OF A 
':;ir\ CT -\/'/’*'* \ vr\/: I V'';T;. ' 
:‘ ‘W/ .-:t 4 L4 V**r 1 vjr ft 
-<? f /s :«l t f -r 7 "7 •% \ / 
| W I /% \ I Vr ft—J ;\ 3 I 
i *) 1 f 2.9 H i i .1 , 5 . 
' h J. X %■ 1. a £ i. 1  LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
OF A PSYCHOLOGIST 
BY 
G. STANLEY HALL 
M » 
AUTHOR OF “ADOLESCENCE,” “SENESCENCE,” ETC. 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 
NEW YORK :: :: 1923 :: :: LONDON COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
I wish to acknowledge my gratitude and obliga- 
tions to the following persons: my sister, Miss Julina 
O. Hall, who has supplied much data for chapters II 
and III; my aunt, Mrs. Augusta W. Beals, who has 
recorded various memories and impressions of my 
early life and surroundings; Louis N. Wilson, who 
in writing a sketch of my life in 1914 (144 pp.) 
collected much material and printed an exhaustive 
bibliography of my papers to the above date, and also 
to my secretary, Miss Mary M. McLoughlin, who 
has not only typed and read the proof of this volume, 
but has run down many references, verified and cor- 
rected many details, supplemented the above bibliog- 
raphy to date, and made many helpful suggestions 
throughout. 
V CONTENTS 
CHAPTER PAGE 
I. Introductory i 
II. Forbears and Parents 22 
III. Childhood and Boy Life 87 
IV. My Secondary and Higher Education in 
This Country 151 
V. Germany, Antioch College, and Europe 
Again 186 
VI. Johns Hopkins University 225 
VII. Clark University 258 
VIII. Progress in Psychology 354 
IX. Some Educational Changes in My Day . . 479 
X. Looking Backward and Forward . . . 548 
XI. Appendix 597 
Index 617 
VII ILLUSTRATIONS 
G. Stanley Hall Frontispiece 
FACING PAGE 
Hall’s Grandfather, Father, Mother, Self at Six . . 50 
Hall’s Uncles and Aunts 51 
Boyhood Home 98 
Hall Aged 14, 22, 35, and 45 99 
Mark Hopkins, John Bascom 170 
Summer group at Ashfield 171 
Beecher, Bryant, Gurtis and Mabie 182 
Bowditch, James and Eliot 183 
Charcot, Haeckel, Abraham and Bilroth . . . .216 
Ludwig, Halmholtz, Adler and Breuer 217 
Balliet, Hyde, Harris and Walker .... 260 
Clark, Hoar and Gilman 261 
Group of Psychologists at Clark Conference . . . 334 
A Group at Clark Conference 335 
IX LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
OF A PSYCHOLOGIST 
CHAPTER I 
INTRODUCTORY 
How and why this volume was written and why published— 
The standpoint from which the later chapters were written— 
Present status, recent progress, and prospects of psychology 
and education—How I became interested in child study—The 
beginnings of laboratory psychology in this country—Dan- 
gers of decline: (i) the limitations of Wundt (2) of intro- 
spection (3) of psychoanalysis (shame the real cause of its 
cure) (4) of tests—Further study of basal instincts most 
hopeful of the present lines of psychological advance—Some 
educational changes within my memory—Natural history of 
young people—Present defects and dangers in education here 
—Need of abler men and larger ideas—Causes of educational 
reforms in the past—Education the chief hope of the new 
world democracy. 
The Hegelian dictum, Die Weltgeschichte ist das 
Weltgericht, which suggests that historiography has 
a judgment day function, is quite as true of autobi- 
ography. One cannot honestly review his own life 
without passing at least implicit judgments, favorable 
or unfavorable, upon it or subjecting it to the higher 
moral criticism of worthfulness in itself and useful- 
ness to others. Each stage of it, too, is itself a kind 
of judgment upon that which preceded. One must 
thus strive for frankness and unreserve, which I have 
done save for certain of the results of self-psycho- 
analysis. He must be as detached, objective, and im- LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
personal as possible while recognizing that in this 
direction one can never quite attain this goal for him- 
self. His prime motive must be a better knowledge 
of himself, and it was with this in view that nearly 
all of the first six chapters of this book, and parts of 
the subsequent ones, were written some years ago and 
then laid aside, with no definite thought that they 
would ever be published, at least during my life. Their 
writing and rereading as a whole has served their 
main purpose in making me better acquainted with 
myself than ever before and has shown me how my 
maturity was concealed in my childhood and how the 
latter stood revealed in the former in ways that for a 
genetic psychologist were not only illuminating but 
profitable for whatever future remained to him. On 
the other hand, my later life has been so exceptionally 
different from my juvenile condition that I believe I 
can look upon the latter with rather more than usual 
aloofness. 
But why publish what had abundantly served and, 
I think I may add, so well served its original purpose ? 
This does need some justification if not apology. Hun- 
dreds of possible autobiographies of men far more 
prominent and helpful to the world than I have never 
been written. Not one of the some half score among 
my acquaintances whose lives have been more event- 
ful and significant than mine and whom, since I began 
this record, I have urged to do likewise for them- 
selves, have responded to this suggestion, perhaps 
because they have a modesty which I lack. I do feel, 
and deeply, that there is a certain presumptuousness 
in unveiling one’s life in public, especially when this 
reveals certain blemishes which are sure to make 
some of one’s friends esteem him, not more but less. 
But I am sure those who know me best would agree 
that I am no egoist or even too prone to reminiscence, 
so that the first-personal style is somewhat new to me 
2 INTRODUCTORY 
and involves a self-consciousness which some would 
feel less acutely. 
It was not the publisher, who urged that autobi- 
ographies are now more read than anything save the 
most popular novels, nor those of my friends whom I 
thought were partly moved by curiosity, who impelled 
me to brush off the dust of years from my manuscript, 
add a little to the early and more to the later chapters 
and also two new ones on the changes in psychology 
and in the theory and practice of education during 
my span of years. The last has helped me still further 
to see myself in a larger perspective. 
Deep down beneath all our conventions, pretenses, 
hypocrisies, compensatory camouflages of defects 
which are life-long and disguise us even to our closest 
intimates, I am convinced there is in all honest souls 
a real desire not only to know themselves but to be 
known by others who care for them as they really are, 
stripped to the buff of all disguises. Underneath and 
counter to all the resistances, inner and outer, there 
is a motive to self-expose our psyche, to exhibit not 
only our sins and deformities but our very vanities 
and conceits, defying censure and even ridicule, often 
so much harder to bear. This is less difficult if one 
has only a few closely bound to him by ties of blood 
or affection to be appalled by his revelations. The 
impulse to the latter is also stronger if one believes 
that aside from plasmal immortality (as represented 
by offspring) only influential immortality awaits us. 
This confessional impulse is still more reenforced if 
the lines of one’s life work have diverged somewhat 
from those which most of his colleagues have selected 
to pursue, leaving him thus a trifle isolated yet con- 
vinced that his way is the right one and, although 
now only a trail, will sometime become the royal high- 
way if it is blazed and charted before all traces of it 
are lost. Finally, while every one, as his life draws 
3 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
to a close, feels that it is unfinished and there are 
many things he would and ought to do before it ends, 
one who has had the good or ill fortune to have 
planned and wrought for years at certain tasks which 
he has come to realize he can never finish, is impelled 
to leave behind him at least some note as to what 
these belabored and more or less elaborated begin- 
nings were before they are destroyed, as most~bf 
them must be since no literary executor seems likely 
to be found. 
I have tried to be objective and even in publishing 
have in mind chiefly the narrow circle of my friends 
and acquaintances. But one cannot help becoming 
very self-conscious in doing this sort of thing, and 
this my psychology tells me is paralyzing, aside from 
the fact that it is generally the last thing any one does 
unless it be to compose his epitaph. It is a kind of 
pupation, which is the last act of many insects. In 
my case it is, in some respects, more like the expensive 
coffin a Chinaman makes and elaborates, with much 
output of time and money, and then decides to sell 
because he wants to use in his own lifetime what it 
may bring. The motives which, I believe, underlie 
some autobiographies’ published during the author’s 
lifetime are to provoke those who take note of them 
to say in advance, while he can yet hear, what they 
would say if they were writing his obituary later; or 
to see that a record intended for posthumous publi- 
cation is not deemed by surviving friends to be un- 
important or to contain material they would prefer 
to have suppressed. Both these motives might be 
found by a psychoanalysis which ran deep enough, 
but I am convinced that they would be vestigial. 
At any rate, never have I been of so many minds 
about saying or not saying this or thatT fluctuated 
so often between the resolution to print or not to 
print while I lived or to provide for publication later, 
4 INTRODUCTORY 
or to suppress sections or let them stand; while at 
one stage I very seriously weighed the pros and cons 
of destroying it all, compromising finally on the elim- 
ination of the one most intimate and confessional 
chapter. It thus goes to the printer with misgivings 
I have never felt before and, I will even add, against 
the advice of some of my most intimate friends who 
have seen parts of it, together with the most earnest 
hope on my part that, however it may affect me, it 
will injure no one else. 
The strongest motive to publish was probably the 
long-repressed impulse to tell the inside story of the 
early days of Clark University and to correct, so far 
as I could before I die, the long injustice done me 
by good men who did not and could not at the time 
know the facts regarding the relations of Mr. Clark 
to the institution he founded, which made the story 
of its first decade so unprecedentedly tragic. By the 
end of the third year Clark seemed to many outsiders 
not unlike a derelict abandoned by most of its officers 
and crew, while to me it was a graveyard of high 
hopes and aspirations. The collapse of our great ex- 
pectations and of the plans we thought so nearly ideal 
was mortifying and humiliating beyond the power of 
words to describe and there were those who, not re- 
alizing the pathos of the situation, were not above 
taunts and derision. Both the trustees and I would 
have withdrawn could we have done so honorably but 
this seemed impossible. So we heartened each other 
as best we could and went on through the seven long 
moratorium years of watchful waiting, which were 
overhung by the great and all-pervading fear that the 
founder would bestow elsewhere the residue of his 
fortune, of the size of which we knew nothing. Of 
this the sequel, especially his will, showed that there 
had in all probability never been the slightest real 
danger whatever we did, so that we might have pur- 
5 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
sued a bolder and more independent course with 
safety. Many members and friends of the University 
have long urged that I become the chronicler of its 
first thirty-one years under my administration and 
with my retirement the psychological moment seemed 
to have come to make this record public. Hence 
Chapter VII came first in time and initial importance 
and I hope that it may prove of some interest, not only 
to Clark men, past, present, and future, but to students 
of recent history and present tendencies in higher 
education in this country. Small as Clark was, and 
whatever its importance, in its plan and in its story 
it was unique. 
The other chapters came later and grew into in- 
dependence. My interest in child study naturally 
extended to curiosity about my ownTHUdhood, which 
was passed amidst surroundings once common enough 
in New England but of which ever fewer vestiges 
now remain, for I can find but very little, literature 
of childhood on the old-fashioned farm two or three 
generations ago. The big old yellow chest in which 
all our juvenile literary effusions and other memen- 
toes were kept by my mother was found to lack her 
book of copious notes written diary-wise of myself, 
the eldest child, and extending from my birth to well 
into the beginning of school life. As I remember, it 
showed her to have been one of the pioneers in child 
study and the loss of this constitutes more than a 
serious gap in my own self-knowledge. With it 
Chapter III would have had more value or greater 
interest, at least to me. I think that the fact that I 
had studied so many of the outcrops of child life be- 
fore becoming interested in the stages of my own 
helped me to objectivity, as it did to the selection of 
viewpoints and the truer appreciation of the many 
factors of juvenile life. The same is true of adoles- 
cence and, to some extent, of senescence itself. It 
6 INTRODUCTORY 
was thus fortunate that general study of each of these 
life stadia preceded the personal study. 
Again, but for the reminiscent survey set down 
in this volume, I never should have realized how much 
I owe to my parents and how in all my thun and 
haben I have simply reproduced their lives, with a 
few amplifications offset by grave shortcomings in 
which I have fallen below them; how deeply I am 
indebted, body and soul, to the country farm life of 
my early years; how early all my very fundamental 
traits were developed so that despite all changes in 
environment I am yet the same in every basal trait 
that I was in childhood or even in infancy, in which 
everything in me was preformed; how relatively iso- 
lated my life has really been despite all its associa- 
tions ; or how much J’arther than most and how much 
beyond what even my most intimate friends suspect I 
have really gone along the arduous road of eclaircisse- 
ment in religious, social, political, economic, and even 
ethical lines and how in all these respects I am at 
heart more radical than I have ever fully confessed 
to any one or admitted to myself. But if this adds 
to the sense of isolation, there is a compensating lux- 
ury in having reached views that are really too satis- 
fying to be made matter for aggressive propaganda, 
which would not merely desecrate them but, if their 
advocacy had any influence, would be too hindering, 
unpedagogic and unsettling to be justifiable in a 
pragmatic age when the highest sanction for truth 
is found in its immediate results upon conduct. 
Since the first laboratory devoted to experimental 
psychology in this country, which I established in the 
early eighties at the Johns Hopkins, the foundation 
of my Journal in 1887 (the first of its kind in 
English), and the organization of The American 
Psychological Association in my study thirty-two 
years ago, this department of learning has had a re- 
7 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
markable development in this country. It was essen- 
tially at first an importation from Germany but now 
there are probably more workers in. this field here 
than in all Europe, if not in all the world, and our 
productivity, at least in quantity if not in quality, is 
no less preeminent. The annual meetings of the 
Association are conducted in parallel sessions devoted 
to general, applied, comparative, experimental, clinical, 
and measurement psychology and among the sessions 
of these sections the several hundred members distrib- 
ute themselves, with frequent joint meetings and sym- 
posia; while we now have a score of journals devoted 
to pure or applied psychology and an ever growing 
number of books, monographs, and theses of all de- 
grees of merit and originality. For years we sat at 
the feet of European savants but we have of late 
grown more independent and authoritative and the 
best work done here is perhaps about as well known 
in Europe and as often quoted and discussed there 
as the work of foreign savants is here. But with all 
this output I find a growing dissatisfaction with re- 
sults, which has greatly increased since the War, and 
a growing uncertainty as to whether we are really 
on the right trails. These trends are very diverse 
and, to some extent, antagonistic. The problems 
attempted are sometimes trivial, special, and lacking 
in perspective; their treatment is often needlessly 
technical, with methods predominating to such an ex- 
tent over matter; and there is a lack on the part of 
leaders along each line of real leadership, little im- 
pulse to get together and see eye-to-eye and come to 
a mutual understanding, so that the future of this 
department is now gravely beclouded, while the ex- 
perimental introspectionists have developed an organ- 
ization, if not a kind of cult of their own, and just 
now seem in danger of becoming a sect apart and by 
themselves. 
8 INTRODUCTORY 
Thus, it is not that I have lost touch with present 
tendencies or because, as old men are so prone to do, 
I have lapsed to a mere laudator temporis acti that I 
deem it fortunate that my most active years lay 
in the stages of development of this department when 
interests were less specialized and there was more 
freedom and it was better form to pass from effort 
in one to that in other directions. By this course it 
was possible at least to get, if not to do, more good, 
and that advantage should not be lost sight of to-day. 
When my limited capacities reached their saturation 
point in one domain I turned to another, and this is 
so old-fashioned to-day, if not obsolete, that I have 
ventured in Chapter VIII to describe my mutations of 
this kind in some detail. One of my severest critics 
dubbed me “an incorrigible enfant terrible in psychol- 
ogy.” How I wish that were really true! I would 
rather be a fool of the Parsifal order stumbling along 
paths wiser men would fear to tread than a partisan 
who could not see impartially the real good being done 
by all who make positive additions to our knowledge 
of any part of Mansoul, which has so many chambers 
and so many ways of entrance. Thus I believe there 
is a growing consensus of the competent that the con- 
dition of psychology in this country, and indeed 
throughout the world, is far from satisfactory and 
that the promise of two decades ago has not been 
fulfilled; also that, as far as can be now foreseen, 
its status is likely to grow yet worse before it can 
become better, as it is sure to do sooner or later. 
As to the causes of this decline, probably no two 
experts who recognize it (as, of course, many do not) 
would formulate them alike. I would tab them off 
somewhat as follows: 
i. The fact that Wundt, who for so long set the 
fashions here, served his apprenticeship in physics 
and physiology instead of in biology (which would 
9 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
have been a better propaedeutic). Hence his disciples 
have little use for evolution or the genetic aspects of 
psychic powers and activities. This, too, gave them, 
as it had given their master, a sense of finality that 
is not justifiable in the present stage of development 
of this science, which is in its nascency. A psychology 
based on all the findings of physiology and which de- 
velops their psychic side, as has been done in the do- 
main of the senses, does not yet exist. There is no 
doubt that all physiological processes have a psycho- 
logical side—tensions, excess and defect of heart 
action, respiration, digestive processes, elimination, 
glandular action, internal secretions, etc., but of these 
we yet know but little. 
2. Introspection, that catches innumerable flitting 
phenomena, most of which are superficial or marginal 
and, without immediate introversion, would generally 
never be known at all because they are so nearly un- 
conscious, has made very important generalizations 
from such data. It, however, makes little effort to 
explain their origin. Its material is gathered from 
a small and narrowly restricted class of individuals— 
especially trained graduate students and their teach- 
ers. Its quest is for psychic elements when in fact 
there are no such things but only psychic germs. It 
claims to be the only Simon-pure psychology but it 
is so only in the sense that it treats conscious phe- 
nomena as if they were finalities instead of being, all 
of them, only symbols, and makes no attempt to ex- 
plain the highly complex categories, determining ten- 
dencies, Einstellungen, etc., with which it works. It 
has, however, accumulated valuable data for a more 
ultimate psychoanalysis which, when it comes, may 
make a use of its conclusions as different from the 
purposes they were intended to serve as the critical, 
scientific, or clinical psychologist does of the psychic 
researchers’ studies of mediums. It has one answer 
10 INTRODUCTORY 
to all critics, namely, that they do not understand. 
Much of it might be called the psychology of mental 
images and it has shed much light. But it gives too 
scant recognition to other lines of endeavor and has 
nearly all the earmarks of a sect apart. It is also 
responsible for the extreme reaction of behaviorism, 
which is a healthy movement of compensation. 
3. Psychoanalysis and the study of the uncon- 
scious have been simply ignored or condemned on su- 
perficial grounds by most American psychologists of 
the normal. This neglect is in part explained because of 
a prudish reluctance to face the momentous problems 
of sex life. This attitude has, too, a certain excuse 
in the unfortunate fact that in this country psycho- 
analysts have fallen too much under the dominion of 
the extreme Freudians who see sex everywhere and 
in everything, ignore Adler and the Zurich school, 
and neglect the wider culture field which this system 
has opened. The psychologists of the American 
Association balk, too, at the unconscious, while a 
dynamic psychology is content with scales measuring 
degrees of more or less instead of always insisting 
upon the “either-or” method. In fact, there is no 
completely unconscious, or even conscious for that 
matter, just as there is nothing absolutely right or 
wrong, true or false, simple or complex, no beginning 
or end, no purely and only pleasurable or painful, 
etc. There is no absolute psychological as there is 
a thermal zero. Most psychologists hover about focal 
consciousness or awareness like insects about an arc 
light when they are by nature twilight fliers, just as 
mankind generally is dominated by the deeper-lying 
and darker processes of his soul, and the manifestation 
of these is primarily and overwhelmingly behavior- 
istic. Thus human life has its night as well as its 
day side and the Freudian mechanisms enable us to 
explore the vast regions of psychic life below the con- 
11 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
scious surfaces. Nothing since Aristotle’s categories 
has gone deeper or, in my opinion, is destined to have 
such far-reaching influence and results. 
Meanwhile, I venture to record briefly my con- 
viction of the Freudian theory of therapy, which I 
believe is mistaken. Full confession or objectivization 
of the contents of the patient’s mind is believed to 
be the curative agent because consciousness is extra- 
ditive and tends to rid the psychophysic organism of 
symptoms. This I believe to be true only in part. 
True, consciousness is in itself in many ways, and 
to a far larger extent than we have ever dreamed 
before, remedial. But it is the motives of shame and 
shocked modesty which I believe are the chief curative 
agents in many if not most of the interesting cases 
on record. 
A once very famous, widely advertised, and really 
effectual cure for dipsomania was said to work some- 
what as follows. All the inebriate inmates of the 
institution, once a day, immediately after the chief 
meal, were allowed free and private access to a bar, 
on condition that they always and at once tell the 
doctor if they had drunk. A trifle later each patient 
always had a hypodermic injection of a yellowish fluid 
called a gold chloride solution (in order to justify 
the high price of the treatment). Normally this fluid 
was entirely neutral and had no effect, but when the 
patient was found to have just had a drink the injec- 
tion was, unknown to him, reenforced by ipecac, with 
a result that there soon came to be a well-established 
association between drink and nausea, so that the taste 
for alcohol became suppressed because its indulgence 
seemed to be the cause of painful retching. So the 
Freudian patients soon become convinced that their 
troubles, of whatever nature, are really due to sex 
causes and mark this function as more or less abnor- 
mal. Hence he or she feels that the symptoms are 
12 INTRODUCTORY 
in fact, to all who know and perhaps to their friends, 
perverted, repressed, aborted, extreme manifestations 
of the procreative impulse and that if the symptoms 
continue they will be thus advertised as lustful or in 
some other way perverted at heart, if not that their 
troubles are really or may be taken by others as a 
form of exhibitionism. This conviction constitutes 
the strongest possible motivation to repress and elim- 
inate all betraying symptoms, and this is the cure. 
And so they get well. Their cure is thus due to a 
deep instinct to conceal all activities of this function 
as disgraceful. Hence they are cured by the very 
modesty which the analyst would destroy and not by 
the confession which the doctor can secure only by 
combating this instinct of concealment that they call 
prudery or resistance. 
Perhaps even the wildest and most extravagant 
use of symbolism may here have a certain pragmatic 
sanction. Despite all the errors and dangers, how- 
ever, psychoanalysis really marks, not the first but 
the full advent of evolution in the psychic field and 
not only justifies but immensely advances the genetic 
method, which is surely ushering in a new and syn- 
thetic dispensation in this field and which is to be the 
psychology of the future. It also sheds a flood of 
new light upon the vast but obscure field of affectivity. 
4. The testers are beginning, but only beginning, 
the great work of applying psychology to practical 
life and have already shed much light upon individual 
differences and vocational fitness but have added little 
to our knowledge of psychology itself. They are as 
far from being able to measure general ability as edu- 
cators to determine a curriculum which makes for a 
truly general culture. They are also no less far from 
being able to measure the fundamental qualities upon 
which success in the art of living depends, such as 
the degree of vitality and the momentum of heredity, 
13 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
honesty and truthfulness, perseverance, the power of 
drawing heavily upon reserve energies without col- 
lapsing reactions afterwards, as all successful men 
must do sometimes in crises; mobility up and down 
the pleasure-pain scale so that they will not be unduly 
exalted by success or lose the power to react from 
disaster, which is the supreme lesson of the story of 
the Cross and the Resurrection; how far they have 
attained self-knowledge and the ability to compensate 
for their weaknesses and defects, mobility up and 
down the age scale so that they keep in sympathetic 
touch with childhood, youth and those undeveloped, 
and also anticipate the lessons of old age; how far 
they were aggressive, independent, eager for and 
capable of leadership, on the one hand, or were born, 
or had learned, only to serve and follow, on the other; 
whether they are narrow, selfish, and egoistic or how 
far they have developed wider interests in others, in 
causes, and in the greater concerns of the community, 
state, nation, and world; how far their vita sexualis 
is controlled and sublimated; whether they love na- 
ture, which is the root of all the natural sciences, of 
literature, and art; the number, direction, and 
strength of their dominant interests and how their 
leisure is spent; what is their attitude to religion and 
also toward the social, industrial, and political insti- 
tutions in which they live; whether their instincts 
and diatheses are radical or conservative. It is by 
rubrics and criteria of this sort that I would evaluate 
or rate my own character traits and those of others. 
The real significance of all tests depends upon the 
wisdom with which they are selected and the correct 
evaluation of just what they test, and the real worth 
for life of the kind of ability needed to meet it. And 
it is to this that far too little attention has been given. 
Yet it is just this which requires the most thought 
and we have as yet no standards by which to test 
14 INTRODUCTORY 
testers, who should be in vital rapport with all the 
psychological disciplines, as wTell as with sociology, 
and should be above and beyond all prejudices for or 
against any school. I will venture to add in all candor 
that I have taken or been given many of these tests, 
especially those for adults, under the prescribed con- 
ditions and have fallen short in most of them, and this 
only strengthens my conviction that something is 
wrong for I cannot yet bring myself to feel that I lack 
average intelligence. 
5. Just now the most promising psychological lead 
seems to be the reevaluation of human life, its mores 
and its institutions, by inquiring how they square with 
the vastly older basal instinct-feelings of the race— 
hunger, love, the herd, property, appetencies, and 
many others, concerning a list of which no two writers 
are agreed. This requires some knowledge of ani- 
mals, primitive men, infants, and all we can gather 
from whatever source about quintessential human 
nature and its evolution. This is really the testing 
of all human institutions by the nature of man and 
not conversely. On the one side this line of advance 
is as purely scientific as psychology is capable of be- 
ing, and on the other it seeks to meet the most urgent 
practical needs of this post-bellum age, which has 
thrust upon it the most arduous tasks man has ever 
been called upon to meet and which our civilization 
must find a solution for if it is not to decline. The 
world problems are becoming now more and more 
psychological and this places upon our science a re- 
sponsibility which we are as yet far from being able 
to meet, and it is this that should bring home to us 
a sense of our peculiar inadequacy. The world needs 
a psychological Plato or, if he would have to be too 
much of a superman, we may perhaps with more hope 
look forward to a great synthetic movement which 
shall bring a new harmony to our now ominously 
15 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
divided efforts and set us again on the trail we have 
so unfortunately lost. 
As I write, nearly seventy years have passed since 
I entered our educational system and while the small, 
ungraded, rural school has not, on the whole, im- 
proved, secondary and higher education have made 
great advances. The average quality of students in 
both high school and college has probably not im- 
proved but declined. The road is so wide open that 
many who go beyond the grammar grades do so be- 
cause they are sent, or because others do so, rather 
than from any inner impulsion to make more of them- 
selves. This is especially the case for students from 
wealthy homes in our older eastern endowed colleges. 
Athletics and the social features of academic life are 
vastly more developed and have a greater drawing 
power than two generations ago. If college athletics, 
journalism, theatricals, musical organizations, dances, 
clubs, and other extracurricular activities were sud- 
denly reduced to the relatively very modest dimen- 
sions they had in my college days, no one could doubt 
that the present size of our student bodies would be 
materially reduced. Yet each of these activities has a 
very high value in itself and I should be slow to believe 
that genuine scholarly effort has declined, greatly as 
its direction has departed from the old ideals of cul- 
ture. I am persuaded that this effort has, on the 
whole, increased, although not as much as it should 
or as much as the rapidly increasing needs of our 
advancing civilization demand. The augmented de- 
pendence of industry upon science has been the chief 
factor in bringing these throngs of students to our 
doors—ten, fifteen, and in one university, thirty 
thousand of them. In a number of our higher in- 
stitutions there are, in my opinion, already far too 
many candidates for degrees for efficient handling, 
and it is a most wholesome tendency that has prompted 
16 INTRODUCTORY 
a number of them to devise various ways of limiting 
numbers, raising standards, refusing to establish 
novel departments already in efficient operation else- 
where, etc. Numbers, too, make student sentiment 
more potent than ever before just as the ever length- 
ening roll of instructors brings increased impatience 
with the centralization of authority and control by 
boards, presidents, deans, and department heads. 
We really know far too little, too, about what may 
be called the natural history of young people thus 
grouped, although it would be a both fascinating and 
useful work to gather such data and draw their les- 
sons. Later adolescence is a stage of seething unrest 
liable to sudden outbreaks of sentiment which as sud- 
denly subside and perhaps bring reaction. Uncertain 
of itself, youth is prone to compensate by positive 
and perhaps extreme affirmations. There is enthu- 
siasm for everything that is newest and yet a unique 
conservatism of student customs and precedents. Col- 
lege feeling may flame into revolt at trifles and yet be 
strangely submissive to authority where revolt would 
be justified. Youth is very certain what it wants and 
is out to get it by every means in its power and yet it 
often utterly misinterprets these desires and really 
wants and needs something very different. It is gre- 
garious and very intent upon having a good time to- 
gether and yet there are solitary moods in which the 
individual seeks to come to terms, not only with the 
great problems of the world but to understand and size 
himself up as to his fitness for the various depart- 
ments of the world’s work. It is wonderfully docile 
if approached aright; yet no less wonderfully immune 
to the infections of knowledge that does not fit the 
mysterious nascent periods for it which, when they 
come, make young men prodigies of receptivity and 
docility. 
It is the vast and sudden increase of numbers of 
17 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
pupils in all grades that has kept us so intent upon 
the problems of outer organization, finances, build- 
ings, marks, grading, mass methods, standards, lock- 
step uniformity, etc., and which has made us try to 
measure efficiency in studies by the hours, months, 
and years devoted to them and strive to fit the pupil 
into the system instead of adjusting it to his nature 
and needs, which is a later, harder, and more im- 
portant problem yet facing us. Our chief difficulty 
is with the teaching personnel. Salaries at every 
grade are far too low and there are no great prizes 
possible such as tempt the ambitious in other fields of 
labor, while very many who teach, from primary 
school to college and university, are too imperfectly 
prepared by either aptitude or training for their work. 
The few professors who are really able to do 
creative work are widely known and give the public 
a far too high idea of their colleagues who do nothing 
but routine work and are unknown off the campus, 
for the vocation of academic teaching has its full 
share of noncompetents and mere routiners. There 
is danger that the proportion of the latter will in- 
crease because of the large numbers of young men 
called of late prematurely from their studies to handle 
the influx of new students. This is yet more the case 
because their functions involve so much drudgery that 
with the best will to do so they cannot forge their 
way to real eminence; while in geology, chemistry 
and, to some extent, in other branches the ablest ad- 
vanced students are drawn by larger salaries, if not 
by better opportunities for investigation, to some of 
our great industries. 
New academic departments of education have 
gone far beyond the old-fashioned normal school. 
The higher pedagogy, for the high school if not for 
the college, is rapidly winning adequate recognition 
and some courses even deal with professional train- 
18 INTRODUCTORY 
ing, with academies of science and culture values 
generally, although few rise to the latter. Thus, many 
if not most of the tendencies in education are in the 
right direction, but how slow is the progress and how 
numerous the handicaps! We have high ideals, too, 
and that is well. But they are not high enough and 
we have no educational statesmen, no far-reaching 
reforms, and no outstanding reformers to make head- 
way against the trends, always so strong in education, 
to dull and low-level mediocrity, while the common- 
place is dignified and teachers read often, not above 
but below their own mental level and think this prog- 
ress. Thus, while the volume and quality of books 
and journals meant to appeal to teachers have greatly 
improved and increased, the rank and file of teachers 
still have a singular incapacity to distinguish what is 
first and fifth or even tenth rate material. If I grow 
a little skeptical about the possibilities of a really gen- 
eral culture, which was once the chief goal sought 
in education, I insist all the more upon the necessity 
of a broader basis for every kind of special training. 
Our chief need to-day is for a great awakening 
bringing not one but many radical reforms in its 
train, such as a widened scope of curricula, a better 
trained, selected, inspired, and more inspiring teacher 
personnel, a great increment of resources, etc. But 
there is no present ground for hope for any such 
transformation of our system by revolution and we 
can only look to the slower processes of evolution in 
this country, for the following reasons. (i) The 
great metamorphic advances in the history of edu- 
cation have been due either to a felt need of propa- 
ganda, religious or political, or else of a greater 
industrial or military efficiency. The latter we are 
too secure and powerful to feel the need of and we 
lack the enthusiasm and strength of conviction for 
the former. (2) Another class of reforms has been 
19 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
due to efforts to save a falling state, as in ancient 
Greece, or to restore one brought low by war, as in 
Germany after its devastation by Napoleon. We 
have no sense of decay or debacle but quite the con- 
trary, so that the salvage motive is lacking, while our 
country is not humiliated by war but has emerged 
from the last one more powerful and in some sense 
less docile than ever before. (3) Another group of 
reforms have sprung from compassion for the pitiful 
state of ignorance and a philanthropic desire to better 
fit the young for success in a world for which they 
need an ever more special training. The former has 
never been a very strong motive here save for pro- 
moting the general cause of education by stimulating 
the war upon illiteracy and by prompting certain 
private charities and individual efforts for social and 
economic amelioration. But the latter has inspired 
many large and small donors during the last decades 
to make bequests which have been beneficent, although 
some of them have not made for improvement 
of the system but only for multiplication and too often 
the duplication of preexisting institutions. 
Industrial education is everywhere more and more 
needful and the prostrate economies of Europe need 
it as never before. But a democracy should give 
foremost attention to training for citizenship. Thus 
because since the War there has been such a remark- 
able trend towards democracy, the need of education 
of the people, who now seem destined to rule them- 
selves as never before, is incalculably increased, for 
at this critical juncture education has been crippled 
as never before in modern history since the Thirty 
Years’ War. This form of government, if it is to 
be safe, is in greater need of popular education than 
any other form, while the disabilities which the war 
brought have greatly reduced the efficiency of the 
educational system of all these newer republics so 
20 INTRODUCTORY 
that in a sense they are stumbling, partially blinded, 
along the new and more arduous road. Thus in this 
reconstruction era, education has suddenly become of 
far greater importance for the future of the world 
than it ever was before. 
If after reviewing my half century of educational 
interests and activities I have a valedictory word to 
present to the future leaders in this field, it would be 
the exhortation to believe that education (along with 
eugenics which, if it comes, will arrive much later) is 
now becoming the only way of salvation for the world 
and to rise to the higher standpoint that sees and 
measures everything according to its educational value 
and makes this the supreme criterion of every factor 
in our complex civilization. 
Education has, thus, now become the chief prob- 
lem of the world, its one holy cause. The nations 
that see this will survive and those that fail to do 
so will slowly perish. Knowledge must henceforth be 
the light and guide of mankind. More of it must be 
quarried from the original sources, nature and man. 
This, together with the choicest lessons of our past 
experience, must be ever more widely diffused and 
there must be absolute freedom of both research and 
teaching. There must be reeducation of the will 
and of the heart as well as of the intellect, and the 
ideals of service must supplant those of selfishness 
and greed. Nothing else can save us and I shall live, 
and hope to die when my time comes, convinced that 
this goal is not only not unattainable but that we are, 
on the whole, with however many and widespread 
regressions, making progress, surely if slowly and in 
the right directions. CHAPTER II 
FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
Pedigree: Vinings, Halls, Tillies, Searses, Bealses—Etymology 
of this name—The Mountain Miller—John Alden, Elder 
Brewster, and the Plymouth records—My mother’s education 
—Her scheme of Bible study for children—Her method as 
a school teacher—Her religious diary and confessional—Its 
interpretation—The abatement of her pietism with later years 
—Her reading—My mother as a pioneer in child study—My 
father’s ancestors—Characterization of his brothers and 
sisters—The old New England farms I knew best—Domestic 
industries in and out of doors—Traits of the Halls—My 
father’s boyhood, education, and western life—His traits—A 
sample address of his—My attitude toward him and my mother 
—Albums—How my parents lived for their children—How I 
look back on them. 
Several of my relatives have been for years in- 
terested in pedigrees and by dint of much correspond- 
ence and the study of many family books, and in a 
few cases with the aid of genealogical societies in 
this country and the College of Heraldry in England, 
have brought together much material, the gist of 
which has been embodied in a large notebook by my 
sister, Miss Julina O. Hall, and a few data from 
which I only very briefly recapitulate here. 
On my mother’s side, my great-grandmother was 
Abigail Alden, a direct descendant in the fifth gen- 
eration of John Alden (b. 1599) of Plymouth fame. 
He was, of course, one of the signers of the May- 
flower Compact. Thus I am one of the descendants 
in the eighth generation of John Alden and Priscilla. 
The name Alden has been transmitted in three suc- 
cessive contemporary generations of Bealses, and I 
have sometimes used the Alden coat of arms as a 
bookplate (see figure). 
22 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
My grandmother on this side of the house was 
a Vining. This was a fruitful branch, a number of 
the families in the five generations we can trace being 
very large. The first Vining came from England to 
Weymouth in 1655 and appears 
to have reared ten children. His 
great-grandchild, George, reared 
eleven children. 
The pedigree of Bealses (my 
mother’s family) goes back to 
Samuel, of Pembroke, Massa- 
chusetts, of whose life we have 
no details. The name of his son, 
Jonathan, appears on the muster 
roll of Bridgewater in 1776. Then 
it was found that “he could re- 
pair gun-locks and he was taken 
out of the army and men were 
placed under him and he was 
kept at work in that line.” His 
son, Joseph, was the Mountain Miller, whose life and 
traits are described later. 
The name Beals has been the center of a great 
deal of discussion. Our ancestry can be traced di- 
rectly to John Beale, who died in Kent County, 
England, in 1399, and this was about the period when 
patronymics began. Rev. Charles E. Beals, who has 
discussed the name in detail, thinks on philological 
grounds it goes back to the ancient Baal, meaning 
Lord, and connects it with Baal-fires and May- 
Day ceremonies. Other theories trace this name, with 
its very flexible spelling, back through the French 
belle to words that mean “to bellow,” or a narrow 
pass between hills, in which latter case it evidently 
had a geographical origin. Or it may, etymologi- 
cally, mean sharpness, as of a hatchet. From one form 
it would appear that men of this name came over 
G. STANLEY HALL. 
23 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
with William the Conqueror, and from another that 
the name goes back to the Druids. 
On my father’s side we trace the name Hall 
through nine generations to John Hall who at twenty- 
one came from Coventry, England, to Charlestown, 
Massachusetts, in 1630, in the fleet with Governor 
Winthrop. We can trace him to Barnstable and 
Yarmouth and Dennis when this latter was set 
off as a separate town in 1793. Josiah Hall, who 
lived on the old homestead in this latter town and 
was interested in genealogy, wrote in 1880, “The 
Halls have always occupied a position as good citizens, 
and I have never heard of any of them being guilty of 
a crime that would make any one who bore the name 
blush. The emigrant ancestor was a man of character 
though not much in office.” He was said to have had 
twelve sons (no daughters) although we have the 
names of only ten of them and his will in 1694 men- 
tions but eight. Our generation runs through his 
second son, John (b. 1637) and his second son, Joseph, 
father of nine children, and the next four generations 
are represented by Daniel, David, Reuben, and 
Thomas, who was my grandfather, although the 
traditions of my youth stop with David and his son 
Reuben, who, we were told in our childhood, was the 
captain of the vessel from which the tea was taken to 
make the Boston tea party. His sympathies were, 
however, with the insurgents and against his official 
duties, and so he was knocked down “very gently” 
when the raid was made. He later wandered west 
to Ashfield as a pioneer settler in 1780 although he 
had then spent only one summer on land since he was 
a small boy. Our tradition of him is that at first he 
knew so little of farming that when his beans came 
up he thought nature had made a mistake and care- 
fully pulled them up and turned them over. 
One of the ancestors of our branch of the Halls 
24 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
was Elder William Brewster of whom Bradford’s 
History has so much to say. In 1585 he was in the 
service of Mr. Davison, Secretary of State and 
Queen’s ambassador to the Low Countries. When 
in token of submission the keys of Flushing were 
given over to the ambassador, he committed them to 
William Brewster, who kept them under his pillow. 
After Mr. Davison lost favor with the Queen because 
of disagreement over the Queen of Scots, Brewster 
went to the country to live. Here he was so active 
against the corruptions of the church that he was one 
of the seven kept longest in prison. After he went 
to Holland he taught English to “many great men’s 
sons” and “drew rules to learn it by after the Latin 
manner” (Bradford). We are told that he had “many 
children,” was noted for his “godlye living,” his “per- 
sonall abilities,” and his habit of “undervallewing him- 
self and overvallewing others.” He died in 1644 on 
his farm adjoining that of Miles Standish. His 
daughter, Patience, came to this country later and 
married Thomas Prence (Prince), who, Bradford’s 
History tells us, was twice elected governor of the 
colony. She died at the birth of her daughter, Sarah, 
in 1633. The latter married Jeremiah Howes. Then 
follow three generations of Howeses—Ebenezer, 
Thomas, and Sarah, who married Reuben Hall. Thus 
I am a descendant of Elder Brewster in the eighth 
generation. 
John Tillie and his wife came over in the May- 
flower but he died soon afterward. He, too, was one 
of the signers of the Compact. His daughter, Eliza- 
beth, came to this country later and married John 
Howland in 1624. The latter had come over in the 
Mayflower, and Bradford describes him as a “lusty 
younge man” who fell overboard from the vessel in 
a storm, and “though he was something ill with it, 
yet lived many years after and became a profitable 
25 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
member both in church and commone wealthe.” He 
died in 1672, leaving ten children, the oldest of whom 
married Capt. John Gorham. Their son, Joseph, 
married Mary Sturgis, whose daughter, Sarah, mar- 
ried Ebenezer Howes (above). In the sixth gen- 
eration comes Horace, in the seventh Sarah, who was 
the mother of my grandfather, Thomas, who married 
Rachael Howes. 
Ten generations take my ancestry back to James 
Gorham, born in England in 1550. The next three 
are represented by Ralph, John, and Joseph, and the 
latter’s daughter, Sarah, married Thomas Howes, 
whose daughter Sarah bore my grandfather. 
Another line goes back to Richard Sears, who died 
in Yarmouth in 1676. His son, "‘Captain” Paul, was 
born in 1637. He married Deborah Willard and died 
in 1707. He was one of the original proprietors of 
lands in Harwich and left his property of four hun- 
dren and sixty-seven pounds to his wife. The oldest 
monument in the original cemetery at Yarmouth is 
a stone slab which was removed from its place to 
make room for the granite monument of the Searses. 
Paul Sears, 2d, born in 1669, married Mercy Free- 
man, and their daughter, Deborah, seventh of 
twelve children (b. 1705) married Thomas Howes. 
Then comes Samuel, who married Mercy Mayo; then 
Seth, his son Thomas, and the father of my great- 
great-grandfather, David. 
The above are all my forbears that we can trace. 
Reckoning back nine generations (two parents, four 
grandparents, eight great-grandparents, etc.) would 
give me, theoretically, in the ninth generation, 512 
progenitors, all of whom would have contributed 
equally with those that can be traced as above to my 
psychophysic make-up. Of most of the rest nothing 
is known. They might have, of course, included 
criminals, wastrels, and degenerates of many kinds, 
26 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
of most of whom I might have more reason to be 
ashamed than I have to be proud. On the other hand, 
some of them might have been famous—perhaps 
kings. 
On the whole, the blood is more Saxon than Nor- 
man. Most of my ancestry was English with a slight 
admixture of Scotch and Irish. My parents, who 
cherished these traditions, made some effort, when 
we were small, to interest us in some of our forbears 
in the many volumed Plymouth records which came 
into our possession about 1855. 
My Mother 
My mother, Abigail Beals (b. August, 1816), the 
fourth child in a family of seven brothers and sisters, 
was the only one to seek a higher education than 
that afforded by the country schools, save her younger 
brother, Alden Porter Beals, who was graduated at 
Williams College in 1849. He was classmate and 
roommate of John Bascom, long a professor at that 
institution and later for years president of the Uni- 
versity of Wisconsin. This uncle spent his life as 
a teacher and school principal in Troy and Stamford, 
Connecticut. Her oldest brother, Fordyce, was long 
a partner of Colt in the manufacture of firearms but 
retired at about the age of sixty with a modest com- 
petence. He had no children, and it was he who in 
part financed my first period of study in Germany. 
My uncle Robert was, during most of his life, an 
official in the Springfield armory. He died twenty 
years ago and is at this writing (1920) survived by 
his childless widow in the early nineties. The next 
brother, Vining, was a prosperous farmer and trades- 
man in Pittsfield. Her oldest sister, Vesta, married 
a Snell, who came of a family with a strongly pietistic 
and missionary spirit and tradition. One of her 
27 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
daughters, Sarah, I remember as a very precise, beau- 
tiful, and cultivated young woman who married a 
clergyman, the Reverend Hiram Howard of Ashfield; 
while her sister, Martha, who was far more practical, 
married a western farmer and had a large family. 
My aunt Polly married Albert Dyer of Plainfield and 
bore three children. She was a woman of great 
vitality whose soul overflowed with good will and 
gladness—a woman, too, of fine physique who must 
have been something of a beauty in her youth. It 
is worthy of note that not only did no other of the 
children of my grandfather Robert Beals, save my 
mother and Uncle Porter, show any special interest 
in the higher education but that none save my mother 
was profoundly religious. In their mature life all 
were absorbed in secular pursuits, and some of them 
reacted in their maturity against the puritanical in- 
fluence of their home by a certain very moderate 
“wildness” which was a great grief to their saintly 
father. 
