cavalierly. Having been engaged for four years to Miss Watrous, whom I had much wanted to marry, and having assurance that the Minnesota position would shortly make that possible, I decided to accept their offer and come back at a later date to complete the process of securing my doctorate. This program I was never later able to carry out, and so it happened that, while in after years I was given an honorary degree of Doctor of Philosophy, I never quite completed the formalities for winning it on my merits. In view of the large number of doctor's degrees I have been instrumental in conferring on others, this circumstance has always elicited sardonic reflections whenever I think of it.

It was an agreeable thing to have my first two offers of academic appointment come from Harvard, our oldest university, even though the positions were of minor consequence. As I knew they reflected the confidence which I had won from James and Royce and Palmer, I was perhaps entitled to a little gratification. All three remained my warm friends as long as they lived and two of them, James and Palmer, I am sure considerably overestimated my abilities. Such evaluation is not a bad thing for youth, if it does not confirm a too vigorous natural vanity. I do not know the judgment of my friends, but I have sometimes thought that a larger share of vanity might have contributed to a more aggressive self-confidence which at times in turn might have been helpful. The impressive modesty of my father, however, whose intellectual abilities I well knew to be distinctly superior to my own, undoubtedly influenced me deeply in this respect.

At Minnesota, my old teacher, Williston Hough, was my chief in charge of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology. His kindness and friendly advice were of constant value to me in facing the

( 11) ordeal of my first teaching. My schedule was extremely heavy. Three successive sections, an hour each in duration, on five days a week devoted to elementary psychology, chiefly patronized by juniors and seniors, with a large twice-a-week lecture course to two or three hundred unchastened sophomores, dealing with fundamental metaphysical ideas, comprised my schedule. In addition, I had to fit out a modest psychological laboratory and in the second half of the year give an introductory course in laboratory methods. Never before and rarely since have I had to work so hard as I did in the effort to carry this load. If I got to bed before two o'clock, I counted myself fortunate, and my first class was at 8:15 in the morning, with a half-hour journey across the city to get from my lodgings to the University. It was a thrilling experience, and my good fortune in almost instantly gaining the interest and confidence of my students made it also a happy one. But I nearly wrecked myself physically and at the end of the year found myself utterly exhausted nervously.

In addition to the hours spent in sheer mastery of the material related to my work, I gave many hours to perfecting a Socratic technique of questioning, the benefits of which remained with me throughout my teaching career. To learn so to phrase lucid questions that they will provoke significant thinking and when answered will open up the next directly related issue and so make the entire class hour one of active thought for every student (and in my classes no student ever knew when he would be drawn in to criticize or assist the student nominally in action) was an objective which I instantly adopted and in reasonable measure achieved. I also, from the first, insisted on the ability of my students to furnish valid and significant illustrations of any proposition they offered. This procedure quickly chastens the glib memorizer and even more the glib phrase-maker and bluffer. On most of my accomplishments I should place a very modest estimate, but I really think I had a genuine flair for stimulating teaching and I certainly gave everything I had to the effort to perfect my knowledge and my technique.

Toward the end of the year, President Harper offered me a position as Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago where John Dewey had gone the preceding year as head of the department. I was to be in charge of the laboratory and the courses in psychology, with an assistant to help me. Simon F. McClellan of the University of Toronto, who later became Professor of

( 12) Philosophy at Oberlin, was appointed to this post. Although President Northrop and my friend and colleague, Hough, and others brought heavy pressure on me to remain, it seemed to me that Chicago had the atmosphere of research and advanced study in which I was primarily interested to a greater degree than could be expected for many years at Minnesota, and I accordingly accepted the invitation---a decision which was unquestionably wise and which I never for a moment regretted, genuinely as I had enjoyed and appreciated my life at Minnesota. In the autumn I brought my bride to Chicago, where for the next 26 years we shared together the joys and anxieties of impecunious young people with a growing family.

The faculty at the University of Chicago, when I went there, was made up of a small but extraordinary group of distinguished scholars whom President Harper had drawn by high salaries and the promise of abundant freedom for research to be heads of the departments. Supporting them was a large group of really brilliant young men who have, with few exceptions, attained high distinction. It was therefore a very stimulating place for a young scholar to start in. I found myself housed in the physics laboratory presided over by Albert A. Michelson, who became my warm friend and tennis companion as long as I remained. Robert A. Millikan came the next year and I at once formed a delightful friendship with him, as I did with Henry G. Gale, who came later into the department, having previously been one of my students. My next neighbor was the great physiologist, Jacques Loeb, with whom I instantly established a warm friendship. Another close neighbor was the neurologist, Henry H. Donaldson, with whom I also came into intimate relations of friendship. Eliakim H. Moore in mathematics was another friend and neighbor of the same kind. Laughlin in economics, Shorey and Capps in Greek, Buck in,Sanskrit, Abbott and W. G. Hale in Latin, Herrick, Lovett, and somewhat later Manly and the poet, Moody, in English, Small and Thomas in sociology, George E. Hale in astronomy, Breasted in ancient history, Mathews and Goodspeed in theology, Stieglitz in chemistry, were all good friends to whom I owe much. In my own department, Dewey and Tufts and George H. Mead, just brought from Michigan, were my colleagues, and a finer and more delightful group of men it would not be possible to name. Their kindness to me and to my wife was unlimited. She early won a place of importance for herself in the community,

( 13) identifying herself with many significant social enterprises. Prior to our entrance into the War, she was especially active in the society which, cared for the orphan children of French soldiers. She was also an active member of the Fortnightly, a club containing many of the leading women in Chicago, of which she was later president.

To have had some hand in molding the early destinies of a great university in companionship with these men I have mentioned and dozens of others whom I have not named was a thrilling experience for any young man and one which I entered into with the deepest interest.

For seven years I received no promotion in rank and no advance in salary, and to say that I was discouraged and disheartened would he putting it mildly. Finally, as I began to listen more sympathetically to occasional approaches from other institutions, I was in 1901 promoted to be Associate Professor.

In 1903 I was invited to go to Princeton as professor to succeed J. Mark Baldwin, who had accepted a call to Johns Hopkins. This invitation enabled me to discuss my future with the Chicago authorities in a more realistic fashion than before, and, as a result, I was in 1904 promoted to a professorship, with the promise that psychology should be set off from philosophy as a separate department, of which I should be made head. This was done in 1905.

It is always a little uncomfortable to have to wait for such outside recognition before academic advancement is accorded. But, to anyone familiar with the problems and organization of American higher education, the reasons for this are obvious enough. In any case, I felt that I had at length "arrived" professionally. Any man who enters academic life looks forward to a professorial post in an institution of the first class as the highest professional recognition to which he can aspire. The position is indeed one of dignity. Its security of tenure, its assured, even if modest, income, its opportunity for congenial work carried on with much independence and among agreeable surroundings count heavily. Meantime, in 1906 I had received the formal recognition of my psychological colleagues in the country by election to the presidency of the American Psychological Association, a post which I suspect had not previously been held by anyone of my years.

