History of Psychology

American Writers.

Among the first group of workers in Wundt's laboratory was James McKeen Cattell, whose reports on the work being done were published in Mind (1881) and were the first announcements of the new methods to reach English and American readers. The first laboratory for experimental psychology in America was opened in 1883 by Stanley Hall, at that time Professor of Psychology and Pedagogy in the Johns Hopkins University. Cattell was the first professor to occupy a chair exclusively assigned to psychology : this was at the Uni versity of Pennsylvania in 1888, where a laboratory was also established. America took the lead in developing experimental psychology, though not without opposition and delays. The progress was in a large measure due to William James (1842 1910), the only man who can be compared with Wundt for the range and influence of his work. James had the interests, abilities and training without which no one could make exactly the con tribution which the times demanded. Born in 1842, James gradu ated in Medicine at Harvard in 1870, became instructor in physi ology and later Assistant Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology. From 1879-1889 James was accredited to philosophy, but in 1889 he became Professor of Psychology. In 1899 he be came Professor of Philosophy and retained that title until he re tired from teaching in 1907. This record is extremely significant, both as showing the variety of interests in the life of James and the complex sources from which his doctrine evolved. The Prin ciples of Psychology, published in 1890, stands alone as a monu ment of scientific skill, comprehensive knowledge and attractive writing. It presented at one and the same time the physiological, the psychophysical, the analytic and the pathological aspects of the subject. James did not allow physiology to obscure the main issues. He did not sympathize with the extremists who treated consciousness as a by-product, the "epiphenomenon" of Huxley. He was inclined to be sceptical about the work of Fechner and to be more interested in the mental pathology studied in France. He had a keen sense for the dynamic aspect and by his famous phrase, "the stream of consciousness," made popular the idea that psychology was more concerned with processes than with static forms or faculties. The chapters on instinct and habit showed an appreciation of the genetic attitude, soon to become developed into a distinct branch of psychology. With the scientific element in the mind of James was united a strain of mysticism, revealed partly in the belief that the powers of the mind were not ex hausted in the ordinary phenomena of experience, partly in the interest which led him to study the forms of religious conscious ness. James revolutionized thought on the nature of religion by his characteristic treatment of that subject in his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). In this also he was a seminal thinker and the psychology of religion owes an immense debt to • the effect produced by this book.

The presence of James and Munsterberg at Harvard gave that university for a time the first place in American psychology. Hugo Miinsterberg (1863-1916) was an able experimentalist and made valuable contributions reported in his Beitrage zur experi mentellen Psychologie (1889-1892), and the Harvard Psy chological Studies (1903-1906). In 1900 he published Grundziige der Psychologie, a discussion of principles. In his later period Miinsterberg broadened the field of his work. In 1908 he pub lished a book on Psychology and Crime. In 1912 he produced a study of Psychology and Industrial Efficiency. In this work he reports a number of investigations, partly made in the laboratory, on such subjects as the qualifications for success in driving street cars. The application of psychological tests to discover the apti tudes of men employed in different industries was then a new departure and this was pioneer work in a field which has since become recognized as a distinct part of psychology.

Edward Bradford Titchener (1867-1927) at Cornell University represented for many years a well-defined type of structural psychology which relied almost exclusively on the experimental laboratory and the principles of Wundt. Granville Stanley Hall (1846-1924) represented a different attitude. Though he had been one of the first students who went from America to Wundt's laboratory, he afterwards became critical of that school and con sidered its outlook too narrow. The influence of Darwin then be came the source of Hall's conception of psychology which was primarily genetic. The evolution of mind in the individual and the race was taken as the focus of a study which had more affinity with biology than physiology. This programme necessitated a study of child life, for it was based on the "law of recapitula tion," that the individual reproduces in the stages of mental growth the mental evolution of the race. This "law" was nothing more than an unprovable dogma, but it did good work as a reg ulative principle and led to careful studies of individual develop ment. Articles written in 1882-3 on such subjects as "The Con tents of Children's Minds on Entering School" are regarded as the beginning of the scientific child-study which now flourishes in America. A work entitled Adolescence (2 vols., 1904) was the chief contribution which Hall made to the literature of the sub ject. James Mark Baldwin was also influenced by the biological doctrine of evolution. His works on Mental Development in the Child and the Race, Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development and The Individual and Society, were notable con tributions to the study of the individual in the social environment, more systematic and logical than Hall's work but also more dia lectical and less wide in scope and application.

In Germany another attitude toward the problems of psychol ogy became prominent in 1900. This was due to the influence of Oswald KUlpe and the so-called Wiirzburg School. The tradi tion of the Wundtian school tended to limit individual psychology to the technique of physiological or psychophysical experiments. Kiilpe attacked the problems of judgment and volition with the intention of discovering how far the experience at a given time was influenced by the whole set of the person's mind. The higher mental processes were treated not so much as combinations of elements but as variable functions of the whole mental attitude. The method required the use of introspection and aimed to make an analysis of the higher thought processes in a way which was more concrete and natural than any of the existing methods. The workers in this school included Karl Marbe, H. J. Watt, N. Ach, A. Messer and K. Baler. Their writings served to shift the em phasis from the concept of psychological elements to the idea of total reactions dependent on such broad conditions as tempera ment, personality and interests. This effort coincided with a growing interest in the science of the individual as a living unity and materially assisted the development of psychology in this direction. The logical result of this tendency would be a complex method which could produce a complete picture of the mental life of an individual. A programme for this kind of work was out lined by W. Stern who founded an Institute for Applied Psy chology in Berlin, and wrote, among other works, a Psychologie der Individualitiit 0910. The object in view was to make for each individual a complete record of all data, such as environment, education, physical condition and intellectual attainments. In effect this was an attempt to organize all methods of psychology in a comprehensive scientific survey of the individual. (See DIFFERENTIAL PSYCHOLOGY.) The expansion of psychology in the loth century has been so rapid and complex that it is impossible to do more than describe its tendencies.