My mother was thus the youngest daughter in a 
family of seven, with two older sisters, and the letters 
of her father, a pious deacon, to her when she was 
away at school show a very close and heart-to-heart 
relation between them. She was evidently his favorite 
child and perhaps closer to his heart than was even 
his wife, a much more worldly woman and little in 
touch with the intensely religious life that pervaded 
the community. I barely remember her sitting in the 
chimney corner with an old lady’s cap which she 
always wore, smoking a pipe, to the great mortifica- 
tion of her spouse. Thus the father-image which 
developed in my mother’s mind up to the age of 
twenty-six, when she married, was very different 
from that which my father illustrated, as the tradi- 
tions of his family involved far less chivalry toward 
women and very much less demonstrativeness of 
28 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
affection. Thus my mother may have been somewhat 
disappointed and perhaps had to make difficult read- 
justments, for her husband certainly was not the 
idealization of the father whom she idolized. There 
may have been some unrealized hopes in her wedded 
life which led her to have recourse to a religion cul- 
minating in the love of the Heavenly Father and 
supplying what the marital relation did not fully 
afford. One element of her pietism seems, thus, to 
be a vent or a sublimation of the repressed affection 
for her own father in whom she had come to prize 
traits that were but little developed in her husband 
who, although both a moral and religious man and 
a church member, kept most of his piety for Sunday 
and to himself. 
The Beals family tradition of piety went back to 
my great-grandfather, Joseph Beals, whose life was 
commemorated in a tract (No. 254) entitled, The 
Mountain Miller, which for many years had a very 
wide circulation.1 This little memoir was not only the 
subject of some pride but was very precious to my 
mother’s family as presenting a standard of Christian 
life to be striven towards. The subject of the sketch 
migrated westward from Bridgewater to Plainfield 
when he was twenty-seven and cleared land and built 
a home for his young family, when a fire destroyed 
his house and all that was in it, bringing to naught 
the result of ten years’ labor and obliging him to 
face hard conditions. He had hitherto held entirely 
aloof from all church relationships, openly asserting 
that a sincerely moral life was sufficient for salvation. 
This calamity, which at first filled his heart with 
1 William A. Hallock, son of Moses Hallock immortalized by Charles 
Dudley Warner, also a native of Plainfield, who in his boyhood went 
to school to my mother, was one of the famous “haystack” (Williams- 
town) founders of the American Board of Foreign Missions. In com- 
petition for a prize of fifty dollars offered by the American Tract 
Society he wrote the Mountain Miller, of which 140,000 and soon 
afterward 170,000 copies more were in circulation. 
29 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
bitterness and resentment toward Providence, finally 
brought about his conversion. He came to see that 
this affliction was a needed chastening by the Lord, 
that he had been proud and particularly prone to im- 
patience with his lot, and now he became a very 
humble, devoted Christian according to the concep- 
tions of his day. He was always at church and 
prayer meeting, instituted family prayers, labored for 
years to convert his wife, who long held out, watching 
for and reproaching every sign of failure and irrita- 
bility in her husband and, when they appeared, taunt- 
ing him with not living up to his new ideals. But at 
last she yielded and experienced a great change, could 
hardly atone sufficiently for her criticisms of her hus- 
band, and she, and later their children, joined the 
church. So ecstatic did Joseph Beals become at times 
that when his oldest and best-beloved daughter died in 
the later teens he declared at the funeral with his 
hand on the coffin, that this was “the happiest day” 
of his life because he felt the love of God so shed 
abroad in his heart. He went on to describe his close 
walk with God and exhorted sinners present to repent 
because for them, as for his daughter, death was ever 
present. He prayed whenever the spirit came upon 
him—in the fields, forest, and by the spring, which 
has been commemorated; and when he bought his 
grist-mill he made it a rule to give some word of 
religious admonition to all his customers. He died 
at the age of sixty-one, and his wife followed him 
the next day with the same fever.2 
The well-laid deep stone wall of perhaps twenty 
feet, which constituted the foundations of this mill, 
is still standing, although the original mill has been 
replaced by a more modern structure. By the road- 
side, near the mill, under a group of sugar maples 
2 In the ledger of the estate of Deacon Beals is found the following 
entry: July 22, 1 coffin—12 shillings; July 24, 1 coffin—12 shillings. 
30 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
is the perennial spring where the miller used to drink. 
On these and adjacent trees are carved the names of 
many visitors, for the romantic scenery here has been 
the cause of many visits. William Cullen Bryant, 
born four miles away in the town of Cummington, 
to whom my mother once went to school, used to 
come here often and spend a day in communion with 
nature. The old toll measure which Mr. Beals once 
used is now a precious relic to the 10,000 people by the 
name of Beals in the United States. 
Reverting now to my mother, of intense and 
unique interest to me was a full and closely written 
‘‘composition book” of themes composed by her before 
she left home at the age of sixteen. Of the existence 
of this book I had never heard until two years ago. 
These effusions are also significant as affording 
glimpses of the higher education of girls in the 
of the last century. The topics were all assigned, with 
no thought of trusting to the initiative of the pupil 
—Autobiography of a Cherry Tree, Where I Would 
Like to Dwell, Improprieties in Common Conversa- 
tion, Practice Makes Perfect, Memory, Broken Reso- 
lutions, Indolence, Perseverance, A Tale of Wild 
Adventure, A Young Lady Who Neglected to Im- 
prove Her Mind, Deception, etc. There are also 
paraphrases of poems and Bible stories, imaginary 
journeys, and letters to fancied relatives. In them 
all there is not a single allusion to literature, save in 
the paraphrases, and there is no indication of any 
other effort to acquaint the student with English 
masterpieces. There is, however, an exquisite love 
of nature afield and a keen sensitiveness to landscapes, 
hills, trees, forests, brooks, and flowers. Much of 
the attention seems to be focused on sentence building, 
but the outstanding feature of all these essaylets is 
their very copious and highly Latinized vocabulary. 
That a girl of this age should have so many sonorous 
31 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
and even mellifluous words at her command and treat 
them so caressingly, almost as if her idea of style con- 
sisted in saying simple things in an elaborate way, 
is, I fancy, due as much to the very nature of this 
age as to nurture. If there is any affectation about 
it, it was doubtless cultivated by the ideals and methods 
of female education in vogue in that day. 
My own writings have often been criticized for 
the use of unusual and perhaps technical terms where 
others would do, and if this is true I wonder whether 
inheritance or the training my mother gave me has 
anything to do with it. I have increasingly felt in 
my educational studies that the vocabulary of the boy 
and girl of to-day is lamentably narrow and especially 
deficient in words describing their feelings or ideas. 
Presentative terms and descriptions of objects of 
sense are well taught and learned, but the psychic 
processes are inarticulate in modern youth. But in 
these compositions the descriptions of sentiment play 
a prominent role. 
The catalogue of the “Plainfield Ladies* School” 
(Sarah Mack, principal) where these compositions 
were written shows fifty-eight other pupils from this 
and neighboring towns. From here my mother went 
to the “Albany Female Academy,” after applying for 
admission to the newly opened Mount Holyoke 
Seminary,3 at which she was told there was no room. 
3 Mary Lyon, the founder of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, 
was born and reared in the town of Buckland adioining Ashfield. Her 
birthplace and the large rock, where she is said to have conceived her 
plans for the higher education of young women, are often visited with 
reverence by those interested in the institution she founded. She was 
a cousin of mv grandfather, whom I have often heard talk of her 
masculine way of soliciting funds from farmers of the region; she 
used to follow them into the hayfield, put her foot on the spoke of the 
cartwheel, and refuse to allow the work of gathering hay to go on 
until she had been promised the proceeds of at least one load. She 
also would requisition a certain number of fleeces of wool, or goose 
feathers enough to fill a feather bed or at least a pillow, till her appear- 
ance on the scene was regarded as ominous by the farmers of the 
countryside far and near. She made a similar canvass later for stu- 
dents, importuning several of my aunts, who were then girls, to enter 
32 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
Here she took, for a year, the studies of the “first” 
or highest department, which according to the cata- 
logue included the following subjects: Moral Phi- 
losophy, Karnes’s Elements of Criticism, Algebra, 
Botany, Technology, Intellectual Philosophy, Coate’s 
Physiology, Paley’s Natural Theology, Geometry, The 
Constitution of the United States, Exercises in Chem- 
istry, Geology, Trigonometry, and Butler’s Analogy. 
There is no mention in the rather elaborate pamphlet 
commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of this in- 
stitution in 1833 of any foreign language, ancient or 
modern, and yet this school, we are told, afforded 
the most advanced education for girls at that time 
in this country. Of just what was done in the above 
branches of the highest form by my mother we have 
no knowledge except that I find a manuscript-pam- 
phlet very carefully prepared by her which consisted 
of a rather detailed analysis of the bulky and really 
learned treatise of Lord Karnes, mentioned above. 
Whether she took all these other studies I doubt, but 
do not know. 
In a closely written large-paged notebook of some 
fifty pages, begun in 1841 and continued for about a 
year, my mother noted the Sunday school work with 
her infant class and the lessons which she worked 
out according to an original plan of her own. She 
first took up the Commandments, one by one, with 
very concrete illustrations from child life to teach the 
goodness of God; the love and respect due to parents; 
the duty of kindness—how those who hate, get angry, 
fight, scratch or bite are potential murderers; the 
necessity of obedience to parents, prompt, willing, 
and constant even though the parents are absent; 
belief in God’s existence, although like the wind He 
her school. One of them, with a promise of free tuition in consider- 
ation of my grandfather’s gifts in kind, prepared to do so but for 
some reason her plans failed. 
33 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
cannot be seen; belief in His omnipresence and sus- 
taining power. She made the children feel their 
pulses and respiration in order to realize that God 
keeps them alive while they are asleep as well as 
awake, that He gives them their several senses, feet, 
hands, etc. This was accompanied by considerable 
review work and memorization, so that in the end they 
must have had some idea of their duties to God, their 
parents, their teachers, and each other. The lessons 
then proceeded to the stories of Jesus, who came a 
forlorn stranger to this earth to save souls; of Paul, 
and especially of how the Lord freed him from prison 
and the jailer believed. Then came the stories of 
Joseph, Abraham, of our first parents, Adam and 
Eve. The lessons later alternated from the themes 
of the New to the Old Testament—David and Goliath, 
Jairus’ daughter, Judas’ betrayal of Jesus, the miracle 
of the draught of fishes, the cure of Naaman’s lep- 
rosy, Job, and Elisha. 
In all these themes a practical lesson was brought 
home at the close that was well within the sphere of 
children’s interests and which, I think, must have had 
a direct influence for good upon their daily lives. As 
a student of education I honestly believe that this 
general plan of work, and perhaps even more particu- 
larly the copious details and illustrations by which 
it was wrought out, would compare in effectiveness 
very favorably with our best modern Sunday school 
courses. Always the chief stress is laid upon duty, 
and especially a spirit of kindness and love. Each 
lesson seems to have been planned in advance with a 
great deal of care, and there are incessant questions 
indicating that throughout the children themselves 
took an active part. This course seems to have been 
continuous through more than one year, and also to 
have been gone over with rather free variations sev- 
eral times during my mother’s experience as a Sunday 
34 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
school teacher. She taught infant classes in the Sun- 
day school for years after her marriage and when 
we were young, though of this I find no written record 
and have little recollection. 
In a small bound blank book, dated 1842, before 
her marriage, my mother has left a daily record of 
a four-months country school where she taught thirty 
pupils. At the close of each day she recorded very 
briefly the conduct of the school as a whole and of 
individual pupils, especially of those who had excelled 
in studiousness or in good behavior. Little faults of 
inattention, gum-chewing, whispering, tardiness, 
playing, etc., are noted, the chief reference being 
throughout to the conduct as pleasing or displeasing 
to the teacher. This she seemed to make the highest 
criterion. Perhaps of all the virtues that are implied 
that of kindness, so often mentioned, takes first rank. 
This day-book would not perhaps be worthy of men- 
tion save for the fact that it is a written record of 
each day to be read on the following morning for the 
encouragement and admonition of the school. The 
method may have been used elsewhere but I have 
never heard of it. It was very evident that she strove 
here to get into close personal rapport with individual 
pupils and also to attach them to her. My mother 
also taught one or two other single-term district coun- 
try schools before her marriage, but of none of these 
can I find any record. It is, however, significant to 
note that some of these former pupils of hers remained 
her steadfast friends through life and with some of 
them correspondence was continued for years. 
Until about two years ago, when they were shown 
to me and finally given me by my sister, to whom 
they had been committed hesitatingly, I knew nothing 
of the religious diaries of my mother, and my sister 
seemed to feel a little as though she were violating 
a sacred confidence even to let me know of their ex- 
35 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
istence. These jottings throw a flood of light upon 
my mother’s inner life and character. ]\fy father, 
we believe, knew nothing of them; nor did my sister 
till just before my mother’s death. They extend from 
October 13, 1850 to March 31, 1861, these dates 
rather nearly coinciding with our life in the town of 
Worthington and with the early years of schooling 
for us three children. In these notes there is, how- 
ever, almost no mention of her children or her hus- 
band. but their sole purpose seems to be a study of 
how to get nearer to the All-Father and to grow in 
Christian graces. This saintly woman, whom I never 
knew under the greatest stress to show a single symp- 
tom of anger or even impatience with three children 
at a trying age about her, living on a farm one third 
of a mile from the nearest neighbor, with social re- 
lations mainly through the church and relatives some 
miles away, here writes in the most feeling, personal 
way of the spirit struggling with the flesh, of her 
devout gratitude that merited judgments of Heaven 
upon her are withheld, and her fears that she may 
sometime be a castaway, etc. There can surely be 
no phrase making, conventionality, or affectation 
here. All this was written with no thought that any 
eye save her own would ever see these records of 
aspiration or sacred communion with self and with 
God. Not a few of these notes consist of prayers, 
most of them so fervid that to read them now for 
the first time touches my heart in ways I cannot ex- 
press. Some of these entries I insert herewith exactly 
as they stand. 
Oct 13, 1850. Sabbath. I sometimes get such a 
glimpse of God’s perfect character—so good, so wise and 
just, that I rejoice to be under His government and feel 
that I could bear whatever He should see fit to lay upon 
me with cheerfulness and more—with pleasure—, assured 
of His kindness even in adversity. Yet often is my faith 
36 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
weak and the cares and perplexities of life trouble me, and 
I forget to cast all my care on God with the assurance that 
He careth for me. Precious promise and encouragement to 
those under trial, may I ever feel its influence in producing 
peace of mind amid every vexation. 
March 16, 1852. O, that I might so realize the hand 
of God in every perplexity that I may be even happy under 
trial, assured that God permits it and designs it for good. 
I deserve severe chastenings for my want of faith and 
murmurings, for my neglect of closet duties. The closet 
bears testimony of my estrangedness from God. And when 
I review the brief record of my experience in religion I 
find but little evidence that I love or have been beloved by 
Him “whose favor is life.” If I love, why am I thus? 
June 24, 1853. This is my birthday and what reflections 
arise? What advances have I made? What resolutions 
have I carried into practice which tend to holiness and con- 
formity to Christ’s image? What account for the privi- 
leges of the past year? What return for mercies past and 
present? While my pen records the loving kindness of 
my God which has attended me through the whole year 
my heart would exercise increasing gratitude that judg- 
ments are still withheld, deserving as I surely am of the 
severest frowns. May I so be led by the cords of Divine 
love in the path of obedience that the rod to drive me to 
duty may yet be spared. 
Sept. 18, 1853. I sometimes feel burdened with care 
and think that with less, and consequently more time for 
self-communing, for the cultivation of the heart and in- 
tellect, I could serve God better and enjoy His service more. 
But I would put away all such desires and remember God’s 
providence places me just here and that I am accountable 
for the faithful discharge of present duties, and spend no 
further thought in regrets that I have not greater privi- 
leges but seek to improve the present and be grateful that 
they do so abound—infinitely beyond my desert. God places 
me just here! He will require of me a strict account. I 
would ever bear this solemn truth in mind. 
37 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
Sunday, Jan. 1, 1854. Sixteen years ago this day I 
publicly dedicated myself to God, and it now becomes me 
to inquire how I have served Him. Have I engaged in 
it heartily and with delight? Have I honored my pro- 
fession by exhibition of a Christian deportment at all times ? 
in the family as a wife and mother? in intercourse with 
friends? in the sanctuary and Sabbath schools? Have I 
been patient and forbearing when rebuked for impropriety 
and neglect of duty? Have I always given the “soft 
answer?” O, I would ever seek to put down that self- 
justifying spirit which I find rising at times and stand 
condemned before the Great searcher of hearts and plead 
for mercy and forgiveness. On the ground of merit I 
have nothing to ask—“Mercy is all my plea.” 
Fast-Day, April 6, 1854. I have nothing to record but 
the spirit struggled with the flesh so earthward bound. 
June 25, 1854. Yesterday was my birthday and cares 
and business pursuits hindered me from making a record 
of my reflections after the lapse of another year of my 
life’s little span. When I now take a retrospect, I see it 
has abounded in goodness and mercy, and the question may 
well arise, why am I so favored? Gratitude should be an 
absorbing emotion with me at the present time in view of 
the multiplied blessings which have attended me for 38 
years. The rich profusion of favors so plentifully showered 
upon me during all these years is highly suggestive of God's 
love and great forbearance. O, for the kind Spirit’s in- 
fluences to enable me to love always and even to find it 
sweet to lie passive in His hands and know no will but 
His. May my confidence in God ever abound. If spared 
through the new year now begun, may I be enabled to 
make a better record of my spiritual attainments. May 
the presence of Jesus go with me continually, cheering, 
comforting, and enabling me to image forth His life in 
my own. 
Sunday, Feb. 4, 1855. For the five past weeks I have 
been called to note the special mercies of my God. Tho 
38 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
increasing cares necessarily rest on me in the absence of 
my husband during these weeks and still continue, its effect 
on my mind and heart has been to give me a more abiding 
sense of dependence on my Almighty friend for the mercies 
of each moment. They have been multiplied every morning 
and even every moment, and I have had increasing cause 
for gratitude. However crosses may thicken and trials 
multiply and vex my soul in future life, may my heart 
ever beat responsive to the truth, the blessed truth, that 
God is good. I would ever love His whole character, love 
Him for what He is, as well as for what He has done 
for me. O, Lord, make my heart thine own, and prepare 
me for all Thy will respecting me. 
Sunday, April 15, 1855. How I long for more leisure, 
more quiet and rest from these constant and distracting 
cares! But with all my intense desire for the greater re- 
ligious privileges which such leisure would afford, the 
question arises, Should I indeed serve God more acceptably 
than I might now if I cultivated a patient and Christian 
spirit, while engaged in the thousand duties which, each 
day, seem to engross my whole time. How little of the 
Christian is exhibited in my daily life! How much of 
conformity to the world! O, I would not have it so, and 
yet I do, and live on, at a poor dying rate. My love to 
God is faint and feeble, if at all existent. I call myself 
a Christian, and wherefore? In what am I different from 
those who make no profession? Ah, in what? No observer 
can tell, and yet I hope and cherish the hope, more from 
the evidence which past experience gives me than any pres- 
ent emotion. O Lord, I desire to live so that each day 
shall furnish myself evidence that I am Thine. And may 
every act, thought, and emotion arise from love to Thee. 
O grant me Divine aid, I beseech Thee, else I injure Thy 
cause by my unchristian influence and be myself a cast- 
away. Help, or I perish! I cast myself anew upon Thy 
mercy in Christ as my only hope. I would seek for relief 
from no other source. Let me not seek in vain. Let me 
find it sweet to be governed entirely by Thee in all things. 
My soul would utter the sentiment of the poet, “P for a 
39 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
closer walk with God,” etc. I would be an earnest, fearless 
Christian at all times and in all places while life is 
continued. 
June 24, 1855. Sabbath. My birthday! Conflicting 
emotions arise as I review the past year and my past life. 
The mercies of the past year have abounded, and a measure 
of gratitude arises. A hope of salvation I still cherish 
(through grace) but what are the advances in piety I have 
made? Seventeen years a professor of religion and what 
have I done to show my attachment to Christ and His 
cause? By what right do I hope? The right of a humble 
sinner ready to perish and hear Jesus say, “Whosoever will, 
let him come and take of the waters of life freely.” I 
would come and anew accept with my whole heart the 
gracious invitation and find Him whom my soul loveth 
and rest in the assurance of His love and delight myself 
in Him always. 
July 29th. A year since a brother was snatched away 
by death, all suddenly and unexpected to him and us. We 
know God has done right and would still rest in the assur- 
ance of His love—without a murmur. Let my great effort 
be to prepare for a summons as sudden. It sometimes 
seems to me that a true child of God can have no trouble, 
mder the government of One who cannot err. O, I would 
ever learn to trust in God always. When providences are 
dark, I would patiently wait for their unfolding in God’s 
own time, remembering the assurance that “what we know 
not now we shall know hereafter.” Let me ever confide 
in the wisdom of God. 
May 17, ’57. I desire this solemn responsibility resting 
on me may be felt and have its weight of influence in 
producing correct emotions of heart which shall manifest 
themselves in corresponding actions and general de- 
portment. 
July 26, ’57. The power and extent of individual in- 
fluence has been a theme of frequent meditation of late, 
40 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
and how fearful the thought that I may have already set 
in motion influences for evil which are to have a widening 
range through all time. With what prayerful carefulness 
should I order my speech, my every tone of voice, all the 
particulars of manner which go to make up the general 
deportment. I have regarded this matter far too little. 
I am a mother, and what is my influence on my children 
on whose young hearts are made ineffaceable impressions 
which have a bearing on their character through time, and 
also their future destiny? It is a solemn inquiry and 
awakens sad reflections. I would this day be stimulated 
anew to greater watchfulness on this point that in all things 
my mite of influence may tell for good on my children to 
the remotest generation. 
March 31, 1861. Sabbath—alone. The very annoy- 
ances of which we most complain may be designed as ferti- 
lizers to the growth of the graces we most lack. Let me 
make a proper application of them that if it so be, I may 
attain that spiritual growth which God designs and desires 
to see in His children. 
These musings of my mother, the majority of 
them written Sundays, can only in part be explained 
by social heredity or by the influence of her sainted 
father and loyalty to his memory. He died about 
the time of her marriage and in her teens and early 
twenties she was in the very closest rapport with him. 
The fluctuations between implicit confidence in God 
and love of Jesus and a feeling of alienation and un- 
worthiness were also in part due to her imperfect 
health. Some of the sense of inadequacy was no 
doubt really caused by excessive domestic duties, for 
she was cook and washerwoman for the family, 
mended and made about all the clothing for us three 
children, and otherwise practiced the strictest econ- 
omies, for we rarely had indoor help. In the haying 
season an additional man or two in the field, which 
increased the housework, were necessary. Thus, 
41 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
these religious experiences measured also in part the 
fluctuations of euphoria, and with these she must have 
found it hard to keep the poise and uniformity of 
deportment which was her ideal, and lapses from 
this ideal affected her religious consciousness. 
This to her meant the abiding conviction that all that 
is is for the best, so that if anything caused her to 
repine it was lack of faith in Providence. Many of 
her expressions are almost paraphrases of the Stoic 
model, “Accept the inevitable with joy,” as her grand- 
father found joy even in the death of his dearest 
daughter. This is easiest when we are at the top of 
our condition, and it was really this for which she 
strove. When we are at our best God seems good 
and near, and if we are in low condition His face is 
clouded. 
Faith was to her not a matter of creed; nor did 
the doubt she speaks of have anything to do with 
doctrine. Belief meant simply the presence, and 
doubt the absence of the feeling that all God’s dealings 
with us are for our good. Our paramount duty as 
Christians is to see and realize this whatever happens. 
Submission is indispensable, but this is not enough; 
we must justify all God’s ways. To fulfill this great 
and often impossible task she sometimes felt herself 
quite incompetent, and when she had to have recourse 
to faith and Bible promises she found this not entirely 
effective. It was all with her a very personal problem 
and her own relations to God took precedence over 
every other matter, not selfishly but because she felt 
this to be the indispensable condition of being able to 
do her full duty to others. 
Of all things in this world she most craved love 
or the intimate, sympathetic relation she had so long 
enjoyed with her father. I think she had an almost 
morbid dread of conflict of any kind. She could not 
endure antagonism or criticism, and seems to have 
42 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
had nothing less than a passion for getting and keep- 
ing in amicable relations with every acquaintance. 
She so dreaded to differ even in opinion with others 
that she often seemed to acquiesce in things that in 
fact she strongly disapproved of. She was distressed 
if we children quarreled as, alas! we often did. One 
of her chief anxieties was my father’s harsh censure 
and occasional punishment of us children. As we 
grew up and the disagreements of us boys, especially 
of myself, with my father increased, she suffered 
growing distress of mind, and it was her mediation 
as a peacemaker, as we grew older, that often averted 
more open and perhaps final ruptures of family ties. 
Indeed, I think anxiety on this point during the later 
years of our home-staying was the greatest of all her 
afflictions and that when we were at last in college— 
and that, too, with the final and hearty, though long 
reluctant, approval of my father—a great and new 
peace settled upon her mind. 
Another source of her distress was lest I, the 
eldest, should bully my brother and tease my sensitive 
sister, which I now see I was almost brutally prone to 
do. My brother was light-haired and belonged to her 
side of the house and was named for her father, 
Robert Beals. She always took his part, which only 
increased my predisposition to heckle him. Although 
a year and a half younger, he was my equal, if not 
my superior, in standing in school and even outranked 
me in college, although in a class two years later. 
As a child, too, I thought him a tattler to his mother. 
Once, when he inadvertently uttered a bad word 
(“darn it”) I held the threat of telling our parents 
over him for months and, I fear, years, as a club 
to compel him to do my bidding. When he was seven, 
we quite inadvertently collided on the ice and he fell 
and broke his nose, and I think I never entirely es- 
caped the suspicion that I had pushed him over. 
43 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
When I was away in Ashfield, as I often was for 
entire school terms, with my grandfather Hall or with 
my uncles and aunts on that side of the house, and 
also when my father was absent in the legislature, 
I have no doubt that it was a great relief to my 
mother’s soul, much as she loved us all. Perhaps she 
felt that she should have prevented all our bickerings 
if her heart was full enough of love and reproached 
herself that harmony did not always reign; and per- 
haps the cause of these self-reproaches was thus so 
personal that she not only did not entrust it to her 
private diary but did not even bring herself to fully 
realize just where the actual trouble lay, for this 
would seem to put the blame on us which her instincts 
inclined her to take over entirely upon herself. Per- 
haps she was so enamored of amity that my then too 
belligerent disposition seemed to her a standing in- 
dictment of herself, because neither the heredity 
which she transmitted nor the training she had given 
made me anywhere nearly realize her ideal, so that 
my nature may have made her feel that the quality 
of her parenthood or her nurture was defective. If 
she had borne and reared a more amiable child she 
might have had less cause for religious discontent. 
But I would fain believe that yet another factor 
entered into these introspective meditations, namely, 
an impulse to keep on growing through adult years, 
an urge that resists arrest and stagnation, the eternal 
discontent that revolts at settling complacently into 
a dull routine of daily duties. This longing for a 
larger, fuller life found expression in the only chan- 
nels which her teaching and environment left open 
to her, namely, in the development of ever more of 
the Christian graces. This she conceived as the higher 
vocation of man. Her very love of peace made her 
almost masochistic to divine influences. Thus she 
secretly cherished the very highest of all aspirations 
44 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
and a horror of inferiority, and a hungering for per- 
fection which pointed unswervingly straight toward 
the goal of human destiny as she conceived it. To 
be and do more in the service of the Great Master 
was her all-absorbing passion, and her dread of medi- 
ocrity here was her excelsior ambition. Only as she 
neared the age of fifty did these records cease. About 
that time more competence came from the bequest of 
a brother, her children were entering upon their 
careers and were away from home most of the time, 
and so it was only then that she began to relax from 
such exactions and slowly settle to more complacency 
with herself. 
She had always found time to read much to us, 
not only from the Springfield Republican, our chief 
newspaper, but from generally well-chosen books 
from the town library. I remember particularly 
Uncle Tom's Cabin, several of the stories of Scott 
and Dickens, some of Shakespeare, The Spectator, 
etc. These she read not only evenings but often during 
the noon hours, even in the busiest season of haying. 
But later, after we left home, she indulged much in 
reading to herself, and I find two lists of books that 
she had finished which represent what she had been 
over in a winter or a year, and, strange to say, among 
these I do not note a single religious work, indicating 
that with senescence the storm and stress of her 
maturer life remitted. 
There is another daily diary, from November 21 
to December 25, 1853, devoted entirely to family hap- 
penings, which gives a very concrete glimpse of our 
home life. It abundantly illustrates how fond my 
mother was of visits, usually a whole afternoon and 
early evening spent with friends, and how she loved 
to invite usually more than one family of neighbors 
at once to some kind of entertainment at our home. 
She greatly enjoyed the week when the teacher 
45 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
boarded with us, especially one of them—Forsyth 
Richards—who had once gone to school to her. 
Almost every day there is a comment upon the con- 
duct and deportment of the children, always with the 
earnest expression that we might improve. 
Throughout her life my mother was very fond of 
copying favorite passages, poems, and hymns from 
very diverse sources. Ishe rarely made epitomes of 
her reading but altogether the scribblings of this sort 
are very voluminous, those in her early years before 
marriage being far more exclusively religious and 
those in later life with a greater and growing pre- 
dominance of secular literature. In some of these 
booklets are proverbs and even witticisms, and on 
several occasions she attempted poetry—though not, 
I fear, with very great success. Soon after I was 
born she began a memorandum of which I was the 
chief theme. It was continued at intervals for years 
and came to embrace the other children. It recorded 
not only our cute sayings but many things which 
were thought to indicate future characteristics, with 
not infrequent expressions of hopes and fears for our 
future and notes of our distempers. This life-and- 
health book, unfortunately, although it was known to 
me all through my home-staying life and long after, 
cannot now be found. If it could it would surely be 
of the greatest interest to me now, and it might prove 
to be one of the first efforts in child-study, to which 
I have given so much attention. 
In a commonplace book begun in 1873 and con- 
tinued for apparently many years we have a record 
of important happenings7~visits given and received, 
of which there are many; church and other social 
activities; family events; anniversaries, etc., and in- 
terspersed throughout all, many titles of books which 
my mother had read and also choice quotations from 
them, together with notes of information about many 
46 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
popular authors of her day. In striking contrast with 
the earlier diaries, we have nothing of her religious 
life here save occasional statements about church- 
going and sermons. The picture here shown is of 
a complacent not oyer strong woman in comfortable 
health, gratifying in rather full measure her taste for 
reading. The second no less strong impression is the 
unusually active social life. These notes, reinforced 
by my own memories, show that although isolated, 
not very many days passed in which visits were not 
given or received and that it was very customary for 
people, in turn, to invite a number of their neighbors 
to visit them at once. At these gatherings a bountiful 
repast was an important factor. News and gossip 
were exchanged, and the men often indulged in long 
discussions about public affairs. Political and some- 
times religious opinions, often very diverse, were very 
freely aired. From my personal memory of these 
occasions I can realize that there is a very significant 
sense in which psychology begins in gossip because 
the latter so largely concerns itself'wfEh intimate per- 
sonal events and discussions of motives and character. 
My Father 
My father, Granville Bascom Hall (b. Feb. 2, 
1812), was the fourth of ten children, nine of whom 
lived to a good old age. I have a group photograph 
of seven of them when the youngest was seventy. 
His mother had a taste for romantic names for her 
children, among whom were Clarissa and Clarinda 
(twins), Viletta, Orville, and Granville. Of my 
father’s nearest relatives I saw and knew far more 
than of my mother’s, for I lived much with my grand- 
father Hall and the Hall uncles and aunts in Ashfield 
even before my parents moved there from Worthing- 
ton, fourteen miles away. 
47 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
A few characteristics of my Hall uncles and aunts 
may be in point here. The oldest of them, Alvin, 
after being three times a widower and living in sev- 
eral towns closely adjacent, came back to the old place 
to spend his declining years, where he lived to be 
within a few months of one hundred years of age. 
He was a man of great physical stalwartness and also 
of great endurance, was proud of his power to work 
well on in senescence, was always jolly and easy- 
going, and the only member of his family who formed 
the habit of smoking. He never had children save 
one son who was rather feeble and died in his early 
twenties. 
One of my aunts, Viletta, who was very fleshy, 
also jolly and good-natured, married the son of a 
neighbor next door, where she spent almost her entire 
life. She bore two but reared only one very capable 
and efficient daughter. She was the comedian of the 
family, always saying the drollest and most original 
things, and had a most contagious laugh. 
One aunt, Lydia, was the handsomest and by far 
and away the most intellectual of them all. She never 
attended schools outside the town but for nearly thirty 
years often taught in Ashfield and in most of the 
adjacent towns. She was a member of the school 
committee, wrote the history of the town, and con- 
tributed poetry for occasions and for the county 
paper. A very clever botanist, she knew the name 
of everything that grew in the vicinity, looked it all 
up in her three or four well-thumbed botanies, and 
had a very extensive herbarium, of which I remember 
there were over a hundred species of ferns. She had 
a good mathematical head (she used to drill me un- 
mercifully evenings in algebra and in difficult prob- 
lems of cube root in Adams’ advanced arithmetic). 
She married late in life a former schoolmate and 
neighbor, Seth Miles, who had gone west and acquired 
48 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
a modest competence. Their courtship at an advanced 
age was a theme of great interest to the entire com- 
munity but they lived happily together for ten years 
and she survived him, living to the ripe age of ninety- 
six. She and one of her sisters for some time alter- 
nated from school teaching to work in the mills at 
Lowell when these industrial establishments depended 
entirely for labor upon farmers’ daughters. They 
made a distinct effort to inspire a high morale in their 
employees, who published the famous “Lowell Offer- 
ing” of which so much has been written and to which 
this aunt was a contributor. 
Another aunt, Clarinda, seems to have been of a 
different fiber, with very few developed intellectual 
interests but rather priding herself on her record 
of how many runs of yarn she could spin in a day, 
how many yards of frocking or rag carpet she could 
weave, etc. She had a great propensity, which she 
often indulged although under the protest of my 
grandfather and uncles, for working in the field— 
milking, harnessing the horse, etc. 
Still another aunt, Clarissa, also unmarried, was 
a person of a good deal of native mentality. The 
deacons appealed to her as one of the best judges 
of preaching and the quality of sermons. She was 
the only member of this family who had a passion 
for church going, Sunday school teaching, etc., but 
her interests in this realm were more social and in- 
tellectual than spiritual. She, too, refused several 
offers of marriage, taught local schools until after 
she was sixty, and died when over eighty years of age. 
She was the most rapid knitter, palm-leaf hat braider, 
weaver, spinner, etc., I can imagine. She always 
seemed to be intent on unloading superfluous nervous 
energy. She had a keen sense of humor and her black 
eyes would snap as she braided at the rate of once 
around the crown of a palm-leaf hat per minute and 
49 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
spelled, to the intense delight of the children, “the 
abominable bumble-bee with his head cut off”—all, 
too, with the greatest rapidity. 
My bachelor uncle, Orville, was so stalwart phys- 
ically in his youth and achieved such prowess as a 
wrestler and performer of athletic stunts that he was 
strongly urged to join a distant relative, who con- 
ducted a traveling circus, as a performer. But this 
offer horrified the family and he declined it. Soon 
after reaching his majority he migrated a good mile 
from the ancestral home and bought a large farm 
with an immense house, where he spent his life and 
died at the age of eighty-one. He was rather saga- 
cious in the conduct of his affairs and in that com- 
munity was regarded as “well off.” He had a fondness 
for fast horses, was very clever in mental arithmetic, 
and was for many years selectman and a member of 
the school committee. But during all his life he never 
rode on the cars or was farther from home than he 
could drive in a day with his horses. He probably 
knew every road in his and all the adjoining towns, 
of which he had well-conned maps and histories, so 
that he presents a striking case of a man of intelli- 
gence who instead of being interested in politics or 
in any larger questions focused on his own immediate 
environment. He was extremely fond of children, 
often taking loads of them on long rides, and offered 
prizes in the schools. He was a man of many stories 
and an inveterate teaser. I, for instance, was the 
cleverest boy he knew because no one else was ever 
able to shirk work on his farm. When he met my 
wife his first greeting to her was, “I had no idea 
Stanley would ever get so good-looking a wife, and 
if you had come to me beforehand I could have told 
you better.” My ambitions he characterized as trying 
to get a living without work. When I was at the 
Johns Hopkins he took me apart once into the horse- 
50 Grandfather 
Father 
Mother 
G. S. H. at 6 Allen Orville Lydia 
Clarissa Granville Viletta Alvin 
Hall Uncles and Aunts; the Youngest, jet. 72 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
shed to ask if I was really and truly a professor and 
earning enough to live and support a family in that 
way. Like the rest of my relatives, he would never 
attend a meeting in town at which I was to appear 
and speak lest he should be thought to be proud of his 
nephew, and he used to tell me that those who did 
go merely went out of curiosity to see if I really had 
any brains. But withal he was very kindly and fav- 
ored me in many ways, and occasionally when I was 
in college would spontaneously send me small sums 
of money, generally saying that he knew I would 
spend it foolishly. 
In the winter it was his custom, up to near the 
end of his life, to invite in all the neighbors interested 
to evening “sings.” He had a big melodeon with many 
stops in the middle of the room, flanked by a double 
bass viol which he played himself, a ’cello and two 
violins which were played if any one was able. He 
was chorister and brought out an armful of church 
and other songbooks in duplicate and distributed 
them. They first sang staid church tunes which he 
selected, then Moody and Sankey, then darky and 
comic songs. 
It was at these performances that another uncle, 
Allen, was generally called on to sing old ballads 
which his mother had taught him, such as Lord Lovel 
and The Mistletoe Bough. This I have heard him 
do at the age of seventy, with his voice cracked and 
his feelings always so stirred that his trembling voice 
and tear-filled eyes made every one else forget the 
ridiculousness of it as a performance in the pathos 
of the theme. His version of the former ballad, 
which had come down by hearsay for several gen- 
erations, I copied for Professor Childs of Harvard, 
who was greatly interested and embodied some of its 
stanzas in his monumental English Ballads. 
This uncle, the youngest, married"early and had 
51 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
a large and sturdy family and there are now many 
grandchildren. As a boy I never “got on” with him, 
and I shall never forget how, when I was perhaps a 
dozen years old, he hit me severely with an ox whip 
one day for impudence. This I never got over, and 
to tell the truth I always hated him. He had a quick 
temper, although he was generally pleasant enough 
to me. He was one of the leaders in the innumerable 
practical jokes which he took delight in playing upon 
me. Indeed, I was excessively teased by all my uncles 
and aunts, and was thought to be very good-natured 
because I almost never resented it unless it involved 
some physical pain and injury, as some of these 
pranks did. 
Grandfather Hall was a man of stocky frame and 
sturdy constitution who never had an illness that 
necessitated a doctor until the typhoid fever which 
took him off in his early when I was in 
college. I remember him as a hard-working farmer, 
always wearing over everything else, save in the heat 
of summer, a heavy flannel frock with pockets, but- 
toned at neck and sleeves, coming to his knees, with 
flaps like a shirt. This was made of homespun blue- 
and-white woolen. He always conducted family 
prayers in the morning, immediately after breakfast, 
and generally in the evening. On Sundays his second 
wife, a diminutive lady whom we called Aunt Lois, 
always braided long locks of his hair up over his bald 
crown, forming thus an effective thatch, the end of 
the braid coming down nearly to his eyebrows. He 
always went to church and preferred walking the two 
miles back and forth to driving a horse, which he 
generally left for his children to do, for he was far 
more used to oxen, of which he was fond, always 
having several yoke of them. 
David Hall, one of the nineteen children of Daniel 
Hall of Dennis, Massachusetts, came to Ashfield 
52 FORBEARS A.ND PARENTS 
about 1780 with his son Reuben (my great-grand- 
father) and built a small house by a brook near the 
road, and later a larger one of two stories on the other 
side of the road, which was afterwards moved to 
another location. It was from this that my grand- 
father Thomas migrated half a mile and built another 
house, purchasing a farm of twenty acres when he 
married at the age of twenty-one. But later he owned 
all the original Hall estate and several others near it 
—two or three hundred acres in all. Thus on this 
place seven generations of Halls have now lived. A 
few years ago most of the land passed into other 
hands, to my great regret, although I was able to 
purchase about a hundred and thirty-five acres, most 
of which at one time belonged to it and with which 
I have at this writing just reluctantly parted. It 
was on this farm that I was born and spent many 
months each year before and in the earliest teens, 
doing all kinds of farm work of which a boy of my 
age was capable and always attending school when- 
ever there was one within reach. My grandfather’s 
large farm was rocky, hard to work, and much better 
adapted to grazing than to crops or even mow land. 
The pasture hills here were said, in the time of the 
first settlers, to have been covered with the choicest 
kind of white clover fertilized by the lime washed by 
rain from the rocks for generations, but even in my 
boyhood years of grazing had stunted the grass crop 
so that it was very hard for even close-nibbling sheep, 
with which some of the pastures were overstocked, 
to keep in good condition. The arable land was par- 
ticularly hard to work. 
Here almost every kind of home industry was car- 
ried on, both without and withirTdoors. Flax was 
raised, cut, broken on the “break” so that the “shives” 
could be removed by “hatcheling”; then it was 
“hanked,” spun, and woven to make scratchy tow 
53 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
shirts and other crude linen productions. Wool was 
transformed into garments, every step of the process 
from sheep washing and shearing to dyeing, spinning, 
weaving, and tailoring, done at home save carding 
alone, for which the wool was taken to a shop in 
town, to be returned in neat long white “rolls” ready 
to spin. Nearly everything the family needed was 
produced on the farm or within doors, and the few 
things needed from the store were for years paid for 
by my aunts by braiding large sheafs of palm leaf 
into hats. The raw material was “given out” at the 
store, as knitting often was. 
On this place there were three large barns with 
sheds and other annexes, with provisions for cattle, 
sheep, horses, pigs, and poultry. There was a large 
sugar camp of, I think, about six hundred trees from 
which in a good season sometimes several thousand 
pounds of maple sugar were made, supplying all home 
needs and leaving a surplus for sale. For new struc- 
tures the logs were cut on the place and taken, usually 
on sleds in the winter across a large pond, to the 
saw mill to be made into boards and beams. The 
distance was nearly two miles and with slow-moving 
oxen but two trips could be made in a day. I often 
drove one of these teams. Lumber, especially chest- 
nut, beech, and pine, was often sold. 
On a good hay day, when there were hired men, 
I well remember the impressive spectacle of six, some- 
times seven, men all starting off in the early morning 
around a new “piece” of mow lot, swinging their 
scythes in unison, each three clips behind the one who 
went before. They kept up a uniform rhythm for 
hours until nearly noon, when, if the ground were 
smooth and the size of the “piece” surrounded were 
rightly chosen, the work should be done. The leader 
of this phalanx, who set the pace for the rate of the 
clips, the depth of new grass cut by each swing of 
54 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
the scythe, the width of the swath, and the closeness 
of the cut to the ground, was generally chosen by my 
grandfather with great discretion, for this place be- 
longed to the best man if the most was to be gotten 
out of the team. The spreading of these swaths be- 
longed to us boys. Work, particularly in this season, 
began early in the morning, soon after light, often 
with a turn before breakfast which was at six. There 
was a stop of fifteen minutes for “baiting” at nine 
a.m., and the work often continued until nearly or 
quite dark. When the tall clock in the corner struck 
nine or the curfew that is rung to this day sounded, 
everybody retired, to be up with the sun the next 
day. 
Good typical illustrations of the social life of this 
day are found in the various “bees” for many pur- 
poses. “Raising day” brought all the people together 
when the framework of a house or barn was to be 
put up and fastened. Sometimes sheep shearing and 
often sheep washing was a festival of this kind, 
though a minor one. One to three days each year 
were given to roadmending, and on these occasions 
neighbors gathered so that there would be perhaps 
a dozen of them working together. And here, too, 
there was abundant gossip and story telling, with a 
great deal of practical joking. Often neighbors 
focused all their forces upon one man’s haying, plant- 
ing, harvesting, etc., and then upon another. Break- 
ing roads in winter was a conspicuous instance of this 
kind of cooperation. I remember once over twenty 
pairs of oxen, the old cattle and the young steers 
alternating, were attached to a heavy double ox sled 
with plows chained to each side, and all the men who 
could find room rode on it to sink the sled deeper 
into the snow. This train was forced through drifts 
sometimes nearly to their backs, and perhaps again 
and again where the snow was very deep, and after 
55 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
an unusually severe storm when everybody was snow- 
bound, several days might be necessary for this work. 