In 1908-1909, upon President Tucker's contemplated retirement, I was, to my profound amazement, invited to become Presi-

( 14) -dent of Dartmouth College. I had been approached about the presidencies of a number of western universities, which fact had always puzzled me a good deal, as I had had little administrative experience. I suppose it was in part at least attributable to my father's commanding reputation. But until the Dartmouth invitation came, I was never disposed to give very serious consideration to the proposals. I spent several days with President Tucker, who had completely rejuvenated the College and left his imprint upon it in innumerable ways. He was a man of remarkable gifts and outstanding character.

After careful consideration, I decided that, attractive as was the post, its acceptance would involve hazards both for the College and for me which it was not wise to face. Dartmouth was distinctly a college. All my training and experience had been in universities. Its primary obligations must obviously be the teaching of undergraduates. My interests had become increasingly centered in advanced studies and in graduate students. Moreover, Dartmouth was a New England college and, while I had been born in New England and spent my summers among its people, I was nevertheless essentially middle-western in my sympathies and outlook. For these reasons I declined the appointment and my subsequent experiences at Yale have confirmed my feeling that the decision was eminently wise for all concerned.

This episode having drawn my attention toward administrative work, it was suggested that I try my hand at it and see whether I found it congenial. I was accordingly made Dean of the Senior College and, upon George E. Vincent's acceptance of the Presidency of the University of Minnesota a few years later, I succeeded him in 1911 as Dean of the Faculties, an office which was in effect a vice-presidency, making me next in rank to the President and in his absence Acting President-a position which I had to fill on several subsequent occasions when President Judson was called away on government service or other missions. These latter duties brought me into intimate contact with the Board of Trustees, whose meetings I attended, and thus I became familiar with the entire operation of a great educational organization-financial, administrative, educational. It was splendid training for anyone and I threw myself into it with all my energy. Although I kept up a considerable part of my teaching and continued active supervision

( 15) of the laboratory and the research program of the department, the division of attention was inevitable and, as so often happens to university men, the administrative work increasingly encroached on the work of the scholar. In many ways I profoundly regret this, although I cannot pretend that I think psychology has suffered any tragic loss by reason of my withdrawal from the field. But no one can give years of his life to a scientific program and then see it fade out of his horizon without genuine regret and a certain sense of frustration. I have only myself to thank for the outcome, as I could at any time, in the earlier years at least, have turned back. The only element of the situation which gives me permanent distress is that so often the controlling motive in the early stages of the change was financial. Salaries were small, the costs of living high, my family growing. The administrative work carried a modest additional stipend which was much needed. Indeed, throughout almost all of my career at Chicago, I was obliged to add to my normal salary by every available means-by teaching in the summer, by teaching university extension courses, by lecturing before clubs, and by teaching in local institutions in the late afternoons, at night, or on Saturdays. All this took a heavy toll of time and energy and left me too little resiliency for my research and writing.

In 1910 I was invited to give the opening series of lectures at Union College on the newly established Spencer Foundation. This led to a delightful friendship with President and Mrs. Charles A. Richmond, and subsequently in 1911 to the publication of the lectures under the title of Chapters from Modern Psychology. The work went through several editions and was an effort to present for the lay reader an introduction to the main subdivisions of psychology as it existed at that time. To my surprise, the book was widely used as a text in schools and colleges, where courses were offered designed to acquaint students with the major problems faced by psychology, rather than to offer the basic training necessary to advanced systematic work.

In the Summer of 1917, after the United States had entered the War, I went to Washington as a member of the Committee on Classification of Personnel, which, under the chairmanship of Walter D. Scott, the Army authorities had been induced to accept as an adjunct to the Adjutant General's office. The necessity for the procedure of this Committee, matured in connection with the mobiliz-

( 16) -ing of the huge force which had been called to the colors, was quite beyond question. For example, to determine quickly where 100,000 mechanics of a certain specific degree of skill were to be found in certain cantonments so that they might be sent to France in ten days and not be found wanting when they arrived, required certain techniques for which the Army in peace times had absolutely no need. While certain of the rating scales which were devised for general officers never secured wide acceptance by the regular Army, the general sorting procedures for enlisted personnel were extremely useful and were still undergoing refinement when the War came to an end.

I do not think that I contributed very much to the effectiveness of the Committee's work, but I found it extremely interesting and rather exciting to be connected, in however modest a capacity, with the nation's war machine and I secured from the inside point of view many impressions of the procedure of the government, especially of the Army and Navy, which were most revealing. They left me with a deep respect for many of the men and certain of the regulation I encountered and with an equally profound impatience and almost contempt for others of the rules and procedures, which seemed to me stupid and hopelessly antiquated-far more designed to protect jobs than to produce efficiency.

Some months later I was transferred to the Committee on Education and Special Training, of which Charles Riborg Mann was chairman. Scott accepted a Commission and the first committee was practically assimilated into the regular Army organization. The new committee had as its chief immediate function the effort to knit the civilian institutions into the training mechanism, so that the whole of our national resources would be brought to bear on sending great numbers of men into active service, already specifically trained for their particular jobs. The subsequent record of the Student Army Training Corps, for the creation of which this committee was responsible, was one of a checkered kind. In many institutions it did its work effectively and with a minimum of disturbance to the regular life of the institution. In other cases friction was instant, widespread, and unceasing. As Acting President of the University of Chicago, to which I returned in the Spring of 1918, I was able to see the picture through both ends of the telescope. Where the Army officers—many of them recently converted civilians

( 17) ---were arrogant, domineering, and unfamiliar with academic methods, where the faculties and executive officers of the institution were uncooperative, unimaginative, and obstinate or pugnacious, chaos reigned. Where reasonableness and tolerance and patience ruled, the infelicities were quickly straightened out and things went ahead peacefully.

Speaking retrospectively, I am sure that the essential idea of the S.A.T.C. was sound and that it represented a wise and economical use of our national facilities, but no venture conducted on such a huge scale and set going in such inevitable haste could possibly avoid grave blunders. The vast relief of the educational institutions when the War ended and the S.A.T.C. disbanded was perfectly natural.

At the close of the War, I was appointed Chairman of the National Research Council, which had rendered invaluable service to the scientific and technical branches of the government, and especially to the Army and Navy, and which, it was rightly thought, might wisely be continued in peace time as an active center of mobilized research in pure and applied science. The University generously granted me leave of absence for the year 1919-1920, and I entered on the work surrounded by a group of extremely able men representing the great branches of modern science, including medicine and engineering. As a child of the National Academy which held a Congressional charter, the Council was available for advisory or other service to any government agency.

During the year I was elected to membership in the Academy, generally regarded as the highest American honor a scientist can receive. Whatever my personal merits, the election gave me peculiar gratification, for, as I have earlier remarked, my grandfather, Alexis Caswell, had been one of the charter members.

This year with the Research Council I regard as one of the most fruitful in my career. It brought me into direct contact with large numbers of distinguished scientists and it allowed me to see how their minds worked, what were the problems peculiar to each of the great natural sciences, as we know them, and what were the vital frontiers of research in our time. It also afforded me most interesting contacts with many of the men at the head of the great industries, especially those in the electrical and chemical fields, where the dependence on the natural sciences was most direct. The difference in the progressive outlook of several of these industries as compared with certain others, notably steel, was very striking.

( 18)

Largely, I think, through the influence of the astronomer, George E. Hale, Dr. Walcott, head of the Smithsonian, and John C. Merriam, my predecessor as Chairman of the Council, the Carnegie Corporation made a very large gift for the erection of a stately home for the National Academy and the Council, and also for the support of the Council. I had to give a good deal of time to the preparation of the building plans which Bertram G. Goodhue was selected to draft, and with Robert A. Millikan and George Hale I spent some time in inducing a group of generous citizens to contribute $10,000 apiece for the purchase of the site where the building now stands. All this brought me of necessity into some contact with Elihu Root, Henry S. Pritchett, and other members of the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Corporation. Perhaps as a result, I was in the late Winter of 1920 invited to become President of the Corporation, which, after Mr. Carnegie's death in 1919, had been conducted by a small Board of Trustees under the chairmanship of Mr. Root.

This invitation compelled me to face the most difficult decision I had yet been called upon to make. The Carnegie Corporation, with immense capital resources, had been created by its founder to operate in the United States in the promotion of human welfare, especially on educational lines broadly conceived. To accept the post meant giving up my lifelong connection with university work, it meant breaking up my friendships of more than a quarter of a century at Chicago, and it meant undertaking a kind of responsibility which I had never before faced.

In making my decision, I was inevitably and crucially affected by conditions at the University of Chicago. There I had served as Acting President on several occasions. I had received a good many invitations to university presidencies, that of my own Alma Mater among them, and during the discussions of these calls influential members of the Board of Trustees had more than once expressed the wish that I should remain and, on the retirement of the President, accept the Presidency there-always provided that the clause in the University of Chicago charter, which required the President to be a Baptist, could be abrogated.[1] In any case, however, promotion

( 19) there was, for the time being at least, blocked and my frequent invitations to other positions of consequence kept my status more or less an active subject of comment and discussion in the University community. All this had created a situation which I felt to be a little uncomfortable. Whether President Judson was sensitive to the same situation or not, I have no means of knowing. After rather painful deliberation, I decided to burn my bridges behind me and take over the New York post.

The following year in New York was full of interest. Mr. Root, Mr. Pritchett, Mrs. Carnegie, Mr. Poynton, and others of the Trustees were extremely considerate and helpful in smoothing my path. I was obliged to start pretty well from zero, for there had never been a president other than Mr. Carnegie, and, after his death, the other great Carnegie Foundations tended to look to the Corporation for enlargement of their resources, while those members of the Board who had been Mr. Carnegie's trusted employees, growing up under him in the distribution of his benefactions, tended naturally to follow the beaten path and to look with suspicion, if nothing stronger, upon new faces and new proposals. Accordingly I had first to familiarize myself as well as I could with the history of the Corporation and its relation to these sister institutions, and then to set about determining a wise general policy for the future which could be submitted to my Board. In all this, I had the invaluable assistance of my former student, Beardsley Ruml, who had taken his doctor's degree under me just before we entered the War.

My position brought me into contact with large numbers of the leading people in New York, as well as in other parts of the country, for such persons are typically concerned with the promotion of all kinds of good works, and an organization known to have large resources for expending in similar ways naturally attracts their attention. It was an amusing experience to be sitting at the other end of the telescope from that which I had commonly used for my observations. To be seeking the wisest ways in which to spend money, rather than centering all one's energies on the securing of it, was a novel experience. It gave me a curious insight into the psychology of promoters, which I had not formerly enjoyed. The tearful and sentimental suppliant, the bullying "if-you-don't-see-that-this^-is^-the^-greatest-opportunity-in-the-world-to-use-your-money-wisely,you-are-a-fool" type, the patient, deprecatory pleader, the optimistic

( 20) promoter who knows that if you will only hear the whole story you cannot fail to help him-all these and many other varieties passed through the office every day.

I had hardly gotten settled down in my job and matured plans for presentation to my Trustees before I was approached by Otto T. Bannard of the Yale Corporation, to ask if I would be interested to succeed Mr. Hadley as President of the University. Once again I had to go through the rather distressing process of considering whether I should change the essential character of my work. The invitation itself completely staggered me, for of all our great universities Yale had perhaps been most tenacious in recruiting its staff from among its own sons. I was not a Yale man, and, while I had been offered a professorship in psychology by President Hadley after Charles H. Judd went to Chicago (an arrangement for which I was in no small measure responsible) and counted many Yale graduates among my best friends, I had never served on the faculty, nor had I many intimate friends there. To go meant cutting my salary exactly in half, it, meant risking a very uncomfortable and unhappy experience in an academic community that might well regard me as a raw western interloper-an attitude which it seemed to me Yale graduates, if not the Yale faculty, would almost certainly take. Furthermore, the institution was organized on a basis of faculty control of appointments and promotions, a system known in only one or two other American institutions, and I saw my ability to assist in building up a powerful faculty thus materially curtailed at the outset. Finally, I knew that the University had just undergone a violent reorganization imposed by the Trustees, with a good deal of vigorous alumni support, to be sure, but entailing wide areas of soreness and discontent which could not quickly be forgotten. And, most unhappy of all, in view of these circumstances, the War had left the institution in grave financial plight.

Looking backward, I think I indulged in far greater risks in hazarding such a change than at the time I had supposed, for the more I have learned of the situation the more unlikely does it seem that an outsider would have been so generously accepted. In any case, I went and, while I have had some dark days, on the whole my life has been very happy. If I have not done all I had hoped, I have at least had fewer obvious failures to regret than I might reasonably have expected.