The women folk, too, found social enjoyment in the 
various sewing circles, quilting parties, and particu- 
larly in mutual visiting. It was very common in the 
slack season of the year for a whole family to go 
off after breakfast to visit a neighbor or relative, 
taking dinner and supper and returning in the even- 
ing, and thus making a business of enjoying each 
other’s society. Everybody seems to have been as 
ready to give as to receive hospitality. 
On this farm at least and more or less probably 
throughout the town, as in other backlying commu- 
nities in New England, things changed very slowly, 
and I think my father’s experiences of life here in 
his boyhood did not vary very much from mine. 
Indeed, I fancy we should find no very great change 
if we went back to that of my grandfather, for a 
rather settled modus vivendi had been established in 
this region which 'enabled the old New England fam- 
ilies with thriftjmd labor to support themselves with 
comfort and self-respect and develop a good degree 
of intelligence. It was communities like this, rather 
than city life, that the framers of our Constitution 
had in mind, for in such citizenship we have the best 
possible of all foundations for a pure and permanent 
democracy, one of the best combinations perhaps of 
plain living and high thinking and feeling that history 
afiTordsT” 
Some of the traits that I think were perhaps ex- 
ceptionally developed among thcjrlalls of whom I am 
writing were the following. The first was extreme 
conservatism. They had little sympathy with new- 
fangled ways or even labor-saving devices for it 
rather suggested shirking. Ends attained by hard 
work were a little more honest, and were the more 
desirable to secure, the harder the effort was to obtain 
56 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
them. My grandfather, for instance, always pre- 
ferred the slow-moving oxen for all kinds of farm 
work to horses, and when his sons introduced the 
latter he was reluctant to see the improvement. There 
were almost no agricultural machines although, to be 
sure, the great unevenness and rocky character of 
the soil precluded many of these. These people were 
pretty set in the good old ways, and if they did make 
innovations or progress it was only in particular items 
and it was done with a great deal of self-con- 
sciousness. 
A second trait very strong in the Ashfield Halls 
was family loyalty. There seemed to be a very deep, 
if half-unconscious, feeling that the Halls were the 
salt of the earth, although the grounds of their superi- 
ority to their neighbors would be hard to discover. 
I never knew an Ashfield Hall to marry anyone whom 
the family as a whole thought quite good enough. 
My mother, during all her life, was never quite 
adopted as a member of the family, although she was 
always on the most amicable terms with all her hus- 
band’s relatives. The children of every outside parent 
had more Hall blood and were felt to be more mem- 
bers of the tribe. Another expression of this trait 
is seen in the fact that while the Halls were extremely 
individual, criticizing and opposing each other some- 
times to the point of anger, they always presented 
a solid front to outsiders, never admitting the re- 
motest disagreement but going out of their way to 
convey the impression of perfect harmony. In some 
cases family feeling was rather deeply stirred at the 
prospect of marriage by some member, and the can- 
didate for possible affiliation was often subjected to 
the severest criticism and sometimes shown more or 
less overt discourtesy, although it very rarely came 
to this. This family pride found its fullest expression 
probably in the Thanksgiving dinners, when all the 
57 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
clan possible came together. I remember over thirty- 
descendants of my grandfather, in the later years of 
his life, who used to gather on these festive occasions. 
Still another trait seems to have been a general 
belief in religion, but always with moderation. No 
Hall was ever a pietist; this would be distinctly bad 
form. Most of them attended church more or less but 
few joined, or if they did they fell off later in life. 
In their maturer years my uncles almost never fre- 
quented public worship. They were not unfriendly 
to or critical of religion but, as many expressions 
showed, considered it more manly and womanly to 
stand before the All-Father on their merits as livers 
of good lives than to be saved by a vicarious atone- 
ment. In one church there was a long and bitter 
war of the more ardent element against the so-called 
class,” composed of people who would 
spend the long intermission between the two services 
in the horse-shed talking of secular matters instead 
of attending Sunday School. To this class most of 
my male relatives here belonged, despite the criticisms 
of my father. 
Interesting, too, I think, is the rather strong feel- 
ing against the villagers on the part of those who 
dwelt in the town~butside. The latter, when they 
came to town, almost always “dressed up,” at least 
a little, and were more or less conscious. They felt 
that the villagers had in some ways the inside track 
because they could more readily combine their efforts 
and lay their plans, as for the town-meeting business. 
Not a few intermarriages between the villagers and 
towners, as they were called, resulted unhappily, and 
this line of cleavage appeared in nearly all the affairs 
of the town and the election of its officers and those 
of the churches. 
To go to the village meant, thus, a certain degree 
of ideality. I think none of us ever did this without 
58 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
changing our clothes and making ourselves more pre- 
sentable, whereas the villagers themselves, who went 
about all the time in the same attire and deportment, 
lacked this stimulus. Attending church had some- 
what the same effect. We always had good “go-to- 
meeting” clothes and school clothes, and also another 
home rig, and those who understand the psychology 
of clothes realize that with them one puts on or off 
a certain deportment and a certain set of somatic 
feelings. 
Other traits which I believe more or less general 
in these decadent communities now characterized by 
their abandoned farms and by race suicide are the 
too frequent fashion of marrying late in life and the 
very common occurrence of the youngest child of a 
large family, on maturing, producing the largest 
family. Propagation thus from the youngest in suc- 
cessive generations is not eugenic. 
Of my father’s early boyhood almost nothing is 
known. He was strong and active and seems to have 
excelled at least some boys of his age in wrestling 
and running. He worked on the farm and went to 
the district school but of all this there is no infor- 
mation now accessible, for all who knew his boyhood 
have passed away. I have often heard him boast that 
he celebrated his sixteenth birthday by going into the 
woods alone with an ax, a beetle, and a wedge, and 
cutting down, splitting, and piling one cord of four- 
foot wood (or perhaps it was two cords). When he 
was eighteen he “bought his time” from his father 
for the three remaining years of his minority at six- 
teen dollars a month, and leaving home struck out for 
himself. With the money he earned beyond this at 
the end of the first year he attended Franklin Acad- 
emy in the neighboring town of Shelburne Falls, the 
red brick building of which is still standing. Here it 
was that he formed the acquaintance of the late Judge 
59 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
Pelig Emory Aldrich of Worcester, who later taught 
school in Ashfield attended by two of my aunts, of 
whom and of my father he gave me some reminis- 
cences. My father, he said, was somewhat behind 
those of his age but worked very hard and, I believe, 
attended this institution several terms, which were, 
however, not consecutive since he was obliged to earn 
money in the interim. In this quest he went to Hat- 
field and learned the trade of a broom maker, a trade 
which he later pursued at the home in Worthington 
in the very early days of my childhood, supplying 
brooms for the chief store of the town. This process 
I well remember, and I contributed some of the tools 
he used to the Ashfield museum, among them an iron 
dish for sulphur used in bleaching the broom corn, 
which was done in a large bin he made in the cellar 
which must have held more than half a cord. There 
was also the sixteen-inch foot-spool for wire, the 
eight-inch needle and the leather palm-thimbles for 
forcing it through the broom, and the vise in which 
it was pressed flat to be sewed. So well do I re- 
member this process that I believe I could myself 
make a good_ broom to-day. Some of these that he 
made had extra ornamentation. The handles, turned 
in a shop near-by, had to be sand-papered and painted 
and varnished. The chief ornamentation was in the 
braid which attached the outer stalks to the handle, 
which were sometimes four to six inches long and 
ornamented occasionally with his own initials woven 
into the wire. There was also a gold leaf put on 
the handles of the superfine brooms. 
With the education he thus succeeded in giving 
himself he taught school in various towns for, I 
think, ten terms in all, the terms usually lasting from 
ten to twelve weeks. Of this, too, I find no record 
but I have often heard that he was exceptionally suc- 
cessful in discipline, so much so that he was sought 
60 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
for in the schools of neighboring towns, particularly 
in winter when young men in the late teens and even 
early twenties attended and not infrequently made the 
teacher’s life miserable. One group of these planned 
to throw him out into the snowdrift, as they had 
done with his predecessor, but learning of their pur- 
pose from a friendly older girl pupil, he brought in 
the next morning several heavy birch sticks, nailed 
the door, and thrashed the ringleader. He had no 
trouble afterward. Of his prowess in other experi- 
ences of this sort he had many tales. He was also 
a very remarkable penman, and his handwriting at 
its best was almost like copperplate. He also taught 
subscription writing-schools in the evening in the 
adjoining towns, and it was at one of these that he 
first met my mother. 
Shortly after coming of age, I think in 1833 or 
1834, he started West, on the way became for some 
months a lumber raftsman on the Susquehanna, and 
eventually found his way to Wisconsin, where he 
“took up” four lots of government land of eighty 
acres each. In order to fulfill the conditions of 
ownership he was obliged to make certain improve- 
ments upon the land and to reside there a year or 
more. Here he saw a good deal of frontier, life, and 
of Indians, and told us children many tales of the 
adventures of this period. After this he came home 
and resumed teaching. Within a week or two after 
his marriage he was obliged, in order to retain this 
land, the title to which had been challenged, to 
go west again for more than a year, and he did not 
return until some time after I was born. I just re- 
member as a young child that during an attack of 
inflammatory rheumatism—the only illness I ever 
knew him to have—he either had to sell the land or go 
west again, and so did the former at what he thought 
were fairly advantageous terms. Now a part of 
61 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
this land is included within the city limits of Mil- 
waukee, and he learned when it was too late that 
he might have received a far larger sum for it at 
the time; while if he had had the sagacity to hold 
it, he would have later been a rich man. No other 
member of his family had shown any such Wander- 
lust and from their conservative point of view he was 
considered somewhat of an adventurer. Letters of 
his mother to him, however, show that she followed 
these ambitions with great solicitude for his physical 
and spiritual well-being and not without sympathy. 
Of my life on the first farm that he bought on 
his second return from the west, and which we left 
when I was two and a half years old, I have only 
the faintest recollections. Most of the buildings, how- 
ever, are still intact and I visited this place more or 
less systematically some years ago and described a 
few of the experiences of reminiscence which re- 
curred.4 The farm in Worthington to which we then 
moved was situated on the outskirts of the town, two 
miles from the village, on a crossroads near a brook. 
The house was a long, low building of one story and 
a large attic, with a second tier of rooms later built 
along its whole length in the back. This building 
has since been entirely removed, with all the many 
trees that grew about it. The family lived here for 
twelve years or more, and I remember it with the 
greatest vividness. The farm contained about a hun- 
dred acres and my father succeeded in paying for 
it, by the sternest economy, before we left. 
During all this period he was active in church 
and town affairs and was elected to the state legis- 
lature in 1855 on the “Know-nothing” ticket, a cause 
he had very actively espoused. I do not think he 
took much part in debates on the floor but he was 
4See “A Note on Early Memories,” in my Recreations of a Psychol- 
ogist (Appleton, 1920). 
62 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
on several committees that required him to visit the 
governor, Gardner. He was an ardent supporter of 
the cause of temperance, and of Charles Sumner and 
Anson Burlingame, both of whom he greatly admired. 
I remember also that he gave a few public addresses 
at home on topics connected with slavery and other 
matters. He attended church quite regularly with 
his whole family, always sang in the choir there— 
as did perhaps a dozen other of the leading citizens 
•—and during all this period was the teacher of a 
large class of ladies in the Sunday School, for which 
service he always made careful preparation, using 
many volumes of “Barnes’s Notes.” He was also a 
member of the local prudential committee which chose 
teachers for our district, No. n, and~I well remember 
my embarrassment when he used to attend, as he had 
to do, the school examinations and make the “re- 
marks” at the close. 
The Ashfield farm was larger, with a compara- 
tively new and commodious house and an old one then 
standing, but the farm itself was in a somewhat run- 
down condition. He had relied much upon the pros- 
pective help of his two able-bodied sons to do much 
of the ditching, fence making, cutting of brush, lum- 
ber, etc., and the other work necessary to bring it 
into good condition, so that he was somewhat disap- 
pointed when one of us after the other showed an 
inclination to leave the farm and go to college. But 
after the disappointment was over he sympathized 
with us and helped us financially to the full extent 
of his means, urged by my mother. In Ashfield the 
position of deacon was offered him but he declined 
it, feeling, as he said, that he was not good enough, 
but really disliking the title as too sanctimonious. 
Here, too, he was active in local politics and was a 
delegate to various county conventions, president of 
a local agricultural club, and a more or less prominent 
63 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
and frequent speaker in town and prayer meetings 
and other assemblies. He read very little but my 
mother read to him a great deal. 
My aunt, Mrs. Augusta Waite Beals, who came 
into the family by marriage in 1857, in writing of her 
first impressions of my parents, says, “Your father 
was a tall, handsome, striking-looking man, particu- 
larly so for one occupied so much of the time with 
hard manual labor. He was never bent with the 
burden of years. I remember that George William 
Curtis spoke of him as a man of “Chesterfieldian 
manners.” I can never forget his kindly eye with 
the sparkle of interest in all about him. He always 
had leisure (or took the time) to visit with all his 
guests. He was an eager listener but loved to express 
his opinions, too, at some length on whatever subject 
came up. He was extremely fond of music, and if 
I was there of a Sunday would gather us in the little 
parlor, take out his violin, and we had an evening 
of song. His soul was really lifted, and his eyes shone 
in enjoyment of the good old hymns. I think he had 
a religious nature of great sincerity.” 
She remembers, too, his solicitude about my own 
liberal views but believes that they gave him deep 
satisfaction because they coincided with his own more 
or less unconscious thoughts. At any rate, in the 
latter part of his life he passed through a period of 
rather serious religious doubt and came out with some 
kind of a creed which, though I think no one ever 
knew just what it was, made him happier. Thus it 
is the opinion of my aunt that his sons contributed 
materially to his emancipation from the narrow re- 
ligious orthodoxy in which his early life was passed. 
She continues, “He was a thinking man with very 
strong opinions of his own and was unafraid to ex- 
press them. He was a man of much dignity of charac- 
ter.” He also had a very quick temper, but my mother 
64 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
could almost always soothe him for she was never 
in the least ruffled, whatever occurred. They always 
addressed each other as “husband” and “wife.” 
During the more than forty years of their wedded 
life together she acted as a balance-wheel upon his 
impetuosity, and in later life after the children were 
away they seemed to settle to a more tranquil exis- 
tence and to come even closer to each other. It is 
therefore no wonder that during the three years 
which my father survived my mother he was more 
or less depressed and, as his strength failed, some- 
times expressed a belief that it was time for him to 
go. Like my mother, he was of a very strongly social 
disposition and was fondest of company and visits. 
His susceptibility to music was, I think, exceptional 
for I have often heard him describe the sensations 
it produced in him and seen him wipe his eyes when 
he heard passages that pleased him. 
After a period of failing health he died, like my 
mother, by night in bed—he at the age of seventy-six, 
and she at sixtymine* A post mortem of my mother 
showed that death was caused by rupture of the artery 
near the heart. My father retired in tolerable, though 
weak, health and was found dead in the morning, 
with every indication that death had come painlessly 
and tranquilly. 
I venture to reprint here, without change, the only 
bit of literature by him now accessible—an address 
at a county fair just before the Civil War—written 
out in his copperplate hand. This must have been 
prepared about i860, when my father was forty- 
eight. 
Farmers appear to be divided into three classes. The 
first I shall mention are chance farmers, who obtain the 
products of the earth by the application of seed, manure, 
and labor to the spot of land which most needs plowing; 
65 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
or, perchance, to that which is most easy to cultivate. 
Having gone along blindfolded, experience has taught them 
no lessons to regulate their practice, except that their crops 
grow from seed buried in the earth, and that manure applied 
in some way makes them grow better. These all chancing 
to meet in soil to which they are adapted, give them occa- 
sionally a fine crop. This they very appropriately call their 
good luck. The second class may be styled hereditary farm- 
ers. They plant their corn on the knoll, their potatoes 
in the valley, and sow on the plain. All very well perhaps. 
But ask them why they do so, and they will tell you with 
the utmost confidence that is the place for them. Should 
you venture an opposite opinion, and suggest that a dif- 
ferent arrangement might be preferable, you will find your- 
self overwhelmed with arguments at once. “Why my 
father always planted the knoll to corn, and the valley to 
potatoes and sowed the plain. And he was a first rate 
farmer, and so was grandfather and he managed the same 
way.” The third class embraces theoretical farmers. This 
may be subdivided. The first division includes those who 
are farmers in theory only. They prove no theory by 
practice. Yet they are ever and anon at their post, as if 
their want of practice was to be atoned for by the super- 
abundance of theory. They abound in fruit, though not 
of the earth, but of the brain. Their products are rules 
—not potatoes. Products of the pen—not of the hoe. This 
class comprises authors, editors, lawyers, etc., whose opera- 
tions consist in printing, speech-making, etc. They scratch 
the face of paper but never perpetrate the like act on the 
face of mother earth, especially if she will give them what 
they want without. These are entitled to great respect for 
characteristic benevolence, for they perform half the work, 
that is, the head work. Indeed, they would be willing to 
do the other half would it not tire their backs and soil 
their fingers. But excusing themselves from this, they will 
congratulate others in the “delightful task.” Indeed, what 
can be more amusingly ludicrous than the imperturbable 
gravity and mock earnestness with which they heap their 
encomiums without measure, on the head of the laborer; 
when, like their class of olden time they will scorn to move 
66 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
his burden with one of their fingers. The last division 
comprises those who produce the fruits of the earth as the 
result of theory applied to practice. These prove theories, 
discarding the false and practising the true. Combining 
virtue and intelligence with physical and moral strength, 
of all creatures deriving subsistence from the earth, none 
more deserve respect. 
r proceed with a few remarks on the farmer’s profes- 
sion. This subject was introduced and prosecuted at some 
length on a previous occasion by Mr. Brewster, who re- 
marked that the profession is looked upon with scorn by 
young men. This is undeniable. It has been a subject of 
some remark and of regret for many years. Judge Buel 
(deceased), former editor of the Albany Cultivator once 
wrote and published an able article on the subject, and 
under the title of “The Professions.” In this he set forth 
facts showing the existence and extent of the aversion, 
together with the causes and remedy for the same. Among 
the many causes named were the comparative facilities for 
acquiring knowledge. But first and above all, was female 
influence; that ladies were alike enemies of dirt and friends 
of knowledge. He predicted reformation, said the scale 
had already turned, that within twenty years young ladies, 
instead of saying scornfully, “would I have a farmer?” 
would ask doubtfully, “can I get a farmer?” And, further, 
that agriculturalists had virtually derogated their own pro- 
fession by encouraging their daughters, alike in their silly 
prejudices against young farmers, and in favor of men of 
other callings. But, like our worn farms, our profession 
is down in popular estimation. The truth is, labor is held 
in contempt by a large class of the human family. The 
retired aristocrat could not labor if he would without de- 
grading himself and losing caste. The smallest package 
must be conveyed to his door by other hands than his. 
And he cannot take a healthy exercise at the saw-horse 
without first locking himself in some cellar to evade obser- 
vation, and then, perhaps, administering the oath of secrecy 
to the servant should he chance to detect the crime. Can 
he labor without depreciating his estimated value; will he 
with all his conscious dignity descend to the rank of him 
67 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
he sold on the auction block? But this is city life you 
say. True, but is it not also true that it has its effect in 
the country? Can manual labor be despised by any con- 
siderable portion of a community and not all sympathize 
with it in some degree? How much more, then, when it 
includes the wealth and fashion of the land? 
But what is to be done? Folding the hands in despair 
will only augment the evils before us. Searching for the 
cause of our ruined reputation avails nothing in itself. And 
yet, this discovery, accompanied by corresponding efforts 
to remove the cause, is an important step towards our 
elevation. But I ask again what is to be done for our 
profession. I reply, we must take it from the dust and 
raise it to the dignified position to which it is destined. 
There are difficulties to encounter ’tis true; but we must 
meet them with strong hands and stronger hearts. Archi- 
medes would raise the world but wanted a fulcrum. This 
even, we are to supply by the education of our sons. Igno- 
rance, says Robert Hall, gives a sort of eternity to prejudice 
and perpetuity to error. No calling has suffered more from 
the effects of this than our own. Hence, we need not 
wonder so much at the contempt in which it has been held 
as that it has been held at all by the intelligent and re- 
spectable. But such instances, though not solitary, have 
been the exceptions rather than the rule. Ignorance con- 
stituting his bliss, and dirt the ever conspicuous badge of 
his calling, caring little which most abounded, the young 
farmer could not respect himself and might justly be re- 
garded with disfavor by others, and an object of dread to 
the delicate and sensible woman. But improved and en- 
lightened in his mind and his person, she would enlighten 
both his heart and his linen. Hence we must educate our 
sons. We must educate them farmers— 
efficient, intelligent farmers. They must be instructed in 
the analysis of soils, the application of manure, the physi- 
ology of plants and animals. In short, they must under- 
stand everything which can facilitate improvement and 
make them masters of the art, and they will have nothing 
to fear for the popularity of their calling. Knowledge with 
virtue commands respect and influence. Give them these 
68 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
and train them to habits of persevering industry and fru- 
gality, and with the blessing of Heaven competence, if not 
wealth, will be the inevitable result. 
But how is this knowledge of agricultural science to be 
conferred you may ask. I reply, by imperatively demanding 
the introduction of elementary work into our primary 
schools, that our boys may learn and recite the lessons 
there and practice them when they come home. Like agri- 
cultural colleges, our school-houses should stand contiguous 
to land held by the district for the purpose of teaching the 
boys to work it. I would give to each his little farm, and 
each girl her flower patch, and then inspire them with 
laudable emulation by fairs and premiums to produce, in- 
stead of destroy, the fruits of the earth. And all this they 
should learn from their books. It may be said that the 
public demands practice, not books; that we have already 
too much printed and too little practical farming. Tis 
true that book farming has in a measure gone into disrepute 
and disuse among many pretty successful and respectable 
farmers. But is not this owing to the fault of rules, which, 
like western cities on paper, appear plausible but on earth 
are impracticable. It must be admitted that much of the 
printed matter thrown out with an honest design to aid 
the farmer to a successful result of his toil is not jworth 
the paper that contains it. But to reject all published theory 
because erroneous ones have found their way through the 
press is unwise and impolitic. On all subjects errors must 
and will appear. But does it follow that truth may not 
also be found in its train? Agricultural like other science 
must be developed by a slow process, by critical observation, 
by unremitted toil, by unwearied effort. It must have its 
infancy and youth of weakness and imperfection ere it 
ripens into maturity. But we want books for our schools. 
Books of practical agriculturalists, whose rules, maxims, 
and precepts, are the result of actual experiment, and not 
the works of authors who let out their pens to the highest 
bidder. It has been truly said that the farmer wishes to 
know how he is to make two blades of grass grow where 
but one grew before. Geology and Chemistry are ready 
to gratify that desire. The~knowledge of these is indis- 
69 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
pensable to the highest success in the art. Qualified as 
he may be and as he should be, the young farmer need 
not doubt as to what shall be the theater of his operations. 
He can derive subsistence anywhere—from the mountainous 
sterile soil of the East as well as the fruitful plains of the 
West. He can live on a rock, provided there be ten inches 
depth of soil upon it. It only remains for him to decide 
where he can most enjoy the good of his labor. Is he 
destitute? he must sj:ay at home. If poor, better stay at 
home. If rich, he will stay at home. Such is the general 
rule; a rule founded on reasons which I would fain present 
did my limits allow. Does he dissent from this conclusion? 
Let him not be deceived. Be assured the pleasing pictures 
of prairies blooming with flowers and vocal with song, of 
forests teeming with bounding game, of creeks swarming 
with the finny tribe, of graneries crushed beneath the rich 
harvest of yellow maize all have their dark as well as bright 
side. I know whereof I speak. Mud, mosquitoes, snakes, 
fetid air, limy water, lack of timber, lack of stones, lack 
of fruit, lack of schools, lack of churches, lack of vigor, 
and often lack of courage, lack of health and lack of life, 
are among the things to be filed in offset. 
But I cannot close without first calling your attention 
to the improvement of stock, especially in the dairy depart- 
ment. At the last exhibition of the Green Mountain agri- 
cultural society who was not pained at the lamentable 
deficiency in this department. It became indeed a subject 
of remark that there was not a premium cow present. And 
the committee in the conscientious discharge of their duty 
were reduced to the painful necessity of withholding premi- 
ums except in a solitary instance. It is worthy of remark 
that the cow receiving that honor was of the native breed. 
And, further, that with scarcely an exception dairy statis- 
tics award to her the palm. Hence the inference that it 
was a sad day for the dairyman when foreign blood first 
flowed in the veins of his cow, however much~the butcher 
might have rejoiced. The dairyman, then, must undo this 
mischief before he attempts progress. He must first restore, 
then improve, and perfect. Is it not time that this subject 
should receive attention? A little reflection with corre- 
70 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
sponding action will set all right. It should be remembered 
that in the animal as well as vegetable kingdom, like pro- 
duces like; that it is as absurd to expect good cows from 
poor as good corn or good potatoes from imperfect seed. 
Should the plowman and butcher be admitted to choose 
from the dairyman’s herd, that choice would by no means 
impair the dairy, except in magnitude. They would leave 
to him the animals of his choice. They would not propa- 
gate animals for the yoke, or slaughter, from the favorite 
milker. Nor should the dairyman propagate from any 
other. Each require cjistinct or opposite qualities which 
seldom combine in the same animal, and should, therefore, 
never be attempted, as confusion will be the result. But 
qualities suited to the design or use should be sought and 
propagated by each, as in this way alone can the highest 
state of perfection be attained. Elevate the pedigree of the 
cow and she will elevate the contents of the pail and firkin. 
Do you wish your ox to possess points requisite for strength 
and endurance, seek those developments in his dam. Do 
you desire him for the slaughter, see that he inherits 
those qualities which best fit him for that end. Do 
you expect your cow to produce yellow rich butter in 
large quantities, see that she inherits qualities which 
justify that expectation. These qualities must be in- 
herited in the line of her sire as well as dam. Im- 
provement in the size and quality of animals is as practical 
as in the size and quality of crops. In the latter case it 
is not more true than in the former that what a man sows 
that shall he also reap. Hence great care should be taken 
that the domestic animals be able to boast of a noble 
ancestry. 
Hitherto, improvement in the various departments of 
the farmer’s calling have not kept pace with the progress 
of the age. As an end, the means of saving labor have 
been paramount to those of producing its greatest results. 
And the time thus having been devoted to law, human 
physiology, history, politics, etc., the farmer is better in- 
formed in almost everything else than the science of his 
own calling. But the farmer’s calling is destined to rise. 
And, sir, may not we congratulate our infant society for 
71 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
the conspicuous part she plays in hastening its day of final 
triumph? This association, like its officers, has acted no 
subordinate part in the agricultural drama. Developing 
energy and talent above her years, adult societies may well 
be proud of their Green Mountain sister. Already she has 
drawn upon her the admiration and encomiums of the sur- 
rounding country. Aided in future by the wisdom and 
dispatch which has hitherto marked the career of her 
officers, what may we not hope for our cause ? I repeat, 
the farmer’s calling is destined to rise. It will rise by its 
own internal merit with all the weight of popular prejudice 
upon it. Improvement will mark its course to the end of 
time. Its destiny Is known only to the imagination. Uri- 
bbfrTgenerations may yet smile at the recital of our most 
sanguine hopes for the future dignity and elevation of our 
cause, as do the people of the empire state at the supposed 
fanaticism of DeWitt Clinton, when he predicted that boats 
would one day sail from Albany to Buffalo. As it is the 
most important of the indispensable avocations, so is it, in 
reality, the most interesting of the honorable callings. It 
contains the elements of true greatness, as it places man 
aloof from many of the demoralizing influences which 
cluster around other pursuits and brings him into com- 
munion with Him whose works proclaim His presence. In 
short, it allies his soul to God, as He is seen in the fruitful 
valley, in the robe of the forest, and in the cattle on a 
thousand hills. Hence when the spirit of the age shall turn 
from mechanical and the finer arts, and breathe its inspira- 
tion into the bosom of agriculture, then, like Samson re- 
stored to his wonted strength, it will rise from its 
degradation and bear away upon its mighty shoulders the 
pomp and fashion of the world, and hurl them beneath its 
feet; and “the hand that feeds” shall be inscribed on the 
temple of its fame. 
My father always insisted on what he called put- 
ting brains into all our work. He believed in the 
easiest way and was wont to criticize my uncles as 
always preferring the hardest. Thus he was always 
adjusting the nibs on scythe snaths, discussing the 
72 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
methods of raking, hoeing, chopping, and selecting, 
and sometimes making tool-handles in a way that 
would have pleased Taylor and the efficiency experts 
of to-day. His chef d’oeuvre in this respect was an 
originally devised and personally made machine for 
sowing carrots, with handles like a plow, which made 
the furrow, sowed the seed by a spring made of a 
hemlock bough that rotated a tiny cylinder with a 
groove, an apparatus that covered it, and a broad 
wheel that patted it down, so that with this a man 
could sow a field of an acre in a day. This he often 
did for his neighbors. The machine is still preserved 
in the Ashfield museum. He also believed, as the 
more conservative farmers of his day did not, in new 
machinery and was one of the first in that community 
to use the mowing machine, horse rake, winnowing 
mill, corn sheller, a new patterned churn, etc., and the 
sewing machine indoors. He was always studying 
how a man could best apply his strength in all farm 
operations, and in “the shop” taught us to plane alter- 
nately to the right and to the left and to use many 
tools, a foot lathe, etc. 
He and my mother always felt that we children 
should receive the education which they had striven 
for but failed to attain, and always impressed it upon 
us that we must realize their aborted ideals, which 
was a great spur to us. Both of them, but particu- 
larly my father, always felt that his life had been more 
or less of a failure because he had fallen so far short 
of realizing the ideals of his youth, and hence when 
we were young we always had to attend any school 
within reach, and after the first initial reluctance at 
having us leave the farm he in every way encouraged 
our academic aspirations and took the greatest pride 
in our every trivial success. We always felt that both 
of them were watching us for signs of promise and 
ability. My father loved to figure, and evenings and 
73 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
rainy days covered much paper and filled many note- 
books with calculations of how much profit each 
plowed field and each animal raised for the market 
produced, how much was spent per year for help, 
food, clothing, etc., and how much should be devoted 
to debts and later laid by for a “rainy day” and for 
old age. 
My father had a quick temper. I remember but 
one severe flogging, however, that I received at his 
hands. The offense I forget, but I recollect distinctly 
that he took me into the parlor bedroom, which was 
the most remote from the family, and after a very 
serious admonition, insisting (I thought hypocriti- 
cally) that it hurt him more than it did me, gave me 
a severe whipping with a willow rod in a part of my 
body which I could not show to my mother for her 
sympathy. I felt that he was trying to make me cry 
and resolved I would not and so did not, although 
I could not refrain from tears, which I found my 
mother freely indulging in when we emerged. His 
temper was of the inflammable kind and expressed 
itself most commonly in tongue-lashings and not in- 
frequently in sudden slaps and cuffs. Then to justify 
himself, for he knew we always told mother, he would 
tell her how bad we were. She always stood up for 
us and certainly generally succeeded in placating him, 
or at least mitigating his displeasure. The last physi- 
cal pain he ever sought to inflict upon me, I well 
remember, was when I was fourteen. We were trying 
to split a four-foot log by each striking at opposite 
ends of it into the same crack. My ax went wrong 
and somehow hit the handle of his, giving a very 
severe jar to his hands, whereupon he slapped the 
side of my face. I stepped back in anger, partly real 
and—I distinctly remember—partly feigned for ef- 
fect, doubled my fists and glared at him as if I were 
strongly tempted to hit back. I shall never forget 
74 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
his amazed look. I was never hit again. Despite 
all this, however, I had for the most part only kindly 
feelings toward him, realizing perhaps that I was 
often exasperating and also, though much more dimly, 
that he was having a hard time in a life which was 
full of disappointments for him. I was never able 
to cherish the least resentment and do not think I 
ever had a lasting antagonism, save one or two, 
toward anybody in my life. He was, on the whole, 
one of the best of fathers. When I began to be 
settled in life and had a home of my own, first at 
Harvard and later at Johns Hopkins, I earnestly and 
often tried to have my parents visit me, but in vain. 
The long trip and the changed mode of life deterred 
them, so that they always preferred to have us visit 
them, which we did every summer that we were in 
the country. When later I bought the old place from 
my father, although he was anxious to sell and I paid 
him more than he could have obtained elsewhere it 
was very hard for him to reconcile himself to the 
changes I inaugurated; and yet, on the whole, he 
seemed to take more pleasure in them for he con- 
tinued to live there until after my mother’s death. 
It is said that parenthood in every one is best at 
a certain stage of the life of the next generation: 
that some mothers are best in the nursing, others in 
the period of early schooling, and that still other 
parents are most helpful in the various stages of 
adolescence. While my parents tried to do their full 
duty to us at every age, I have always believed that 
they felt a greatly renewed interest in us when we 
entered upon the stages of the higher education which 
they had not enjoyed. The hundreds of letters from 
my mother and a few score from my father, which 
began at my first leaving home and continued all 
through college and my studies abroad and to their 
death, testify to their intense interest in everything, 
75 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
even the most trivial, that befell us, and it almost 
seems as though the older and more independent we 
grew the more absorbed they became in what hap- 
pened to us. 
I was always very conscious of the public appear- 
ances of my father, and in my boyhood and at least in 
my very earliest teens was always judging him as a 
part of my own self-consciousness. If he spoke in 
public where I was present I was on tenterhooks, 
wished he would speak slower, faster, better, won- 
dered what other people thought of him, and there 
was a stage when it was so great a strain on my 
self-feeling to ride to church in the family carryall 
and get out on the stone steps in the presence of the 
many who were standing about that I often preferred 
to walk both ways. This is a feeling that I cannot 
fully analyze. In town meeting, in school exhibitions, 
agricultural meetings, etc., I always wished my father 
would not speak, although he generally did. It was 
not so much that I thought he did poorly or that I 
felt any responsibility for him as that it seemed to 
draw attention to the Hall family, while a little of it 
was due to the fact that he often hesitated so long 
before finding the right word. 
The most mortifying thing to me during all my 
childhood was that my father, along with the other 
stock kept at the barn raised and sold pigs, having 
sometimes half a dozen litters at once. He spent 
much time banking the inner pens in the long shed 
where they were kept, made flying doors hinged at 
the top, cared for the new-born, pastured them in one 
lot where all were free to root up the soil. When 
they were four weeks old I was compelled to hold 
all the male pigs, one after another, for an operation 
which raised the utmost commotion in all the pens 
and brought forth the loudest squeals that human ears 
can bear. Worse yet, I sometimes had to drive the 
76 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
hogs for miles, and occasionally through the town and 
back, past the houses of people and even girls I knew, 
for which I was often derided by my schoolmates. 
I think this was the most degrading experience of 
my life, unless it was to have my father occasionally 
take surplus pigs in a trap, he had devised and con- 
structed, by a back way to peddle them to the men 
and women in the factory section of Shelburne Falls, 
six miles away. Both he and my mother felt this 
necessity, when it came, to be simply degrading. One 
day in a select school at the “Corners” the teacher, 
a neighbor, who always “put on airs,” referred before 
the whole school to the cause of my absence the pre- 
ceding day as driving hogs, which was true. Every- 
body tittered, and I think I have never felt a 
mortification so profound or hated any one so in- 
tensely. Years afterward, when I was instructor at 
Harvard, I lived for a year—and to all appearances 
most amicably—in the house with this man, and while 
I was there it so happened that he sickened and died 
in the night. I, as the only man in the house, was 
obliged to “lay out his corpse,” in doing which, owing 
to the nature of his illness, there were most painful 
circumstances. Even this and all the Christian spirit 
I have ever been able to summon never made me 
forget or very much abated this resentment. 
According to the custom of that day, my father 
and mother both had “albums.” Both were elegantly 
bound in morocco, with gilt edges, and in each we 
find several score inscriptions made by their friends, 
mainly during the decade 1833-44. Some of these 
tributes are in prose but most are in poetry, and a 
goodly number were original. Not a few were illus- 
trated by water colors of various kinds. The major- 
ity of the signers in my father’s album were his 
schoolmates in the Franklin Academy, which num- 
bered over three hundred pupils from the towns 
77 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
adjacent to Shelburne Falls, and many of my mother’s 
were from the friends of the Albany school period. 
In reading these effusions one is chiefly struck with 
their almost unexceptional religious tone. The writers 
descant upon the vanity of fame, wealth, and every 
earthly success, and praise chiefly friendship and 
virtue and, above all, piety. The wish most often 
expressed is that despite the sad parting at the end 
of every school period all may meet again in Heaven, 
and that every one may seek chiefly the abiding joys 
there. This life is vain, fleeting, it can never bring 
a sense of real worth or value, and even love is not 
perfect unless fixed upon God or, more often, upon 
Jesus. To ask an acquaintance to write in one’s 
album was itself not only a tribute of respect but a 
compliment, and it was apparent that nearly all felt 
it to be such and so not only wrote in their very best 
hand but expressed the loftiest idealism of which they 
were capable. Some of these selections were incul- 
cated upon the minds of us children some years later, 
so that in rereading them now there is a pleasing 
recrudescence of juvenile recollection. 
Altogether we have in these choice pages, which 
were always cherished by my parents and were, in 
nearly every case, written by unmarried friends in the 
later teens and twenties, exquisite illustrations of sub- 
limation and how the heart ripe and yearning for 
love infallibly turns to religion and especially to 
death, which was a theme mentioned, I should judge, 
in not less than half of all these pages. In my father’s 
album I find one carefully folded sheet with a colored 
picture which I think he drew, of a weeping willow 
overhanging a tomb on which is inscribed the name, 
Nancy Miller, to whom he was engaged before he 
met my mother and who died of consumption at the 
age of twenty-four. On this sheet also is a generous 
lock of her dark chestnut-brown hair braided in the 
78 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
shape of a friendship circle. Of this and of her I 
often, as a boy, heard my parents speak, and my 
mother used often to refer to herself as her husband’s 
second love while he was her first. Not very long 
after they were married my mother presented my 
father with a tiny volume entitled, The Bridal Token: 
or A Hint to Husbands. The story is about a young 
man who rather neglects his wife after their wedding 
and repents later when she dies at the time their first 
child is born. He tells the story to his daughter, 
evidently as a warning when she wants to marry, 
and she and her husband live happily presumably 
because of the warning. 
My father first saw my mother as she sang in the 
choir at Plainfield and always represented himself as 
having fallen in love with her at first sight. Desiring 
her acquaintance on a courtship basis he sent the 
following note written in his very ornate hand: 
Miss A. Beals: 
The compliments of the subscriber respectfully accom- 
pany this early solicitation of your company. Should the 
desired interview seem proper and agreeable to you, please 
signify your approbation by retaining this billet; otherwise 
return it. 
Yours respectfully. 
Oct. i, 1842 
G. B. Hall 
There is no other item now accessible of their 
courtship or their marriage save that the latter some 
years later was in the midst of a very severe snow- 
storm, so that a drift had to be tunneled to the door. 
If ever parents lived for their children, mine did. 
We were not only their offspring but as we developed 
they looked to us to realize their own youthful ambi- 
tions, the thwarting of which they always felt so 
keenly that it actually clouded their lives. They alone 
of all their brothers and sisters ardently aspired to 
79 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
a larger horizon and to be and do something worth 
while in the world, and were always oppressed by a 
sense of failure. We children were incessantly ex- 
horted to “make good” in their place, to succeed as 
they had fallen by the way. As we matured this 
became more and more of a spur to us, and education 
seemed to both them and us to open the only 
way. The pathos of their disappointment grew upon 
us with advancing years. Reversing the usual order, 
I think that the older we grew the dearer we became 
to them until they seemed to find a kind of vicarious 
completion of their own lives in us. My mother 
always sympathized, encouraged, stimulated; while 
my father warned, criticized, and sometimes rebuked 
to the end of his life but nevertheless reinforced, 
sooner or later, all my mother did and said for our 
good. In most respects theirs was an exceptionally 
happy marriage for the traits of both complemented 
and supplemented each other in a high and very un- 
usual degree. Thus the family environment, though 
simple, was always wholesome and tonic, and the few 
and slight discords always ended in harmony. My 
mother’s frequent and severe attacks of migraine all 
her life until her later years, with the violent fits of 
nausea when my father always had to hold her head, 
only seemed to increase the tenderness of all of us 
for her. At these times we had to go on tiptoe and 
even play in the yard, must be quiet, and the evenings 
without her were sad and solemn. My father was 
always more or less of a “lady’s man” but there was 
never a trace of jealousy or cause for it on my 
mother’s part, although this was a common subject 
of jest between them. His devotion to us in his way 
was no less than hers. They conferred freely and 
frankly on all matters, with no reservations, and in 
these councils I think it was she who generally, by 
reason of her infinite tact and patience, prevailed. 
80 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
My aunt writes of her, “She was an unusual 
woman, gentle, refined, both intelligent and intellec- 
tual, loved fine things, and with all the limitations in 
her life was always cheerful and made the best of 
everything. Her Sunday school pupils were devoted 
to her. They all loved and appreciated her and found 
her counsel and example helpful in their daily lives.,, 
My aunt also records a month’s absence from home, 
about i860, prescribed by her physician, in which she 
visited her brothers in Stamford and New Haven and 
later made a trip to New York. But very much as 
she enjoyed this visit, she longed to get back home 
for she felt that her place was there. The outside 
world had no particular charm for her, although she 
loved her friends and was of a very social disposition. 
My niece, Edith Hall Plimpton, writes me to the 
effect that my father was a great lover of children 
and used to take her about the farm, explaining things 
and sometimes admonishing her; and says that she 
felt in her childhood that she would like to do every- 
thing for him that he wanted but stood in such awe 
of him that she would dread to incur his disfavor. 
The above will serve to show that I came of 
sturdy, old, New England, Puritan stock that had 
been long enough in this country to be more or less 
acclimated, that in the moral atmosphere of my home 
I heard more of duty than of pleasure, that religious 
influence and tradition were very strong, that genera- 
tions of toil and life close to nature had toned down 
the spirit of enterprise and adventure that must have 
animated my pioneer ancestors in their migrations 
from the old world to the new, and that after long 
dormancy the same spirit had shown some degree of 
resurgence in the excelsior impulsions of both my 
parents. 
I recall and cherish the memory of both of them 
with an appreciation and gratitude that grows with 
81 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
every passing year. I owe to them my rather ex- 
ceptional physical stamina which they transmitted 
from many generations, for every ancestor I can trace 
worked with his hands and lived an active and mostly 
out-of-door life. Most were farmers and the rest 
followed the sea or were carpenters, and nearly all 
were pioneers and spent their entire lives in the 
country. None were rich, none were traders or 
profiteers, while none were paupers. Most avoided 
towns or even villages and led rural lives close to 
nature. They were frugal, thrifty, economical, and 
devoid of great ambitions. They were home-staying, 
content with simple ways, and virtuous, whether with 
or without piety. I cannot find that any ancestor or 
blood relative ever committed a crime or was insane 
or mentally abnormal, and very few were tubercular. 
Not a few lived to a great age, and despite all the 
hardships that cut many of them off prematurely they 
often had large families. So far as I can learn few 
of their offspring died in infancy, while most married 
neighbors’ daughters so that there was almost no in- 
fusion of other than English blood save occasionally 
Scotch and Irish. 
As I review their lives I realize that I have no 
mental aptitudes or moral traits of character that I 
did not inherit from my parents. With the stimulus 
and opportunity they gave me I believe both of them 
would have achieved more than I have done. No 
children in our early environment, and I believe I 
may safely add in any other I know, even the most 
favored, ever had the incentive to make something of 
themselves as did the three offspring of my parents 
for, as I have said, they lived for and in their children 
to a very exceptional degree. We were the very cen- 
ter of all their deepest interests, not only at home and 
through college but out into life, and this interest 
seemed not to decline but to grow till they died. I 
82 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
rejoice that they both lived to see all of us settled in 
our own various fields of activity, I as professor at 
the Johns Hopkins; my brother as a pastor in Cam- 
bridge, where he died in the early thirties, overworked 
in a large parish; and my sister a teacher in a well- 
known institution for the higher education of girls. 
Our parents could never be induced to visit us in the 
homes we had established for ourselves but corre- 
spondence was incessant from the time we first left 
home to the end, and several hundred letters of my 
mother, who generally wrote for both, are still in my 
possession in which she often said that in their isola- 
tion letters from us were their chief joy. 
In every success or failure and in every joy or 
sorrow that has come to me I always did and even 
yet think of them and imagine how they would feel 
and what they would say. How often I have wished 
I could bring them back if but for a day or an hour 
to show them what has happened in the world since 
they left it, and above all to tell them again, and with 
more emphasis than I ever did, how much I owe them 
and have striven to fulfill their hopes and wishes for 
me, and how much I owe to that motive. For years 
after their death I used to pity them for their strait- 
ened circumstances and their thwarted ambitions but 
I do so far less of late for, after all, they enjoyed most 
of the really essential goods that life can offer. So, 
as every summer I revisit their graves under a stately 
row of pines at the edge of the village cemetery, where 
I may probably ere long join them, I am both proud 
of them and happy to realize that they were victors 
in life’s battle with circumstance and that I am, in 
some peculiar sense and degree, only a continuation 
of their lives. While I have tried to be a good father 
and have spent far more money in the up-bringing of 
my offspring, I now realize, when it is too late to avail, 
that in my greater pre-occupation I have really done 
83 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
far less in the way of incentive and personal effort 
and attention for my own children than they did for 
theirs. 
Since writing this chapter I have discovered a 
bundle of letters that passed between my parents when 
they were separated, which occurred thrice during 
their nearly forty years of married life, once very 
soon after their wedding when my father was called 
west to save his Wisconsin land, again when he was 
in the legislature (1855-1856) at which time my 
mother stayed at home to care for us children and 
the farm, and once more, a few years later, when 
she went to New Haven to recuperate with her 
brother. The surprising thing to me about these 
letters is the strength and especially the expression 
of affection on both sides, particularly by my wholly 
undemonstrative father. He wras usually averse to 
letter writing but here writes often and voluminously. 
He recorded every trivial incident and longed to see 
and even to kiss her, which we children cannot re- 
member ever seeing him do at home. My mother not 
only felt, as she expressed it, that she could only half 
live till he came home but descants, often with great 
humor, a new quality I never saw in her, upon not 
only local but even public events, often indulging in 
caricature and almost satire upon personages in town, 
state, country, and political movements in a way I 
never dreamed she knew or cared for. These letters 
show how much each meant to and stimulated the 
other and suggest that all married couples should 
separate occasionally in order to bring out the best 
attitudes of each to each. Yet it was of such parents 
that I often had a contemptible juvenile feeling of 
shame, as when they met Mark Hopkins, certain of 
my classmates, George William Curtis, Professor 
Charles Eliot Norton, and others. If they could but 
know it, they have had far better reasons to feel 
84 FORBEARS AND PARENTS 
shame and pity for me, but very few of these hun- 
dreds of letters I must have written home are now 
extant. They must have been lacking in the quality 
my mother most treasured, demonstrativeness, to 
which I seem to have been temperamentally averse. 
I know not why since my brother did not lack this, 
and I now wish I could atone. 
If my life has been somewhat more in the open 
than theirs, and if I have found more public ways of 
self-expression, I feel that I have lost something very 
essential that they possessed. Hard as it was for 
them, I think it was most fortunate for me that they 
were poor, humble, and hard up against the stern 
realities of life. On the whole, I would not exchange 
my boyhood for that of any boy I know. Such an 
environment for boys, which cannot to-day be pro- 
vided anywhere, was not only full of excelsior motiva- 
tions but was so varied that it provided healthful 
activities of every kind for both body and soul. 
My parents, too, were most ideally mated, the 
qualities of each supplementing and evoking the best 
traits in the other. Their mutual adjustment grew 
to the end. In their later years each often expressed 
the wish to die first for neither could face the world 
without the other. Freudians tell us that all boys pass 
through a stage in which deep down below conscious- 
ness they feel impulsions toward killing their father 
and marrying their mother or, in milder forms, revolt- 
ing from the former and cleaving to the latter. This 
QEdipus complex is misnamed, for CEdipus never re- 
volted against and did not even know either of his 
parents as such. I distinctly felt a constraint removed 
whenever my father was absent and always turned 
to my mother for sympathy, and she alone was my 
confidante in nearly everything. There was also “re- 
volt” or a “manly protest” against her but this was 
less pronounced and less instinctive, and more due to 
85 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
the taunts of other boys. My first wife was remark- 
ably in the mother image, not only in temperament, 
tastes, and disposition, but even in looks, although, 
(after being a widower for ten years) my second wife 
was in nearly all respects the opposite of this type. 
My early and especially pubescent antagonisms 
toward my father may have laid the foundations for 
a certain independence of authority and impatience 
of control and an idealization of freedom in thought 
and action, and it may be that this would have reached 
the extreme of kurophobia or morbid horror of re- 
straint had it not always been held in check by the pre- 
dominant and ambivalent feeling of respect and even 
awe for him. There was affection, too, although the 
very atmosphere of Puritanism chilled almost every 
manifestation of it. 
I inherit, too, my mother’s even and sunny temper, 
her exceptional dread of disharmony or even disagree- 
ment, and her exquisite sensitiveness, which makes it 
hard for me to disagree with any one, especially to 
his face. Thus in disposition I am an extreme if not 
almost pathetic pacifist. With this, too, goes, I think, 
my very strong and deep impulse to get into sympa- 
thetic rapport with the most diverse types of person- 
ality and opinion. I want on every subject, first of 
all, to take in all others’ views unchanged and know 
not only what others think but how they feel, however 
outre their standpoint. On the other hand, if this 
pristine passion for amicable relations is broken 
through, I often tend to be not only critical but severe 
and sometimes to give way to temper, which is my 
father’s diathesis voiced again in my soul. Thus in 
these and in many other ways I love to think of myself 
as only the prolongation of my parents’ lives and of 
making patent what was latent in them. 
86 CHAPTER III 
CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
I. Babyhood on farm—Relations with and feeling for animals— 
Animals as embodiments of human traits—The first gun and 
imagination — Passenger pigeons — Trapping — Rats, wood- 
chucks, squirrel-hunts—The crow and other birds—The charm 
of water—The development of ballistics—Running away— 
Scrap books—Collection crazes—Medicinal plants—Locating 
stories on farm. 
II. Home industries in flax and wool—Acquaintance with the 
work of the tanner, blacksmith, etc.—Stories and shed talk— 
Gossip as a foreschool of psychology—Sample tales and myths 
—The first day at school—Organization, conduct, and studies of 
the school—Fights—Early compositions—Successive passions 
for music, dancing, oratory, romance-writing, and their abor- 
tion—The old-fashioned school paper—The epitomes of read- 
ing—A sample “composition”—Vita Sexualis—State of morals 
in some old rural schools—Girls—First acquaintance with 
death—First teaching experiences—Old New England farm 
life as an ideal environment—Tendencies to revert to it— 
Heredity vs. environment—Individuality—Character long 
plastic and why—Country best for children—A new compla- 
cency with my life—Inverse ratio between hope of heaven and 
fullness of life here—Why I did not go to war in the early 
sixties. 
I was born at my grandfather’sjhouse in Ashfield, 
Massachusetts, where my mother was staying during 
the absence of my father in the west, where, as I men- 
tioned before, he had been imperatively summoned 
a very few weeks after his marriage. I have often 
speculated on the prenatal effects of this absence, 
which may have been eugenic although it may have 
been a source of increased mental anxiety to my 
mother. Of my earliest infancy there is no record 
except in the lost, imperfectly remembered diary of 
87 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
my mother began soon after my birth. I seem to 
have been a healthy child and to have been nursed 
at the breast until I was some eight months old. 
Upon my father’s return, when I was several 
months old, he bought a farm in the western section 
of the town, where we lived till I was two and a half. 
Of this I retain a few faint recollections which I have 
elsewhere recorded in connection with a systematic 
visit to the place some sixty years later.1 My memory 
of the old red pump with which I played, certain, 
although it was somewhat hazy and doubted by my 
parents, was triumphantly vindicated by this visit, 
for I found it. I also rather vividly remember a scene 
in the Worthington house to which we moved, par- 
ticularly the piles of boxes and barrels which filled 
the spacious living room when we arrived with the 
last load of goods. Here the family lived for twelve 
years, although for possibly half of this period or 
less I lived with my father’s people in Ashfield. I 
also distinctly remember, when I was three and a half, 
coming home with my young brother from a neigh- 
bor’s to find a new-born sister and also how at this 
neighbor’s the kitchenHoof'was torn up, revealing 
what seemed to me a deep well underneath, which for 
years was the pattern of all my ideas of hell. I have 
a vivid and very early recollection, too, of our strong 
propensity to visit the large though not deep stream 
that flowed by just across the road, of the willow 
huts that we built near it, of the mud pies in and 
near the tiny rivulet that flowed into it almost from 
our yard, near which stood an apple tree with an 
abundance of small and very bitter fruit and with a 
hollow into which we could just squeeze ourselves. 
Four other apple trees grew near the front yard, and 
another large one, far easier to climb, grew over the 
1 See “A Note on Early Memories” as above. 
88 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
grindstone in the back yard and bore large apples 
striped with red, very unlike the green russets and 
the purple “sheep-noses” and the lighter “seek-no- 
farther” varieties. The prohibited things were swim- 
ming in the big brook (which we could do unobserved 
behind the willows), walking the high board fence 
and bank wall, playing near the deep well, running 
over the vegetable garden when things were just 
growing, going behind the horses in the stable or in 
their stalls, getting into the barnyard when the bull 
or the butting ram were there, climbing into the pig- 
pen when there was a young litter, etc. The violation 
of this latter precept once nearly cost me my life. I 
climbed over in a spirit of bravado to show a young 
neighbor caller a new litter, and incidentally to demon- 
strate to him that I was not afraid. The gigantic 
mother, alarmed as always by the presence of a 
stranger, which generally meant the loss of one or 
more of her young, flew at me, seized me by the arm, 
threw me upon my back and was about to disembowel 
me when the neighbor clubbed her from outside and 
I scrambled to safety, utterly exhausted and so fright- 
ened that for some time I could scarcely move. 
All of us children, perhaps I most, were always 
greatly interested in the animals. Not only the horses 
but the cows and some of the sheep received names, 
and the faces of even the latter, perhaps twenty or 
thirty in number, were not only distinguished and 
recognized but felt to be very indicative of character. 
We often surreptitiously pulled out bits of their wool 
with which to stuff tiny pincushions, the making of 
which was at one time a craze, though we usually 
gathered this wool from the briars in the pastures 
frequented by the sheep. 
Among my earliest duties was that of driving the 
cows to and from pasture each day in summer. 
Although the distance was hardly twenty rods there 
89 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
were four corners in the road and two abrupt changes 
in direction, and a bridge to be crossed. The most 
difficult problem was to let down the bars when we 
had driven the animals to them, without letting out 
those which remained in the pasture or scattering 
those we wished to put in. Thus very often, espe- 
cially in the spring when the young cattle are prone 
to capering and antics when first let out of their win- 
ter quarters, there were many runaways. The cow 
bent on an excursion in the road is very wary of 
any one who seeks to get around or ahead of her and 
turn her back, and long detours through the adjacent 
fields were often necessary. Worst of all was, natu- 
rally, when the cows would not come home but re- 
mained at the farther and very elevated part of the 
pasture, “above the woods,” which they were particu- 
larly prone to do on dark and rainy nights. This was 
nearly half a mile distant. I vividly remember many 
excursions with my brother to this remote corner, 
sometimes in the midst of heavy thunder showers. 
Occasionally after long searching in the growing 
darkness it was impossible to find these perverse ani- 
mals, who would shelter themselves perhaps in a 
clump of hemlocks and occasionally, when found, 
would take any of the many paths home rather than 
the right one. Once when we returned with them 
in pitchy darkness and in a severe thunderstorm when 
we could see the way only as the lightning flashed, 
I was rewarded by a very appreciative letter from my 
father, written while we were away, in praise of our 
courage and perseverance. I may add here that this 
was one of my functions in later boyhood at my 
grandfather’s yet larger pastures, which began half 
a mile from the house. Here the task of finding, 
gathering together, and picking out the cows, steers, 
and oxen wanted from the other animals which were 
not to be driven home was one of my daily trials, 
90 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
sometimes involving a tramp of several miles. I was 
afraid of some of these animals. 
Besides this “chore” it was a distinct achievement 
when I was able, at six, to catch (sometimes no easy 
task even with a salt box) one of our steady old horses 
in the pasture, halter it, lead or sometimes mount it 
from a fence and ride it home, put on the harness 
and hitch it into the wagon alone, attaching and dis- 
entangling the lines and even driving from the barn 
to the house. 
Besides the domestic animals I became greatly in- 
terested in wild ones and in birds, the latter interest 
being greatly stimulated by a large animal book with 
colored pictures describing perhaps thirty or forty of 
those most common in that region.2 The Worthington 
home was sometimes infested with rats which would 
play havoc with the corn, ears of which covered the en- 
tire attic floor to a depth of perhaps a foot or more, and 
many were the fall and box and even wire and spring 
traps we set for them, one being a peculiar contrap- 
tion with a spring that forced steel points into the 
body of the animal. It was a great delight to take a 
box trap containing one or more live rats into the 
open field, let them out, and chase and kill them with 
sticks. I even used to skin them, tacking out their 
hides on the barn, and at one time had quite a collection 
of these with which I intended to make myself a coat. 
I still have a little book of compositions written when 
I was six, every one of them on animals, the first of 
which was entitled “The Rat.” All these devices, to- 
gether with cats, arsenic, and other poisons, were 
only partially effective, however, against this pest. 
A little later, when at the age of eleven I was 
reluctantly allowed to buy an old shotgun from a 
neighbor for $2.50,1 found intense pleasure for years 
2 For my idea of the value of all this see my Educational Problems, 
vol. II, p. 405 et seq. 
91 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
in spending my leisure roaming the pastures and ad- 
jacent farms in quest of game, often shooting at 
hawks and crows at impossible distances. This gun 
was a wonderful stimulus to my imagination for as I 
hunted, having read the life of Daniel Boone and 
many tales of hunting and trapping, I fancied every 
kind of wild beast and every kind of adventure with 
them. Occasionally my shots were successful, and I 
accumulated a large collection of trophies—tails and 
skins of squirrels; woodchucks; wings, heads, tails 
of crows; jays; one pigeon hawk; a weasel; a few 
partridges, etc. All these I kept in an old trunk, 
preserving them carefully in salt and turpentine, and 
took great pleasure in showing them to my mates. 
Once in the old shop we had an “exhibition,” tickets 
for which we carefully prepared and sold for one 
cent. Here these trophies were displayed and several 
snakes hung up by strings. A tame crow which a 
neighbor had got from a nest when it was young was 
a source of intense interest and stayed with us until 
long after it was fullgrown, and there were squirrels 
in wire cages with a wheel, fish alive in tin pails, 
etc. It was also customary to bring the feebler young 
lambs and occasionally tiny pigs into the back kitchen 
and to partially raise them by hand. A girl cousin 
always had several of these artificially raised “cos- 
sets” which she reared to maturity and sold. 
Once while shooting at a single crow in a tall and 
dense forest I brought down two. The crows were 
an unmitigated pest despite the effigies of men we 
stuck up and the twine that was always strung around 
every cornfield. They always came at dawn before 
we were up and sometimes we had to replant long 
rows of young corn. Mice, too, of several species, 
sometimes belonging to the jumping variety, were 
almost always found under every “shock” of corn 
and under every pile of sheaves of wheat, oats, and 
92 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
barley, occasionally in the haycocks and even in the 
buckwheat field. The woodchuck was another pest, 
digging its holes on every side hill and pathing down 
the richest grass so that it was almost impossible to 
mow it. Many of these succumbed to our steel traps 
and occasionally we succeeded in drowning one out 
after pouring many bucketfuls of water into its hole. 
I may add here that only a few summers ago I shot 
sixty-three of these with a Winchester on my own 
farm in Ashfield. 
Skunks, too, were rather common. An uncle of 
mine acquired the art—I know not how—of killing 
them without the unpleasantness usually attending 
any attack upon them. They were very deadly to 
chickens, often destroying a whole brood of them in 
the night, and to their oil was ascribed many medicinal 
properties. When I was very young I saw one and 
thinking it a “kitty” tried to catch it, to the intense 
grief of my family and especially my mother, for I 
nearly lost my eyesight for a time and the suit I wore 
had to be long buried in the ground. One night, 
while walking home from an evening spelling school 
with the young daughter of a neighbor whom I es- 
corted, I felt something under my foot and stopped 
to pick it up, thinking she had dropped her muff or 
neckpiece. I somehow managed to conceal the results 
from my parents but the next day at school was singled 
out and ignominiously sent home, and my blue brass- 
buttoned Spencer jacket, and I believe the pants, too, 
that buttoned on to it, were never again wearable— 
again to the grief of my mother, who had made them. 
Muskrats, too, abounded, and many were trapped 
in the streams and in a pond a mile and a half away. 
They were easy to catch by setting a trap in their paths 
and covering it very lightly with grass. Woodpeckers 
of several species and different sizes, from the yellow- 
hammer down, were thus collected and sometimes 
93 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
crudely skinned and stuffed. One species which 
abounded in my boyhood, with a bright red topknot 
and much white and black, seems to have entirely 
vanished from this region. 
I well remember, too, the vast flocks of passenger 
pigeons that flew in my earliest boyhood, sometimes 
almost clouding the sun and alighting in rows as 
thick as they could stand on the beech and other trees 
in the forest. These I used to shoot in great numbers, 
sometimes getting an alignment of a row of them and 
bringing down a number at a shot. Their nests con- 
sisted of only a few twigs so that the young, when 
nearly mature, often fell to the ground before they 
were able to fly, and these “squabs” made delicious 
eating. Now one of the mysteries of natural history 
is the complete disappearance of these birds from this 
country, so that the prizes offered of late for a single 
specimen have never, I believe, in any instance been 
won. Hunting hen’s eggs was also great sport for 
we had no house for them and sometimes belatedly 
found nests in unsuspected places containing perhaps 
a dozen eggs, some already addled. An occasional 
perverse hen would nest among the willows or bul- 
rushes (“steal its nest”) instead of somewhere in a 
henhouse built later or under the floors of the barns. 
Hawks, too, abounded, and I have often seen them 
pounce upon and carry off young chickens and occa- 
sionally seize, mutilate, and perhaps kill the mother 
hen. On one occasion, to my great surprise and de- 
light, when I was nine I found a mink in my muskrat 
trap and my father sold the skin for $1.50. For years 
my ideal in life was to be a hunter and I took intense 
delight in my father’s frontier stories, while my 
heroes were the young men in town who were most 
successful with a gun. 
Almost every fall there were “squirrel hunts.” 
Leaders were chosen who would select alternately the 
94 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
best men, these two “sides” were pitted against each 
other, and at the end of a few days those who showed 
the most tails (a chipmunk counted one; a red squir- 
rel, five; a gray one, ten) had a supper at the expense 
of the other side. As these rodents were a pest no 
voice was raised against the efforts to exterminate 
them. Occasionally there was a coon hunt by night. 
Several men would go out with a dog and when, 
generally near a cornfield, one was treed, it either had 
to be shot (my grandfather usually doing this with 
his old flintlock) or, if the animal took to a hollow 
tree and could not be smoked out, the tree was cut 
down. On very rare occasions bears were seen—once 
by my uncle on a distant fence-mending tour, but in 
my day or his I think they never were known to 
attack man. My father had many tales of deer hunt- 
ing, preparing vension, etc., in the west. On one 
occasion I saw a lynx, which made that region a terror 
to me for years, and one of the neighbors shot a large 
wildcat. But neither the real nor the imaginary 
dangers deterred me from penetrating with my trusty 
gun into the most remote and dense woodlands. 
Animals to me had a very definite character, and 
perhaps here the foundations were laid for my sub- 
sequent interest in animal and comparative psychol- 
ogy, which has prompted various experiments by 
myself and by my students in later years and on 
which subject I have for years given lectures. This, 
too, probably gave me my great interest in menageries 
and zoological gardens, which I have always fre- 
quented on occasion. I think I have never visited 
an American or European city that had an animal 
park without seeing it. I have always been interested 
in cats and still more in dogs,3 although never, save 
S G. S. Hall and C. E. Browne: “The Cat and the Child,” Ped. Sent., 
n:3-29. 
G. S. Hall and W. F. Bucke: “Cyno-psychoses: Children’s Thoughts, 
Reactions, and Feelings Towards Pet Dogs,” Ped. Sent., 10:459-513. 
95 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
on one occasion, was I allowed as a boy to have one 
of the latter. Although this was an object of peren- 
nial desire, my father always disapproved of dogs 
from an unpleasant experience with them. In general 
they had an aversion to me for I remember being 
bitten by one when I was seven, which made me 
always rather suspicious of them, although in maturer 
years I owned several and took great satisfaction in 
them. Thus one important boy interest was aborted 
in me. 
The very old-fashioned New England farm, repre- 
sented by such museums as those in Salem, Plymouth, 
Deerfield, and Boston, made an almost ideal environ- 
ment for boys. When I was about three I told my 
first but, alas! I fear not my last lie. I came in with 
a large pailful of dandelion heads and told my mother 
with great earnestness that God came and said I must 
not pick my pailful of flowers but I did, adding, “I 
don’t mind God sometimes.” Obedience was the first 
of all duties, and disobedience summed up about all 
sins. To say “I won’t” was almost unthinkable. My 
mother’s commands were often sugar-coated by say- 
ing, “Now, Stanley, you want to do” so and so, and 
my worst recalcitrancy was by responding, “I don’t 
wish to want to.” 
Water was an incessant temptation, and perhaps 
most of my early disobedience and feigned forgetful- 
ness was in getting to it. We built dams, made water 
wheels and, with the help of an older boy, a sawmill 
which would cut a long marino potato; sailed little 
boats here and in the larger stream; waded; paddled, 
pushing each other in; went swimming, often secretly, 
as we could do behind the bushes or evaded the pro- 
hibition by keeping some upper garment on; dug deep 
pools in the brook by lifting out, as I remember, cart- 
loads of stone; caught fish and kept them alive in 
the water-trough, cistern, and well, if they were not 
96 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
much injured; were very cruel to the frogs, which 
were extremely numerous in a marsh near-by; reared 
polliwogs; occasionally wandered to a pond a quarter 
of a mile away and played in a boat that was always 
chained and belonged to a neighbor.4 
Ballistics had with us a genesis not unlike that of 
the race. Before the passion for throwing abated 
we learned to hit stones with clubs to make them hum 
louder, tied short strings to them which we let go 
after whirling the stone, by which they were sent 
farther; and then, of course, came the sling, which 
was a veritable passion. One of the earliest amuse- 
ments here was with sticks split at one end in which 
a tiny piece of wood like a shoe peg was inserted 
which we could snap out at some distance. Then 
came the elder popgun, always homemade and which 
if turned against a mate could hurt. Wooden arrows 
or darts thrown by a knotted string attached to a 
springy hemlock bough could be sent great distances 
by an expert. The bow at one time had its innings 
but with us was soon supplanted by the crossbow, 
which carried a very formidable arrow. To the latter 
we gave heads of melted lead poured into a paper tube 
in which a short nail or barb was solidified with the 
lead, and with these we sometimes brought down 
birds. But all this was superseded when the gun 
came. Why my people allowed this, and especially 
the small and then the large pistol which my uncle, 
who manufactured them, gave me and which I used 
rather freely before I was eleven, I do not know. I 
may say that there were no accidents but there were 
several very narrow escapes. I also remember making 
an effigy of “Bully” Brooks, who assaulted Charles 
Sumner, of Stephen A. Douglas, and other even local 
characters whom we were taught to execrate and 
4F. E. Bolton: “Hydro-psychoses,” Am. Journ. of Psychol., vol. 
10, Jan., 1899, pp. 169-227. 
97 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
which we used as targets in a kind of mimic murder 
on the principle of savage magic. 
Soon after the pincushion craze came that of 
weathercocks, and rude imitations of fish, roosters, 
boats, etc., were stuck on every building and many 
trees, if we could reach the top of them, and on the 
summit of poles which it was possible to climb. These 
were, however, superseded by tiny windmills which 
went with every breeze. Birdhouses at one time were 
mounted in the apple, maple, and cherry trees near-by, 
and a few stuck on poles, which bluebirds and wrrens 
were fond of patronizing. The first playhouses were 
simple rows of stones for different rooms with sticks 
laid across for doors. Several of these structures 
were of snow actually roofed over, and many were 
the booths we built of willow tied at the top and 
called wigwams, in one of which I was once allowed 
to spend the night till I was frightened and came in 
during the small hours. Each of us had our own tiny 
plot in the garden. 
I must have been a strange combination of adven- 
turous boldness and of cowardice. I once had myself 
let down in a deep well in a bucket by a chain wound 
on a windlass to inspect the fishes I had put there. 
On one occasion, as the result of a dare, I lay down 
under the big church bell in the steeple, which deaf- 
ened me with its din and swung within an inch of my 
body. I was a great climber and once fell off the barn 
and, as my father wanted me to believe, nearly broke 
my neck. It was common for boys to “stump” each 
other to taste forbidden and even the most repulsive 
objects imaginable, at least touching the tongue to 
them, and this I hate to remember. 
From early childhood I must have had a propen- 
sity to run away. At any rate, I often did so and on 
one occasion was found wandering lost in the pasture 
after dark. We had stone duels, in one of which I 
98 My Boyhood Home G. S. H., jet. 14 
G. S. H., ,ET. 22 
G. S. H., iET. 35 
G. S. H., jet. 45 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
was hit on the head and carried unconscious into the 
schoolroom and finally home, and the indentation still 
remains on my skull. On the other hand, I was a 
mortal coward about lightning, bulls, rams, and 
darkness. 
Scrapbook-making, which consisted of pasting 
pictures, which we often painted in water colors, and 
gathering select extracts, was a favorite diversion. 
Half a dozen of these yet remain. We were allowed 
for this purpose to cut the illustrated paper, Frank 
Leslie’s, Ballou’s, advertisements, etc. 
Coasting had a history of its own. First we slid 
on barrel staves, then on “jumpers” made of a stave 
with a short post surmounted by a crossboard for a 
seat; then came the homemade sled of two curved 
boards for runners with hoop-iron nailed on as 
“shoes,” which was sometimes decorated. The seat 
of this we always padded with boot linings and rags; 
then came the “boughten” Ringville sled which was 
painted; then the double runner on which sometimes 
a dozen could sit and which was always getting out 
of order. 
At one time all the children were drawing out the 
ravelings of various kinds of cloth so as to leave 
checked and other effects with only warp and woof 
alternating. But the day of the “sampler,” which this 
suggests, was already passed. 
At this period all children, some more some less, 
were collectors of many sorts of things.5 I remember 
particularly collections of postage stamps, bits of 
broken crockery, buttons of every hue and size, and 
scraps of cloth of every kind and of no pattern for 
some imaginary bedquilt that was never made. One 
of my largest collections was of bits of wood, each 
about six inches long. I sought to gather specimens 
5 See “The Collecting Instinct” (by F. C. Burk) in my Aspects of 
Child Life and Education (N. Y., Appleton, 1921). 
99 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
of every known kind of tree, including rare bits pre- 
sented to me such as mahogany and lignum vitae, 
and had in all some one hundred specimens. Later 
I collected an herbarium of things that grew in Ash- 
field. Then, too, there were the birds5 eggs of many 
kinds kept in a big box on cotton wadding, insects 
impaled upon pins, and a small collection of coins— 
nearly all pennies. To a different order, of course, 
belong the beech nuts, which were very abundant and 
of which we gathered pecks to be sold at the store, 
and in Ashfield there were chestnuts; while in the 
berrying season the order was, as I remember it, first 
snake-berries, then wintergreen berries, strawberries, 
raspberries of two kinds—red and black—blueberries, 
and blackberries, many of which were preserved. 
Elderberries, too, made excellent pies and so-called 
wine. At my grandfather’s we gathered slippery elm, 
pine cones and, from the swamp, cords of pine knots, 
which made far hotter and brighter fires than any 
other kind of wood, and we always expected to lay 
in a supply of herbs. Those we actually gathered 
were pennyroyal, tansy, spearmint, peppermint, cat- 
nip, mugwort, motherwort, elecampane, burdock, 
aconite, arnica, lobelia or Indian tobacco, mullein, 
sorrel, comfrey, flag, and witch-hazel, and my grand- 
mother also remembered when they had scratch-grass, 
valerian, larkspur, mallow, plantain, anise, arrow- 
root, yarrow, balmony, tag alder, and bloodroot in 
the house. These constituted, most of them, the 
family pharmacopoeia and were each “good for” some 
distemper; only when their usefulness was exhausted 
was the doctor called. 
Once, working occasionally for weeks or perhaps 
months, we boys dug a well so deep that it became 
dangerous and, to our great grief, had to be filled. 
The kite and marble mania entered but I think played 
only a very small role in my boyhood. One of the 
100 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
outbuildings, a large shop, was almost entirely covered 
inside, from the ridgepole down, with pictures large 
and small pasted on at intervals for years, and here 
they stood for decades until the building was burned 
down a few years ago. I was taught “old sledge” 
and euchre in a safe retreat over the horse-sheds one 
Sunday by the minister’s son while his father was 
preaching. He was found out and punished, while 
I escaped. 
Three great schools of the imagination were freely 
open to us. One was the frost on the window panes 
in which we saw all kinds of fancied objects which 
by scratching we brought into closer resemblance with 
the objects they seemed to suggest, a few of which 
I remember vividly to this day.6 Then there was 
the cloud scenery, especially in the far perspective 
where forests receded and allowed us an open view 
of the west, where we saw battles, monsters, angels, 
and on two occasions corpses.7 A third source was 
the open fireplace, where not only in the dancing 
flames but in the dying embers we saw many of the 
things children have so often fancied. In flowers we 
rarely saw faces and I think did not give them the 
characters so often ascribed to them and sometimes 
reflected in their names in the way Miss Thayer 8 has 
described in her interesting anthology. Trees, 
however, did have, some of them, a very individual 
character which I could even now describe in some 
detail.9 How we should have profited by the present 
cult of Arbor Day! 
6 “Children’s Ideas of Fire, Heat, Frost, and Cold,” by G. S. Hall 
and C. E. Browne, Ped. Sem., 10:27-85. 
7 “How Children and Youth Think and Feel about Clouds,” by G. S. 
Hall and J. E. W. Wallin, Ped. Sent., 9:46o-5o6. See also Day-Dreams, 
by Theodate L. Smith. 
8 “A Study of Children’s Interest in Flowers,” Ped. Sem., 12:107- 
140. 
9 “Dendro-Psychoses,” by J. O. Quantz, Am. Journ. of Psychol., 
9:449- 
101 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
A dark closet with no windows always seemed a 
little awful because it was associated with Bluebeard, 
who here slew his wife amidst a lot of dead ones. 
A spot near an elm in the pasture, otherwise un- 
marked, was where the demon in the Arabian Nights 
escaped from the bottle. A steep acclivity in the mow 
land with rocks and scrub trees was Bunyan’s “Hill 
of Difficulty/’ and a boggy place in the cowpath was 
the “Slough of Despond.” Moses lay amid the bul- 
rushes behind the willows just below the dam. Under- 
standing that an altar was a large pile of stones, I 
pictured Abraham about to slay Isaac near one in 
the east lot, and no experience of my real life is more 
vividly associated with that spot. Not seeing very 
many pictures I made them, and the features of this 
farm were the scenic background and setting for 
many an incident and story. Everything read to me 
was automatically located. Mrs. Southworth’s stories, 
which I conned furtively in The Ledger, all seemed 
to have been laid out on this farm, with the addition 
of a few castles, palaces, underground passages, dun- 
geons, keeps, etc. The “Sleeping Beauty” was just 
behind a clump of hemlocks. Under a black rock in 
the woods was where the gnomes went in and out 
from the center of the earth. My mother told me 
tales from Shakespeare and I built a Rosalind’s bower 
of willow; located Prospero’s rock and Caliban’s den. 
Oberon lived out in the meadow in the summer but 
could only be seen by twilight or in the morning be- 
fore I got up. There was a hollow maple tree where 
I fancied monkeys lived, and I took pleasure in looking 
for them there. 
Children had some part in almost all the activities 
on the farm, which combine so many elements of the 
physical, industrial, civil, and religious life of the 
citizen voters contemplated by the framers of our 
political institutions. Thus we went back to sources 
102 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
and made contact with the fresh primary thoughts, 
beliefs, feelings, and modes of life of the race or of 
simple, homely, genuine, primitive, men. From this 
our higher anthropology always strives to take a fresh 
start in the original Ethos, Muthos, Nomos, and 
Logos of mankind. For instance, in woodwork we 
had each our own team in the logging camps, were 
familiar with the whole process of making “rive 
shingles,” saw the process of making ax helves, for 
which each maker had his own style as distinct as 
that of the painter or poet. There were butter and 
sugar-paddles, mauls, beetles, and even birch brushes 
and brooms made by stripping down the filaments of 
the wood which represented the successive years’ 
growths, to say nothing of troughs, salt mortars, 
pokes for unruly geese, hogs, sheep, and jumping 
cattle. Even ox yokes of ash, and oak ox bows bound 
with withes were made. The whole process, too, of 
the manufacture of hemp from the sowing to cutting, 
breaking, hatcheling, hanking, spooling, and weaving, 
was a domestic industry that was not extinct in my 
boyhood. The same was true of woolen, every stage 
of which from shearing (an expert doing his twenty- 
five head a day) or the pulling of the wool from 
dead sheep, a very offensive task when they were 
found in the pasture perhaps weeks after they were 
defunct, we saw and sometimes took part in. The 
“rolls” had to be carded elsewhere but were spun in- 
doors, then reeled into seven-knotted skeins, five or 
six of which constituted a good day’s work. Thence 
they went to a great dye-tub in the chimney corner. 
Butternut bark for everyday suits, indigo for Sunday 
suits, and madder for shirting was the rule. There 
was much fancy dyeing for contrast effects. Then 
the warp had to be very carefully spooled and trans- 
ferred to the warping bars, whence it had to be 
thumbed through the harness and needled through 
103 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
the reed, and then a “piece” was said to be put in 
and the weaving began. Nubias and son tags, even 
men’s gloves and clock stockings were knit, while the 
shag mittens were made from the thrums or the left- 
over ends of the warp.10 
We had the run, too, of various shops in town. 
In one, canes were made and we knew the process so 
well that in that shop I could repeat it. We ran 
among the vats of the tannery and saw the various 
stages of making leather out of raw hides. Every 
hemlock tree cut down was skinned with a “spud” 
and the bark piled in cords to be ground for the tan- 
nery. We watched the cobbler, too, at his bench. 
One family largely supported itself by making baskets, 
splitting out the ash strips from trees they had felled 
themselves. There was a harness and saddle maker 
who allowed us to watch him at his work, as did 
another citizen who made his living by extracting and 
selling essences from plants he gathered. We were 
familiar not only with the several sawmills and grist- 
mill but with the three local factories that made, re- 
spectively, sieves, broomhandles, and planes. There 
was a blacksmith’s shop, and I remember at least one 
visit each to the establishment of a cooper and a wool- 
carder. One neighbor made birch vinegar, and several 
had small carpenter shops. In the southern village 
there was a tin shop, and my father remembered a 
pottery there. 
Where men gathered rainy days, evenings, or 
Sundays, as they often did in the shed or barn, there 
was endless gossip (one of the foreschools of psy- 
chology) and a great many very apposite stories illus- 
trating human character and incidents. Very often 
these tales were immemorially old but ascribed to 
some “granther” or “uncle” and eccentricities seemed 
10 See “Boy Life in a Massachusetts Country Town” in my Aspects 
of Child Life and Education. 
104 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
to be particularly dwelt upon. Some of them I have 
sampled in my “Boy Life in a Massachusetts Town” 
just referred to. One neighbor, I remember, used to 
say that he would take anybody’s wager that he could 
tell two hundred “minister stories.” Everybody ap- 
preciated especially a good “grind”or “rig” in which 
the fool’s cap was clapped upon some one present who 
must defend himself or retort as best he could. Every- 
one knows the pithy humor of which the typical 
Yankee is often capable. 
If gossip is, in any sense, the foreschool of psy- 
chology and especially characterology, the atmosphere 
in which I was reared was favorable, for there was 
incessant discussion of real motives and much analysis 
of personality, and endless criticism which, on the 
whole, favored public and private morals. The homely 
anecdotes that were retailed were very often of eccen- 
tricities, which are far more common in rural com- 
munities and perhaps among elderly people. I never 
wanted to miss the congregation of men of the neigh- 
borhood who so often stole together of a rainy or Sun- 
day afternoon in my uncle’s long shed where, sitting 
on the grindstone, chopping block, bench, manger 
ledge, wagon tail or seat, or the long high step that 
led to the pigpen, some perhaps whittling and some 
of them chewing tobacco, sticks, or straws, they 
passed the joke and sometimes the “buck” along and 
each took his turn in contributing to the edification 
of all. It was here that I heard of an old character 
long since defunct, L.W., who lay drunk overnight 
in the ditch and, on coming to himself, found two 
dead snakes that had bitten him and died of the ef- 
fects, suggesting the old distich of some classic 
author, “An adder bit a Cappadocian’s hide, but 
’twas the adder, not the ‘Cap,’ that died.” 
In my grandfather’s youth, after a sheepshearing 
four men pushed out to the middle of the pond and 
105 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
one was so drunk that he kept rocking the boat. When 
cautioned, he cried out, “We’ll all be in hell in five 
minutes,” rocking it the more until he did upset it. 
Three were drowned and their bodies, clinging to- 
gether, were recovered by a mystic stranger who 
appeared on the spot, dove for and brought them up, 
and then vanished, so that no one ever knew who 
he was or where he came from. There was the old 
chestnut of a young minister, new in town, who, ac- 
cording to custom and as a joke, at the close of the 
town meeting was elected hog-reeve for the ensuing 
year and accepted gracefully, saying, “I supposed I 
came to town as a shepherd of the sheep but have 
it your own way”; of a good old man who had lately 
been converted and enthusiastically clasped the minis- 
ter’s hand at the close of the service and told him he 
preached a “damned good sermon”; of another clergy- 
man who began a discourse on a very hot day, wiping 
the perspiration from his forehead, thus: “This is 
a damned hot day—such was the expression that fell 
upon my ears as I entered the House of God” and 
proceeded to denounce profanity; of old “uncle” 
N.E., a noted horse jockey, who when worsted in a 
trade called all the members of his household together, 
as if to family prayers, told them that his neighbor 
had cheated him out of ten dollars, and exhorted his 
own sons to get it back out of the sons of the neighbor 
or, if they did not, to teach their grandchildren to 
get it back from his. But later, after another trade 
which he effected with the same man, he assembled 
them again and lifted the obligation, saying that he 
had made everything all right himself; of old “uncle” 
G.V., who when a young man was said to have called 
upon a deacon of the church and asked him to “pub- 
lish” the next Sunday his banns with Miss A., took 
his departure but shortly came back to say that he 
had decided to substitute Miss B., leaving again but 
106 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
returning once more to say that he had decided on 
Miss C., whom he did marry; of the same man, who 
had an ignorant negro who agreed to work for him 
for one hundred years, at the end of which the tables 
were to be reversed and “uncle” G.V. was to work 
for him. This darky was cured of the habit of 
sucking eggs by being shown a nest of them put 
surreptitiously into his bed after he was up in the 
morning and made to believe he had laid them, and 
was helped to contentment by carrying on a corre- 
spondence through G.V.with a beautiful but fictitious 
Nancy in the south whose effusive love letters G.V. 
used to pretend to read to him and to take his no less 
effusive replies. 
There was the story, too, of Stephen and Ann. 
They were courting one Sunday evening in the kitchen 
(which contained but one chair and yet no one was 
standing) when she suddenly asked him if he was not 
tired of holding her. He gallantly replied, “Not a 
mite, Ann, keep right on settin’ just where you be. 
I was powerful tired an hour ago but now I’m numb.” 
P.M., another old character in town, was said to have 
“crept up, all unbeknown” to his best girl one evening, 
with the salute, “Well, Sal, feel kind’er sparky to- 
night?” to which she coquettishly but encouragingly 
replied, “Well, I reckon p’raps a leetle more sorter 
than sorter not”; and a little later they rode many 
miles on the same horse, she on a pillion behind, and 
were married. There was the story, too, of the old 
cat ground up in the gristmill with dreadful cater- 
waulings, so that two bushels of good rye were re- 
quired to grind the mill clean again; the tale of the 
Baptist deacon who would not pay his tax which the 
town exacted for Congregational preaching so that 
his apple trees were dug up by the constable for pay- 
ment; and of how he came home from the General 
Court in Boston with a barrel of cider brandy drawn 
107 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
on two poles strapped together, one end of each in 
the holdbacks of the harness and the other ends drag- 
ging on the ground, and how he sold this in a pint 
measure, always inserting his big thumb by way of 
economy. There was the tale of old Sloper who 
vanished mysteriously and the long persistent rumors 
that he had been murdered by a prominent but not 
very well-beloved citizen. 
One interesting illustration of mythopeic tenden- 
cies in such communities was the following. A very 
intelligent old man called me in to his bedside, as I 
was passing, and confided to me almost in a whisper 
that his ancestors in the very remote days of history 
had cheated mine by hiring Indians to dig with sharp- 
ened sticks all through a dark rainy night at a certain 
place so that the Deerfield river, which used to flow 
through Ashfield village and was the boundary be- 
tween the two holdings, had been turned northward 
into its present course. I have since been told by 
Professor Emerson, the geologist, that in some very 
remote geological age such a change of river beds 
probably did occur. How such a belief had been in- 
culcated in my friend and why he should charge me 
never to reveal it until after his death is a mystery. 
Much as novelists like Mary Wilkins have ex- 
ploited the humor and pathos of the Yankee life and 
character, I believe there are many rich veins of it 
yet to be explored and that it was marked by a homely 
sagacity and a kind of intuitive feeling for and ap- 
preciation of character that is more or less unique. 
I shall never forget my first day at school. I was 
not only a bashful boy but had heard so much of 
school discipline that I was in great fear of punish- 
ment, and it was, therefore, with much trepidation 
that I started for the school a mile away, at the age 
of six, led by a much older girl pupil to whose care 
my mother committed me. My parents had already 
108 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
taught me to read and write a little so that I was 
more advanced than those of my age, but this did not 
count and I had to begin in the lowest class and sit 
on one of the front deskless seats. 
In this day the school district, of which there were 
twelve in Worthington, was an autonomous unit. The 
parents met in the schoolhouse and chose a prudential 
committeeman for the year from the district whose 
chief duty it was to find and engage a teacher for 
each term, of which there were always three and some- 
times four, with often as many different teachers. 
At this meeting, too, the job of supplying wood, which 
must be of a certain kind and length, was given to 
the lowest bidder. The older boys took turns in 
making the fire in cold weather, which required them 
to go to school an hour earlier than usual, and this 
appointment was given out each day for the next 
and the boy thus chosen was given the key. 
The district schoolhouse was also, especially in 
the warm weather, a place of religious meetings late 
Sunday afternoon. The districts to have such service 
were given out every Sunday by the minister, who 
appointed some parent in the vicinity to lead the meet- 
ing, occasionally attending it himself. These were 
generally fully attended and consisted of singing, 
prayers, exhortations, and “remarks.” The school- 
house was also used as the place of evening meetings 
of various kinds, particularly spelling classes where 
“sides” were chosen and the prize was given to the 
side that spelled down the other. Often the speller to 
be used was given in advance so that the experts 
could prepare for the ordeal, but sometimes anything 
was allowed which was in Webster’s dictionary, to 
consult which in cases of disputed spelling some one 
was appointed. Again, there were rhetoricals in 
which the children spoke pieces, learned little dia- 
logues and songs, and in which older people also 
109 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
volunteered readings—more often, as I remember 
them, comic—and sometimes a school paper was pre- 
pared. Both these gatherings were presided over by 
the teacher. In several of these schools there were 
debating societies formed in which the parents took 
part. The question was decided upon the week before 
and individuals were appointed to open the discussion, 
which was then free to all, with a verdict rendered 
at the close by an appointed committee, first on the 
merits of the question itself and secondly on the 
weight of argument, which was often on the other 
or wrong side. In these gatherings my father always 
took an active part and there was often great interest, 
the schoolhouse being packed to overflowing. When 
I was twelve or thirteen I once took part in such a 
debate on the opposite side from my father, and a 
jocose member of the jury committee, notorious for 
his teasing propensities, went out of his way to say 
that I in some points had bested my father, which 
was of course preposterous but, I thought, annoying 
to him. 
The teachers were usually selected from the town 
or one adjoining, for it was a very common practice 
for young men and, still more, young women who 
were able to teach school, which was somewhat more 
dignified than “working out,” often the alternative. 