( 21)

From the very first the great majority of my colleagues extended to me a hearty and sincere welcome. I am sure they quickly sensed my keen desire to cooperate with them in every possible way to advance the power and prestige of the University and to enable it to fulfill more perfectly its great function in American life. The alumni were also very fine in the support they gave me, many of them at the outset with frank reluctance, which I fully appreciated and completely respected. But their loyalty to Yale presently made them my good friends and, oddly enough, as it seems to me, I apparently won the general confidence of the older group much more rapidly than that of the younger classes. One might perhaps have anticipated that the conservatism of the earlier generation would in this respect have been more tenacious and aggressive, but such was not the case.

The acceptance of the position has at least allowed me to exercise a significant influence in the promotion of psychology and the allied scientific interests. In the Institute of Psychology founded shortly after I went to New Haven and financed by the Rockefeller interests, and later in the Institute of Human Relations, supported by the same group, it has been possible to set up fruitful cooperation between psychology on the one hand and on the other a large group of closely related interests, such as psychiatry, neurology, physiology, biology, anthropology, and the social sciences in general. Any university that counts in its staff psychologists of the calibre of Dodge, Yerkes, Angier, Robinson, Hull, Miles, May, Gesell, with anthropologists like Wissler and Sapir, is fortunate.

With this sketch of the main features of my life considered in its more personal aspects, I turn back to the earlier years of my career as a psychologist and to its trend in scientific convictions and interests.

Dewey's Psychology, on which I cut my first psychological teeth, was an interesting combination of fundamental principles and empirical materiâl drawn from a wide reading of German, Scottish, and English scources. There was practically no evidence of contemporary French influence in it. Taking the three fundamental categories of thinking, feeling, and willing, the 'author had developed a rather subtle and extremely intriguing dialectic which suggested, if it did not actually derive from, Hegel's Logic. Accepting, as many other writers had done before him, the irreducible character of these three modes of being conscious, he elaborated the manner in which each not only involved but depended upon the other two to effect the

(22) actual achievements of mind and conduct. Reading the book in later years, and in the light of fuller knowledge, it seems here a bit forced and there a bit devoted to special pleading and it all smells of the lamp and the arm chair; but, as the first work of a very young man, it was an extraordinary tour de force and its mastery provided an admirable intellectual discipline to all who could survive its rather rigorous and difficult style. I certainly have never seen cause to regret gaining my introduction to psychology and philosophy through so bracing a medium.

Some two or three years later, when I encountered James's Principles, I found myself in an entirely different world. The dialectic of Dewey's thinking was utterly alien to the working of James's mind. The great inrush of provocative observation, the wealth of pertinent facts, the ingenious manipulation of data, the wide knowledge of relevant literature, and above all the irresistibly fascinating literary style swept me off my feet. The vital employment of cerebralistic hypotheses to account through habit for the central structure of human conduct and experience together with the radical and, to me at least, revolutionary avenues of approach and points of view contained in such chapters in the Principles as the "Stream of Consciousness," "Habit," "Self," "Emotion," and "Will" all left me breathless and excited as one may imagine feeling after coming through a great storm, or an earthquake. Even if somewhat shattering at first, it was extraordinarily stimulating.

To read Wundt, or Bain, or Spencer, or Ladd, after a session with James, was an anticlimax which seriously disturbed one's equilibrium. To a youngster brought up on Dewey, where closeknit, systematic organization was of the essence of the thinking, the complete lack in James of anything which could be instantly recognized as system was highly disturbing.

When I began to teach, I started using James's Briefer Course as a text, in which was digested a good deal of the meat of the larger work. From the very first, I found the absence of any systematic articulation which ordinary college students could detect, much less apprehend, a serious obstacle, and this circumstance, perhaps more than any other, led to my writing my own book which now, for reasons which are dark to me, more than thirty years after its first appearance, still sells a few copies. The cordial reception given it was a complete and delightful surprise, for it was not easy reading.

( 21) But for many years, it shared with the James the larger part of the college market for psychological texts and at times, I believe, led all college textbooks in its field. After four editions had been published, in response to many requests for a briefer and simpler treatment, I put out an Introduction, which had a reasonable success, although of necessity it divided the market with the older book.

Although I had come up to psychology through philosophical channels and was reasonably familiar with the main metaphysical problems and solutions which the European tradition has recognized, I early came to accept the practical wisdom of setting psychology apart as an independent empirical science, a branch of biology, exactly as physics and chemistry had earlier been set off. As part of this process, I followed a then growing tendency and accepted psychophysical parallelism as a device through which to phrase mind-body relationships. I think I never regarded it as anything but a convenient formula, and certainly not as a metaphysical dualism, for, taken as more than this, it involves belief in an incredible and unceasing miracle; but it certainly avoided some of the theoretical difficulties of interactionism, as well as the verbal prestidigitation of some of the forms of monism.

Despite my adoption of parallelism for practical purposes in teaching and writing, I came, first under the influence of James's doctrine of habit, and later under the influence of certain of Dewey's views, in both respects affected by my reading of other men and by my own reflection, to accept as a basic element in my general theory of organic life the conception of mind and body as functional poles in the life of the organism, such that the latter, having as its major task the adjustment of itself to the environment—physical and social —in which it found itself, utilized conscious processes at the point where new sensory-motor coordinations were being established, which later, as they became perfected, permitted the mental aspect of the process gradually to diminish, until, in the limiting case, consciousness had entirely disappeared and the coordination had become completely automatic. It still appears to me that this view was expediently called functional, because it obviously disclaimed any dogmatic teaching about the ultimate nature and relation of mind and matter, and contented itself with pointing out the actual living relationship which even a rather superficial observation could verify.

Such a doctrine fits easily and naturally into the further widely

( 24) held theory, earlier developed, that instinctive and reflex acts, like those exclusively under the control of the autonomic system, may all have originally been acts of the voluntary type which, by some biological means, got themselves deeply enough established to be handed down by heredity from parent organism to offspring. Obviously such a view, defended by not a few psychologists of unquestioned eminence, implies dogma about heredity which in those days of controversy between the disciples of Darwin and Lamarck, to say nothing of the crimp put by Weissmann in nearly all previously accepted notions of the mechanism of heredity, left the matter very much in the air. What bearing the present doctrines of hormones and genes would have on that view, I will not pause to discuss.

Both the functional formulation (as against any existential or metaphysical tenet) of the relation of consciousness to the nervous system and the conceptions of the origin of instinctive and reflex acts have come in for abundant criticism, which it is not my province to review here.