In Worthington I had access to two different schools, 
and in Ashfield to five of them which were nearly 
equidistant from my home, so that in the six or seven 
years of my attendance at these schools I had nearly 
a score of teachers. When I was fourteen I wrote 
a history of my school life, covering twenty-four fools- 
cap pages, which is still extant. Here I find recorded 
in their order my impression of seventeen of these 
teachers. This record showed chiefly my very definite 
attitude toward their personality. In later years it 
would have been entirely impossible for me to recall 
110 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
the names of most of them. Some were hated and 
detested, others loved and respected. The only teacher 
who ever flogged me (and it was for a fault I had 
not committed) I dubbed “old red-nose” because she 
had a fiery temper which inflamed that organ. In 
my sketch nothing whatever is said of any of my 
studies but the character of the teacher and his or 
her discipline are always noted in a grotesquely wise- 
acre way, and many pranks are described. 
In the treatment of the schoolhouse and its sur- 
roundings we were vandals. The first schoolhouse I 
attended is still standing as it was. The desks were 
carved by the jackknives of generations of pupils, 
especially on the boys’ side. There were rude initials 
deeply indented, and the walls had to be whitewashed 
often to obliterate pencil marks and drawings. At 
the end of a term the rounded ceiling of the room 
was covered with chewed paper wads which it was 
a favorite diversion to throw and make stick there. 
We tore up the floor in the wood-room and raised 
havoc in the cellar, while the outhouses, both that of 
the girls and boys, were indescribable. We tore down 
stone walls, too, to make playhouses. We were often 
allowed to decorate the windows, teacher’s desk and 
blackboard with boughs and trim them with flowers 
and vines. Sometimes a pupil was appointed to pro- 
vide the teacher’s desk in summer with a “nosegay” 
the next day, and the stove, too, in summer was often 
covered with flowers and the stovepipe twined with 
a kind of creeping vine, for which purpose even hop 
vines were often used. We all brought our dinner 
and ate it together, often swapping dainties with each 
other. There was much trading, too, of pencils, jack- 
knives, and particularly of toys, for which every scrap 
of lead was in great requisition. 
Of school games the favorites were tag, hare-and- 
hound, which involved long cross-country runs with 
111 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
bits of paper thrown as “scent”; pompom pull-away; 
one-and-two-old-cat, a form of ball game; goal; to 
say nothing of hoops, tops, etc., many of which were 
taken away from the pupils when they were found 
in use in school time and locked in the teacher’s 
capacious desk for one or perhaps several days before 
they were given back. “Cat’s cradle” was a favorite 
diversion and very highly developed. There was 
a great deal of fighting, and every boy in school knew 
just who could “lick” him and whom he could lick. 
Sometimes two boys had a “set fight,” and I remem- 
ber one with a mate, C.K., in which we hit, struck, 
kicked, pulled hair, etc., for an hour, while all the 
children stood around and took sides, and we both 
went home dilapidated and exhausted. Neither 
admitted, however, that he was whipped although the 
fight was several times renewed without decision. 
Squarehold wrestling was common everywhere, not 
only in the school but in the village, where often 
older men indulged in the sport and occasionally, 
horrible dictu, in horsesheds Sunday noons. In this 
contest each grasped with one hand the collar and 
with the other the elbow of the antagonist, each must 
“play up,” and there were various trips (knee hold, 
toe hold, cross trip, side trip, etc.). Two throws out 
of three meant victory. 
School exercises always began, after roll call, with 
a brief Bible reading in which each pupil read a verse, 
and at the close each was obliged to say one from 
memory. “Jesus wept” was a favorite on account of 
its brevity and it was never disallowed. Then came the 
reading classes, beginning with the lowest primer 
class and ending with the highest in the Village 
Reader. Then came geography, arithmetic, perhaps 
grammar with parsing, perhaps twenty minutes for 
the writing lesson in the copy book, and the forenoon 
closed with the spelling classes, in which we always 
112 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
“took places,” with a good mark for standing at the 
head for a day. The afternoon exercises were pre- 
cisely the same. Occasionally an advanced class be- 
gan Worcester’s Universal History. Arithmetic was 
always given most time and was the hardest. Every 
term we began House-That-Jack-Built fashion and 
usually got a little farther at the end than we had gone 
the term before. Very common were the Colburn 
exercises in which sometimes the whole school in- 
dulged. They went in this fashion: take 4, divide 
by 2, multiply by 6, subtract 2, multiply by 20, sub- 
tract 100, etc. Some of these stunts were very long 
and rapid. They were, however, very popular, and 
the more advanced students often became quite pro- 
ficient in them. When I was a little older, a few 
teachers introduced algebra into the Ashfield schools, 
and when one of my aunts was the teacher, as was 
several times the case, I used to be severely drilled 
by her in this and in advanced arithmetic at home in 
the evenings. One teacher here long tried to make 
cube-root plain by a block of wood which she built 
to larger dimensions on three of its sides by seven 
smaller blocks. This I learned to do mechanically but 
entirely without understanding it. One teacher tried 
to start a class in botany; and another, one in Latin. 
Among the scribblings of my youth I find pre- 
served nearly a dozen lists of names of my fellow- 
pupils in various district schools I attended. Of many 
of these I retain some knowledge or even acquaintance 
from the summers spent in these towns. Not a single 
one of them all, even those who attended the higher 
select school or academy, ever went to college. Many 
settled at once on the parental acres. Others did so 
after various excursions into other callings, and some 
went west. Three have been very successful in busi- 
ness, and two are, I suppose, millionaires. A great 
majority of them, however, are now dead, and another 
113 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
surprise in conning these lists is that so many of them 
died young, indicating lack of stamina connected 
probably with the race suicide which is perhaps better 
illustrated in this region than anywhere else in the 
country, if not in the world. 
My father and mother both used to sing together 
at home when we were very small, and among my 
first recollections is that of some of the old ballads 
and church tunes, my father singing bass and my 
mother, sometimes sitting in his lap, singing treble, 
with which we were thus made familiar. I recall, 
too, the rather thick book of secular tunes, now lost, 
I believe. It was called “The Vocalist” and contained 
serious, sentimental, and also a few comic songs. My 
father, too, had some slight skill on the violin. When 
I was very young, both my brother and I were given 
a flageolet, and before I was large enough to hold the 
violin under my chin I began to play a number of 
church tunes which, to my great mortification, I was 
sometimes called on to play before company. We 
also performed crudely on the jew’s harp, the harmo- 
nica, and on the “bones,” the latter very carefully 
carved of oak and ash while some were made of the 
ribs of beeves. Of these I at one time had quite a 
collection. At the age of perhaps eleven or twelve 
I bought an accordion which I earned, not by reading 
the Bible through as I did in the case of my skates, 
but by braiding the sides of two hundred and fifty 
palm-leaf hats at a penny each. On this I learned 
to play over a hundred tunes, the names of which I 
find written in my own hand and, which, I think, were 
always secular. With this on one or two occasions 
I surreptitiously officiated as musician at dances at 
neighbors’ houses, although my parents strongly dis- 
approved. The family fiddle was given my grand- 
father by a pauper from the town of Hatfield who 
was allowed to tour the adjacent towns among people 
114 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
who would keep him overnight to enjoy his skill with 
the violin and to whom my grandfather was very 
kind, nursing him through his last illness until he 
died under his roof. A few years ago I rediscovered 
it in a closet in an old house that had fallen down on 
the place. It was somewhat broken but I had it re- 
paired. It is a Stephens, with the back and sides made 
of bird’s-eye maple, and I have been offered five hun- 
dred dollars for it. My skill on this instrument coin- 
cided with and just about equaled that on the 
accordion. Many were the tunes I played, although 
my performance was of the very crudest kind and 
mostly by rote. 
When I was fourteen I became enamored of the 
piano (having whittled out a full seven-octave key- 
board on an old table, on which I first practiced), 
and my father, with great reluctance, bought one and 
I was allowed to take lessons for one or perhaps two 
years. Although I practiced with great assiduity I 
had neither the hand nor the mind of a musician. 
My chef d’oeuvre was a rather halting performance 
of the several movements in Beethoven’s Sonata 
Pathetique. Later in life I was just able to earn five 
dollars a Sunday by playing a melodeon in a mission 
church in New York, and still later sometimes offici- 
ated as organist at Antioch College. Though I was 
never able to attain the least virtuosity as a performer, 
all this gave me a profound appreciation of music and 
in Germany I became an enthusiastic admirer of 
Wagner, and have always attended operas and con- 
certs when it was practicable to do so. Indeed, music 
has added greatly to my joy of life, and even at the 
present writing I take great satisfaction occasionally 
in my pianola and Victor, for both of which I have 
several hundred records. Music is the language of 
the sentiments and feelings almost as much as speech 
is that of thought, and although I have not the slight- 
115 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
est claims to being a connoisseur I am always pro- 
foundly moved and affected by it, as my father was. 
Along with this, I think near the dawn of puberty 
and in common with several other boys I knew, clog 
dancing, often with performance upon the “bones,” 
was very much in vogue. A group of us taught each 
other various steps copied from the strolling negro 
minstrels, and it may be that in this way started the 
interest which I have theoretically and practically had 
in dancing and in rhythm, which was a subject of 
several investigations made at my Baltimore labora- 
tory. Nothing on the variety stage gives me such 
pleasure as a good and original performance of this 
kind, and I have followed the literature on the subject 
and always advocated the practice of dancing in its 
higher forms as an important factor of general cul- 
ture. In my courses on education I have given a 
prominent place to the history of the dancing11 and 
have often been able to do something to introduce 
folk and other kind of dancing into our educational 
institutions. 
I hesitate to confess here, although I must do so 
as a scientific psychologist, that I have a very highly 
developed rudimentary organ in my psychophysic 
make-up which must go back to my early musical 
ambitions, for to-day if I sit down and strum the 
piano, which I sometimes do if I am alone and there 
is no one in the house to hear me and I am tired, 
and if it is evening—for that helps—my fancy takes 
wild flights. I am a great performer playing either 
at a concert to admiring and applauding crowds or 
else surprising a little circle or perhaps some indi- 
vidual friend by suddenly coming forward and dis- 
playing a wonderful capacity as a performer which 
I had hidden from the public up to that triumphant 
11 See various sections in volume II of my Educational Problems. 
116 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
moment. I often catch myself in these reveries with 
a start and laugh at the ridiculousness of it, and 
wonder whether if I were insane with the delusions 
of greatness I should not try to act out just such a 
scene and force myself thus upon a disgusted audience 
if I had a chance. 
Declamation had a place somewhere in every 
school and played an important part in the little eve- 
ning school often held by my father and mother at 
home. I could not have been more than six or eight 
when I had to march out on the floor, turn in a curve 
like a fishhook, make a formal bow, and spout pieces 
like “On Linden When the Sun Was Low” and “The 
Boy Stood on the Burning Deck,” etc. There were 
several “speakers” or books full of oratorical selec- 
tions, and often the reading books were entitled, 
Reader and Speaker. In the earliest days I detested, 
but with the dawn of the teens began to love this 
exercise, and as I now turn over these old anthologies 
of rhetorical gems I find many familiar faces, most 
of them saturated with the spirit of adventure, mawk- 
ishly sentimental, or perhaps lurid with passion. 
Spartacus’ address to his fellow gladiators, a poem 
entitled “Rum’s Maniac” in which it was thought 
necessary to act as a man in delirium tremens is sup- 
posed to do, alternated and gradually merged into 
better selections from Daniel Webster, of whose ora- 
tions we had a volume in the house, as we did of 
Sumner, the gems from Anson Burlingame, Edward 
Everett, William Lloyd Garrison, and others. How 
I used to make the woods and pine groves ring, some- 
times frightening the cattle and occasionally being 
overheard and then overwhelmed with derision, 
shouting these eloquent passages by way of practice. 
I had been commended for excellence here and it 
nearly turned my head. 
At fifteen and sixteen I began to write “orations,” 
117 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
the whole or a part of more than a score of which are 
still preserved and some of which I have not been 
able to read without feeling that I came near being 
a victim of dementia praecox. The written speeches 
are on a great variety of topics—The Pen and the 
Sword; The Head and the Heart; The Future; 
Philosophy; The Curse of Slavery; The Demon, 
Rum; The Art of Declamation; The Evils of Igno- 
rance; various war subjects (this was at the time 
of our Civil War), etc. Nearly all these effusions 
are composed in the most florid style with a passion 
to be eloquent, and the more elaborate ones always 
begin with a paragraph or two of disproportionate 
length expressing my incompetence to handle so big 
a subject before the vast and imposing audience which 
I always imagined before me. Here first I had very 
florid but very secret reveries of fame and envied 
the laurels of the great masters. The crudity of it 
all was ineffable, the style stilted to a degree, and the 
only good this craze could have done me was that it 
did prompt me to read many orations—chiefly, how- 
ever, to pick favorite passages. When I was fifteen 
I once walked eighteen miles to the neighboring town 
of Greenfield, and stayed the night there, to hear 
Charles Sumner, one of my ideals, and words cannot 
express my thrills. He seemed to me a god-man with 
a voice and head like Jove, and I am sure I was far 
more impressed by the music of his resounding sen- 
tences than by any ideas or even sentiments he ex- 
pressed. My “sentence-sense” did, however, receive 
from all this craze an extraordinary development. 
This fad partly lapsed of itself and partly was 
ruthlessly crushed by my intense diffidence and morti- 
fying failures, after all the Ashfield successes, when 
I went to Williston Seminary to finish my preparation 
for college and joined the debating society there, and 
heard so many in my own class who so far surpassed 
118 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
me that I never once ventured to “appear before” 
them. In college, however, I mustered courage, was 
elected to take part in an interclass debate, in which 
I made a ridiculous fiasco, forgetting everything I 
had planned to say, although I rallied and was made 
class or “moonlight” orator at the close of the sopho- 
more year. And it is not until lately, even after many 
summer trips sometimes of two months of week 
stands at half a dozen or half a score summer schools, 
speaking twice a day for several decades, that I have 
escaped some degree of initial stage fright. I have 
also reacted from the rank gesticulation and fiery 
action which characterized the juvenile period to a 
very quiet informal conversational style, with almost 
no gesticulation. 
The memory of one sophomore peroration still 
haunts me. It ran thus: “To thee, oh future his- 
torian, we commit the issues of the present hour; and 
when thou hast recorded the completion of what is 
therein begun, close thy volume and break thy pen for 
all men have read our future history, for it was written 
more than two thousand years ago in the proph- 
ecies of millennial brotherhood.” My every phrase 
had its gesture: for the past I pointed backward; I 
broke the pen and closed the volume in pantomime; 
I raised both arms with hands supine in addressing 
the future historian; I scribbled with the fingers of 
my right hand at the word “recorded”; I extended 
both arms to the utmost for “all men,” for eloquence 
at that stage was gymnastics and it was thus we were 
taught. Thus this muse of my boyhood has taken on 
many aspects. 
For terms and years at the Wednesday afternoon 
“rhetoricals” in all the select-school-and-academy 
stage it was customary to choose some member of 
the school to edit and read what was called the school 
“paper.” Of these, when my turn came, a number of 
119 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
specimens are preserved, bearing such titles as “The 
Medley,” “The Classic Gem,” “Vox Populi,” “The 
After-Thought,” “The Chip-Basket,” “Miscellany,” 
etc. It was the duty of the editor, who read the paper 
to the class, to solicit what contributions he could from 
the pupils and supply the rest himself, always includ- 
ing an introductory “editorial” commenting seri- 
ously or humorously upon events of current interest 
in the school, town, or even nation. These consisted 
sometimes of crass expressions of would-be lofty and 
judicial thoughts on life and the mores generally but 
were prone to lapse to comic descriptions of picnics, 
previous exercises, “machine poetry” coupling the 
name of a boy and girl, as “First they come and then 
they tarry, Jennie Jones and Johnnie Barry.” There 
were also frequent prophecies of what individual 
schoolmates would become when they were “grown 
up,” conundrums, proverbs, occasionally efforts at 
original poetry, but never anything religious. It was 
essential that these sketches should be pithy, pointed, 
and not too long, and mild satire at the school ex- 
ercises and even at the teacher himself was not taboo. 
There was always much comment on the comparative 
merits of these “papers,” and every editor laid himself 
out to do his best. Occasionally fine writing was 
attempted, perhaps under the influence of the teacher, 
who sometimes made a contribution. On the whole, 
I think these exercises were an excellent stimulus to 
literary effort, and they certainly do express more or 
less the morale of the school, which like the quality 
of the teacher varied much from term to term and 
from teacher to teacher. 
Most voluminous of all in the stage of advanced 
rural schooling were my attempts to write stories. 
These were never intended for the school or for any 
public but were personal and private ventures. Most 
of them are written under the influence of the Phila- 
120 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
delphia Ledger, which was then publishing serials by 
writers like Sylvanus Cobb, Jr., Mrs. E. D. M. South- 
worth, and others of that ilk. The spirit of adventure 
and of sentimentality to a melodramatic degree ran 
riot here. The Ledger was taken by one boy who for 
years passed it around to several, of whom I was one, 
each installment of each story being awaited and 
conned with the utmost interest. This had to be done 
surreptitiously, however, for this kind of reading was 
under censure by my parents, so that I read it nights, 
with my door locked and the keyhole covered with a 
handkerchief, when I was supposed to be abed. 
To be able to write stories like these was long the 
supreme goal of my ambition, so that I find among 
the contents of the old yellow chest, which my mother 
long made the receptacle of everything we children 
wrote, not a few efforts of my own in this vein, bear- 
ing such titles as “Black Tom, the Outlaw,” “Queechie 
Link,” “The Robbers of Ohio,” “Crazy Jack,” “Peter 
Snooks,” “John Katz,” “Jim Nimshi,” “Delia Tingle- 
son.” The most elaborate of these was entitled 
“Ralph Burton,” which covered a quarter of a ream 
of closely written foolscap, in seventy-five chapters. 
Most of these were begun but not finished. Some 
were short; others, long. Nobody ever read them to 
my knowledge (nor did I wish it) except a girl cousin 
whom I allowed to see the longest of them. She 
claimed to have read it (though I was always skeptical 
of this, especially in view of the difficulty of decipher- 
ing my chirography) and pronounced it “splendid.” 
These tales were full of grotesque and impossible 
characters and events, with hairbreadth escapes, 
burning, passionate love at first sight, castles and 
underground keeps and dungeons, tortures, mortal 
combats with foes and wild beasts, saintly and exotic 
virtue, loud-mouthed taunts and defiance hurled at 
doughty and superior foes, tricksters, satellites, spies, 
121 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
hunters and frontiersmen, caves, fabulous wealth, 
voluntary starvation, and were calculated to play upon 
the whole gamut of human emotions. But everything 
was inexpressibly crude, fragmentary, incomplete, 
often clumsy in expression, and, alas! often with bad 
spelling and in execrable penmanship, always the 
despair of my father.12 This fad, though it lasted 
several years, seems to me rather an excrescence and 
I think it left little trace in my mind unless it is some 
taste for the lurid and melodramatic on the stage and 
in novels, which I have almost all my life read the 
last thing before or after retiring, often with a lamp 
and latterly with an electric bulb at my bedside. This 
makes a good night cap, especially if one has worked 
late and hard. 
In the Ashfield higher schools we had a good start 
in Latin, Greek, and Algebra which gave us a sense 
of esoteric superiority because here our parents were 
not able to help us and we felt that we had entered 
upon an education that was really “higher.” We had 
a severe drill, especially in Andrews and Stoddard’s 
12 Being somewhat unusually long versus broad-headed (dolicho 
versus brachicephalic) I have come to connect my clumsiness at the 
piano, at shuffling cards, my bad penmanship, invincible slowness on the 
typewriter, etc., with this cranial conformation. My arms are strong 
enough but less so than my legs, as was the case with my father, and 
I used to excel in leaping, vaulting, and running; while my son won 
the prize during two years as the all-round strong man of his college, 
Harvard, and the other New England colleges, and also in pole-vaulting 
although he weighed nearly two hundred. If my brain should be ex- 
amined at my death I am sure that the left will be found to be less 
developed or more atrophied than the right hemisphere for the attacks 
of migraine to which I have been occasionally subjected are more 
severe on that side. On the other hand, the speech centers are there 
and my command of language is not deficient. I have, too, an unusual 
ambidexterity, being, however, fundamentally left-handed. Till I was 
eleven I wrote with my left hand and was then made to change, to 
the permanent detriment of my penmanship. I have taken drawing 
lessons but proficiency here has always been out of the question so 
that even the simpler diagrams for my lectures have been made on 
charts prepared beforehand under my direction. I bat, throw, and am 
strongest in the left arm and the right leg. Vision is strongest in 
the left eye and audition in the right ear. The hair on the left side 
grew gray earliest. All the relatives I know of are definitely right- 
handed. Thus I fancy if I should ever suffer hemiplegia it would 
surely be in the left hemisphere. 
122 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
Latin and Goodwin’s Greek Grammar, and were re- 
quired to give, when challenged, not only the rule 
itself, which was often very elaborate with lists of 
words which were exceptions, but also the number of 
the rule in the book. Another more elementary ex- 
ercise that has gone out of vogue was parsing and 
analysis according to Greene. Term after term classes 
of older pupils began to parse Milton’s “Paradise 
Lost” or Pope’s “Essay on Man,” each term going a 
little farther than the one before but always starting 
at the beginning with each new term. Each phrase 
was an adjective, objective, or verbal element—of the 
first class if a single word; of the second, if there 
was a preposition and its object; of the third, if it 
contained a subject and predicate, and the lingo was 
—“man,” a noun, because a name; common because 
a general name; third person spoken of; singular 
number, meaning but one, but collective because it is 
a general name; objective case according to rule 16, 
etc. Often long discussions arose on subtler points 
of grammar, meaning, and sentence structure. 
Very early in life I was required and formed the 
habit of making brief epitomes of books that I had 
read that were not novels, and it was, I think, in this 
connection that I had another craze. We had studied 
Worcester’s Universal History and, I believe, had been 
introduced to Weber’s still larger work. At any rate, 
it was here that I conceived the idea that I should 
like to be an historian and specialize in this field. I 
read and epitomized many of Plutarch’s Lives and 
dabbled a good deal in Bancroft, Hume, Macaulay, 
and even Gibbon, and of parts of these I find many 
crude epitomes. A rough and elementary historical 
atlas fell into my hands, and in my first attempts to 
purchase books for myself and to form a little library 
histories led. They had to be small and cheap but 
I was anxious to have a history of every country, and 
123 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
accordingly I still have booklets, the more elementary 
the better, sketching the histories of France, England, 
Germany, Russia, Italy, Spain, Portugal, a few of 
the South American countries, China, and several 
charts picturing the whole course of human events. 
I never read much in these books but to own them 
gave me some false sense of possessing their contents. 
I did attempt to write the history of Ashfield, but 
this idea of being an historian entirely died out soon 
after I entered college and was supplanted by other 
aims. 
In the yellow chest I find more than a score of 
vocabularies. As a boy I put down and often defined 
words that were strange, new, or especially attractive 
to me from their sound. This I did with a view of 
enlarging my vocabulary for I confess to an early 
conceit of using words that would make my school- 
mates gape and stare. My critics in later years have, 
alas! often accused me of pedantry of this sort. If 
I am guilty, I fear I am incurable because it may thus 
go back to childhood. 
I insert, unchanged, a school composition written 
at sixteen and suggested, of course, by Addison’s 
Temple of Fame. 
About two weeks since I pursued my lucubrations to an 
hour of the night somewhat later than usual. When I 
retired my excited imagination was disturbed by flitting 
thoughts and sounds so strange and extravagant that had 
I been awake I should have supposed I had exchanged brains 
with some visionary lunatic, who sees sights and prodigies 
in every wind and leaf. Now a Latin rule and a knotty 
translation I had in vain tried to master danced before my 
eyes with menacing and defying air. Now an irregular verb 
went crashing through my bewildered brain. Problems and 
rules and ideas were personified and whirled before my eyes 
like the weird sisters in their giddy dance. Now a dagger 
jigged it over my bosom in the decorous attire of a holy 
124 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
monk. But my discerning sight penetrated all its disguises 
and saw it stripped and wielded by a strong arm over my 
head. Now a dozen Latin and as many Greek grammars; 
a few algebras boiled down to an almost imperceptible de- 
coction of sense, then suddenly transformed into a gibbering 
Egyptian mummy, with gown and cowl. Pigmy fairies, 
snatches of song, griffins, every kind of sense and non- 
sense in promiscuous profusion, in short I should judge 
all the raw material which dreams are made of, went tram- 
pling and tearing through and over my brain, and it was 
a long time before this trumpery arranged itself into any- 
thing like the form of a dream. 
But at length the tumult was assuaged and I felt a very 
pleasing vision stealing over my oppressed senses. I thought 
that passions were materialized and that we lived in the time 
of myths and allegories. I seemed to be walking up the 
streets of this trim little village, when my attention was 
attracted by a building which I had never noticed before, 
and which seemed by some magic power to have risen out 
of the ground during the night. It was situated on the 
side hill, eight rods north of the old church. The back 
part of the edifice was veiled by a cloud, which also covered 
the hill beyond. The front was formed after the fashion 
of our national Capitol only much smaller, and glittered 
with a peculiar silvery brightness. The dome was sur- 
mounted by a small cupola, upon which was seated a figure 
of the goddess of Justice. 
Seeing people from all parts of the town thronging about 
the doorway, my curiosity prompted me to enter. Stepping 
upon the threshold, a voice which I soon recognized to be 
that of the oracle of the place informed me from a dense 
cloud, which appeared to prohibit farther ingress, that the 
almighty gods, rulers of heaven and earth, had in their 
eternal wisdom determined to dispense with the worship of 
temples where so much hypocrisy was practiced and where 
men held to God with one hand and to Mammon with the 
other, and in their stead had erected this building where 
each man must worship the idol which his heart adored, 
where there could be no hypocrisy and where each must 
openly profess what he secretly loved. And, further than 
125 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
that, the gods had here vitalized and deified all those phan- 
toms which men pursue, and within were living deities— 
the goddess of Envy, with all her deformity, the goddess 
of Charity with all her loveliness, and many others, each of 
whom received upon its altar the oblations of its votaries. 
The cloud then vanished, and I entered. I found my- 
self in a spacious hall about which were seated gods and 
goddesses representing the various objects which men in 
this town live for, each with its several attractions or de- 
formities. The first object which attracted my attention 
was the giant god Contention, at the farther end of the 
hall. His feet were shod with iron; his limbs were huge 
and brawny. He leaned upon a glittering falchion. His 
head towered nearly to the top of the hall. He was natu- 
rally pale and cadaverous but when excited red and florid. 
Ever and anon he cast his eyes toward the two oppugnant 
churches down on the hill with grim complacency. He was 
particularly fierce and active about the time of the fall 
elections, and often private broils seemed greatly to refresh 
him. Before him stood an altar on which those who adored 
him burned their offerings, and when the smoke shrouded 
the whole hall and reached his lofty nostrils he seemed 
greatly delighted, inasmuch as most of his votaries were 
members of the two militant churches and each laid his 
sacrifice upon the altar with imprecations on the other. 
Moreover, I learned that those sacrifices annually amounted 
to a sum which if rightly expended might pay the salary 
of one minister and support one church and pay the town 
officers, and that if politics were exterminated and the mili- 
tant churches were to smile again and assume their pristine 
friendship this mighty god would dwindle, pine away, and 
die. 
I looked about me for a certain humble little deity called 
Piety. At length I espied her, no bigger that a Lilliputian 
queen, sitting by one of the huge feet of the monster Con- 
tention. There was a wonderful gentleness and beauty in 
her languishing features. Her eyes though red with weep- 
ing were turned upwards. Her hands were clasped in de- 
votion, and a sweet smile mantled her face through her 
tears. She looked not on the present; her gaze was bent 
126 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
on the joyful future. And although no one can tell what 
she reads on its obscure pages, yet her heavenly aspect tells 
plainer than words that she sees there joy and peace and 
rest the world knows not of. Often she is hidden and 
nearly suffocated by the smoke from the altar of Conten- 
tion. Often his iron foot is raised to crush her frail form 
to the earth, and often the sword raised threateningly over 
her head. Yet she fears not, for her look is upward and 
onward and she knows in the end all will be well. Now 
and then came a suppliant with meager offering to lay upon 
her altar, but it was like the widow’s mite, small and given 
in poverty. Once she had been tall and vigorous, but as 
Contention grew up so strong and rampant by her side, 
she fainted and waned and her days seemed numbered unless 
the monster perished, for the smoke of his altar was to her 
deadly malaria. 
Near her I espied another humble goddess, Charity. 
Her countenance was lighted up with a wonderful benig- 
nancy as I entered, and although I had nothing to offer, 
my presence seemed to fill her with unspeakable delight. 
Her right hand was stretched imploringly for alms while 
her left pointed to the haggard goddess, Poverty. If sacri- 
fices were offered to any of her friends, Piety, Faith, Hope, 
Love, she was greatly delighted, but toward the god of 
Envy at the other side of the room she was filled with 
most implacable disgust. Some came up and with a great 
deal of ostentation threw into her hand jingling coin that 
all might see. But she scornfully rejected them, tossing 
them on the altar of Vanity nearby. 
Patriotism was a strange god. He seemed once to have 
been beautiful. But now his beauty was sadly degenerated. 
He was bloated and deformed and strangely decked with 
galoons and furbelows, gewgaws of every kind all worn 
and soiled, and though many offerings were piled on his 
altar most were rejected as counterfeit. At his left hand 
sat the goddess of Liberty to whom he had pledged himself 
and for whom he would fight like an ancient chevalier for 
his mistress. In his right hand he held a flashing sword, 
which seemed greatly to terrify the monster, Tyranny, the 
arch enemy of his fair mistress. This bloated Patriotism 
127 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
was a martial Patriotism, and he seemed to forget that he 
might live as well in peace as in war and hold the plow as 
well as the sword. Regiments of soldiers filed by to cast 
their noble offerings of life and ease upon his altar. What 
is that strange commotion about the doorway ? Ah, I have 
it. It is the female regiment. And now they enter in 
solid column, as solid as circumstances will admit. A huge 
gonfalon waved over their heads with the motto “Shame 
on Exempts.” Rosettes flutter from every part of their 
apparel. Martial ladies, old and young, march with steady 
tramp on toward the altar of Patriotism. The commander 
marches proudly at their head. Maids who never had a 
son or husband, married ladies whose sons are all daughters 
and whose husbands are exempt and whose friends are too 
old or too young, boast with stentorian voice that if they 
had twenty able sons or husbands all should go to the war. 
Clear voices and cracked voices respond in the chorus of 
“Red, White, and Blue” till the whole edifice creaks and 
trembles. Cavalry and infantry, with noble self-devotion, 
cast their offerings on the altar of their country’s god. 
But how shall I describe their consternation when the 
sprightly deity rejects them all as unsubstantial and worth- 
less, finding them to consist of a rosette, a bunch of lint, 
a miniature flag, a copy of the “Star Spangled Banner” 
and a few stale imprecations on exempts. But ’tis said that 
female regiment has melted away and that no traces of it 
now remain save in the mutterings of a few of the most 
masculine and infatuated of its members who yet groan 
and hiss at exempts. 
Nearby sat Avarice, his bony fingers clutching a few 
greasy coins and still grasping for more. Each new acqui- 
sition seemed but to increase his avidity. His eyes were 
sunken and his visage grim and ghastly. On his altar a 
few sacrificed their dwindled manhood and honesty. 
At the other side of the hall Intemperance presided over 
his altar. Here men sacrificed their property and manly 
virtues and yet the monster was inexorable and still with 
bloody eyes and bloated face and disheveled hair importuned 
his votaries for more of staunch and manly self-respect, 
more of dignity and virtue. Nearby Vanity with her 
128 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
butterfly attire received the vain oblation of a few of the 
gaudy sons of fashion. She had a very sycophantic and 
fawning aspect but was very beautiful withal. But her 
heart, like that of her followers, was a mass of corruption. 
I woke and the moon was filling my room with its silver 
beams. I sprang up and paced my apartment for some 
time before I could realize that I was really alive and that 
I was still in that pleasant world I had left the night be- 
fore. I would spare each one of you the sweat and agony 
by which that dream was wrought out; therefore let me 
implore you to give it no consideration. Let me beg of you 
not to be either offended or delighted at anything so flat 
as a dream. You know the consequences which befell the 
sons of Jacob because they even condescended to give their 
brother’s dream the consideration of a sneer. And let me 
entreat you not to be so silly as to be either glad, gloomy, 
pleased, or offended at anything so trivial, transitory, and 
awry as the stuff which dreams are made of. 
I print the above juvenile effusion for several 
reasons. It was, in a sense, an emergency product. 
I knew long beforehand that I had to read a “compo- 
sition” of my own at the evening exhibition that 
marked the close of the school year and had tried 
various themes which proved unsatisfactory and were 
discarded. As the date approached, there came the 
dreadful prospect of failure to do anything credit- 
able. Almost at the last moment the suggestion of 
the above came to and almost possessed me, and in 
setting down the substance of it, which needed only- 
revision and final rewriting and which I believe was 
done in an evening and night, I had my first experi- 
ence of something like an intellectual afflatus, so 
much so that I slept but little and was good for 
nothing the next day. I had hitherto almost no ex- 
perience with any kind of mental erethism so that it 
really marked the beginning of a series of many such 
experiences later when work had begun hard and been 
gradually accelerated and finally had done itself, often 
129 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
in very late hours of the night. Moreover, I would 
fain believe that I have inherited from my parents 
some degree of the knack, often remarked in both of 
them, of turning off work expeditiously when they 
had to, something for which my mother seemed almost 
to have a sleight of hand in all she did. Just as 
she was always saving steps, with the faculty of 
carrying and doing many things at the same time, 
my father, as noted above, was always insisting on 
easier and more efficient ways of doing things or, as 
he said, putting head work into hand work. 
As to the subject matter, I resented very pro- 
foundly the extravagances of the town brigade of 
women who suspected everybody of trying to get ex- 
emption for themselves and their friends from enter- 
ing the army, and I had long felt, even more strongly, 
the bitter and degrading antagonisms which attended 
the split in the church that divided so many families. 
Of these deeper perturbations, then, this screed was 
a kind of spindrift, a spindrift being, in a sense, as 
I have since been fond of pointing out, a symbol of 
consciousness itself. I most vividly remember, too, 
at the close of the evening a very revered, elderly man 
and his wife, who had made a competence in New 
York and retired to their native Ashfield to live, 
sought me out, and the lady shook my hand and said 
she liked my paper, while her husband said, “Perhaps 
you have done better than you know, and possibly you 
may sometime go far.” This was almost the first 
encouragement in this field I had ever had because 
my parents and relatives were always prone to dis- 
paragement and were critical and even derisive, fear- 
ing I should be guilty of the mortal sin of being 
“stuck up.” The sentence-sense, too, which is the 
mysterious psychological root of style, seems to have 
taken a certain form here which perhaps has always 
stood by me more or less. At any rate, I have always 
130 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
since felt less dread of emergencies, feeling somehow 
or other that I should be able to meet them. 
In these Freudian days any autobiographer, es- 
pecially if he be a man of science and most of all if 
he be a psychologist, would shirk his duty if, painful 
though it be, he did not write frankly upon at least 
certain aspects of the vita sexualis. I am further 
impelled to the following confessional in the hope that 
it may contain some germ of moral value if only by 
way of warning. 
On a farm one sees much of sex among domestic 
animals. As a very small boy I had to keep account 
of the ewes and older sheep that had been reddened 
by the madder daily rubbed under the forequar- 
ters of the buck hired for a week or two to run with 
the flock till all were covered, a process I often saw 
long before I knew its meaning. I always drove the 
sows, often miles, to the boar and was given detailed 
instructions as to what I must see done and how. 
This also began in the age of innocence but continued 
beyond it. I was never kept from seeing all this re- 
lation among cattle and even horses. This often 
caused, in later years at home, an excitement from 
which I should have been shielded. Again, I often 
saw and not infrequently helped in the castration of 
pigs, lambs, calves, and colts, an operation in which 
one of my uncles was a local expert. 
As a child the only name for a certain part of the 
body, which I long supposed was its proper and 
adopted designation, was “the dirty place” for this 
phrase was applied to nothing else. I knew no other 
name until I went to school, where I was greatly 
shocked by the obscenities that prevailed and where 
these parts were much shown, talked of, compared, and 
experimented with. My father occasionally went in 
swimming with us and once or twice took occasion to 
give us crude admonitions on sex hygiene. The thing 
131 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
that sunk deepest was his story of a youth who abused 
himself and sinned with lewd women and as a result 
had a disease that ate his nose away until there were 
only two flat holes in his face for nostrils and who 
also became an idiot. For a long time, if I had any 
physical excitation or nocturnal experience I was 
almost petrified lest I was losing my brains and care- 
fully examined the bridge of my nose to see if it was 
getting the least bit flat. I understood that any one 
who swerved in the slightest from the norm of purity 
was liable to be smitten with some loathsome disease 
which I associated with leprosy and with the “un- 
pardonable sin” which the minister often dwelt upon. 
So great was my dread of natural phenomena that 
in the earliest teens I rigged an apparatus and applied 
bandages to prevent erethism while I slept, which very 
likely only augmented the trouble. If I yielded to 
any kind of temptation to experimentation upon my- 
self I suffered intense remorse and fear, and sent up 
many a secret and most fervent prayer that I might 
never again break my resolve. At one time I feared 
I was abnormal and found occasion to consult a physi- 
cian in a neighboring town who did not know me. He 
examined me and took my dollar, and laughed at me, 
but also told me what consequences would ensue if 
I became unchaste. What an untold anguish of soul 
would have been saved me if some one had told me that 
certain experiences while I slept were as normal for 
boys in their teens as are the monthly phenomena for 
girls. I did not know that even in college and thought 
myself secretly and exceptionally corrupt and not 
quite worthy to associate with girls. This had prob- 
ably much, if not most, to do with my abstention 
from them and was, I think, the chief factor that 
brought about my “conversion” in my sophomore 
year, although this made the struggle for purity far 
more intense, though I fear but little more successful. 
132 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
I fear the good Lord on whom I was told, and 
tried, to cast my burden did not help me much here. 
Indeed, perhaps in transferring and committing all 
to Him I trusted my own powers less. Perhaps, 
again, my profound sense of inferiority here prompted 
me to compensate by striving all the harder for ex- 
cellence in other lines, although there was always a 
haunting sense that if I succeeded in making any- 
thing of myself it would be despite this private handi- 
cap. I should certainly never dare to marry and have 
children. It was ineffable relief, therefore, to learn, 
as I did only far too late, that my life in this sphere 
had, on the whole, been in no sense abnormal or even 
exceptional. 
I can think of only Tolstoi who by his unusual 
frankness in the story of his life has to this degree 
defied conventional prudery or refused to yield to the 
instincts of repression here. 
The morals of my first Worthington school were, 
without exception, the “rottenest” I have ever heard 
of, although I have for many years been interested 
in sex perversions and have seen many disgusting 
revelations of things that went on in reform schools 
and many other places. Homosexuality, exhibition- 
ism, fellatio, onanism, relations with animals, and 
almost every form of perversion described by Tar- 
nowski, Krafft-Ebbing or Havelock Ellis, existed in 
this school. Once an older girl, when we chanced to 
be under a bridge by the brook, exposed herself to me. 
It was common for the older boys to catch us younger 
ones, unless we were fleet enough to outrun them, and 
to strip and exhibit us to older boys and even girls. 
Several couples were caught in flagranti. There was 
every kind of obscene word, tale, and cut, and things 
utterly indescribable—and I hope and believe incred- 
dible—were done for two or three years at this school. 
There were so-called French cards, apparently inno- 
133 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
cent but transparent when held up to the light, with 
obscenities, and various indecent pamphlets and leaf- 
lets were surreptitiously circulated. I have always 
felt it fortunate that although I saw and heard so 
much that was vile I was too young, “under twelve,” 
to be personally corrupted by it save in thought. 
The fons et origo of it all was one of the older 
and also mentally brilliant boys whose grandfather 
seems to have initiated him into every manner of 
lewdness. I think there were two families who sent 
children here that must have been more or less de- 
generate, as, indeed, the subsequent career of its 
members indicated. One much older boy attempted 
to bribe and then to force me to do an indecent thing, 
which I refused. My father somehow got a hint of 
it, or possibly saw something of it at a distance, and 
took this young man into the barn, from which I 
distinctly remember hearing his loud cries and groans 
as he was being thrashed. One, and I think two, of 
the older girls had to leave school, and it was rumored 
had escaped maternity by medical means. I do not 
think any of us, even the younger boys, ever dared 
or else were too modest to tell our parents so that 
I have no idea that they knew anything about these 
iniquitous practices. It is remarkable, too, that the 
ringleader of it all later married, became a prosperous 
and wealthy citizen, and I met his two rather beautiful 
and accomplished daughters just after they were 
graduated from college. Only one other of the leaders 
in these debaucheries seems to have successfully 
raised a family. In none of the other six schools that 
1 attended was there anything whatever of this kind, 
and so far as I know the morals of all those in Ash- 
field was in this respect entirely irreproachable. 
My first love affair had for its object a girl half 
a dozen years older than I who attended the academy 
for several terms with me. I thought her beautiful 
134 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
and admired all her acts and ways. She was popular 
with the older boys, and one in particular always 
accompanied her on school excursions and often took 
her to rides. I particularly hated him and took many 
ways of venting my spite upon him—putting crooked 
pins in his seat, throwing down and wiping my feet 
on his coat and hat as they hung in the closet, and 
was once caught dropping something on his head from 
the roof of the piazza above, for which he gave me 
a severe drubbing. I was conscious of this girl in 
all I did in her presence and did many idiotic things 
to “show off,” once tackling a far bigger boy because 
I thought she was looking and coming to grief there- 
for. Once or twice I placed dainties in her desk, but 
I almost never dared to speak to her and she probably 
never dreamed of my devotion. She later became the 
mother of a large family and I often saw her on her 
summer visits to the town. 
The next and only other juvenile craze of this 
kind was toward a girl of my own age, and this, too, 
lasted for several years. But, again, I hardly ever 
dared to address her, far less to accompany her home 
from the evening exercises, but was always interested 
in her career until she died a few years ago, with 
never a dream that she had been my idol. 
I may add here that I think I was always rather 
a boy’s boy and a man’s man, for during my social life 
at Williston and later at Williams and the profes- 
sional school in New York I never called on a young 
lady or even had more than the most passing acquaint- 
ance with one. In this respect I was, I know, very 
exceptional among my classmates. 
Modern psychology attaches great importance to 
the child’s first acquaintance with death, and as I 
hark back to my past I find that although death en- 
tered my own family very late I had some unusually 
close and early experiences with it. It was customary 
135 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
in the town where I lived for people who were very- 
sick to have two watchers outside the family, and 
very often one of these was a schoolboy or girl. Thus 
when I was in the early teens it so happened that in 
performing this office for a schoolmate the latter died 
in the night and it was my duty to help ‘day out the 
corpse,” which we did on a long board and left in 
the parlor near a window, covered with a sheet. We 
then retired to the kitchen to our little “bunks” on the 
floor. The fat man with me fell into a sound sleep, 
which my fancy was too riotous to permit me to do. 
Suddenly a noise like a groan, with a long crescendo 
and diminuendo, was heard from the direction of the 
parlor. Words cannot describe my horror and I 
awoke my companion. We both heard it several times 
and he was, I think, even more alarmed than I. We 
investigated the corpse, which had not moved, but 
still heard the horrible noise. At length we mustered 
courage to investigate further and found that it came 
from a bumblebee that had crawled under one of the 
thin dry weather-worn clapboards just outside the 
window. 
Some years after this, in performing a similar 
office alone for an elderly neighbor who was mortally 
ill and who also died in the night, I undertook, with 
what courage I could muster, to perform the function 
of “laying him out” by myself without rousing the 
family. I did it with the single mishap that the board 
raised on the two chairs, by which the very heavy 
corpse was supported, broke and I had to find my 
way to the shed and obtain two others to replace it. 
My horror was greatly increased by the fact that 
when the crash occurred the body, from which life 
had been extinct for half an hour, gave a groan as 
if he were really alive. I do not know why, but during 
my teens, perhaps because I was good-natured and 
sympathetic, I was repeatedly called upon to serve 
136 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
at such occasions, and my uncle, who loved gruesome 
jokes, thought that I was made for an undertaker. 
I remember, too, when the village drunkard fell some 
fifteen feet olf an abutment by a bridge, crushing 
his skull, it was my fortune to be the first to discover 
him the next day and again to perform these func- 
tions, as I was called upon to do much later for both 
my father and my mother. 
When my brother, a young clergyman, was dying 
of pneumonia and I agonizingly asked him if he could 
not possibly rally and throw it off, he replied that 
he could not but was dying. He roused himself 
sufficiently to give each one at his bedside a parting 
word, almost at the last moment, and I shall always 
remember that his admonition to me was to “be mind- 
ful of all that is good.” 