In an article published by the late Addison W. Moore and myself in 1896,[2] we brought our functional view overtly to bear on a specific psychological problem of long standing, to wit: the simple sensory-motor reaction of the voluntary type. Growing out of observations made in a number of laboratories, primarily Wundt's, there had developed a doctrine of reaction types with a widely prevalent persuasion that reactions were more rapid when the attention of the reagent was directed to the movement to be made, rather than to the sensory stimulus serving as the signal for the movement. My friend, Moore, and I showed, as a result of extended experimental studies involving a number of persons, that at the outset of such observations individuals varied appreciably as to the point at which such coordinations required most supervision and discipline. Some persons needed to put their attention on the sensory stimulus to secure the fastest and most regular reactions. More frequently the need was felt to put the attention upon the movement. In either case, by allowing the subject's attention to go to the point where the coordination most required supervision, in other words where it was at the time least automatic, the best results were attained, both in speed and in regularity. The two types would be expected, on our

( 25) theory, to grow more or less together under practice, and this was exactly what occurred.

The problem is much more complex than this simple statement would imply and there were several variant theories in the field; but at least I trust this statement will make clear how I viewed this conception of the function of consciousness as it applies to a particular concrete set of phenomena.

All of us in the Chicago group had been deeply influenced in coming to the view above presented by ideas which presently were embodied in a brilliant paper which Dewey published at about that time on the reflex arc concept,[3] in which he had elaborated the "circuit" character of all reactions such as those with which Moore and I had been dealing, as contrasted with the notion of an "arc" merely as such, with its termini fixed and final. He showed that the entire organic situation preceding the particular stimulus enters into the picture to determine what the stimulus shall actually be and do, and furthermore that the reaction itself is reflected back into the stimulus and thus conditions the succeeding stimuli. The article incorporated one of Dewey's flashes of insight which in other hands would perhaps have been more patiently developed and consequently led to more fruitful consequences in the area outside the Chicago group.

At about the time I was beginning to write and to organize my own experimental program, there was a considerable controversy abroad about the true objectives of psychology. Whether psychology should remain content to be merely a descriptive science, or should go on to seek valid explanations and, if so, the question as to the nature of such explanations, was much in evidence. In America at least, the general disposition was to seek explanation in terms of nervous activities, the exact character of which was, to be sure, far more obscure than the psychological facts whose explanation was thus sought.

A common view held that psychology should concern itself with the "what" and the "how" of studies of consciousness, but not with the "why." The disposition to reduce all conscious phenomena to elements (patterned after the procedure of chemistry or morphology) was strongly urged, thus producing a kind of psychological atomism, issuing in the hands of one important group of authors in "simple

( 26) sensations and simple feelings, or affections," nothing being said about a volitional element. In other instances the tendency postulated a volitional drive, or element, as the basic factor upon which all other psychic qualities were superposed. James, with characteristic independence, had insisted that however correct might be the introspective analyses of the adult consciousness into simple sensations of color, taste, sound, and the like, with their attributes of duration and intensity, the actual genetic beginnings were to be found in "one great, blooming, buzzing, confusion," out of which, little by little, as the infant nervous system matured, emerged first one and then another psychological mass, in its turn to be further disintegrated by the analytic-synthetic effects of experience. He even proposed a plausible account of how analysis, with its ever concomitant synthesis, brought all this to pass.

Closely associated with these issues was a fundamental question of method. Despite abundant criticism, valid in not a few particulars, introspection had been regarded from the beginning as par excellence the basic method on which psychology must rest. It remained therefore to refine and compensate for its normal errors, and experimental procedure, largely Germanic in origin, was everywhere welcomed as the savior of the day. Some of this experiment was directed to facilitating introspection under conditions of control. A good deal of it, notably as in Fechner's psychophysical experiments, did not require introspection in any technical sense of the term at all. One simply pronounced a judgment "present," "not present," "heavier," "lighter." The logical extreme of experiment conceived in this second manner came into operation under biological influences with Bechterew's objective psychology and later behaviorism, which my student and assistant, John B. Watson, developed in such an extravagant manner.

In the matter of method I took a broad, and I still think entirely sound, position, i.e., that, as a branch of biological science, psychology should avail itself of any methods which would result in a deeper knowledge of the, mind and its relation to the physical organism and its environment. J Introspection in one form or another I held to be indispensable as the method from which inevitably derives our original apprehension of the whole field of study-that is to say, the phenomena in question. This too I feel to be a correct position. Exclusive methods, like Watsonian behaviorism, simply beg the ques-

( 27) -tion and tacitly assume data which, without essentially introspective processes, performed by their predecessors, if not by the proponents themselves, would be paralyzed and wholly sterile. I may inject in passing that, despite much which seems to me rather ridiculous in its naïveté, I value highly the contribution behaviorism has made both to methodological procedure and to a factual knowledge of both human and animal life.

At the opposite pole from behaviorism were such positions as Miss Calkins' personalism, with which I have great sympathy, and the doctrines of the Gestalt psychologists, which came on the scene somewhat after my active contact with psychology had ceased. As I have followed their writings, the latter group seemed to me to be keeping alive a very important set of considerations which derived logically from much the same source as the a priori metaphysics of German lineage, especially in its Kantian form. But, like the Freudians, they seemed to me to have embalmed their procedure in a rather needlessly repellent terminology.

For myself, to analyze and describe correctly the major aspects of mental experience and to try to bring it into context with the physical organism, to do this in the general atmosphere of recognition of the necessity for adaptive behavior, and to seek at each point to discern what peculiar service conscious processes render in these adaptive acts, both social and physical —that is the essence of what I understood by functionalism and as such set over against a psychological atomism, or a rigid structuralism The transitory nature of the position never troubled me, and does not now. 'Changes in viewpoint and method are of the essence of progress in science. If our contribution at Chicago was of material assistance, as I think it was, to the forward movement in psychology which has since taken place on so impressive a front, I am quite content.

My name has been so often connected with the development of the so-called functionalist position in psychology that I feel a somewhat further statement on that subject is warranted, even at the risk of tiresome repetition. Readers who find the matter devoid of interest are advised to omit the next few pages of text.

In an article on "The Province of Functional Psychology," which I presented as my presidential address before the Psychological Association, [4] I pointed out that this variety of psychology is rather def-

( 28) -initely directed to three objectives. It is concerned fiat with the identification and description of mental operations, rather than with the mere stuff of mental experience. In the second place, any description of a mental state, if it is to be at all accurate, must take account of the conditions under which it occurs, the circumstances which evoke it, for it largely depends in its precise quality upon these facts, a portion of which are narrowly physical in nature, a portion social. What the conscious state is doing, biologically speaking, contains the clue to what it really is when descriptively approached and analyzed. In the third place, functional psychology is interested in mental activity as part of the larger stream of biological forces which are constantly at work and constitutive of the most absorbing part of our world. Functional psychology thus desires to understand how the psychical contributes to the furtherance of the sum total of organic activities, considered as _adaptive, and not alone the psychical in general, but especially the particular modes in which it appears, e:g., mind as judging, as feeling, etc. It is desired to discover the exact accommodatory service represented by the various great phases of conscious expression. This point of view is well exhibited in studies of animal behavior, where mental adjustments are increasingly in evidence as we move up the scale of organic life. The whole genetic movement, seeking longitudinal, rather than merely transverse, views of life phenomena, is keyed to a functionalism of this sort. Pathological psychology has a similar bearing on the objectives of functionalism. All this leads to, and supports, the theory of consciousness as being that form of organic expression which occurs when adjustment to the novel is involved, and it may therefore be regarded as characteristic of the form taken on by the primary accommodatory process. Selective variation of response to stimulation is its sign. This broad biological ideal of functional psychology may be connected with the problem of discovering the fundamental utilities of consciousness. If mental process is of real value to its possessor, it must be by virtue of something which it does. The functionalist's problem is therefore to discover, describe, and, if possible, classify the, great types, or forms, in which these utilities are represented.