For several years at the very dawn of puberty I 
fancied my heart was not doing its duty, an experi- 
ence we now know to be quite common at the time 
when growth of the circulatory system is rapid and 
the heart and the caliber of the large blood vessels 
near it do not always keep pace with each other. 
Scores of nights I went to sleep with my finger upon 
my pulse, which occasionally skipped a beat, and 
imagined I should be found dead in my bed in the 
morning in ways I had read of. The infant prayer, 
which I must have said at least until schooling began, 
“If I should die before I wake” was associated with 
gruesome fancies. A schoolmate who suffered a vio- 
lent attack of epilepsy in which he was carried out 
screaming from the church during the long prayer 
by the minister was another awful warning, and so 
were the revival sermons which represented life as 
being hung by a hair from which we might at any 
moment drop into eternity. Young’s “Night Thoughts” 
was a book from which my mother often read aloud, 
and the “Thanatopsis” of W. C. Bryant, to whom she 
137 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
had been to school, was one of the earliest things I 
had to memorize. The thought of death, too, per- 
vades the Westminster catechism, for memorizing 
the seventy-two points of which I received, when I 
was eleven, a decorated diploma which I still have. 
There was another very marked phenomenon 
which I think must have been due to some kind of 
abnormality in my psychic make-up that followed me 
for years, perhaps up to the time I was ten or twelve. 
When looking, for instance, at a window, it seemed 
to rock, perhaps due to imperfect and alternating 
focalization; and connected somehow in my mind with 
this, but perhaps due to a psychologically different 
cause, was the fact that I found myself, when some- 
thing was happening in which I was interested, look- 
ing at some utterly irrelevant object and sometimes 
thinking and often even uttering the word “by” as 
if there were some imperative association of the seri- 
ous event which occupied me with a trivial irrelevancy 
of sense. Was it that rank associations were trying 
to form themselves and because there were no natural 
connections one was forced upon me? In this way 
a reproof of my father became associated with a 
crack in a windowpane, etc. 
When I was sixteen, after appearing before the 
three members of the school committee and passing 
their oral examination and receiving a written certif- 
icate of competence, I was engaged to teach my first 
school in an outlying district of the town called Chapel 
Falls. The building was large and one half of it was 
used for religious service while the other half was the 
school. It was beautifully located near a deep gorge 
through which flowed a small stream with many falls 
and deep pools and above which towered “horse-neck 
rock,” from which a horse was said to have fallen to 
his death. It was a winter term and there must be 
a man teacher because the older boys came in, some- 
138 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
times up to the age of twenty-one. Half a dozen 
of my pupils were older than I, and two or three had 
been fellow schoolmates at the Academy. It was, 
therefore, with great trepidation that I began entering 
their names in the register, from which the roll always 
had to be called the first thing in the morning, and 
organized the classes. The oldest girl was twenty- 
four and had herself taught school for several terms. 
She came now to begin Latin and to improve her 
knowledge of Algebra. I think it was owing to her 
kindly influence that I had none of the anticipated 
trouble in discipline, and everything passed so 
smoothly that I remember very few incidents. 
I boarded around so many nights to the scholar, 
and as I trudged home every Friday night the burden 
of keeping me was thus less when the number of 
nights in the term was divided by the number of 
scholars. Occasionally I had to invite myself, but 
usually the time was set by the parents and generally 
followed butchering day, for the teacher lived on the 
fat of the land and I think there was often competition 
as to who should set the best table. I was often asked 
how many nights per scholar I should impose upon 
them and as there was in fact a fraction, I was often 
generously and jocosely told that I need not get up 
in the middle of the night, because it was three days 
and a half per pupil, for they would gladly take the 
extra half. Thus I became acquainted with the family 
life of every pupil, best so, of course, with the larger 
families. Occasionally the pupils would ask me in 
the evening to help them with some difficult sum. 
Very commonly before retiring refreshments were 
served—a big milk pan of popcorn, butternuts, cider 
and apples, etc. The teacher was given the best bed 
but the room was always cold, and I often found the 
bed warmed either by a well-wrapped soapstone for 
the feet or by a warming pan, while the sheets were 
139 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
generally of flannel, and the “ticks” were always made 
of feathers and all covered by a counterpane. 
One day I sent one of the older girls to do an 
example on the board, and instead she began to write 
in a strange way which I thought meant insubordi- 
nation and so sent her to her seat. She came to school 
no more but soon afterwards, when I came to board 
at her house, I was told that this act in school marked 
the development of her power as a spiritual medium, 
and evenings she went into a trance and wrote me 
messages from several of my dead relatives. She 
afterwards became a speaking medium of consider- 
able note in the county. 
This was an unusually severe winter and twice, 
at least, after blizzards it was impossible even for me 
to reach the schoolhouse because the roads were un- 
broken. Here I democratically took my turn with the 
older boys in building the morning fire. Once we ran 
out of wood and school had to be omitted for the day 
until the contractor could supply it. 
A few of the older and brighter pupils were really 
more advanced than I in mathematical ability and I 
had to work secretly, after I had supposedly gone to 
bed, to puzzle out and explain a few of the more diffi- 
cult examples. In one case I made a secret pilgrimage 
one night to my aunt, two miles away, who told me 
how to solve a problem which was beyond my own 
powers, and I finally fortified myself with a printed 
“key” explaining how the harder sums were done. 
The next term I was engaged to teach at the oppo- 
site end of the town in a school that was considered 
very hard to manage. There were some forty pupils 
of all ages. Here my first problem was three large 
boys who had ensconced themselves in the back seats 
against the wall and defiantly chewed tobacco, with 
copious spitting all over the floor. Although I was in- 
formed that this had been allowed I held that it must 
140 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
be stopped. I said nothing, however, for the first few 
days but one night tramped four miles to see if the 
chairman of the school committee would sustain me if 
I attempted to stop it. He refused to commit himself, 
but another member of the committee promised to 
stand by me. The next night, therefore, at the close 
of school I announced that, by the authority of the 
committee, chewing tobacco in school hours would no 
longer be permitted. I knew this meant trouble. Next 
morning only one of the chewers defiantly bit off a 
piece of his plug and began to chew before me. The 
crisis was here and I saw that I must break the habit 
or leave the school. He was a very slender and tall, 
slouchy, sickly stripling of twenty-one, and when I 
reminded him of the last evening’s prohibition and 
told him to stop chewing he insolently and loudly bade 
me “go to hell.” This angered me, and casting the 
program I had planned aside I rushed up the aisle, 
seized him with both hands by the collar, jerked him 
forward so suddenly that the desk in front of him fell 
over, dragged him down the aisle and across the floor, 
out of the room into the shed, and told him he should 
not come back until he promised to comply with this 
new rule. He was somewhat cowed but did not at- 
tempt to come back, and finally strolled off toward 
home. The two other chewers might have attacked 
me and thrown me out, and probably would have done 
so if I had acted less suddenly. As it was, they re- 
mained in their seats although at recess one of them 
went home, to come back the next day with a letter 
from his father saying that his son had chewed for 
years and I had no right to forbid him. I insisted 
that I could not break this rule and he should not, and 
after a few days both returned and there was no 
further trouble with discipline on this or any other 
score. On the contrary, these young men became my 
ardent friends and supporters. For many years after, 
141 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
when I occasionally met the one I dragged out, who 
became a baggage master in the railroad station near- 
est Ashfield, his universal greeting was always remi- 
niscent of what he called my thrashing and the good 
it had done him. His and the other parents, when 
my turn came to board there, seemed to have lost all 
their hostility and were rather effusive in their assur- 
ance that they always backed up the teacher. 
Here there were twin girls in the earliest teens 
who were so exactly alike that I never was able to 
tell them apart, and they used to play mild pranks upon 
me because of this inability. In one family there were 
four girls bearing the names Leonora Clarissa, 
Sophronia Malissa, Isadoria Orissa, and Philoria 
Felicia, all bright, attractive girls and almost as alike 
as their names. The two last or youngest went to 
school to me with their still younger brother, and the 
older sisters occasionally came in. In this district 
there was a far more active secular life and a great 
many dances, parties, sleigh rides, spelling schools, 
and evening “rhetoricals,” at one of which I spouted 
as my contribution a few paragraphs of Cicero’s ora- 
tion against Catiline in Latin, to the befuddlement of 
the groundlings. Very often in the evenings the 
parents where I boarded would go away to some of 
these gatherings after supper and leave me in charge 
of the younger children. In one case I was the sole 
occupant of the house with a young baby who, the 
mother assured me, would not wake up. But it did, 
and I did everything possible to stop its crying. But 
in vain until the happy thought struck me that the 
big bass viol in the corner that the father played 
might soothe it. It did, for when the parents came 
home I was found playing it to a silent, wide-eyed 
infant in the cradle. This was remembered and was 
often repeated to me for decades. 
Here, toward the latter part of the term, I became 
142 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
so popular that I ventured, against the advice of my 
parents, to play games with the boys at recess and 
during the noon hour after we had eaten our dinner, 
and found no difficulty in modulating from playmate 
to teacher when I rang the bell. 
It was in this school that I first noticed the pre- 
valence of fads.13 One older popular girl would come 
to school with spit curls and before noon all would 
have them. Then came parting the hair on one side, 
wearing a bow in some unusual way, certain expres- 
sions which were taken up and spread through the 
school like wildfire, etc. There was a bookmark fad, 
too. The girls in this school slightly outnumbered the 
boys and were somewhat flirtatious, and one or two 
were prone to make slight advances toward the school- 
master. But although I had very decided preferences 
I had always been warned that it was fatal to show 
these, and I believe I never did. To my great delight 
I was asked later to try another term at this school, 
but did not do so. 
This winter was one of several in which I attended 
a singing school held in the village Friday nights, 
usually conducted by a local chorister although some- 
times others were brought in by a committee and occa- 
sionally one came as a private venture, holding schools 
for a small fee, perhaps a dozen evenings. A concert 
was given at the close for which admission was 
charged and generally packed the old church. Where 
home talent only was employed the singing was almost 
entirely religious, with sometimes rather difficult “set 
pieces,” while in the other schools secular music found 
a place. 
I have always been grateful not only that my early 
life was passed in the country and on a farm but in 
18 See M. H. Small: “The Suggestibility of Children,” Ped. Sem., 
4:186 (1896). 
143 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
a community where life was close to nature and the 
simple virtues of industry, frugality, and clean living 
were taught and exemplified. Obscure as most of my 
relatives here were, it affords me much satisfaction 
to record that I never heard of a Hall in town (and 
they constituted perhaps one fourth of the popula- 
tion) who ever committed a crime, was the subject of 
any scandal or, so far as I know, was guilty of a 
sharp or dishonest dealing of any kind. There were 
no quarrels and they never went to law. They all 
lived by hard work and, as my uncle used to say, he 
doubted if any of them ever got a dishonest dollar. 
Most of them placed morality above religion although 
giving certain deference to the latter. Few were 
pietists, although most of my remoter relatives of 
whom I have learned who did enter a profession chose 
the ministry, while none of them became missionaries, 
although nearly all in town always felt it their duty 
to make modest and often stated contributions to this 
cause. 
As I read over the above I realize that it at least 
illustrates an old man’s tendency to indulge in remi- 
niscence and anecdotage. It shows, too, the reversion- 
ary-tendencies that I suppose are normal and even 
inveterate at my time of life. I do not think that at 
any earlier period I could have taken the pleasure in 
recalling or the pains to set down these items as I 
have now done. I realize that many if not most of 
them are trivial and commonplace but they do illus- 
trate the kind of boy life once common in this country 
but now gone forever, so rapidly have circumstances 
changed since my early days. But no genetic psychol- 
ogist ever before attempted a frank autobiography 
or, indeed, any at all, although above all others he 
should strive for that highest kind of self-knowledge 
that comes from the careful objective and impersonal 
study of the developmental stages of his own psycho- 
144 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
physic personality which I think are pretty well 
marked in my own life. 
Whether I owe more to heredity, glimpsed in 
Chapter II, or to early environment, which this chap- 
ter sketches, it would be as idle to discuss as would the 
problem of the innate or acquired traits which have 
occupied so much of the history of philosophy from 
Locke to Spencer, or of preformation by germ plasm 
versus epigenesis which biologists since Weismann 
and Hertwig have so hotly debated. Of these two 
views it may be said, as the theologians said of the 
relations between the Old Testament and the New, in 
the first the last lay concealed and in the last the 
first stands revealed. 
Individuality, if not more developed in the country 
than in the city, is less veiled by conventionalities so 
that basal traits are more apparent, and the relations 
between adults and children are closer so that the 
latter know more of human nature and even develop 
attitudes toward most of the grown-ups in their en- 
vironment, as in Ashfield many of these also came 
to do toward me. I heard all of them discussed and 
a rather complex system of likes and dislikes, now the 
one and now the other predominating, was thus 
evolved towards not a few individuals in the commu- 
nity. This is less the case with boys in larger places 
where there are more children and where their in- 
terests are more restricted and absorbed in those of 
their own age. There were far fewer children there 
than when my father, and still less than when my 
grandfather, was young, and this disproportion still 
further lessened age segregation. ' 
I must have been a rather unusually active young- 
ster in mind and body and this of course made for 
a wider surface of contact with both men and things. 
Thus before I left home both my character and views 
of life were in some respects beginning to take definite 
145 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
shape. I should have stiffened in the mold had I not 
molted the old environment, for this prevented pre- 
mature inspissation and made me plastic again and 
susceptible to new influences. Had I spent my early 
years in a larger place with a wider horizon and with 
thus a less complete orientation to my surroundings 
I should have been less ripened for transplantation. 
Ashfield, Easthampton, Williams, New York and the 
professional school, and then Europe—each involving 
a change into a wider field, gave me always at first a 
deep sense of insufficiency if not of inferiority and 
so kept me docile, and yet gave a sense of progress 
for each transition fitted more or less my psycholog- 
ical age and brought new incentives. Had I been 
born in or suddenly thrust into opportunities that were 
so large for me that I could not improve or even 
appreciate them, or had I grown up in an environment 
too vast and complex to be grasped, my life would 
have less nearly recapitulated the evolutionary history 
of the human race and there would have been more 
waste and misfit. But as it was, ontogeny did in a 
rather rare sense epitomize phylogeny. 
Hence just as in reviewing my family and for- 
bears I grew not only reconciled to but proud of my 
pedigree, so now in reenvisaging my boyhood and 
home life I have come to think it fortunate that it 
was rural, amidst straitened circumstances, simple, 
and among homely but genuine people. Hence I should 
not be surprised if, when we know more of paidology 
and pedagogy and understand better the laws of the 
development of character and disposition, the condi- 
tions of my early life or their psychokinetic equiva- 
lents would be found to have been not far from the 
ideally best for the unfolding of the higher powers 
of man in early years. Thus this survey brings to 
me a new complacency. The best that could have been 
is, after all, not so very far at variance with what 
146 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
was, as I have always before felt it to be. Thus I 
am not only more reconciled to my boyhood and early 
home than I have ever been able to feel before but I 
am pretty well convinced that for me, at least, most 
of its features and circumstances (not, however, 
without a few definite xeservations) were about the 
best possible, and that many conditions I had grown 
into the habit of deploring and wishing could have 
been otherwise, had they been changed as I desired 
would have meant loss and perhaps disaster. We 
read of late very much about repressions which dwarf 
childhood and distort and pervert it, and thus many 
adults have come to feel a kind of self-pity for them- 
selves, regretting the powers that were aborted or 
thwarted in them. But in my childhood I am con- 
vinced that there was vastly more incentive than re- 
pression and that most of such abilities as I was en- 
dowed with have had a development well up toward 
the maximum of my capacity. Fully flowered indi- 
viduation in this life saps the root of desire for a 
life beyond the grave so that the above may be at 
least one psychokinetic cause of my growing indif- 
ference to or doubt of personal immortality, just as, 
on the other hand, my parents* sense of arrest here 
may have increased the tenacity with which they clung 
to their faith in the life beyond. This, however, was 
less strong in them in their later years, partly perhaps 
because it found vicarious expression in the fact that 
their children were doing well, as they felt they had 
not done. Had we all fallen by the way they would have 
found more compensation in their personal hopes of 
heaven, according to laws I have tried to set forth 
elsewhere.14 Perhaps they loved and lived in and for 
us too much. 
This thought brings me to an incident of the ut- 
14 See my Senescence, p. 478 et seq. 
147 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
most moment for all my subsequent life, one which 
I would fain leave unrecorded but which, as I have 
set out to be honest and unreserved, I must not omit, 
painful as is the memory of it. It occurred not long 
before I left home. I was not quite old enough to be 
drafted or to enlist in the army during our Civil War, 
which a number of my older schoolmates did. As the 
war dragged on, my father took me one day to a 
government physician who had opened an office in 
town and had him examine my knee, which I had 
badly sprained and abraded. He greatly frightened 
me by saying that I was in danger of having a “white 
swelling’’ or “water on the knee,” which was con- 
siderably inflamed. I thought it strange that I had 
not been taken to our family doctor whom we all re- 
spected and loved. Only later, and in a very morti- 
fying way, did I learn that as a result of this exami- 
nation my father, on payment of a large fee, had 
taken out for me a certificate of exemption from 
military service on the ground of this injury, which 
proved to be very temporary and left no trace. Still 
more humiliating later came the knowledge that not 
long after this he had also hired a “substitute” for 
me for three hundred dollars in case I should be 
drafted, as I was approaching the age of liability for 
army service. The last draft, however, occurred be- 
fore I had reached the required age and I do not know 
whether the above sum was ever actually paid. 
The term “an exempt” was one of great reproach 
and it stung and rankled. How I reacted to it is seen 
in the later part of the above composition. My father 
was taunted for “loving his son more than he did his 
country” and writhed under the accusation. These 
censures were severe by neighbors and particularly 
by relatives who had sent their sons, and were bitter- 
est of all by those whose sons had died in the service. 
In some cases this alienated families which had been 
148 CHILDHOOD AND BOY LIFE 
friends for years. But my father should not bear 
the blame alone for I must frankly confess that I was 
a coward at heart in this matter. My imagination 
was too strong and active and I pictured every sort 
of horror in battle and hardship in camp. Had I gone, 
either my name would now be enrolled among those 
who died for their country on the modest soldiers’ 
monument where farmers now water their horses in 
the village or else I should have been a whole or 
wounded veteran, and “oh, the difference to me!” 
True, I tried to enlist surreptitiously at last, largely 
probably because goaded, stung, and ashamed. To 
make my confession complete, I have never since been 
able, on the whole, to wish I had gone. 
This experience has always been, I think, the very 
sorest of all my memories but it has also been a tre- 
mendous stimulus to atone by service, so that it is 
not too much to say that there has been something 
like a penance motif in all my efforts ever since. The 
fact that although able-bodied I did not answer my 
country’s call has also, to some extent, affected all 
my views about our Civil War, its issues, its leaders 
and heroes, about the carpet-bag regime that followed, 
my feeling toward the south, where I have often been 
on lecture tours, about nationalism, patriotism, and 
war and peace. Even with the best of will no training 
could have ever made me a good soldier, inheriting 
as I do my mother’s dread of conflict. Perhaps with 
my temperament I might have started a stampede in 
battle, although I could never have become a deserter. 
In his course my father was doubtless largely influ- 
enced by my mother. He longed to enlist himself but 
was too old. He was a born fighter, a passionate 
abolitionist, made war speeches at prayer meetings 
and in public, imploring the blessing of Heaven upon 
Lincoln and the northern army, refused to meet a 
slaveholder who spent his summers in Ashfield, and 
149 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
later grew almost bitter toward Lincoln because he 
so long delayed to free the slaves and finally did so 
only as a war measure. Besides the three weekly 
newspapers diligently read, mostly aloud, our life was 
little affected by the war and, strange as it may seem, 
I really heard and knew much less of it after entering 
college than at home. There we had a collection of 
rude portraits of some two hundred generals and 
others whom the war brought into prominence and 
we knew something about them all. But I do not 
remember ever having heard an address or even a 
sermon on war either at Williston or at Williams and 
I have never read a history of our Civil War, although 
I have bought and begun several. I think that the 
above painful experience may have obliterated my 
memories of it and made the perusal of it painful, 
illustrating the strong unconscious tendency to evict 
what is unpleasant from consciousness. Hence, 
although I have done a good deal of reading in his- 
tory, especially of the wars during my life—the Cri- 
mean, Franco-Prussian, the Boer War, and that with 
Spain—there is a gap here. It was this war that came 
closer home, I think, than even the Great War lately 
ended. Thus here for the most part only juvenile 
impressions, unrevised and unenlarged, remain. CHAPTER IV 
MY SECONDARY AND HIGHER EDUCATION IN 
THIS COUNTRY 
Williston Seminary: impressions, influences, and work there— 
Williams College: studies, professors, and their influence, 
particularly Perry and Bascom—Classmates—The “Junto”: 
its members and work—Emerson—The beauties of nature 
there—Religiosity of the institution—The personality and sys- 
tem of Mark Hopkins, his great influence upon graduates and 
his cult—Ashfield—Charles Eliot Norton and his group—The 
academy dinners—Union Theological Seminary and its work 
—Seeing life in New York City—The theater, etc.—Modes of 
earning money—Cowdersport—Henry Ward Beecher and the 
debt of European study I owe him. 
When I was seventeen I left home, not perma- 
nently, however, because vacations were spent there 
through all the later stages of my education, and after 
I was settled in life there were visits every summer 
when I was in this country until both my parents 
died. It was at last definitely decided that I should 
go to college, as my mother had always wished, and 
to this plan my father finally acquiesced. Accord- 
ingly I was packed off to Williston Seminary at East- 
hampton, Massachusetts, only some twenty-four miles 
away and yet involving, as I well remember, my first 
ride on the cars. Here I entered the senior class of 
1863 in the classical department, which numbered 
forty-one students, three of whom were girls and all 
fitting for college. This was to me a radically new 
stage of life. I was probably the most backward of 
my class at the beginning and I had never had a single 
schoolmate who, so far as I know, ever dreamed of 
151 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
an education higher than that which the Ashfield 
schools afforded. Moreover, the social status of my 
classmates here was, on the whole, much higher than 
anything I had ever known. Many of them were 
young gentlemen who had seen much of the world, 
who were somewhat traveled and came from distant 
parts of the country, and most had a savoir faire 
which I entirely lacked. 
In Ashfield I had become a rather marked young- 
ster, was thought to be promising by a goodly circle 
of friends, and had developed some complacency 
even in my “clothes consciousness.,, But at East- 
hampton I found myself not only at or near the very 
bottom of the class but thrown into association with 
young men somewhat older. They were greatly my 
superiors in scholarship, looks, dress, deportment, ex- 
perience, ability in debating, in writing, and perhaps 
above all their characters were well developed and 
their individualities very marked, and some of them 
even had peculiarities that were generally accepted. 
The seniors in the classical department of a school of 
this kind were very conscious of their superiority to 
pupils in the larger English department or in the 
lower classes; so much so that on becoming freshmen 
in college it was necessary for them to essentially 
change their attitude and discard much of their 
dignity. 
I felt intensely self-conscious as with my heavy 
black enameled cloth valise, which contained all I had 
brought, I was landed at the door of the boarding 
hall and, after living a day or two with an uncle in 
town, was assigned a room in the dormitory. Every- 
thing was strange and new, but I fortunately found 
a distant acquaintance who had been there before and 
who helped me through the initial stages of adjust- 
ment. One of the teachers of Greek, Richards, a 
brilliant and recent valedictorian of Amherst, had, as 
152 SECONDARY AND HIGHER EDUCATION 
I have said, been to school to my mother and had also 
taught me in a district school when I was young, and 
he befriended and counseled me. 
The work to which I had to give myself here was 
almost entirely Latin and Greek, the Algebra and 
Geometry required for admission to college needing 
but little time. The requirements for admission, as 
I remember them, were six books of Caesar’s Com- 
mentaries, four orations of Cicero, four books of the 
Aeneid, with some of the Eclogues and Bucolics, 
several books of the Anabasis, and four of the Iliad. 
All of this was not required for entrance to all col- 
leges but the Williston standard was high, and stu- 
dents must be fitted for Harvard and Yale as well 
as for institutions which admitted on less. Much of 
this work was review for my classmates who had 
spent one, two, or three preceding years there but it 
was new to me. I never worked harder. It was the 
last year of the presidency of that remarkable man 
and teacher, Josiah Clark, assisted by M. F. Dickin- 
son and several others. The instructor opened a little 
box with tiny slips of cardboard on which the names 
of the class were written, shuffled them, and selected 
one student at random to march out to the high- 
standing desk before the class, on which was a clean 
copy of the text which he must use. This he had to 
pronounce, translate, and he must answer questions 
regarding its construction and meaning. My dread 
of this was prolonged for weeks before my turn came 
and I suspected “Prex” of “tempering the wind to 
the shorn lamb” by not calling me to this ordeal for 
a long time and being very gentle with me the first 
time I blundered through and took my seat in utter 
confusion. “Ponies” and Bohn’s Translation were 
in vogue but I had vowed I would never use one and 
did not, although I now believe a judicious use of them 
would have greatly facilitated my knowledge. But it 
153 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
was bad form in this school. Perhaps I was unwise 
to resist this temptation. 
The moral tone here was, to the best of my knowl- 
edge, ideal. The worst suspicion cherished against 
any classmate was that he sometimes secretly smoked 
in his room. Sundays the school marched in pro- 
cession to the village church, the seniors always taking 
precedence. I remember little of these exercises save 
that occasionally we heard Julius Seeley, president of 
Amherst, and on one Sunday the pulpit was filled by 
his younger brother, Clark, who had just come home 
from Europe with all the eclat of foreign study and 
who seemed to me the highest embodiment of all my 
ideals. All that he said has vanished, but the im- 
pression of his personality then and there made upon 
me was indelible. He was the future distinguished 
first president and co-founder of Smith College, and 
a man whose acquaintance I have since enjoyed and, 
in common with all who knew him, have always held 
in the greatest reverence. 
There was a weekly debate which took place, with 
other exercises, in a room set apart for it. I simply 
marveled at the facility with which difficult subjects 
were treated by classmates like Spellman, Herrick, and 
E. Root, who after a year’s brilliant apprenticeship to 
Helmholtz, became a professor of physics at Amherst 
and was prematurely cut off by death near the outset 
of what doubtless would have been a most eminent 
career. Graves, the valedictorian, did not shine here 
but one or two of the men lowest in scholarship 
did. I never mustered courage to hear my own voice 
for I felt that I had everything to learn and never 
could begin to equal my classmates, the least compe- 
tent of whom I envied. All I had known and done 
before seemed as nothing, and I now feel that I must 
have been allowed to stay only by sufferance of the 
authorities. The address at commencement, which 
154 SECONDARY AND HIGHER EDUCATION 
to me was the most dazzling event in my life thus 
far, was given by a young man, Francis Walker, also 
lately from European studies, who later became presi- 
dent of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 
I could comprehend but little of what he said but felt 
that it was a masterly effort. I value very highly 
the slight acquaintance I had with him later for he 
was more than once a guest at my house in subse- 
quent years. 
At Williston I never attempted to write anything 
save translations of all the classic authors we had 
there, and these were copious and are still preserved. 
Fortunately we used here the same grammars in both 
Greek and Latin that I had begun with in the Ashfield 
Academy—Goodwin’s, and Andrews and Stoddard’s 
respectively. I did not graduate because in mathe- 
matics my rank was with the middle or lower class. 
Strange to say, I never visited Williston again until 
the seventy-fifth anniversary of the school in 1917, 
at which I delivered the anniversary address on “Some 
Aspects of the War.” I did, however, later enjoy 
some acquaintance with E. A. Hubbard, who taught 
there for decades after I left, and with M. F. Dickin- 
son, who became a distinguished jurist in Boston. 
Principal Sawyer, who presided for so many years 
over the destiny of the institution and under whose 
wise leadership it has enjoyed such prosperity, was 
rightfully the central figure of all the anniversary 
exercises, and the memory of Samuel Williston, the 
financial founder of the institution, with whom two 
of my father’s cousins were for many years intimately 
associated in business, was and always will be held in 
the highest reverence there. 
One day in July, 1863, I left the hayfield, where 
I was working with my uncle for a dollar a day, and 
went to Williamstown, walking eighteen miles of the 
way, to take private entrance examinations. I visited 
155 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
the three professors in mathematics, Greek, and 
Latin, and came home late at night, entered as a fresh- 
man in the class of 1867. I tried to conceal this at 
the farm but it was found out and I was unmercifully 
jibed. 
At Williams, thanks to the Williston drill, I found 
myself better prepared than most of my classmates, 
and as these three subjects constituted most of the 
work of the first two years I had much leisure. 
Although there were no electives and all the exercises 
consisted in hearing recitations, the last two years 
were more humanistic and interesting. The eight 
professors, with the president and three instruc- 
tors who constituted the faculty, no doubt did their 
best for us, but conditions were hard. In my day we 
had no geology or paleontology, although Professor 
Emmons on his death had left two museums that were 
well organized and their contents were well displayed. 
Professor C. F. Gilson started a course in French but 
became paralyzed before we had fairly begun. The 
professor of natural history gave a brief course one 
term and then was called away, so that we had almost 
no biology. The professor of chemistry gave a few 
dozen demonstrations and was the only man who 
taught in this way. He, too, left before the close of 
the course. There was no English literature save the 
little taught by the professor of rhetoric, who was 
far more interested in philosophy and economic 
questions. There was almost no physics, for the pro- 
fessor of natural philosophy was interested chiefly in 
astronomy and barely demonstrated a few of the in- 
struments in his small cabinet. Most if not all of the 
professors covered nearly the same ground, with the 
same authors, year after year, and but few of them 
had aspired to authorship of any kind or were known 
to the outside world; yet the institution was by no 
means “mono-hipic.” The exceptions were Professor 
156 SECONDARY AND HIGHER EDUCATION 
A. L. Perry, who was one of the pioneer apostles of 
free trade; Professor Bascom, who had published 
several books of a philosophical character and after- 
wards printed more; and of course, chief of all, the 
president, Mark Hopkins, who was also “professor of 
moral and intellectual philosophy.” Professor P. A. 
Chadbourne gave us a few lessons in geology and 
biology but was interested in politics and devoted 
much of his time to business outside. He was a man 
of great and many-sided activity and later became 
president of a western university; and Bascom also, 
became president of Wisconsin University. As I look 
back on my four years here, it is to Bascom that I 
owe most. He alone suggested to me reading, criti- 
cized personally and in detail my literary efforts, and 
encouraged me to break away from Sir William 
Hamilton, whose system was taught by the president, 
and to become interested in Mill, Mansel, Jouffroi, 
and The Associationists. The divergences of his 
standpoint from that of the president were marked 
and a source of great interest to us students in the 
later college years, as most of us took sides with one 
or the other. 
The president’s brother, Albert, suggested to us 
in person and manner some old Hebrew prophet. He 
was intensely pietistic, we never knew him to smile, 
he was extremely slow in his physical and mental 
activities, and in teaching astronomy (for he had one 
of the first observatories in the country) he always 
gave a pietistic turn to the subject and in large letters 
under the dome where he taught was inscribed “The 
Heavens declare the glory of God,” etc. It was he 
who instituted daily noon prayer meetings every 
spring and occasionally surprised students who were 
playing cards or smoking in their rooms at unseason- 
able hours. We regarded him with mystic awe and 
even dread but learned extremely little from him. 
157 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
Perry was always the most beloved of men for he 
was reputed to take the student’s part at faculty 
meetings and was the most accessible of all. 
I think the intellectual caliber of the faculty as a 
whole, as represented in our instruction, was in my 
period pretty low, probably a little lower than it had 
been before and certainly far more so than it later 
became. Williams has long since outgrown these 
early limitations. It is to-day a college for rich quite 
as much as for poor men, its curriculum has been re- 
peatedly and radically revised and improved, its 
faculty greatly enlarged, and it has succeeded in con- 
serving the best of its earlier traditions and becoming 
modern and progressive in the best sense while at the 
same time preserving the loyalty of even its older 
graduates, as witnessed by the recent and successful 
“drive.” The scholarship of not a few of its faculty 
has been productive, its resources have been greatly 
increased, the new buildings connected with it and 
other changes have made it one of the most beautiful 
and attractive college towns in the country, while its 
conferences during the last two summers have drawn 
very wide attention. All these changes have contrib- 
uted to give it an ever warmer place in the hearts of 
all its graduates. 
The professors seemed to us to live in splendid 
isolation. There was only a “ten-foot-pole” relation 
between them and us. I never heard of a reception 
to students given by any of them. To call on them 
socially was unheard of; nor did they visit us in our 
rooms. Even to linger after class to ask questions 
was bad form—“bootlicking, currying favor,” etc. I 
do not think that I ever met one of the professors’ 
wives. How the faculty, who usually taught three 
hours a day, spent their spare time was always a 
mystery to us for we rarely saw them outside of the 
classroom or chapel. The college was, I think, during 
158 SECONDARY AND HIGHER EDUCATION 
our course in a transition period from the extreme 
religiosity which characterized it years before to the 
more secular era that followed. 
Most of my classmates were in moderate, and 
some in very straitened, circumstances. Some came 
from farms in the surrounding towns, and there was 
a goodly sprinkling of missionaries’ sons, for Dr. 
Hopkins was long president of the A.B.C.F.M., and 
the traditions of the haystack nearby, where missions 
originated, were strong. The monument, I recall, 
stood on the site of the haystack in a field just back 
of the street, surmounted by a large marble globe, 
with the inscription, “The field is the world” and was 
a shrine of pious resort. 
One classmate was so poor that he borrowed a 
wheelbarrow to take his trunk from the station, three 
quarters of a mile away, thereby saving the freightage 
of twenty-five cents. Board in one club cost $1.75 a 
week, although it was usually $2.50; $3.00 was 
thought high. One year we hired a woman, paying 
her so much plus the cost of food, and decided our- 
selves what we should have. We went in mostly for 
substantials but had no meat save on Sundays. Des- 
serts were rare, and tea and coffee unknown; but on 
the whole I think we were well-nourished. Once I 
undertook to conduct a club for my fraternity but ran 
up the cost to nearly $5 a week and was discharged. 
A few private families took boarders, and one year 
the college supervised the boarding table. The tuition 
was sixty dollars but was often remitted to those pre- 
paring for the ministry, of which I was supposed to 
be one. I paid it, however, for one or more years. 
One dormitory room was devoted to old textbooks 
bought for a song from students who were through 
with them and sold at small cost to lower classmen, 
and this I patronized both as buyer and seller so that 
I now possess but few of the books used during the 
159 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
course. I have made some effort to regain these 
books, but with very little success. 
The college library was a small hexagonal build- 
ing, open at certain hours only and with very meager 
resources although rich in theological works. The 
two literary societies were well stocked with standard 
works in literature and with fiction, and these, I think, 
were much more patronized by the students, espe- 
cially in the later years, most of whom belonged to 
one or the other of them. Here, one evening every 
week literary exercises were held, and both the Philo- 
logian and Philotechnian competed in an annual de- 
bate organized under the name of the Adelphic Union. 
Here it was that I made one of the most mortifying 
of my fiascos. I prepared elaborately, but my chief 
opponent, Virgil P. Kline, a born orator who later 
had a brilliant and eminent career as a lawyer in 
Cleveland, anticipated all my arguments so that I could 
only flounder about, and I took the extraordinary time 
of twenty-five minutes trying in vain to gather my 
wits and thus brought mortification upon my side— 
and that before all the faculty. 
In general, however, from the very start both the 
repression and the intense pressure I had felt at Willis- 
ton were gone. Here, instead of being near the foot 
of my class I could maintain good standing with little 
work and so devoted myself with great assiduity to 
reading entirely outside the course. I am amazed as 
I recall the many poets, novelists, essayists, and even 
historians that I devoured. The chief influence for 
good to me during all these four years was the forma- 
tion, I think in the sophomore year, of an association 
of less than a dozen classmates interested, which we 
called the Junto. We met every Saturday night, im- 
mediately after supper and often stayed till midnight, 
telling each other what we had read, reading papers, 
etc., and among us there was great emulation. Hamil- 
160 SECONDARY AND HIGHER EDUCATION 
ton Wright Mabie, my classmate and lifelong friend 
until his recent death, was a leader here, and during 
the entire quadrennium I felt myself his unsuccessful 
rival in reading and writing although I outranked 
him in scholarship. Other members were: Sanford 
Dole, later president of Hawaii; F. L. Stetson, the 
chief financial benefactor of Williams in later years, 
who died in 1920; the late Judge Robert Harmon of 
Lowell; Professor M. B. Thomas of Northwestern 
University; Judge Teller of New York; and several 
others. How we pored over and discussed Emerson, 
even his poems, Carlyle, Coleridge, Lamb, Words- 
worth and the Lake Poets, Tennyson, E. P. Whipple, 
“Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” and other of the plays of 
Shakespeare, the Brownings, and G. W. Curtis. We 
discussed Dante in translation, Wilhelm Meister, 
Faust, read some of the plays of Schiller and Lessing 
in English, and many others. We cultivated style 
here, and I find very voluminous notes and papers 
which I wrote for these meetings. 
I gave great attention, too, to the weekly debates 
in both societies, which I always attended and care- 
fully prepared for. I was elected class or “Moonlight” 
orator at the end of the sophomore year and delivered 
a very sophomoric address on “The Year 1865,” 
which I tried to make out the pivotal year of the 
world’s history. War subjects, of course, held a 
prominent place in the debates. In my senior year I 
was elected one of the five editors of the Williams 
Quarterly, a fifty-page magazine appearing four 
times a year and supposed to contain the choicest 
undergraduate effusions. Here I find not a few of 
my own contributions—“The Inventive Mood”; a 
long fifteen-page article in fine print entitled, “The 
Editor’s Table”; “The Student’s Sin,” and most be- 
labored of all an essay on John Stuart Mill, for which 
I remember I read every available scrap of his 
161 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
writings save his “Political Economy,” which was too 
stiff. Mill was my first love and hero in philosophy 
and I defended his views as best I could against all his 
critics. Most of these printed, and the more numerous 
unprinted, productions seem to me now richly 
crammed with choice phrases borrowed, and some of 
them made, and to show an intense sentimentality 
which I think I have outgrown. The effort throughout 
was style, an affectation of superfineness which, again, 
I believe has left little trace. But it is all interesting 
to me now because in the copious and incessant allu- 
sions I can find traces of the wide extent of my read- 
ing in both prose and poetry in this golden period 
of my life. 
I several times essayed poetry, and as I write I 
have before me several printed specimens, one on 
Bryant, one on “A Life Without A Soul”; but the 
most elaborate effort here, and the last, was when as 
poet of the class on Class Day I filled twelve pages 
with verses in many meters on philanthropy. I have 
never attempted poetry since. In reading over these 
effusions now I realize in an overwhelming way that 
the rank lush sentiments and emotions which really 
constitute the very heart of life in youth are gone 
forever and that I could never by any possibility, 
however much I might strive, revive the keen sensi- 
tiveness to all the beauties of nature or the subtle 
responses to many of the best productions of poetry 
which I then felt, so that it seems as though growing 
maturity had brought a certain desiccation of the 
psyche and that mere intellectuality had supervened 
with distinct loss of emotional response to life. 
C. E. Woodbury, an upper classman and an enthu- 
siastic admirer of Emerson, on whom he has for years 
lectured all over the country, invited him to give a 
series of addresses in Williamstown and he came— 
not to the college, however, but to speak in the village 
162 SECONDARY AND HIGHER EDUCATION 
hall. Few of the faculty attended but the students 
heard him gladly, and in my set a veritable Emerso- 
nian craze ran rampant. I even ventured to call upon 
the great man in his room at the hotel, and although 
I had nothing to say and remember nothing he said 
at the interview I felt that I had come into personal 
contact with the greatest living mind. I doubt if he 
was ever alluded to by the faculty in the classroom, 
for his ultra-Unitarianism was thought to be a very 
subtle and dangerous thing. 
Near the end of my sophomore year, in the usual 
spring revival, two seniors whom I greatly respected 
began to cultivate my acquaintance and urge upon me 
the importance of “taking a stand for Christ.” They 
even insisted on praying for me in my room and finally 
conducted me to a prayer meeting, and when the 
leader asked all who desired to be saved to rise, both 
of them—one on each side—urged me to stand, which 
I finally did with great reluctance. This, in that day 
and place meant that I was suffering from conviction 
of sin, and accordingly, by various stages which I do 
not recall in detail, I was led to believe that I had 
been converted. The next fall I united with the col- 
lege church and for the two remaining years attended 
and sometimes took part in the various prayer meet- 
ings—class, college, etc. As I look back upon this I 
cannot think that it made any great change in my life 
although it did bring me into certain new associations 
and gave my parents great joy. I do not think that 
my emotional experiences were very deep. If they 
were, I do not remember them. 
The last two years I taught a Bible class of mature 
ladies in the village of Blackington, three miles away, 
to which I devoted much time in preparation, and I 
still have a large Morocco-bound Bible which they 
gave me when I graduated. I could spend the more 
time in preparation for this because Monday morn- 
163 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
ings, in place of the regular eight-o’clock recitation 
we had “Evidences of Christianity,” so that we should 
not be tempted to break the Sabbath by secular studies 
on Sunday evenings. “Evidences,” too, required less 
time. 
At the close of sophomore year I had a severe 
attack of typhoid dysentery at Williamstown so that 
my parents both came and cared for me in the dormi- 
tory, where Dr. Hopkins also called during the most 
critical days; and when I was able, they took me home 
in a carriage by slow stages. 
I was never quite able to make a place on the col- 
lege baseball team, a game that I think began to pre- 
vail during my college course, but I was accepted for 
the glee club. 
The beauties of Nature about Williamstown were 
very attractive, so that we not only climbed Greylock 
on “Mountain Day” but made frequent visits to the 
Cascades, the Sand Springs, East Mountain, and es- 
pecially Flora’s Glen, where Bryant was said to have 
written his “Thanatopsis.” Hazing was always prac- 
ticed though there was a strong religious element that 
discountenanced it. A group of sophomores who in- 
vaded our room filled it so densely with smoke that 
my chum was ill; but there was compensation because 
two of them were also affected. Our only rebellion 
was against the new professor, later president, 
Franklin Carter, who, as the old textbooks showed, 
set us somewhat longer Latin lessons in Juvenal than 
tradition gave precedent for. Hence we all stayed out 
of his class for a few days until the president gave 
us a serious talk which broke the back of the eniute. 
We learned greatly to revere Washington Glad- 
den, a graduate of earlier years, then preaching near- 
by in North Adams, whom we often heard; George 
Mills, principal of a large fitting school in the southern 
part of the town; John Dennison, the very gifted but 
164 SECONDARY AND HIGHER EDUCATION 
partially invalided son-in-law of the president; Robert 
Booth, a brilliant New York pastor and trustee who 
often visited us; but in general we saw little of dis- 
tinguished men from without or even alumni like 
Garfield, later our martyred president, or the sarcastic 
Senator Ingalls. 
The college body was not large—some fifty in a 
class, so that each knew nearly every one and a good 
deal about all the upper classmen. Some of them we 
greatly revered and they had great influence upon us. 
I have always considered myself fortunate in being 
duly “trotted” and finally “swung” as a member of 
the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity. It was then small 
but its principles and aims were very high, and I 
entered with much zest into the literary exercises 
connected with most of its meetings. This, too, gave 
me a small inner circle of friends, although I broke 
less than most with the “oudens” or nonsociety men, 
who then constituted nearly half the class. To-day 
Williams College is, I think, preeminent for the rela- 
tive power, wealth, and influence of its Greek-letter 
fraternities, most of which have elegant clubhouses 
and in which many of the students live in the most 
intimate social relations. Here the alumni foregather 
when they return at commencement, and in these fra- 
ternities alone class distinctions are forgotten and 
seniors and freshmen associate in the most intimate 
way. I think I shocked some conservatives by sug- 
gesting in a paper read to the alumni years later that 
each of these institutions might now profitably employ 
some graduate of Ph.D. rank who would act a little 
as an English tutor does at Oxford and Cambridge, 
and that if each of them thus chose a specialist from 
their own graduate membership who would go about 
from one society to another as a coach, the curriculum 
itself might gain somewhat over the growing prepon- 
derance of social life in these organizations. 
165 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
Mark Hopkins towered above all his associates in 
the faculty in our estimation and was, indeed, a re- 
markable man. Of commanding stature and with an 
unusually impressive face, stately, with old-fashioned 
manners, venerable with age, wise and experienced in 
policies, we all looked forward with the liveliest antic- 
ipation to senior year, during which he was the chief 
instructor. He had a very definite, comprehensive, 
and coherent system of life and mind, which, although 
printed later, we got the benefit of in class. His 
scheme of things was well organized and he was a 
great believer in making subtle truths accessible to 
memory by frequent use of the blackboard and dia- 
grams. He was, first of all, a moralist but his thought 
ranged over the fields of logic, psychology, aesthetics, 
and even science, in which so little was taught in 
other courses that he had a very wide domain. 
He began by representing man as the top stone in 
a pyramid of six tiers—gravitation, cohesion (which 
for him meant crystallization), chemical affinity, vege- 
table life, and animal life. Each stage was condi- 
tioned by the lower and itself conditioned the next 
higher. These he compared with the six days of crea- 
tion. He then proceeded to discuss the body, dividing 
its functions into physiological (digestive, circulatory, 
secretive, absorbent, etc.) and anatomical (muscular, 
tegumentary, etc.) with the mind and its organ, the 
brain, the highest, and here gave hygienic “improve- 
ments” and still found his law of conditioning and 
conditioned. He then discussed sensibility and spoke 
of the five senses, the very first action of which evoked 
the innate conceptions of time, space, relation, num- 
ber, etc., these ideas or categories being fundamental 
elements of self-consciousness. Thus he tried to 
account for the origin of knowledge and ideas, of the 
outer world, and the concept of self, for consciousness 
is not knowing that we know, as Descartes said, but 
166 SECONDARY AND HIGHER EDUCATION 
a sense that it is I who know. He then proceeded to 
set forth the involuntary mental activities in dreams, 
fancy, impulse, and other spontaneities, and intro- 
duced reason as a regulative or selective function which 
should control these. Logical extension he illustrated 
by a seven-graded pyramid—being, organization, ani- 
mal, mineral, vegetable, man, Cato; and intention by 
the same elements inverted, Cato being the base of the 
pyramid, and being, the apex. Many other schedules 
illustrated his classification of our mental activities 
and faculties. Reason, the highest intellectual prod- 
uct, was shown to work both inductively and deduc- 
tively, the latter being the more important. Instinct 
diminishes as we ascend in the orders of life and 
should entirely vanish in man. For this his favorite 
illustration was a diagonal in a square, at the bottom 
of which all was instinct while at the top all should 
be reason. Higher than the intellect stood the will, 
which presides over all the desires. It was free and yet 
did its supreme work under the influence of recog- 
nized responsibility. The supreme act of the will is 
choice among the many lower and higher ends, and 
the highest choice was self-surrender to the service 
of God. The feelings (if I understand his system, 
which I have just now reviewed and revived) really 
stand highest of all, and the noblest of the affections 
is love fixed on the highest being, God, the supremely 
good, to love and serve whom is the chief end of man. 
No such outline begins to do justice to the range 
and scope of thought involved in this processional, 
least of all to its details. Associationism, Berkeley- 
ism, Locke, Porter, and many others were discussed 
and defended or criticized. With the advent of mind 
something higher than science can fathom came into 
the world, and to this revelation added a still higher 
story. Love to him was not only the fulfillment of 
the law but should have an Edwardsean scope and be 
167 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
directed toward all that is, save the sin that man has 
introduced. Perhaps there could hardly be in the same 
scope a better introduction to anthropology in general 
and to the study of psychology in the larger modern 
sense for minds in our stage of development and 
which had to be evolved within the lines laid down by 
Christian thought. We certainly felt at the close that 
we had been initiated into the great problems of the 
world, that we had had a bird’s-eye view of human 
knowledge, effort, and affectivity; and the wide range 
of appergus and the definiteness of the schedules by 
which they were formulated seem finally to have satis- 
fied the philosophical inclinations of generations of 
students, whose development along these lines stopped, 
as it was very prone to do, where he left them. 
It must be remembered that experimental psychol- 
ogy was in those days something unknown, as was 
any study of animals under controlled conditions or 
much observation of their instincts; that mental 
pathology, too, was in the crudest state; that the 
history of philosophy was unknown in this country 
and nowhere taught unless at Amherst in Seeley’s 
translation of Schwegler, and was looked upon with 
suspicion as teaching men to hold no opinions. While 
for Mark Hopkins, on the other hand, there were no 
open questions but only further details to fill in. We 
were certainly saved from the great danger of pre- 
mature specialization which is now so amply illustrated 
on every hand in this field. His was the method of 
indoctrination and we were all proud to be his disci- 
ples. There could probably be no better succinct in- 
terpretation of the universe of thought in the same 
compass to serve as a background for the clerical pro- 
fession or missionary work, of which latter he was so 
long the leader in this country. 
Long afterwards, when at the close of the year at 
Johns Hopkins I was asked to give a three-weeks’ 
168 SECONDARY AND HIGHER EDUCATION 
daily course to seniors at Williams, to break up the 
inveterate custom of the senior vacation there in 
which some were supposed to write their commence- 
ment parts and others to do nothing, I had many 
confidential talks with Dr. Hopkins, who honored me 
by attending my lectures. In one of these talks he 
asked me what I thought of Kant and said that he 
had never tried to read him except in Bohn’s Transla- 
tion and in that was never able to get beyond the 
first paragraph of the Critique of Pure Reason, which 
he could not understand. His range of thought and 
reading included, I think, almost nothing of either 
the German or the Greek thinkers in this field and his 
mind was not historic. 
His medical studies (for he was an M.D.) inclined 
him to dwell upon the structure and functions of the 
body and its parts, and his anthropology (for such it 
might be named) was really animated by a deep and 
strong instinct for evolution under the guise of his 
favorite formula of conditioning and conditioned by 
which all the human faculties were graded and rated, 
although he had no use for Darwin or Spencer. His 
scheme of things was later set forth more systemati- 
cally than we had it in his The Outline Study of Man 
and The Law of Love and Love as a Law, the highest 
possible human activity being worship, and the scheme 
as a whole giving ready-made answers to about all the 
open questions of life, whence came a dangerous sense 
of finality. It was when in the spring he approached 
the conclusion of his system, that a great choice be- 
tween the higher and lower ends was man’s supreme 
duty, that his brother, Albert, began his daily prayer 
meetings. 
The Hopkins cult has been intense at Williams, 
though with the lapse of years it is naturally now 
somewhat abating, but even at this late day I would 
bring my humble tribute to his memory because I 
169 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
think, while I should now differ from him widely on 
almost every point, he did give us a precious set of 
attitudes and appergus in the highest study of man- 
kind, which is man. I believe my own interests have 
had a wider range because of him, and although so 
much that he taught is more or less obsolete to-day, 
there is now no need so great as that of a man of his 
synthetic and apodeictic type and with a range no less 
wide to introduce young people to these subjects. 
There was nothing inchoate or unformed in his opin- 
ions. In class he welcomed queries and discussions 
and dealt mildly with my own very crass attempts to 
criticize Sir William Hamilton, Bowen’s edition of 
whom was his text in one course, and my enthusiasm 
for John Stuart Mill and his criticisms of Hamilton. 
My admiration for Hopkins was less at the time than 
that of most of my classmates, who would have ap- 
plied to him the saying of Hippocrates, “Godlike is 
the philosopher who is also a physician.” 
During my sophomore year Professor Charles 
Eliot Norton purchased a home in Ashfield where he 
came early and stayed late summers, and with him 
came his friend, George William Curtis. The latter 
took one of the humblest and smallest houses in town, 
half a mile from the village, and practiced the most 
rigid economy—as rumor had it, to pay a debt of 
honor for which he was not legally bound. Later he 
purchased another place and made it into one of the 
most attractive in town, and here for decades these 
two men were the center of attraction for many 
others. 
Norton organized his famous dinners for the 
benefit of the Academy where for twenty-five years 
the people of the town, and the many who came from 
a distance as these festivals grew in fame, heard per- 
haps for two hours after the banquet the most dis- 
tinguished speakers—Mark Twain, who once came up 
170 John Bascom 
The Chief Influences at Williams 
Mark Hopkins Charles Eliot Norton 
Edward John Phelps George William Curtis Atkinson G. Stanley Hall 
A Summer Group in Ashfield SECONDARY AND HIGHER EDUCATION 
from Hartford; George Cable from Northampton; 
Parke Godwin from Cuinmington; Rudyard Kipling 
(although I am not certain that he ever spoke there) ; 
Matthew Arnold; James Russell Lowell, who after 
his return from his brilliant ambassadorship to 
England took a little cottage a mile from the village 
for several summers where he tried to get back to 
literary work; Presidents Eliot of Harvard and 
Carter of Williams; ex-ambassador Phelps, Senator 
G. F. Hoar, and others. The story of these dinners 
and the influence of these guests, and especially of 
Professor Norton, who took a great interest in Ash- 
field affairs, really ought to be written. 
To him I owe a great debt. When I was in college 
I often spent most stimulating evenings with him. 
He loaned me books, and I was immensely impressed 
by the charm of his manner, the wide international 
range of his personal acquaintance, his admiration for 
Ruskin, Carlyle, and Dante, which I found very in- 
fectious—in very many ways and for many years he 
broadened and refined my views of life, although I 
fear in later years there was less sympathy of stand- 
point and opinion between us. When I was a junior 
he first assigned me a brief place among the notables 
at perhaps the very first of the above dinners, intro- 
ducing me as a sample of the native product of the 
Academy. It was a most impressive ordeal for me 
and I well remember how on going to the post office 
when it was all over, the wide piazza of which was 
covered with people from the dinner, an old farmer 
noted for his wit turned to me and piped up before 
the crowd somewhat as follows: “So, Stanley, they 
showed you off as a sample product of the ’cademy. 
Norton reminds me of old B.D., a drummer fer the 
tannery, who done well till he ’sperienced religion and 
then became so all-fired honest that he leaned over 
backwards and tried fi sell sole leather from samples 
171 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
a little poorer than the average instead of better, as 
a good drummer should, and so run the tannery- 
all out. I don’t know as Norton’s ’sperienced religion, 
but that’s what he’ll do with the ’cademy if he tells 
them you’re a sample product.” 
Soon after I graduated, I remember on one occa- 
sion coming up to another group in the same place 
waiting for the mail to be sorted, when this same 
“uncle,” fearing I might be guilty of the mortal sin 
of being “stuck up” greeted me thus, to the delectation 
of all the bystanders: “So they say you’ve really 
gradooated. I never s’posed you could. I s’pose you 
think you know it all. But take this from old uncle 
Bill. If all you knowed was writ in a book ’twould 
just about go in there” (poking his finger into the 
upper pocket of my vest), “and if all you don’t know 
was writ in another book ’twould fill Curtis’s lawn 
over there and ’twould be so big that Heenan and 
Sayers (the two great pugilists of that day) might 
both put their shoulders under the ‘kiver’ (acting it 
out) and boost till they died but couldn’t lift it.” This 
was an admonition as wholesome as it was homely, 
and I hope I have profited by it. 
Ashfield is said to be the only town of its name 
in the world. I can find no account of the origin of 
the name. It was never laid in ashes by any great con- 
flagration or forest fire. There are ash trees but far less 
of them than birch, hemlock, beech, maple, or even wal- 
nut, oak, chestnut, butternut, elm, or bass. Perhaps it 
was named from the sporadic and somewhat striking 
mountain ash with its red berries, which have played 
such a role in mythology, for groups of these seem- 
ingly indigenous trees are there. It is hilly and within 
its six square miles are found great diversities of soil 
and to some extent of climate, for its altitude ranges 
from 600 to 1,800 feet above the sea level and the 
flora of the north and south exposures of side hills 
172 SECONDARY AND HIGHER EDUCATION 
often differ widely. There are also sand dunes, 
swamps, morasses, and muck fields. Acres are 
thickly strewn with boulders of the drift period, there 
are natural as well as artificial ponds, and many kinds 
of soil. There are many old orchards and long rows 
of maple trees, both once assiduously set out but most 
of which are now slowly dying or dead of old age 
with not much replacement. Nature tends here to 
“brakes and brush” rather than to grass and crops. My 
boyhood home was completely burned some twenty- 
five years ago and the yard and even the old cellar 
hole are now overgrown with sumacs and other scrubs 
which together make a jungle of growths hard to 
penetrate. The rows of apple trees I helped set out 
as a boy are in all stages of decay and a family of 
woodchucks have made their burrow under what was 
once the family living room. Only a few of the 
hardier perennial plants we set out and cultivated so 
diligently still survive, but these will soon be crowded 
out by ranker growths. I found vestiges of the old 
currant bushes, a clump of tansy, and others of spear- 
mint, peppermint, and an old huckleberry bush, but 
there seemed to be no trace of the old peach, cherry, 
and pear trees I so well remember. Of all the “set 
out” bushes, only the lilacs seem to have increased in 
vigor. An old man musing on such relics of the home 
of his childhood has a unique sense of the lapse of 
time and the changes it brings, but also of the vanity 
of most effort to permanently affect the course of 
nature. 
Planting, harvesting, lumbering, fence and wall 
making and wall mending (the former of two vari- 
eties—the zigzagVirginia kind, made of ash rails very 
laboriously split and the “rip-gut” kind of rows of 
slanted slabs, each held in place by a pair of stakes 
driven deeply into the ground), finding and bringing 
in oxen, cows, and horses, as I did as a boy on half 
173 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
a dozen or more of these farms, to say nothing of 
hunting, fishing, and trapping, made me early familiar 
with even the minute details of the topography of this 
town. 
I am ashamed of myself as a psychologist that I 
cannot explain the strong fascination which I feel 
(increasing, I think, with years) in revisiting these 
scenes and loitering about the old haunts and abandon- 
ing myself to all the suggestions born of memory and 
mood which are thus brought to mind. It cannot all 
be because I thus renew my youth, for to do this brings 
home also a very poignant sense of my age and the 
changes which now separate me from my earlier days. 
I sometimes wonder whether it is normal or morbid 
to love thus to revive the days that are no more. The 
luxury of this kind of reminiscence must certainly not 
seduce us from duties to the present or interest in the 
future, although I am inclined to think that on the 
whole it brings a wholesome rejuvenation and is a 
safeguard against a certain tendency of juvenile atti- 
tudes to be entirely lost with age and thus leave the 
soul more or less desiccated. If this be so, we have 
here a suggestion for the mental hygiene and therapy 
of old age. 
There is an analogy here between plant and human 
life in Ashfield. There have been repeated efforts to 
improve the inhabitants by exogenous cultures. Pro- 
fessor Norton, from the time he first became a sum- 
mer resident of the town, now nearly sixty years ago, 
did far more than any other for the moral, intellec- 
tual, and civic uplift of the town, entering with zest 
and wisdom into nearly every local activity and making 
his influence felt in all issues. He cultivated not a 
few personal acquaintances and even friendships, 
brought other men of eminence to reside in or visit 
Ashfield, and instituted the dinners. Although not 
himself a man of wealth, he was the cause directly 
174 SECONDARY AND HIGHER EDUCATION 
or indirectly of quite a list of material improvements. 
But his moral influence was yet greater and more 
wholesome, many first learning from his example and 
teaching that there could be both rare virtue and cul- 
ture quite outside of the church and also that it was 
possible to be respectable without attendance upon 
stated worship. He showed there could be political 
views outside and above the lines of narrow partisan- 
ship, that even a democrat could be both virtuous and 
intelligent, and that an aristocracy existed that was 
not at all dependent upon wealth. Thus there came 
to be not a few citizens who were proud to be known 
as his friends and craved to be on his list of “those 
who had deserved well of Ashfield.” Of course, there 
were local Philistines who flouted him and all his 
works and ways and some who even descended to 
insults and some degree of sabotage, but, on the other 
hand, he may have sometimes lacked tact and patience, 
or overestimated the capacity of such a community 
for improvement. So at least I sometimes thought 
and even said, but however this may be, he was by 
far the most useful citizen and the town owes more 
to him than to any other man in its history. 
A little later a signal material “boost” was given 
the town by Milo Belding, a wealthy progressive silk 
magnate. He was born in the town and as a stripling 
in the early teens used to work for my father in the 
hayfields, as he told me, for seventy-five cents a day. 
Some forty years after he and his brothers had left 
the town, his interests and those of his wife, also a 
native of the town, brought him back and he spent 
much time and money there building fine houses and 
developing other properties, greatly improving all of 
the upper part of the village street, the mill and the 
pond, starting new small enterprises and bringing 
much summer patronage to the town. He employed 
first and last many of the brightest Ashfield young 
175 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
men in his own business, and gave the town a solid 
and beautiful library building of granite. Now he is 
dead and his son has little interest in the town and 
rarely visits it, and as a result some of his father’s 
houses are empty or for sale, the land he redeemed 
is relapsing, and most of the values in which he was 
interested seem declining. 
Just so with the death of Norton a few years 
earlier, the higher civic ideals and public morale lapsed 
slowly, although probably imperceptibly to the natives. 
The population of the town has dwindled for 
nearly a century, some of the larger old families are 
entirely extinct, while many if not most of the capable 
young people have for generations left the town for 
larger fields. A sturdy remnant still remains as one 
may see by attending, not the churches, where a few 
of them are found, but the dances where most fore- 
gather. Their spirit, their joys and sorrows, their toil- 
some life, punctuated none too frequently by amuse- 
ment and small social pleasures (all with a just com- 
fortable moral tone) was not essentially unlike those 
of their age when I was young there. I wonder if I 
did not become an exotic like the “set out” trees and 
the cultivated plants and flowers and, indeed, whether 
the higher culture superimposed as nurture upon 
nature may not be destined to the same progressive 
oblivion. Certain it is that in some moods I am 
almost persuaded to go back after sixty years of ab- 
sence to the old farm again, and there revive the inter- 
ests and even the occupations of my early years so far 
as my strength will permit, and plan to end life some- 
what as I began it, on a farm close to Mother Earth. 
As a youth I thought myself most unhappy and this 
discontent drove me out into the world. Now I am 
beginning to wonder whether I can ever find real 
happiness and content anywhere else. 
I long since realized that childhood can never be 
176 SECONDARY AND HIGHER EDUCATION 
complete or fully lived save in the country, and I 
would not now exchange my boyhood experiences 
with nature and the primitive social and industrial 
conditions under which I was reared (which are now 
gone and can never be replaced) for any environment 
or training I could devise. The best education we can 
now give in industry, civics, physical culture, econo- 
mics, morals and the rest, does not begin to equal that 
afforded by the old New England farm as it existed 
a few generations ago, and this life when, where, and 
as I knew it was perhaps at its very best stage of 
development. What I am realizing now is that with 
certain mitigations of its hardships such an environ- 
ment would be no less ideal for the closing years of 
life (see my Senescence, p. 415 et passim). 
Recovering from a severe attack of typhoid fever 
the summer after graduation (which has left no trace 
that I know save a certain varicosity) and still being 
very uncertain as to what I would be and do in the 
world, I entered Union Theological Seminary in Sep- 
tember, 1867. was then at 9 University Place and 
contained library, chapel, lecture rooms, dormitories, 
and boarding hall all under one roof. Here, as in 
the transition from Williston to Williams, there was 
a distinct let-down of tone and standard. Quite a 
proportion of the students here had never been to 
college and there were representatives of all the leading 
Protestant denominations, Presbyterians and Congre- 
gationalists predominating. The chronic quarrels be- 
tween conservative clerical graduates, who were in 
control, and new and progressive ideas, which have 
kept higher religious education in this country at such 
a scandalously low ebb and helped to perpetuate the 
calamitous eternal warfare between science and re- 
ligion, were greatly mitigated, indeed hardly existed 
at Union even though the professors held very diverse 
points of view. Most conservative was Dr. Shedd, 
177 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
whose strength lay in the exegesis of the New Testa- 
ment, particularly of Paul. His theology as later set 
forth in his writings was rigidly Calvinistic. R. D. 
Hitchcock and Philip Schaff together made church 
history perhaps the strongest course, and both sought 
to be objective, Schaff being by far the more scholarly, 
having free access to German sources of erudition, 
although Hitchcock, who had a very effective pulpit 
oratory all his own, impressed us more. The presi- 
dent, Skinner, was very old and taught us homiletics 
and pastoral theology. After preaching our trial 
sermon before the institution we visited the president 
for criticisms. When I entered his study for this 
purpose, instead of discussing my sermon with me he 
at once knelt and prayed that I might be shown the 
true light and saved from mortal errors of doctrine, 
and then excused me without a word. 
The man to whom I owe far more in this group 
than any other was Henry B. Smith, a foreign-trained 
scholar, versed more or less not only in systematic 
theology, which was his chair, but in ancient and 
modern philosophy, on which he gave us a few lectures 
quite outside the course. Of him alone I saw some- 
thing socially. He did me perhaps the greatest intel- 
lectual service one man can render another by 
suggesting just the right reading at the right time. 
It was he, too, who, seeing my bent, advised me to 
go to Europe. 
For the single year I was in New York I saw 
much of life. When I left college I had never even 
visited any larger city, not even Albany or Springfield, 
so that everything in the great metropolis was new. 
With classmates or alone I explored New York and 
its vicinity certain afternoons a week; was employed 
by the City Missionary Society for a month or two 
'to visit every family in an assigned row of tenement 
houses and leave tracts and a printed invitation to a 
178 SECONDARY AND HIGHER EDUCATION 
local religious meeting, which gave me a first-hand 
glimpse of slum life; had a few mild adventures (as 
when, on breaking into a “wake,” I was very roughly 
handled); and saw certain scenes of intense pathos, 
to some of which I was able to bring relief from 
charities. For a few months I was employed, with 
other classmates, to roam Greene, Bleecker, and other 
notorious streets and invite street-walkers to the mid- 
night mission for them nearby, where we sometimes 
took part in conducting the religious exercises. For 
both these lines of visitation work we received fifty 
cents an hour, but one may well question the wisdom 
of employing students of our age in the latter work 
of salvage. I think no harm came of it, however, 
even if there were narrow escapes, save in the case 
of one classmate, who fell and gave up his calling. 
During this year I occasionally attended a little 
club of Positivists who were interested in the study 
of Comte. I remember particularly Stephen Pearl 
Andrews, a very ambitious thinker and voluminous 
writer whose immense book, Universology, I tried to 
understand. George Ripley occasionally came in, as 
did John Fiske, whose articles in the Modern Thinker, 
a progressive journal printed in many hues of paper 
and ink, undertook to spread this cult. I indulged my 
curiosity in church-going, attending now for the first 
time a Catholic service; a Greek-Russian church on 
Sixth Avenue; a Jewish synagogue; and the church 
of the Seventh-Day Adventists and of the Spiritists. 
I heard the great preachers of the day, notably Dr. 
Thompson in Thirty-fourth Street, Dr. John Hall on 
Fifth Avenue, Richard Storrs in Brooklyn, Henry 
Ward Beecher, and I was particularly fascinated by 
the radical O. B. Frothingham, many of whose Sunday 
discourses I not only heard but read as they appeared 
weekly in print. I attended many if not most of the 
meetings in the large institute hall of Cooper Union 
179 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
and listened to the debates, where every form of radi- 
calism was ventilated. One meeting, the occasion of 
which I forget, was held at the house of Victoria C. 
Woodhull, in which rumor said Cornelius Vanderbilt, 
Sr., had established her, where Theodore Tilton was 
the chief speaker. 
I fairly reveled in the theater, which I had never 
attended before, although my scanty purse compelled 
me always to be a “gallery god.” Here I heard 
Ristori, Lester Wallack, Charlotte Cushman, Clara 
Morris, and especially Edwin Booth, who in his new 
theater just built on Sixth Avenue gave a wonderful 
Shakespearean revival with Barrett. I was also 
caught by the opera bonffe of Offenbach and heard 
the French celebrities, a number oFwHom it brought 
to New York, and I made no exception in the case 
of Tony Pastor and the Black Crook, the White Fawn, 
and their successors at Niblo’s Garden. I joined the 
Philharmonic chorus, which gave several oratorios 
during the winter in Steinway Hall. I also heard 
Parepa-Rosa; Charles Dickens’ American read- 
ings in New York, given at that hall; attended the 
German theater near the foot of the Bowery and occa- 
sionally frequented the then famous Fulton Street 
noon prayer meetings and others held in various grog 
shops near the “Five Points” and in the rat pit of a 
notorious convert whose name I forget. I remember 
his once lapsing into the rankest profanity because a 
deaf hearer in the upper tiers kept asking him to 
speak louder. 
Here, too, I turned an honest penny by teaching 
history to the daughters of the elite in the fashionable 
school of Miss Greene at 2 Fifth Avenue, and occa- 
sionally by singing or playing the organ or melodeon 
in some mission. Once I paid five dollars to have 
my “bumps” examined at the Fowler and Wells em- 
porium ; had one private seance each with the notori- 
180 SECONDARY AND HIGHER EDUCATION 
ous mediums Slade, the slate writer, and Foster, who 
read folded pellets by placing them on his forehead, 
the methods of both of which have since been exposed. 
I saw the fire that destroyed Barnum’s museum 
farther up Broadway, where the bears and other ani- 
mals were cruelly burned alive; frequently visited the 
nine-o’clock police court at the Tombs and also the 
old morgue at the foot of East Thirty-fourth Street; 
the foundling home where unwed mothers were 
allowed to deposit their newborn infants from the 
sidewalk in a beautifully bedecked creche and to de- 
part unknown, knowing their offspring would be well 
cared for. Occasionally I read books from the Astor 
and society libraries, both near-by. Had the authori- 
ties of the seminary or even my classmates any idea 
of some of these ventures I should doubtless have 
been summarily dealt with. It was because my life 
before had been so restricted that all the accumulated 
curiosity of years to see the world and what it really 
was and meant was irresistible. It interfered, of 
course, with my studies, for my interest in these out- 
side things was far greater, but as I look back now 
I believe that, on the whole, it was the wisest course 
I could have pursued. 
The family of my chum, Mann, belonged to Henry 
Ward Beecher’s church, which I attended and joined 
by letter. He catechized all candidates from other 
churches and asked me whether my theological studies 
had made me more or less devout. I said “less” and 
he “passed me” with a commendation for my honesty. 
Through my chum’s mother, Beecher consented to 
receive a group of us from the seminary a certain 
number of Monday nights and these meetings I shall 
always remember, for his disagreement with many of 
the things we were taught at the seminary was very 
marked. I well recall his study on Brooklyn Heights 
overlooking the bay. He told us that when he had 
181 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
thoughts during the week he jotted them down and 
threw them into a drawer, rising early Sunday to look 
them over and write out the first pages of his sermon 
and he then trusted to extemporaneous inspiration. 
I once took a walk with him across the ferry and 
into New York and remember how every one—cab- 
man, and ferryman—knew him and had a hearty 
greeting and how one familiarly slapped him on the 
back, called him “Henry,” and told him he was the 
only parson whose preaching he could stand. 
Late in the academic year, just before the semi- 
nary had closed, I went or rather was sent to preach 
in the little town of Coudersport in central Pennsyl- 
vania, although I was not licensed or ordained. Here 
I “labored” and did my best for nine consecutive 
weeks, boarding in the family of a very estimable 
parishioner of German descent, named Metzler. I 
often hunted pigeons that were there that season in 
vast flocks. I ministered once to a poor dying woman, 
being the only one present when she died save a neigh- 
bor who was acting as nurse, and conducted her 
funeral services. While here I received a letter from 
Beecher, who supposed I was still in New York, asking 
me to call on him. I immediately took the train, and 
Beecher told me that through the Manns he had 
learned that I wished to study philosophy in Germany 
but lacked the means. When I assented he asked if 
it would not make me less religious but I said I thought 
it would make me religious in a larger sense. This 
he approved and gave me a sealed note to the lumber 
magnate, Henry Sage, the benefactor of Cornell, 
which I presented at his office without knowing its 
contents. To my amazement, after some scowling 
and a remark to the effect that his pastor took amazing 
liberties with his purse, he gave me a check for one 
thousand dollars. Taking my note to repay it with 
interest, he told me to sail for Germany the next day 
182 Henry Ward Beecher 
William Cullen Bryant 
Geo. Wm. Curtis 
Hamilton Wright Mabie President C. W. Eliot 
William James 
Henry P. Bowditch SECONDARY AND HIGHER EDUCATION 
and never trouble him again. I wrote my resignation 
to Coudersport, sailed the next day, and never saw 
Mr. Sage afterward but paid him the principal and 
interest from my earliest savings some years later. 
Thus I owe my first triennium abroad, which began 
in July, 1868, to Beecher. 
To pursue advanced studies abroad had long been 
my most ardent desire. There was then no opportu- 
nity for graduate work in this country and it was my 
already developed interest in philosophical subjects 
and the influence of Mark Hopkins that sent me to 
the theological seminary as affording most nearly what 
I wanted, although I thought seriously of medicine 
and less of the law. My parents did not favor Europe 
but wished me to become a clergyman. My mother, 
however, when she realized how fixed and strong I 
was in my desire, applied to her wealthy, childless, and 
retired brother to help me and I visited him to present 
my case. He did not, however, see his way to assist 
me then, even with a loan, although he did so later. 
I made other efforts but all ways seemed barred. Had 
they remained so, I should very probably have landed 
a year or two later in the ministry, near the middle 
twenties, and settled in some country parish, perhaps 
for life, would have married and been bound by 
family ties. But I should have been out of place, a 
misfit, restless and unhappy. I had no taste or apti- 
tude for parish work, no gift of pulpit oratory, was 
utterly incompetent and unfurnished mentally to pro- 
duce the circa fifty or one hundred edifying sermons 
per year, and above all was far too skeptical on the 
fundamentals of doctrine to hold my place in any 
orthodox church, while to have “turned Unitarian/' 
as I might then easily have done, would have broken 
my mother’s heart and shamed all my relatives, for 
that creed was quite beyond the pale. How could I 
break with those who had sacrificed so much to the 
183 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
one end that I be qualified to preach the Gospel! Thus 
just ahead along the road I had started, only misery 
and stultification awaited me. 
Schoolmastering was, to be sure, an alternative, 
but this had no charm. It was, however, in the New 
York period that I first began to daydream, very 
secretly, of the possibility of some time becoming a 
professor. This would be a way of escape but I dared 
not confess my ambitions even to my mother for she 
would have never thought it possible, and in fact there 
was very little chance that I could ever attain or fit 
into such a position, least of all with my subject, 
which was generally taught by the president and 
which in unwise hands would be very unsafe and un- 
settling. It was, however, the strength of my interest 
in this field even more than the fact that all others 
seemed closed that impelled me to play a desperate 
chance with fate. While I realized that this step, 
momentous as it seemed, might prove in the end only 
a form of self-indulgence, I hoped that it was a real 
inner call of the spirit. I had entered the broad high- 
way of eclaircissement and found the new insights 
so ravishing that I had to go on. If I had not set 
out from so narrow and saturated an orthodoxy my 
sense of progress would have been far less, and had 
I known how many had taken the same road and gone 
much farther in it I should have felt my problem far 
less unique. 
I had been profoundly influenced by Darwin, 
Spencer and Tyndall, Renan, Strauss, Emerson, and 
Carlyle; and had tried very hard to understand Cole- 
ridge’s Aids to Reflection, the wonderful Essence of 
Christianity by Feuerbach, Comte in Harriet Marti- 
neau’s two-volume abridgment, Schwegler’s little 
history of philosophy, even Hagenbach’s history of 
doctrine, as my marked copies of these last five still 
attest. I had read Theodore Parker, Tom Paine, 
184 SECONDARY AND HIGHER EDUCATION 
some of Lessing, Schiller, and more of Goethe in 
translation; and English liberals like Charles Kings- 
ley, Canon Farrar, Matthew Arnold, G. H. Lewes, 
and some of Ruskin, besides John Stuart Mill, my 
hero as I have shown before. J. F. Clarke’s Ten 
Great Religions, when it appeared, absorbed me, as 
did John Fiske’s Cosmic Philosophy and his Myth 
Makers. The poets helped me to clarity, most of all 
Tennyson, my cheap volume being badly soiled and 
worn and the “In Memoriam” almost committed to 
memory. Wordsworth and Byron, but never the 
Brownings, influenced me somewhat. 
My wide and diligent reading, much of which I 
later realized I had but superficially comprehended, 
had nevertheless influenced me vastly more than did 
the topics in the curriculum, and altogether this con- 
stituted a most effective disqualification for interest 
in the ministry of that day and hardly less so for 
success in teaching in the field of my dominant in- 
terests. My old uncle, Orville, said I must be un- 
commonly stupid if I had not been able to finish my 
education at this time. My father thought it strange 
that I could not get what I wanted in this country 
without going to study with “Dutchmen,” while my 
mother feared it would make me skeptical, never 
dreaming how far I had gone along this perilous 
highway, and assured me that her prayers would 
always attend me. This caused her far more anxiety 
than my physical safety or going among strangers so 
far from home. So I embarked without trusting my- 
self to go home to encounter all the family protests 
and go through the pain of saying farewell. No one 
saw me off and it was many months before I was to 
see any one I had ever known before. But strangely 
enough, everything was so new and absorbing that 
I never felt a trace of homesickness or even lone- 
someness. 
185 CHAPTER V 
GERMANY, ANTIOCH COLLEGE, AND EUROPE 
AGAIN 
First impressions at the University of Bonn—Craze of lecture 
hearing at Berlin—Seminaries of Dorner and Trendelenberg 
—Student life in Germany—George Bancroft—Kaiser Wil- 
helm I — Treitschke — Eduard Von Hartmann — Michelet — 
Kirschmann—Correspondent in the War of 1870, and other 
war experiences—A foot tour to Switzerland—Back to New 
York—George S. Morris—Tutoring with the Seligmans—Pro- 
fessorship at Antioch College, founded by Horace Mann—Ex- 
periences there—William T. Harris at St. Louis and at Con- 
cord—Wilberforce University—Tutoring at Harvard—Europe 
again—Studies with Wundt, Ludwig—Another lecture craze 
—Academic freedom in Germany—Experiments with Helm- 
holtz—Lecture theaters—Myology with Hugo Kronecker— 
Letters to the “Nation”—Marriage in Berlin—Eccentricities 
of certain German professors—Experiences in Paris, Nancy, 
Oxford, and Cambridge, and visits to secondary and other 
schools—Boston lectures to teachers, my first success—Joseph 
Cook—My acquaintance with William James—Ph.D. at Har- 
vard—New attitude toward the Puritan Sunday, beer and 
wine, the German Fraulein—Sense of limitation on coming 
home a Teutonophile—The spirit of revolt and my narrow 
escape from an expression of it. 
Entirely alone, I embarked on a German steamer 
in the early summer of 1868 and took a so-called 
“intermediate” passage, little better in berth and menu 
than the steerage. After landing in Rotterdam, I 
took a very slow Dutch river steamer which required 
a day to go up the flat region of the Rhine, and made 
my first stop in Bonn, just before the famous Rhine 
scenery begins. Here I found humble quarters in 
the very narrow Reingasse with a family who rented 
186 GERMANY, ANTIOCH COLLEGE 
me their small but tidy front room over the little 
store which was their support, and none of whom, 
happily for me, spoke a word of English or evinced 
a desire to learn it from me. Very vividly do I re- 
member my first walks in and about this fascinating 
old town, and I was located very near the old arched 
gateway that separated the new from the old part of 
it. The University would not open for two months 
so I made frequent excursions—to the Drachenfels 
and the Siebengebirge which are spun over with old 
German myths; to the old monastery with its famous 
Pilot’s staircase, and the long range of hills to the 
south which Goethe frequented and where he is said 
to have made his famous studies of the effect of color 
upon the gemiit. I roamed the streets, sometimes with 
my dictionary under my arm and looked up on the 
spot or wrote down the many signs over the shops, 
sometimes conversing a little with some chance ac- 
quaintance in a kneipe. I of course studied the news- 
papers, and the first Sunday heard the noted pulpit 
orator, Christlieb, who was also a professor of homi- 
letics in the University, and was mildly shocked the 
same afternoon to see him, with his family, drinking 
beer and watching the dancing in a beautiful wood- 
land resort on the other side of the Rhine which was 
reached by a densely packed excursion boat. 
I finally mustered courage to present the letter of 
introduction I had brought to Professor Lange, whose 
long row of commentaries on the books oT the Bible, 
which had been already translated into English, was 
held in great reverence by the Union faculty. He 
was a very old but very genial man, received me most 
kindly, introduced me to his middle-aged daughters, 
and kept me for the evening meal, giving me my first 
glimpse of the charming life and disposition of the 
Westphalians. I also called on the philosopher, Bona 
Meyer, one of whose books I knew slightly and greatly 
187 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
admired, but he was preoccupied and received me 
rather coolly. When the term opened I matriculated 
and attended the lectures of these three men and 
dropped into many others, intent mainly on learning 
the language. I looked up all the new words I could 
and was greatly helped by the daughter of my hostess, 
who, I think, had been a teacher. 
I remained here only till Christmas and then went 
to Berlin, where I was very fortunate in finding a 
place in a German “pension,” where no English was 
spoken, kept by a very dignified Herr Gildermeister 
directly opposite the Petri Kirche. tie had four 
daughters, whose average age was near my own, and 
had lately married a second wife who had been a 
teacher in a German higher school for girls. In the 
evening it was her custom to gather her daughters 
and the four students to read from Goethe, Schiller, 
or Lessing. This was, of course, an admirable train- 
ing in the language for me. Often we accompanied 
the family to a beer garden, where we spent the entire 
evening listening to a concert or a play, the admission 
to which, I remember, was about ten cents. At two 
of these half out-of-door Volkstheater we could hear 
classic German plays, even Faust, for the above sum. 
Pleasant Sunday afternoons, too, there were often 
excursions to Hasenheide, Tivoli, Charlottenberg, 
and other outlying points. Here I made my first ac- 
quaintance with the genuine German and specifically 
Prussian life as it was just before the War of 1870. 
The father of the family, with his embroidered velvet 
skull cap, presided with great dignity at the table, 
always calling upon one of his daughters to say grace 
and expecting us all to say gesegnete Mahlseit on 
sitting down and leaving the table. This formality 
was observed only at the more stately evening meal, 
where all were expected to be present and on time. 
There were really six meals—Fruhstiick or coffee and 
188 GERMANY, ANTIOCH COLLEGE 
a Brodchen brought by the servant girl, before we 
were up, into the large front room where we four 
students slept, each under a heavy feather bed. Then 
came a ten o’clock “bischen” for those who cared to 
take the ten-minute walk from the University for it; 
a somewhat formal noonday meal, with another 
optional “bischen” later; and finally the dinner men- 
tioned above. One of the foreign students, an Italian, 
awoke the rest of us very late one night, by coming in 
in a state of great excitement, very evidently empha- 
sized by overimbibition, to announce his engagement 
to a real Grdfin (countess). He showed us her picture 
and descanted on her charms with an enthusiasm that 
suggested Ariosto and a frankness of the details of 
their love-making that Petrarch himself would have 
enjoyed. 
Upon matriculation I took the courses of Dillmann 
and Dorner in theology, DuBois-Reymond in physiol- 
ogy, Westphal’s clinics at the Charite. Here each 
day he demonstrated from the rich material that this 
vast hospital afforded various types of mental aliena- 
tion and took us through the wards Sunday mornings, 
where he was later killed by a lunatic. The surgical 
course of Langenbach; all of Trendelenberg, the 
great Aristotelian; one course of Duhring, another 
of Magnus in physics, hearing Althaus and Droysen 
on the philosophy of history (the Grundriss of the 
latter I translated) and an occasional lecture of 
Lepsius, who took us one day through the rooms of 
the wonderful Berlin Museum devoted to Egyptology, 
made up the rest of my courses. I heard enough of 
Steinthal in the psychology of language to get an im- 
pression of his personality, and wished that I was able 
to take the courses of the University professors in 
dancing and fencing. I also often hospitiert with a 
German friend I met in the anthropological course 
given by Virchow, the founder of modern pathology, 
189 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
whose duties at the Reichstag took up much of his 
time. 
Thus if ever there were wild electives, they were 
illustrated in the above selections of courses, which 
were quite often unrelated throughout my five semes- 
ters. Altogether I think I must have attended lectures 
seven or eight hours a day, but I had too little experi- 
ence in note-taking at first to get much benefit from 
most of them, and some, even those I had paid for, 
were sooner or later abandoned. 
My chief interest and effort centered about two 
courses, the first that of Dorner, who represented a 
so-called “mediatizing” theology between the ex- 
tremes of Hegelism and Schleiermacher’s Reden and 
progressive Lutheran orthodoxy. His lectures dealt 
much with philosophical problems, and these I studied 
carefully and with the help of classmates’ notes so that 
on my return from Germany later I translated and 
published them in three successive numbers of the 
Presbyterian Quarterly beginning October, 1872. To 
the accuracy of this epitome of his general system, 
after it was printed, Dorner took some exceptions but 
admitted its substantial correctness. I also attended 
his weekly evening seminary, the work of which 
focused on Schleiermacher’s Christliche Glauben in 
which he attempts to construe all the articles of re- 
ligious faith as formulations of his feeling of abso- 
lute dependence (Das Gefiihl der schlechthinnigen 
Abhdngigkeit). This to me was an admirable disci- 
pline for it seemed to reduce theology largely to a 
formulation of man’s deeper emotional nature, and 
Dorner had been his pupil. 
The other course I followed intensively was that 
of Trendelenberg, whose weekly seminary I also at- 
tended. He was a large stately man who met his half 
dozen pupils in his own study, where he sat at his 
desk in cap and dressing gown, with a large dog he 
190 GERMANY, ANTIOCH COLLEGE 
had taught to curl up about his feet to keep them 
warm. The seminary took up the various parts of 
Aristotle’s Organon in Greek, my preparation for 
reading which had, again, been inferior to the other 
German members of this esoteric circle, especially to 
that of Paulsen, who was also a member and whom I 
recall as a somewhat uncouth countryman. But I 
learned more Greek here than I had in all my previous 
courses and became deeply interested in the leader’s 
great work, Kategorienlehre, which I pored over and 
fancied I more or less understood. I was greatly 
impressed by his conception of motion or movement 
as the prime category, in which he differed from 
Hegel by placing it first and holding that the ideas of 
both being and nothing were evolved from it. This 
conception I much later tried to develop in several 
articles. We were deeply interested in a violent con- 
troversy that arose at this time between Trendelenberg 
and Kuno Fischer regarding the pure apriority of 
Kant’s ideas of the sensory. Trendelenberg’s lectures 
covered the field of Greek philosophy and I followed 
his courses a second year. 
Outside the university I saw more or less of 
Berlin. Each student was given a “legitimation karte” 
which he could present to the police to exempt him 
from their custody if held up for roistering or other 
petty offenses. He was then tried by the University 
where he might be sentenced to the university prison 
(karcer) for a few days. This card, too, gave us a 
seat at reduced rates in the Studenten Logen at the 
theater and opera house, where I saw royalty for the 
first time, as well as the classic German dramas, to 
which the Schiller Theater was devoted, and not a few 
of the gorgeous ballets and standard operas. All 
performances began late in the afternoon and were 
usually over by nine o’clock, often in the summer be- 
fore it was dark in this northern latitude. The Volks- 
191 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
theater I justified myself in frequenting, to the de- 
rision of some of my new acquaintances, because it 
helped me with the language, and I attended many 
of the famous Bilse concerts. Here I saw little of 
corps life but did witness several duels as a guest and 
also attended, during my stay, several of the larger 
university kneipen, where most of the student body 
gathered and in which distinguished professors often 
took part. I was of course impressed by the very 
elaborate beer rituals, which sometimes required an 
entire glass of beer to be drunk by every one at a 
single standing, and then a kraftige Salamander had 
to be “rubbed,” everybody banging empty glasses 
upon the table—customs that have been so often de- 
scribed elsewhere in detail. I often visited the Reichs- 
tag and several times heard Bismarck speak from the 
minister’s raised desk at the right of the Speaker, 
heard the elder Liebknecht and Bebel, and the diminu- 
tive leader of the Center, Windhorst. Our minister, 
George Bancroft, was very hospitable to the few 
American students and sometimes invited us to his 
receptions, where on one occasion we filed by and 
shook hands with the great Bismarck. 
The old kaiser, Wilhelm I, was plainly visible 
during the forenoon from the yard of the University 
through the window of the palace directly opposite, 
and one day I remember a very large and breezy 
student from the west, walking with me during the 
akademische Viertel, remarked that he thought this 
exposure of the emperor unsafe, saying that he could 
easily “pick him off” from where he stood with a horse 
pistol. Soon a bright young student cultivated his ac- 
quaintance quite assiduously, often calling at his room 
evenings and also at my own, and then after a week or 
two he told us that he represented the police, to whose 
ears my friend’s remark had been conveyed. He was 
delegated to find out whether it meant a plot against 
192 GERMANY, ANTIOCH COLLEGE 
the Kaiser, and warning us against rash language left 
us and we saw him no more. This venerable ruler was 
very often seen on the street, and I was on Unter den 
Linden, although some distance from the scene, when, 
as Bismarck later described it, “the most beloved of 
all monarchs was peppered with buckshot like a rabbit 
by a renegade” (Nobling) from a distant high win- 
dow. This was, I think, just after the war. 
this Attentat did not prevent the kaiser from his rides 
alone in a low open barouche, and I even saw him 
at the “Corso” in the Tiergarten slowly riding back 
and forth between the large crowds, a target for bou- 
quets, which filled his carriage to more than over- 
flowing. 