Functionalism as a psychophysical psychology is accordingly constantly recognizing' and insisting upon the mind-body relation-not as existential, but as functional---as illustrated in the process of habit formation, with the end state one where consciousness has sub-

( 29) -stantially given place to physiological automatism. The dominance of social situations as stimuli, as objects toward which reaction is directed, is always stressed in this point of view.

These three aspects of functional psychology are inseparably interconnected and no one of them can get far without involving the others. If behavior may be regarded as the fundamental category of general biology, so control may be regarded as the basic category of consciousness in a functional psychology. The special expressions of consciousness simply represent particular aspects of the process of control.

In the functionalist view, reflective consciousness and the philosophical disciplines are seen as having a necessary and essentially organic relation to one another. This is hardly true of any other view, and often these disciplines are regarded as quite independent of one another. Thus, when the adaptive functions of conscious processes are seriously followed through to their ultimate implications, one inevitably emerges in the problems with which the realistic logic, ethics, and aesthetics of our day deal, to say nothing of the non-normative philosophical disciplines. These are in fact outcomes of a functional psychology which strives to understand how and why mental process really functions as it does, as well as to find out merely what it is. This is but another way of saying that "value" categories, when treated pragmatically, tend to run instantly over into issues of adaptive function. However it may fare with transcendental values, the values of direct concern in modern ethics, logic, and much of aesthetics are thus colored predominantly with considerations valid in the world of practice. A functional psychology of feeling, for example, cannot keep out of the field of modern aesthetics. Indeed the latter is largely made up of such material. Practical considerations will doubtless always determine where responsibility shall reside for exploration in these fields, where the man who calls himself a psychologist shall cease and the man who would be known as a logician shall begin, but their intrinsic relationship, as here described, can hardly be challenged.

My functional interests naturally made me sensitive to the literature of adaptive behavior and this in turn led me to fairly exhaustive studies of the contribution of . win and other naturalists to the whole problem of the evolution of intelligence, with special reference to the history of instinct and emotion. This trend in my

( 30) thinking is perhaps best exemplified in an article on "The Influence of Darwin on Psychology," appearing in the Psychological Review, 1909, Volume 16, pages 152-169. The same influence is also disclosed in the chapter written by me on "The Evolution of Intelligence," in the volume entitled The Evolution of Man, published by the Yale University Press in 1922.

I was highly sympathetic to the development of the field of comparative psychology and gave every encouragement to the growth in my laboratory of experimentation on animal behavior. The subsequent excesses of behaviorism as a cult I naturally could not support and my views were frankly set forth in a paper on this subject published in the Psychological Review.[5]

At Minnesota, I had barely been able to organize the beginnings of a laboratory and had had no opportunity to make even a beginning at research. At Chicago, I found a considerable amount of apparatus which had been secured at the conclusion of the World's Fair from among the collections that had been brought together there under scientific auspices. I utilized a small appropriation put in my hands to supplement the collections at the points of greatest defect and secured, as a result, sufficient material to conduct effectively an introductory demonstration course covering the simpler sensory processes, such as were chiefly dealt with in the manuals that presently began to appear, the first edition of Sanford's useful little book being already available. As students began to come and ask opportunity for carrying on research, I started them on such elementary problems as their training and the resources of the laboratory made possible. Thus Whitehead's study on auditory and visual memory,[6] the study by Amy Tanner and Kate Anderson in the same volume,[7] and the studies by Mahood, Spray, and Ashley on spacial perception[8] were cases in point where the problems attacked were within the reasonable range of the students' abilities and where the apparatus was either at hand or easily constructed.

Later on, when students reached the point of preparing for the

( 31) doctorate, I always encouraged them, if possible, to find their subjects in problems growing out of their own scientific reading and reflection. I soon found that many students expect a thesis subject to be handed out to them, and, for men who wish to utilize such opportunity to set students at work on different phases of a general problem of interest to the professor in charge, the outcome may be valuable for all concerned. It has certainly been found so by not a few scholars in the well-established disciplines, and the fact that some men have rather ruthlessly exploited their students for an appreciable amount of more or less hack-work in this way should not render one oblivious to the compensating benefits.

The variety of subjects chosen for theses by my students in the earlier years of my Chicago teaching shows clearly enough the wide range of interests which they reflect. After Dr. Watson (aided and succeeded by Dr. Carr) had launched our Chicago work in the comparative field, which was done with my enthusiastic sympathy and support, for I had long felt its potential fruitfulness, the tendency for students to choose thesis subjects in the general area of animal learning was pronounced. There were abundant reasons for this, some scientific, some prudential; and the body of work which came forth was highly creditable. To much of it the cooperation of Dr. Donaldson and his assistant Dr. Hardy (and later Dr. Herrick) in neurology was invaluable.

As I always followed closely the progress of my students upon their thesis topics, serving as subject in problems dealing with human processes sufficiently to keep intimate contact with their procedure and the drift of their findings, my own research was doubtless less close knit than otherwise might have been the case. I carried a heavy teaching schedule and, as I have earlier indicated, I was obliged, for financial reasons, to teach a large part of the summer and to find such outside employment as I could in term time. All this invaded both leisure and strength for research. But in this respect my experience was like that of hundreds of other young American scholars.

The fact that I had myself enjoyed a sound philosophical training, and the further fact that I valued highly for psychology the related biological disciplines, especially physiology and neurology, not less than my conviction of the paramount importance for young scholars of direct contact with forceful and productive personalities

( 32) in other fields, led me to encourage my students to do a considerable part of their work in other departments, particularly philosophy, neurology, and education. This policy was not generally prevalent at the time, but I am sure it was expedient and I think the subsequent careers of many of my doctors demonstrated its wisdom.

Another practice which I believe I developed earlier and more systematically than in other American universities was insistence on a knowledge of the history of the science. This procedure, if well executed, lends background and balance to the young scholar's outlook and often saves him from running after strange gods. Although the library facilities never permitted me to carry out the program in the manner I should have wished, I am sure that my students all profited genuinely by this phase of their training.

I have already cited my work on reaction times with A. W. Moore as an example of the manner in which I tried to bring to bear on experimental problems the general functional conceptions of consciousness, with which I had become intrigued. I may mention another example in the work which I did with Helen B. Thompson as my assistant on the organic accompaniments of conscious processes.[9]

There had been not a little interesting work done abroad, notably by Lehmann, by Binet, and in Wundt's laboratory on the connection between pleasure-displeasure and pain on the conscious side, with cardiac, circulatory, and respiratory phenomena on the physical side. While the findings had by no means been in agreement, the weight of Wundt's authority had been given for a fairly specific correlation in which, for example, pleasure was alleged to be accompanied by deep respiration and by dilation of the peripheral capillaries. Pain and displeasure (not infrequently, though incorrectly, identified) were alleged to have exactly the contrary organic accompaniments, i.e., superficial, broken breathing, and vaso-constriction. The study of blood pressure had not then been brought into the picture. At a slightly earlier period McClennan and I had published a paper10 on the organic effects of agreeable and disagreeable stimuli, in which we had formulated our failure, on the basis of considerable experimentation on the lines of the authors mentioned above, to demonstrate any constant correlation

( 33) of the kind called for by the theory. We pointed out the complexity of the mental conditions which were supposedly reflected in the particular organic process in question, and urged that a uniform correspondence between any single element in the psychic complex with the specific organic activities involved in the experiments could not be reasonably expected.

It should be said at the outset that the apparatus then available for recording these organic reactions was difficult to manage with precision, and, even under the most felicitous conditions, its presence made it difficult to deal with the more delicate and refined forms of stimulation. The ordinary forms of plethysmograph, for example, were cumbrous and difficult to keep functioning without a good deal of disturbing attention from the reagent. It was likewise troublesome to adjust the devices for recording respiration without occasioning a distinct sensory stimulus, which was disturbing to the respiratory cycle. However, the apparatus used by Miss Thompson and myself was essentially like that employed by Binet and distinctly less annoying than that used by the other previous investigators. Agreeing with Binet and with the preceding work of McClennan and myself, we were unable to verify any uniform correlations between such affective conditions as we produced and the organic responses called for on the Lehmann-Wundt hypothesis. Vaso-constriction and disturbed breathing, with accelerated heart beat, were indeed frequent concomitants of painful stimulations, but even here the intensity of the pain and the antecedent circumstances entered in to modify the reactions, and the phenomena called for as the concomitants of pleasure were extremely variable.

The general theoretical prepossessions with which we set out led us to be observant of the action of attention, and we believed that creating experimental conditions where the attention processes would vary in determined directions might exhibit corresponding variation in the organic concomitants with which we were concerned. This expectation was supported by our findings in a manner which seemed to us quite striking. With every allowance for the imperfection of the technique, I am persuaded that we were on a correct trail and that the essence of our findings will stand. If there were subsequently experimental efforts to discredit our observations, they escaped my notice. The work attracted rather

( 34) less attention than I thought it deserved, perhaps because we did not state our views lucidly enough.

The drift of our discovery was that, regardless of whether we were confronted with vaso-constriction, or vaso-dilation, with acceleration of rate and increase in vigor of the heart heat, or the reverse, with acceleration of respiration, with or without change in its form, or the contrary reactions, we found general dynamic stability in all these processes when the activity of attention was smooth and effective, whereas we met interruption in one or more of them as attention itself became interrupted and disorganized. In other words, the parallelism which we remarked and which seemed to be strikingly uniform was not statable in terms of pleasure-pain and certain sets of organic opposites, but in terms of the smooth and effective functioning of attention, passing from one adjustment to the next without dislocation, correlated with stable or slowly changing conditions in the organic series. Any breakdown in the attention process was accompanied by a shift in one, and often in all, of the organic activities, and these shifts were sudden and violent, roughly in proportion to the disturbance to the adjusting activity of attention.

I may illustrate briefly what is implied. In a situation where arithmetical computations were required, such as continuous adding of columns of figures, as long as the process went forward smoothly and effectively, the breathing and pulse would be quite constant in rate and form and the vaso-motor reactions would show only the slightest change. But let any material disturbance occur in the computations, whether occasioned by external or internal circumstances, and one or all of the organic activities would at once show changes and the more extreme the mental distraction the more pronounced the organic responses.

If conscious processes are, as held, really engaged in facilitating the adjustments of the organism to its surroundings, and if the focal point of conscious process is at attention, as it certainly is under normal conditions, then the changes in the stability of the vital sustaining processes of the organism which we were observing might well reflect exactly the conditions we found. In other words, our findings confirmed in a highly definite (and I may say rather unexpected) degree the requirements of our theory,

In all the researches which I pursued for my own satisfaction,

( 35) only one of major consequence was devoid of a background of general theoretical interest. That was my study of auditory localization, with the cooperation, in its early stages, of Dr. Warner Fite, whose assistance was of great value by reason of his acute critical qualities.[11]

I had been deaf in one ear from early childhood, a heritage of scarlet fever already mentioned. The hearing in my surviving ear was unusually keen, as repeated tests disclosed. I had always been able to locate sounds with some promptness and accuracy, despite my infirmity, and on the theory then generally accepted regarding the binaural differential as the basis of localization this should have been impossible. The matter seemed well worth examining.

With the use of ingenious apparatus, some of it new, some of it based on improvements in earlier devices, a thoroughgoing study was made of my own powers of localization, and then of four other persons totally deaf in one ear, one having been in this condition for 26 years, one for 14, one for six, and one for one year. The results from these persons were compared with the localizing capacities of normal adults subjected to the same conditions, with the same apparatus. All the known literature was canvassed and advantage taken of any suggestions there to be found.

In general, it was discovered that strictly pure tones cannot be localized in monaural hearing. As the sound stimulus begins to take on acoustic complexity, the ability to localize it grows rapidly. This is at all events the case in the median ranges of pitch. Our experiments did not deal with extremes of the tone scale. With fairly complex tones, such as that of a pitch pipe, the only serious errors occurred in the area immediately opposite the deaf ear. The evidence, which cannot be recited in detail here, makes it quite clear that damping and reenforcements of the partial tones of complex sounds by the pinnae, the meatus, and the bones of the skull produce changes in the sound quality of the stimulus which permit the localizing process to occur. In other words, to illustrate, a complex sound arising to the left and in front of the face of a person deaf in one ear is heard as qualitatively different from the same sound when it arises opposite the right ear. Moreover, practice in such localizing exercises shows marked improvement over a

( 36) considerable period, even though the reagent is not informed of the correctness, or incorrectness, of his judgments. This circumstance is further reflected in the observation that our monaural deaf subjects in general react more accurately in proportion to the duration of the deafness. The man deaf for one year only was thus much the least accurate.

Later studies of the physics of the sound wave, showing that in normal persons the phase of the wave as it strikes the two endorgans plays an important and possibly decisive part in determining localization, have tended to draw attention away from these psychological monaural studies. Many hypotheses to account for the localizing processes have been offered on the physiological side, e.g., reflexes released by the semicircular canal mechanisms affecting the head and eye muscles, stimulation of the tensor tympani, cutaneous stimulation of the auditory meatus, etc. But none is adequate and most of them encounter obstinate factual difficulties with which they cannot satisfactorily cope. Whatever the final form a successful psychophysical theory may take, I feel convinced that in the field of monaural phenomena my discoveries will stand, and it seems quite improbable that they should not bear fundamentally on binaural theory as well.

From the period of my master's degree, dealing, as before indicated, with a sector of the imagery problem, I have always been interested in this general field and it was therefore inevitable that I should be drawn into the controversy over imageless thought which raged for a time during the first decade of the twentieth century.

I was involved in the issue as early as 1897, as a result of a review which I published of Stout's Analytic Psychology, in which I criticized certain statements of his which appeared to defend the existence of meaning devoid of any imaginal, or sensorial bearer. In the subsequent discussion (Philosophical Review, 1897-1898), Stout made it clear that his doctrine was essentially like my own, for he said that, in speaking of imageless apprehension, he had in view a partial constituent of a total state, which as another constituent had some sensation or image. A good deal of the subsequent writing in the journals seemed to me to be based on a crude misapprehension of the issue. Stout, Binet, and others were repeatedly quoted in ways evincing the most inexcusable distortion. My

( 37) own views were set forth in an address at Columbia University.[12] After exhaustive canvass of all the experimental findings and of the available literature for discussion and exposition, I came to agree substantially with Wundt that: "The actus purus of the thought experiments is no fact of observation, but simply a consequence of defective observation and false presuppositions."[13] I cannot here repeat all the varied possibilities which are available to explain the radical divergencies of belief and theory as between psychologists presumably equally competent as observers. These are gathered in the article above cited.

The doctrine of voluntary control also raises this question of sensorial and imaginal antecedents, and here again I do not find the views of the defenders of "pure thought" antecedents of such movements convincing as against the older doctrines.

In the Psychological Monographs series for 1910 [14] I published a study dealing with the various techniques for determining the character and function of imagery. This paper comprised part of a report of a Committee of the American Psychological Association on the standardizing of tests.

Despite my early and sincere interest in abnormal psychology, the Freudian movement with its sundry variants found me driven into an attitude of criticism and hostility, for, while I regarded certain of its contributions as sound and fundamentally significant, not a little appeared to be somewhat romantic and distinctly unscientific. The excesses of its proponents, many of them psychiatrists of the slenderest scientific equipment, compelled me to adopt a position of rather active opposition. It is still too early to appraise its final worth, but it has unquestionably constituted one of the major movements in twentieth-century psychology and one whose impress upon subsequent theory and technique is bound to be of first-rate importance. My impatience was always stirred by the failure of the expounders of the cult to acknowledge adequately the achievements of their predecessors in the psychiatric and psychological field upon whose foundations they were actually building.

The "psychological test" movement was rapidly gaining importance and prestige when I dropped out of psychology, and while

( 38) some of my students have made distinguished contributions to its development I myself was entirely on the fringe. Much of it has been shallow and unscientific, and consequently to some extent unwholesome in its effect. It certainly has suffered gravely from premature publicity and from exploitation by the utterly untrained. On the other hand, in its fundamentals, it is essentially sound and, in my judgment, will gain increased significance, both practical and theoretical, as its techniques become more thoroughly established. Already the more radical claims for it in education and in industry have become much chastened.

I am sure that any influence I may have exerted directly on the course of psychological development in my own investigations and publications is less than that which I have exerted indirectly through my students who received their training under me and most of whom matriculated for the doctor's degree. Among the women, Helen Thompson Woolley, June Downey, Florence Richardson Robinson, Kate Gordon, Jessie Allen Charters, Ada Hart Arlitt, Grace and Mabel Fernald, Mary Hayes, Stella B. Vincent, Helen Koch, Jean Weidensall, Dagny Sunne, Edwina Abbott Cowan, to mention only these, have had highly successful careers, while among the men, John B. Watson, Joseph, Harvey, and John Peterson, Walter Hunter, Harvey Carr, Beardsley Ruml, Clarence S. Yoakum, Curt Rosenow, L. L. Thurstone, Joseph Hayes, Myron L. Ashley, Walter V. Bingham, Henry F. Adams, Edward S. Robinson, Harry D. Kitson, Carl Rahn, Conrad L. Kjerstad, Jacob R. Kantor, Louie W. Webb, F. A. C. Perrin, Joseph U. Yarborough, Elmer K. Culler, Rutledge T. Wiltbank, and many others have done fine work and I have watched their careers with deepest sympathy and satisfaction.[15] Five of the members of my doctorate group have held the presidency of the American Psychological Association. To have such young people under one's charge is an extremely rewarding experience. I count my contact with them as among the most precious of my memories. Teaching as a profession has in the United States many drawbacks, but these intimate and friendly relations with strong growing minds are its great rewards.

Notes

This was later done and, although President Burton who succeeded President Judson was a Baptist, the legal requirement had been withdrawn, and President Mason and President Hutchins, who successively became President, were not Baptists.
Reaction time: a study in attention and habit. Psychol. Rev., 1896, 3, 245-258.
'The reflex arc concept in psychology. Psychol. Rev., 1896, 3, 357.
'Psychol. Rev., 1907, 14, 61-91.
Behavior as a category of psychology. Psychol. Rev., 1913, 20, 255-270. Although remarkable additions have since been made on the factual side of Pavloff's doctrine of conditioned reflexes, the bearing of this on psychology still seems to me much as it was in 1913.
Psychol. Rev., 1896, 3, 258.
Psychol. Rev., 1896, 3, 378.
Psychol. Rev., 1898, 5, 579.
Psychol. Rev., 1899, 6, 32-69.
Psychol. Rev., 1896, 3, 371-378.
Psychol. Rev., 1901, 8, 225-246, 449-458; 1903, 10, 1-14.
Psychol. Rev., 1911, 18, 295-323.
Psychol. Stud., 1907, 347.
Psychol. Monog., 1910, 13, 60-100.
Deeply mourned by all their friends, June E. Downey, Joseph W. Hayes, and Joseph Peterson have unfortunately died.

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