Treitschke, a very imposing figure (I think it was 
at this time although it may have been in my later 
visit), was lecturing with the stentorian but unmodu- 
lated voice characteristic of his deafness to immense 
crowds of students on the destined greatness of Ger- 
many, a course in which Du Bois-Reymond gave 
several of his classic popular lectures which later be- 
came so well known on two continents. Kirschmann, 
the philosopher, had been deposed for socialistic 
teachings, which was thought by the professors to be 
a grave infringement of academic freedom, but I made 
several pleasant, and apparently welcome, calls on 
him at the very humble quarters he was obliged to 
assume after his dismissal. He too, was a member, 
as was Michelet, the aged Hegelian, and Lasson of a 
philosophical club which met Saturday afternoons in 
a cafe on Unter den Linden. With several of its 
members I formed a pleasant acquaintance, and was 
occasionally invited to their houses; on one occasion, 
I remember, making my first acquaintance with the 
German method of proposing a toast to a guest at 
dinner, which always required a response. Not un- 
derstanding, I failed to reply, which seemed to be 
193 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
taken amiss. I spent a number of memorable after- 
noons at the house of Eduard von Hartmann, the fa- 
mous philosopher of the Unconscious. He was then 
a young man with a very long, flowing sandy beard, 
and as he was more or less paralyzed in his limbs, 
sat always in a high wheel-chair with his young sec- 
ond wife standing over him, while he discoursed to 
his visitors. He spoke either inside his tiny house 
or on the little piazza in front of it to which he was 
often wheeled. We always marveled that he never 
had any academic recognition, but the cause was obvi- 
ous for he had already attacked the “professorlings” 
almost as bitterly as his master, Schopenhauer, had 
done. 
It was during this triennium that the Franco- 
Prussian War so suddenly broke out. The universi- 
ties were closed earlier than usual that spring and I 
became one of several American correspondents, 
working under Dr. Jacobi in Berlin, who, I think, 
gathered and sent all the news of the war to the New 
York and other American papers. I was first sent to 
Stettin on the Baltic where it was feared the French 
fleet would appear and make an attack. After idling 
for two weeks and sending in various notes and im- 
pressions I was dispatched toward the front and was 
near enough to the battle of Sedan to hear the cannon 
and see the wounded as they were brought back. 
Soon, however, the regular correspondents arrived, 
and either for this reason or because our work was 
unsatisfactory we were discharged. 
I was in Berlin during the whole course of this 
war and my sympathies, like those of America gen- 
erally, were with the Germans. I saw thereafter little 
more of the war than the street sights in Berlin af- 
forded. There was incessant marching of the troops, 
and when the first wounded soldiers arrived they 
often rode in open barouches through the streets and 
194 GERMANY, ANTIOCH COLLEGE 
were overwhelmed with gifts of every kind, from 
fruit to jewels. The streets swarmed with handsome 
young officers who seemed haughty, very prone to 
take offense, and often almost came to open hostilities 
during their discussions in the cafes of Unter den 
Linden. Most impressive of all, however, was the 
formal entrance of the army through the Branden- 
burger Thor when they came home crowned with 
victory, the Kaiser, Von Moltke, and Bismarck lead- 
ing. There could hardly be greater excitement. 
Every one was ecstatic. It was, indeed, a crucial mo- 
ment for the Fatherland, for then it received a new 
soul, and the great transition from culture to Kultnr, 
which has since brought her to grief, if not then 
actually begun was accelerated greatly. The change, 
too, was marked and instantaneous. Every Prussian 
seemed to stand more erect, was less gemutlich, and 
less respectful to foreigners, as one noted even in 
asking the way upon the street, for a new self-con- 
sciousness was born that day in the heart of every 
German. 
One summer I made a memorable vacation jour- 
ney with a docent some ten years my senior, whose 
name and department, strange to say, I cannot now 
recall. He cultivated me for my English, and I, him 
for his German. We started from Bonn, planning to 
walk all the way to Switzerland but later often 
availed ourselves of steamboats and railways. We 
were both poor and spent the nights generally with 
some peasant whom my companion inveigled into 
keeping us, and lived largely on black bread and 
sweetened bonnyclapper, sampling middays the vari- 
ous Rhine wines. We made one long detour through 
the Black Forest and the Brocken region and then 
passed into northern Switzerland. We climbed the 
Kulm, spent one night with a peasant high on the 
spur of the Vetterhorn where, I remember, after the 
195 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
evening meal, in the late and glorious twilight we both 
had an attack of mountain fever, and sawed and split 
wood for our host for a long time with fury, ex- 
hausted though we were with the day’s tramp. One 
night near the Griindenwald Glacier we were kept 
awake by the incessant falling of ice boulders where 
a short time before there had been a serious ava- 
lanche. We explored the Vierwaldstatter See and 
scenes of Tell’s life, and I fancy my companion must 
have been a specialist in mythology for his interest 
throughout seemed to lie in this field. One day, near 
the latter part of this trip, we fell in with a solitary 
pilgrim who joined us for several days. We found 
him unusually bright and active. Every night he 
stripped and gave himself a rubdown and we noted 
his fine form. When he left us he gave us his card, 
and he proved to be the ballet master of the Royal 
Opera House in Berlin whom we had both seen upon 
the stage but had not recognized. 
On coming home from Germany in 1871, I passed 
through a period of acute discouragement for I was 
grievously in debt. I thought I had a modest appoint- 
ment in a large midwestern state university, but the 
president requested me by letter to tell him what I 
had done abroad, and on receiving my reply wrote 
me canceling the engagement because he thought the 
history of philosophy which I wished to present in 
his institution would “unsettle men and teach them 
to hold no opinions.” I went to New York, taught 
a few weeks in Charlier’s French school for boys but 
was a misfit and left. In another fitting school on 
Broadway where beginners in Greek and Latin were 
taught to talk it I also failed. 
I had met George S. Morris, who was then trans- 
lating Ueberweg and was by far the most scholarly 
man in the history of philosophy that America has 
even yet produced. He was also an excellent musi- 
196 GERMANY, ANTIOCH COLLEGE 
cian and a man of the keenest aesthetic and the highest 
moral impulses. He had just received a call to 
Michigan University, where his life was to be spent, 
and procured my acceptance as his successor as pri- 
vate family tutor of the five children of the eminent 
Jewish banker, Jesse Seligman. Here I lived as a 
member of the family in almost entire charge of the 
training of three boys and two younger girls, select- 
ing their schools and to some extent their studies, 
keeping a kind of school for them at home five even- 
ings a week, selecting the two or three theaters they 
were allowed to attend each week and perhaps accom- 
panying them, sending them away from the table 
when they were saucy or misbehaved, helping them 
a little with their Hebrew lessons (for the Jewish 
Sunday school meant work), and being in a general 
way responsible for them. I was free during the 
entire day, during which I sometimes attended lectures 
in the Seminary and for the rest read mostly in the 
history of philosophy. 
My first evening there one of the boys defied my 
authority and I finally took him across my knee and 
used and, as I remember, broke a heavy hairbrush in 
administering Dr. Spankster’s tonic. His shrieks 
brought the mother downstairs to the schoolroom just 
as it was over. She stood in the doorway and asked 
what was the matter. I replied that A. was impudent 
and I spanked him. He was crying loudly to appeal 
to her sympathy and I think she wavered. It was a 
critical moment but she was a sensible and highly 
educated woman and finally said, “I place the boys 
entirely under your authority” and left, and I had no 
further trouble. 
I was there sixteen months, during which I took 
one of the older boys to Harvard and saw him entered 
and established there, and placed another in New York 
University. It was during my stay that the family 
197 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
moved from Gramercy Park to East Forty-Second St. 
near Fifth Avenue, opposite the place where the 
ill-fated Windsor Hotel was later built. One summer 
was passed on Staten Island and the other at Lake 
Mahopac. It was here, too, that I became intimate 
with Horatio Alger, the noted writer of many juvenile 
works, who was tutor in another Seligman family. 
I also made many pleasant and profitable acquaint- 
ances among the Jewish people of New York, and 
was greatly impressed with Felix Adler, who had 
just returned from European studies and by his pro- 
nouncement in a synagogue had lately shocked his 
conservative and pious Rabbi father. The accom- 
plished and charming Mr. Costello, who, I remember, 
was very expert in the billiard room, was another 
friend. For years I kept up a very pleasant acquaint- 
ance with this family, of whom I have only the most 
delightful memories. German was spoken here as 
much as English, and Sunday dinners, at which there 
were always guests, were not only enjoyable but very 
profitable for me. 
It was while I was with the Seligmans that I one 
day received a call from James K. Hosmer, whom I 
had met in Europe, the author of Thinking Bayonets 
and other works. He was leaving his chair at Antioch 
College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, for a larger field and 
offered me his place there; this I gladly accepted. 
Antioch College had been founded as a western out- 
post of Unitarianism which here sought to amalga- 
mate with the Christian denomination, which believed 
in the Bible without theology. But the fusion was 
always more apparent than real. Christians had 
founded the institution some decades before as a re- 
sult of an enthusiastic campaign to give their clergy 
and young people a taste of the higher education, and 
Horace Mann, after he had lost favor in Boston, 
spent the last fourteen years of his life here as its 
198 GERMANY, ANTIOCH COLLEGE 
first president, bringing, I believe, a substantial en- 
dowment fund gathered from Unitarian sources. 
The first year I boarded with the president, the 
venerable George Washington Hosmer, father of my 
predecessor and teacher of morals and philosophy. 
My chair at first was a whole settee, embracing 
English, French, and German language and literature. 
In one class we read Egmont, Faust, and Gotz von 
Berlichingen; in another, Racine and Moliere; and 
in yet another Shakespeare, etc. The institution was 
one of the pioneers in coeducation and we had a select 
body of mature young ladies who came from a wider 
area and were, on the whole, superior to the men, 
who were more local. Although there was a large 
preparatory school connected with it, it had always 
striven in the academic department, in which all my 
work lay, for high standards; and although it was 
small, the little faculty was very ambitious to do the 
best work possible and there was much talk about 
“maintaining Harvard standards.” The second year 
and the two later ones I passed here, four in all, 
were very stimulating although my activities were 
extremely varied. I was librarian, leader of the choir 
and sometimes organist, took my turn with, I think, 
four others in conducting church services on Sunday, 
held rhetorical exercises evenings, formed intimate 
personal associations with the students, some of whom 
were older than I, and taught them as best I could. 
The second year, when the president left and was suc- 
ceeded by the genial and expert geologist, Edward 
Orton, later for many years president of the Ohio 
State University at Columbus and father of the dis- 
tinguished neurologist, I was able to devote most of 
my time to teaching philosophical subjects as I would. 
I was an enthusiast for Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley, 
and as the religious spirit was free I could do practi- 
cally what I would. It was during my stay here that 
199 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
the first volume of Wundt’s Physiological Psychology 
was published, which I devoured. This eventually led 
me to resign in order to go to Leipzig to study with 
him. 
From Antioch I several times made excursions to 
St. Louis to spend Saturday evening with the Hegel- 
ian, William T. Harris, who had won national fame 
by his educational reconstruction of the St. Louis 
schools, which was widely copied. Here Schneider, 
Thomas Davidson, and a German thinker of much 
note and ability whose name I forget, and sometimes, 
I think, Miss Blow of kindergarten fame, listened to 
expositions of Hegel by Harris, and of Aristotle by 
Davidson. I may add here that later when Harris 
established himself in Concord and opened a famous 
summer school which although rather sparsely at- 
tended received great space in the newspapers in the 
slack summer season, I often attended. He had 
sought to graft Hegelism as a kind of new dispensa- 
tion upon New England transcendentalism, but Emer- 
son was too old to be interested and Bronson Alcott 
“never understood,” and so Harris established, one 
fall, a weekly conference in Boston which began with 
great promise and was attended, as I remember, by 
the venerable Professor Hedge and C. C. Everett of 
the Harvard Theological School; Benjamin Andrews, 
later president of Brown and of the University of 
Kansas, but then connected with the Newton Theo- 
logical School; Professor Francis Bowen, William 
James, George Palmer, Mr. Cabot, and a few others. 
There were immense possibilities here. Harris’ 
method, however, was to translate and expound the 
larger logic of Hegel, and this he did in a somewhat 
de haut en has way rather more calculated to indoctri- 
nate than to promote discussion. Thus his hearers 
began to fall off, James even writing his humorous 
Some Hegelisms ridiculing what was taught as almost 
200 GERMANY, ANTIOCH COLLEGE 
sacred in this circle, so that at the last meeting in 
the spring I remember only myself and a St. Louis 
devotee of the cult were present. I have always 
thought that by a different method and by requiring a 
more independent and less abject discipleship there 
were possibilities here for a new cult of idealism 
which might have had a great influence upon Harvard 
and the intellectual elite of Boston. 
My work at Antioch was diversified, but although 
the penumbra was wide there was a solid nucleus to 
it all. One year I had to teach Anglo-Saxon, of which 
I knew nothing and had to “cram” from Corson and 
Marsh. I also had to prepare Shakespearean dramas 
four times a year to be given in the chapel, the plat- 
form of which was expressly built that it might be 
used as a stage for the benefit of the literary society. 
I had to choose and cut the play, assign the parts, 
prepare the scenery, suggest the costumes to the 
young women who made them, and act in every way 
as impresario. Occasionally I had to preach in the 
Unitarian church in Cincinnati, where I met Dr. 
Mayo, noted for his advocacy of a better education 
in the south; Dr. Vickers, the librarian, a man of 
great German scholarship; Judge Stallo, and occa- 
sionally spent a Sunday with the Tafts. Ex-Presi- 
dent Taft was then a boy and his father, Judge Alonzo 
Taft, was a trustee of Antioch College. 
Once a week during the winter I had to ride seven 
or eight miles to the colored Wilberforce College and 
lecture in a popular way to the student body, which 
was presided over by the really venerable Dr. Payne. 
Here on one occasion my lectures were interrupted 
by an interesting outbreak of religious frenzy when 
an active revival was in progress. There was a tem- 
perance crusade in town in which the women took 
turns in standing before every place where liquor was 
sold and taking the names of every one who entered, 
201 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
day and night—a singular craze that spread far and 
wide. 
Some of the older graduates of Antioch had 
founded and widely advertised “The Great American 
Literary Bureau,” which supplied compositions to 
students in different colleges for a fee. I was chair- 
man of the college committee to break this up. We 
found several students in other institutions who had 
patronized them and who made full confessions, by 
publication of which we were able to suppress this 
traffic in brains. But as a result, when I happened 
to meet the leader of the organization on the street 
he took a revolver from his pocket and loaded it while 
passing me. Later, a bullet fired in my direction 
lodged in the post of the store a safe rod from where 
I was; another was fired through the window of my 
room a few nights later; while at a rhetorical evening 
exercise where I sat on the platform, a bottle of acid 
was thrown through the window, evidently directed 
at me but fell short and broke on the edge of the 
platform, spoiling my clothes and the dresses of some 
of the girls in the front row. 
There were occasionally county educational meet- 
ings, and for one of these, I remember, I prepared and 
gave my first address to teachers. At commencement 
not only the local but our more distinguished eastern 
trustees, Dr. Edward Everett Hale and Dr. Bellows 
of New York, and Robert Collier, another trustee, 
were generally present for a few days and gave several 
addresses. They were all very companionable with 
the instructors. I greatly enjoyed the friendship here 
of my colleague, Professor Rebecca S. Rice, head of 
the mathematical department, who had studied in 
Germany and was a lady of great ability and refine- 
ment. Although she was much older than I, we struck 
up a great intimacy, not only in college but in town 
and church matters. I treasure highly the memory 
202 GERMANY, ANTIOCH COLLEGE 
of this acquaintance, which lasted not only during my 
stay here but for many years after she had established 
a successful private school for girls in Chicago. Here, 
too, I formed the slight acquaintance of Cornelia 
Fisher, who was later to be my wife, whose father 
had retired from business in Cincinnati and lived in 
town upon a modest income. 
The scenery in the vicinity was beautiful, as the 
college was situated near the edge of a very deep and 
long ravine and near a famous chalybeate spring, be- 
side which an immense summer hotel had been built. 
The beautiful walks were always tempting to the stu- 
dents, and the chief disciplinary cases which came 
before the conservative faculty were the results of 
incessant “pairings off” of the boys and girls for 
afternoon and evening rambles. I was always im- 
pressed with the way in which the strong feminine 
element dominated the college sentiment, and felt that 
the active boy student life that characterized other non- 
coeducational institutions was lamentably lacking be- 
cause of this. At my age and stage of development, 
however, no experience could perhaps, on the whole, 
have been better. 
At the end of the third year I resigned but was 
induced to stay one more year, and then I started off 
for Europe and Wundt. I only reached Cambridge, 
however, for I was met by the offer of an instructor- 
ship in the English department at Harvard under Pro- 
fessor Childs, and more specifically under A. S. Hill, 
and reluctantly accepted in the hope that I might 
acquire a foothold to teach philosophy, as it was ru- 
mored that Professor Bowen was about to retire, 
which the sequel showed he had no thought of doing 
for some time. I had met President Eliot the summer 
before, when I called on him with a letter of intro- 
duction from Dr. Hale with a proposition that origi- 
nated in the mind of my colleague S. C. Derby, that 
203 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
Harvard should hold entrance examinations outside of 
Cambridge at different points, of which Antioch was 
to be one. Dr. Eliot was interested and at once ac- 
cepted the suggestion, and this was the origin of the 
system of nonlocal entrance tests, although we were 
disappointed that other places not including Antioch 
were chosen. 
At Harvard I had, I think, the only work required 
of the sophomore class, numbering some 250, which 
I had to divide in three installments coming in suc- 
cessive hours, to repeat the same lesson. There were 
also in this subject two written examinations of three 
hours each and four “sprung” tests of an hour each. 
Each student, moreover, had to write six “themes,” 
all of which had to be corrected, each of course by 
a different standard and with enough corrections to 
justify rewriting. All these twelve papers by each 
student had to be marked, as did each recitation, with 
considerable care because there were many scholar- 
ships that depended upon rank. This drudgery was 
so distasteful to me that I was very glad that a siege 
of scarlet fever, which kept me out two or three weeks, 
gave me a good excuse to send in my resignation in 
the early spring. But President Eliot replied that the 
class would “await with equanimity” my recovery and 
I was expected to finish the year, which I did. It 
was during this year that my younger brother, Robert, 
died. He had lately been settled over a church in 
Cambridgeport and with him I had boarded. 
As soon as this year was finished, I hied again to 
Europe for my second triennium, in 1876, and now 
had a very definite purpose—to study experimental 
or physiological psychology with Wundt at Leipzig. 
He had only lately been elected full professor there 
over Horwicz, the author of the Analysis of the 
Feelings, and his laboratory was but little organized. 
Kulpe and Kraepelin were there, and I participated 
204 GERMANY, ANTIOCH COLLEGE 
as subject in several of the experiments. But as the 
laboratory was open only in the latter part of the 
afternoon, and especially beause I felt it necessary 
to ground myself in physiology, I left Wundt and 
spent most of the day in the laboratory of Professor 
Ludwig, who gave me a problem in myology, work- 
ing with me a great deal. When my results were 
ready he wrote the entire long article himself, em- 
bodying his own experimental devices and ideas (for 
he had worked with me daily) and printed my name 
as the sole author of it all, stating only in a footnote 
that the study had been done in his laboratory. Here, 
too, I did another lighter piece of work on indirect 
vision with Professor Von Kries, which also found 
a place in Ludwig’s Archiv. I made the acquaintance 
and, I think, heard the first courses of Flechsig on the 
microscopic structure of the brain, and took one 
practical course in microscopic histology, at the end 
of which I had a large collection of slides made by 
myself which I long treasured. Here I first made 
the acquaintance of Professor Mosso of Turin, a 
former student of Ludwig, who made us a long 
visit to see his friend and later associate, Fenno, who 
was still there, and I became more or less intimate 
with Von Frei, who was just beginning his epoch- 
making studies on the dermal senses. 
Ludwig was the leader and one of the founders 
of experimental physiology, and it was his pupils who 
filled most of the chairs in that great department not 
only in Germany but in other countries. He was a 
charming man, already elderly but with activities un- 
abated, full of delightful reminiscences. He sometimes 
invited us to his residence, which was over the labora- 
tory. One day while I was there a small mob, inspired 
by a fiery apostle of antivivisection, attacked his 
laboratory, and when he came out to expostulate he 
was hit with a stone; but I think no great damage 
205 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
was done either to him or to the building. Physiology, 
of course, is entirely built upon experiments on living 
tissue and we had to have animals, particularly frogs, 
rats, rabbits, guinea pigs, dogs, pigeons, etc., at our 
disposal. But no needless suffering was inflicted and 
narcotics were always used where they would not 
interfere with the experiment. It was also then, I 
believe, the rule of that institution never to use vivi- 
section for purposes of class demonstration but only 
for research. Ludwig was the most humane of men 
and was long president of the anticruelty society, es- 
tablishing a home for stray dogs and cats, drinking 
places for horses, abolished the check rein, etc. 
I always left the laboratory long enough to attend 
Wundt’s lectures, although at that time he was con- 
sidered somewhat of a usurper, not entirely scientific, 
and rumor said he had been superseded as Helm- 
holtz’s assistant by a man of severer and more accu- 
rate methods and greater mathematical knowledge. I 
also attended Wundt’s seminary, in which his method 
then was to assign reading, expecting each to report in 
detail. He took incessant and voluminous notes, so 
that in a sense we read for him; and I have always 
thought this method was the key to the vast erudition 
that marks his publications. From the very first he 
was one of the most popular of all lecturers in this 
previously entirely Herbartian institution. Students 
from all departments flocked to hear him for it was 
a tradition that every German student must know 
some philosophy. He was an indefatigable worker 
and we rarely saw him outside the laboratory, 
although even here he spent little time and did little 
work, most of it being done in his study at home. He 
impressed me then as being rather inept in the use 
of his hands. I only ventured, despite my great admi- 
ration for him, to call on him once, when I was very 
pleasantly received also by his English-speaking wife. 
206 GERMANY, ANTIOCH COLLEGE 
I think his own knowledge of English was slight and 
I never heard him speak it. In his old age he made 
the great mistake of bitterly antagonizing his own 
pupils who had developed the methods of introspec- 
tion, which has added so much to our knowledge of 
psychology, and still later was not only one of ninety 
odd professors who signed the notorious German 
Manifesto but published a very bitter attack upon 
Germany’s enemies, particularly England. His many 
students, however, in all lands mourn his recent death. 
Very near me lived the famous Professor Theo- 
dore Fechner, retired, almost blind, read to incessantly 
by his devoted wife, and there I was always a welcome 
caller. He was then preparing his final book on the 
psychophysic law. It was he, Weber, and the astron- 
omer, Zollner, who in their later years fell victims, 
greatly to the scandal of their colleagues, to the Ameri- 
can medium, Slade. Zollner, at his house, showed me 
messages on slates; a solid wooden ring on a spool, 
over neither end of which it could apparently go 
which he said the spirits had put there; a knot tied 
by them in an endless string, etc. He alone, however, 
took this vagary into the classroom, and although it 
drove nearly all his students away, the authorities 
never violated academic freedom by subjecting him 
to any kind of discipline. I also found time to take 
the course of Heinze in philosophy, and occasionally 
dropped into the little group that followed the lectures 
of the very aged elder Striimpell and three other 
popular introductory courses which the leading Ger- 
man professors then always gave because it added so 
much to their income. Each course required its own 
fee and all the proceeds went to the professor in 
charge. These courses were five hours each,—Kolbe 
in chemistry, His in anatomy, and Leuckart in 
zoology, all three laboratories near together. 
During the two Leipzig years I found relatively 
207 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
little time for reading, save in connection with my 
subject, the physiology of the muscles, on which I 
focused as I had never done on any subject before. 
There was then much interest in hypnotism and I 
visited Breslau to see Heidenhain’s remarkable 
methods and results. At one time he passed down a 
line of soldiers giving each a glass marble to hold 
up and gaze at in a fixed way, as the result of which 
nearly a third became more or less cataleptic. Both 
these summers were spent in town. Here I had very 
little time for amusement except at the Stadt Theater 
and opera house, where I made it a point to see every- 
thing I could. 
One year was spent in Berlin. Here I undertook 
first to work with Helmholtz to determine from the 
study of the shadow of the retinal blood vessels 
whether the different rays were brought to a focus 
which coincided with the discs of the rods, and I thus 
came in slight contact with this great man who had 
already published his Optics and Acoustics and whom 
his biographer paid the supreme compliment of saying 
that throughout his mature years nearly every one of 
his serious thoughts extended the boundaries of hu- 
man knowledge. After a few weeks of effort to 
approach my theme by various methods, during which 
he spent some time daily in the little room assigned 
me, he concluded that the above problem I had 
brought could not be solved. We attended musicales 
occasionally at his residence. 
Back in 1848 or ’49, Du Bois-Reymond in his 
Physiology had said that we should never be able to 
determine the rate of the transmission of a stimulus 
along nerves because the tracts available were too 
short and the motion too rapid, but in 1852, Helmholtz 
published a four-page leaflet, for a copy of which I 
paid ten German marks as a model of condensation, 
in which he did measure this time with the greatest 
208 GERMANY, ANTIOCH COLLEGE 
accuracy on the two inches or less of the sciatic nerve 
available in the frog. As Helmholtz did not lecture 
on any physiological subject and as I could not follow 
his mathematical discussions or purely theoretical 
physics, I soon gave up the course. 
Du Bois-Reymond, at the other end of the large 
new laboratory building, was giving his famous 
demonstrations in physiology, preparation for which 
took most of the time of several assistants. He had 
evidently been inspired by Czermak, who had previ- 
ously built a “physiological theater” in Leipzig with 
a large stage with endless wings, screens, and flies that 
were also let down from the top and came up through 
the floor and where every physiological phenomenon 
was demonstrated. This theater had burned but Du 
Bois-Reymond was doing just this and was giving a 
unique series of demonstrations with the abundant aid 
of vivisected animals and all the apparatus in his 
copiously stocked cases, helped out by magic lantern 
slides, etc. My own special work here was with his 
chief assistant, Hugo Kronecker, on reflex action 
(where, again, the frog was chiefly used) the history 
of which I studied very carefully one summer, even 
visiting the great library at Paris and the British 
Museum for material, proposing to publish a compre- 
hensive memoir on the subject, which was, however, 
never quite completed although I later utilized some of 
it, as did also my Clark colleague, Professor Hodge. 
The only painful incident here I recall was the wanton 
destruction of our choicest kymograph curves by a 
jealous student. 
Here, too, it was that one day we were hastily 
sent home at eleven o’clock in the morning to don 
evening dress and demonstrate, each what we were 
doing, to the Crown Prince, the father of William II, 
who with his wife honored us with a visit. I was 
just then engaged with a plethismograph and had the 
209 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
arm of my assistant in a tube filled with water termi- 
nating at a point to show the contraction and expan- 
sion of the arm due to changes of circulation. As the 
royal visitors approached, his awe drew so much blood 
away from the arm to his head that the former shrank 
till the needle dropped off the drum, and my experi- 
ment failed. The professor explained it, to the hearty 
amusement of his visitors. 
Zeller had been called to Berlin but my interest in 
these new studies was absorbing, and the fact that he 
was said to be covering the same ground on which 
he had already printed kept me from hearing him. 
The same was probably true of Lotze, whom I greatly 
admired and who had, I believe, already been called 
to Berlin. 
Here, too, I wrote most of the letters and essay- 
lets to the New York Nation which made up a large 
part of my Aspects of German Culture, published in 
1881. It was during this period that Kaiser William I 
died and was succeeded by his son, and I well re- 
member the controversy and the bitterness that was 
visited against his wife because she had imported an 
English specialist, MacKenzie, to treat her spouse in 
order, it was said, to evade the German law that no 
one suffering from a mortal disease like cancer could 
come to the throne. I remember seeing him ride in 
the streets of Berlin with a healthy color, later said to 
have been painted on his face at the instigation of 
Victoria, who was determined to and did, in spite 
of Bismarck, become Kaiserin. It was during this 
stay, too, that I attended the funeral of our minister 
to Berlin, Bayard Taylor, who had become a great 
favorite at court. It was here, also, that I again met 
Miss Fisher, who had come to Berlin to study art, 
and we were married there under circumstances de- 
scribed in my Recreations of a Psychologist (1920) 
and had our first brief experience in housekeeping. 
210 GERMANY, ANTIOCH COLLEGE 
The lecture method that then prevailed in Ger- 
many in philosophic subjects, and still more in theol- 
ogy, was medieval. It strove to present with a 
systematization too ostentatious, a view of the subject 
so complete that reading was almost unnecessary. 
Students wrote with great assiduity the words of the 
master as dictations, and this he expected them to do 
save in his E.rpektorationen, which were more sponta- 
neous interjections and were often far more inter- 
esting and important. The ideal of the student was 
to have a full and complete Heft or body of notes 
for future reference. Thus little use was made of 
libraries. This method did and was designed to pro- 
duce schools of disciples, and professors then and in 
these fields often printed only late in life when they 
were practically done lecturing. Publication was 
often detrimental to the number of auditors and there- 
fore to the professor’s income, so that there was 
sometimes no other way of getting the ideas of a 
famous man than from his lectures. Thus reputations 
often grew great in the perfervid minds of youth in 
a feudal if not almost a tribal sense, for learning was 
esoteric and the monopoly of the universities, which 
considered themselves direct continuations of the 
“porch,” the “grove,” and the academy. Its advan- 
tage is that knowledge that does enter through the 
far older and wider ear-gate sinks deeper than that 
which comes through the upstart source of reading. 
It gave the great masters a moral eminence and de- 
veloped the instinct of fealty which youth needs. 
Books were not sealed to the laity as was the Bible 
of old, but bad library methods and the social atmos- 
phere of the lecture room, which gregarious youth 
prefers to book work at home and alone, helped to 
give the professor something of the oracular quality 
once held by the priestcraft. Thus for generations 
the German student lived for the most part in a pre- 
211 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
Gutenberg stage, especially in the departments of 
theology and philosophy. 
The very formalism with which some of the pro- 
fessors still hedged themselves about added to their 
luster. The beadle preceded the instructor and 
ushered him into his lecture room with more or less 
elaborate ceremonial, carried and laid his manuscript 
before him together with a glass of water, sometimes 
shouting Silentia to announce his presence and acting 
as a kind of sergeant-at-arms until the lecture was 
begun. The professor often wore his academic robe, 
the luster and hues of which indicated his eminence. 
He stood or sat on a high dais, usually plain but some- 
times much carved. All rose to salute him as he 
entered and sat only when he nodded permission, per- 
haps applauded, and always rose to let him retire 
first. Before my day, in the age of the great philos- 
ophers some instructors in this subject were, indeed, 
Sir Oracle and seemed to be almost mouthpieces of 
the Divine. Some of them claimed to ignore all other 
authors and to lecture only upon their own ideas or 
discoveries, to demonstrate God—as though He had 
been waiting all these years to have the honor of this 
proof conferred upon Him—or they established the 
reality of the world as though it depended upon their 
ratiocination. It was not uncommon not only to adju- 
dicate on high grounds between science and religion 
but to issue credentials and letters patent to all other 
departments of human knowledge, triangulating vast 
mental spaces, real or assumed, and developing logical 
grounds for holding what every normal mind has 
always accepted on the more instinctive and sounder 
basis of common sense, but sometimes refuting the 
latter. 
In delivery, the German professors, even in my day 
and still more so earlier, had almost every excellence 
and every defect. One very popular Heidelberg 
212 GERMANY, ANTIOCH COLLEGE 
savant was said to have laboriously cultivated every 
rhetorical grace, and he certainly spoke and gestured 
with great fervor and sometimes pathos and dramatic 
force, which often entranced his hearers and made 
them forget note-taking and punctuate his well- 
rounded periods with applause. In some departments 
long extracts from German, Greek, French, English, 
and other languages were read with a style that was 
very effective, and we are told that French professors 
at one time especially cultivated these arts and took les- 
sons in voice-building and elocution of the great pro- 
fessors of dramatic art. Very commonly, however, 
all these devices were utterly neglected by the German 
savants. Some of them either instinctively or, as I 
used to half suspect, with design developed personal 
idiosyncrasies and automatisms which would them- 
selves be an interesting theme for study. One vener- 
able man at Leipzig often forgot his collar and 
necktie—and we fancied also his morning ablutions. 
His long locks were disheveled and often hung over 
his face, and were automatically thrown back every 
little while by a jerk of the head or stroke behind the 
ear. Another could not lecture without fingering his 
pencil in a characteristic way and was said to have 
adjourned his class once when he had forgotten it 
and no one offered him one. One brilliant professor 
whom I heard almost ran into the room, beginning 
as usual Meine Herren before he had got to his desk, 
lectured so rapidly that he seemed to have Gedanken- 
flucht, and indeed often had to be reminded by the 
traditional scrapes of the feet upon the floor that his 
hour was up. Another habitually gazed at a peculiar 
knot in a tree outside and was upset when the tree 
was felled. Another was always turning the leaves 
of his manuscript back and forth as if trying to find 
his place, lecturing all the while with great continuity. 
Another would lower his voice at all important points 
213 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
so that there was a rush for front seats, and occa- 
sionally students would tiptoe close to his desk to get 
their ears a few yards nearer his mouth lest a precious 
syllable be lost. One was lame and had to be wheeled 
in and lifted on to a curious kind of saddle, on which 
he would sway to the right and left until we feared 
he would fall, although he clung to his desk. Another 
stood rigid and immovable and spoke in tones of 
almost absolute monotony like an automaton, or sug- 
gestive of the “machine minister” that Eli Perkins 
described (although there were no stops in him, re- 
vival, funereal, or other). Another sank down in his 
chair as if abstracted, looking toward his feet, and 
seemed soliloquizing, sometimes clucking and bring- 
ing his heavy hand down with a blow upon the desk 
—not to kill flies, as it seemed, but to annihilate pessi- 
mists, materialists, or other enemies. A Leipzig epis- 
temologist was fond of taking his text from any 
salient object—the chalk on the blackboard or a bird 
on the tree outside—thence proceeding to the myster- 
ies of the subjectivity of all knowledge, taking fire as 
he went along like the wheels of Jove’s chariot. He 
began with a thin falsetto, baby voice and ended in 
stentorian. 
I used to wonder whether some of these learned 
men thought thus to give greater saliency to their 
individuality by cultivating a repertory of idiosyncra- 
sies, or whether these were compensatory for a sub- 
conscious sense that their subject matter did not by 
itself sufficiently stand out. Perhaps the number of 
distractions of this kind that students had to overcome 
in order to get the pith and drift of their masters 
measured their degree of appreciation of them, and 
perhaps it was felt that the students would love the 
truth all the more because of the difficulties they had 
to encounter to obtain it.1 All this, of course, tends 
1 One recalls here the practice of certain pulpiteers a few centuries 
214 GERMANY, ANTIOCH COLLEGE 
to divert attention from what should be the first or 
inner circle of resources to be exhausted before any 
of these secondary devices are appealed to, namely, 
spontaneous stress, inflection, pitch, and timbre. 
These are the most immediate and effective accompa- 
niments of speech and the best media of psychic in- 
fection. 
As my second stay abroad drew to a close and 
I had no prospects of a position I became, again, very 
anxious about my future, thought much of studying 
medicine and entering upon the practice of that pro- 
fession, and finally decided that neither psychology 
nor philosophy would ever make bread and that the 
most promising line of work would be to study the 
applications of psychology to education. With this 
in view, and also with the desire to see something of 
great men in other institutions, I spent the last months 
of this period in travel and in visiting schools. I 
heard the Passion Play in Oberammergau, which is 
given Sundays during the summer every ten years, 
and was so interested that I stayed over a week to 
hear it again and become acquainted with some of the 
chief characters. I visited a number of Gymnasia and 
Realschulen; spent a few weeks in Vienna, hearing 
lectures by the venerable physiologist, Kiihne, and by 
the brilliant neurologists, Meynert and Exner. I had 
a letter to the great surgeon, Bilroth, who, I know not 
why, was very cordial and several times entertained 
ago whose sermons were punctuated with hieroglyphic signs which 
meant—here, hem and haw; here, use the handkerchief to the eyes or 
nose; pause, sniffle, sob, etc.; now fast or slow; high or low; loud or 
whisper; so that there was a long list of interjections, sighs, gasps, 
etc., to say nothing of closing the book, folding the hands, kneeling, 
rolling the eyes, and very elaborate systems of gesticulation—pronate, 
supinate hand, quivering index finger, fistic movements, horizontal 
sweeps, etc., the latter being finally mechanized in the device of an 
American professor of pulpit oratory who constructed an adjustable 
frame in which the student entered from behind, with grooves for 
all the important arm movements, for each cardinal gesture; so that 
being once in it it was said to be impossible to make an awkward 
movement. 
215 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
me. He was then, I think, writing his remarkable 
culture history of syphilis. I heard Kuno Fischer on 
the History of Modern Philosophy for a few days at 
Heidelberg and was greatly impressed by his elo- 
quence. I was told that he had a unique rhetorical 
device behind his desk—a stool with several short 
steps up which he would climb at impressive para- 
graphs, when he seemed to rise and come forward. 
I spent one very pleasant afternoon with him, as I 
had done before with Zeller. A few weeks were spent 
in Paris in hearing Charcot and Ribot, but meeting 
personally only the latter. I visited several lycees, 
particularly the largest and newly built Janson-de- 
Sailly, and studied the pedagogic museum at Paris. 
I went to Nancy and saw the aged Liebault and was 
shown through various hospital wards by Bernheim, 
who in one successfully hypnotized every one of the 
dozen patients. I then passed to England, calling on 
Foster, the founder of the new physiology, at Cam- 
bridge and Burdon Sanderson at Oxford, and also 
visited Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and the Merchant 
Taylors’ and Cheltenham Schools. The glimpses I 
thus obtained of great men were most stimulating, 
and this superficial study of educational institutions 
was most fortunate and very determining in my later 
life. 
I came home, again in the depths because of debt 
and with no prospects, took a small flat on the edge 
of Somerville, where my two children were born, and 
waited, hoped, and worked. One Wednesday morn- 
ing President Eliot rode up to the house, rapped on 
the door without dismounting from his horse, and 
asked me to begin Saturday of that week a course 
of lectures on education in Bumstead Hall, Brom- 
field St., Boston, under the auspices of Harvard. 
The university would print and sell the tickets, hire 
the hall, and he himself promised to be present and 
216 Charcot 
Haeckfx 
Abraham 
Bilroth Carl Ludwig 
Helmholtz 
A. Adler 
Breuer GERMANY, ANTIOCH COLLEGE 
introduce me. There were to be twelve lectures and 
the fee was five dollars. I think nearly three hundred 
tickets were sold. Short as the notice was I con- 
sented, but requested at the same time to be appointed 
Lecturer on Contemporary German Philosophy at the 
University. This course, also of twelve lectures, was 
duly given, although the classes were small as there 
was no examination at the end and the course did not 
count for standing or toward any degree. On Satur- 
day morning, thanks to the prestige of Harvard, I 
faced a very impressive audience, among whom were 
Charles Francis Adams, then greatly interested in 
Colonel Francis Parker’s new educational ideas which 
he was embodying as superintendent of schools at 
Quincy; Mr. Philbrick, superintendent of the Boston 
schools; most of the school principals from Boston 
and the adjacent towns, and others. In President 
Eliot’s introduction of me he stated that Harvard had 
never been much impressed by pedagogy but I was a 
young man who had studied it abroad and this course 
had been instituted as an experiment. In concluding 
he invited the audience to decide whether Harvard 
was right in ignoring it or I was right in advocating 
it. This was, of course, a tremendous stimulus. At 
the close of each lecture there was an informal con- 
ference for those who desired to stay, in which I re- 
member Supt. Philbrick challenged me to find any 
imperfection in the school system of Boston, declaring 
that he considered it as near perfect as human insti- 
tutions could be. Miss Elizabeth Peabody, the founder 
of the kindergarten in this country, and her disciple, 
Miss Laura Pingree, I also well remember. The 
newspapers, especially the Transcript, gave great 
space to each of my lectures, and the attendance was 
not only maintained to the close of the course but 
grew. This was my first real success, and I came 
from Baltimore the next spring to give another 
217 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
twelve-week course which seemed no less successful. 
When I left, William T. Harris continued this work 
for some years in the same place and at the same 
hour. 
It was at this time that the Rev. Joseph Cook was 
at the height of fame delivering his noted Monday 
noon lectures to crowds that packed Tremont Temple. 
He was a man of immense vitality and rare oratorical 
powers who had studied abroad and come home with 
the gospel that science confirmed all that orthodox 
religion had taught. I often heard him, with a grow- 
ing and very active dissent, and wrote two long and 
very belabored and acutely critical reviews of his 
work and his published lectures, which were printed 
in the New York Nation and attracted much attention. 
I was told they gave him intense displeasure and 
contributed to the disfavor into which he later fell. 
Once, soon after this, an usher conducted him to a 
seat in some public meeting next to me, and when 
he recognized me he very ostentatiously arose, brushed 
his coat as if to remove contamination, and took 
another distant seat. 
In my earlier stay at Cambridge I had formed a 
rather intimate acquaintance with William James when 
we were both unmarried. I was often at his house, 
where he was living with his father, Henry James, 
Sr., by whom I was greatly impressed. James and I 
even then had many talks and walks together. In 
a tiny room under the stairway of the Agassiz Mu- 
seum he had a metronome, a device for whirling a 
frog, a horopter chart, and one or two other bits of 
apparatus. I was immensely impressed and fasci- 
nated by his personality and looked up to him, who 
was several years my senior, somewhat as I had done 
before to George Morris. One summer we spent a 
week together in a little cottage in the Adirondacks 
and tramped. I had also met him in Heidelberg, and 
218 GERMANY, ANTIOCH COLLEGE 
we corresponded for years. On my return now this 
acquaintance was renewed and he took great interest 
in the experiments connected with my thesis which I 
was carrying on in the laboratory of his friend, H. 
P. Bowditch, the pioneer of scientific physiology in 
this country and later for many years Dean of the 
Harvard Medical School. It was at this time that I 
came near receiving a serious injury to my eyes in 
experiments with a rotating disc, half the sectors of 
which were black and half of which reflected light 
directly from the sun into my eyes. Here, too, I 
formed the acquaintance of Charles Sedgwick Minot, 
who was then beginning his life study of growth and 
was a fellow worker in this laboratory. 
I had never planned to take my Ph.D. in Germany 
but did so this year at Harvard, being, I think, the 
first to do so at that institution. My examination, 
which was held in Professor Bowen’s study, was very 
impressive to me. It was oral and conducted by Pro- 
fessors Bowen, Hedge, Bowditch, Everett, James, 
and Palmer, and lasted several hours, at the close of 
which I felt I had done well; at any rate I passed 
and duly received my diploma at commencement. 
Germany almost remade me, especially the first 
triennium there. It gave me a new attitude toward 
life which I can only illustrate by a few items, 
although these do not do justice to the inner trans- 
formations which occurred in me during, and later 
because of, my period of study there. I fairly reveled 
in a freedom unknown before. 
i. The hated Puritan Sunday which all my life 
before had been a dreaded day of gloom and depres- 
sion now became one of joy and holiday recreation. 
Such claim as the church made on the small number 
of its devotees (statistics showed then that on an 
average Sunday only about two per cent of the popu- 
lation of Berlin attended religious service) was over 
219 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
by noon and in the afternoon there were excursions, 
plays, games, theaters, and concerts with dancing in 
the evening. Servants went out and families dined 
together with friends in public resorts. Soldiers re- 
leased from their barracks were everywhere; courting 
and love making were carried on in the open, and 
young couples seemed not only unabashed but almost 
fond of having others observe their enjoyment of one 
another. The population seemed all out of doors if 
the day was pleasant and all abandoned themselves 
to joy unconfined. 
2. Almost every one not only ate in public but 
drank beer or light cheap wines, slowly but very de- 
liberately, to prolong the pleasure, and moderately. 
Intoxication was very rare but nearly all were more 
or less “let out” (Ausgelassen). Not to be so in some 
at least very slight degree was almost bad form and 
suggested lack of good fellowship or of Gemiitlichkeit. 
At any rate, it was quite comme il faut to be a bit 
“illuminated” before the day’s end. Hence the tee- 
totalism in which I had been nurtured went the way 
of the old Sabbatarianism and I came to love beer, 
drank it habitually, and felt it more necessary in that 
somewhat depressing climate than here. To thus 
banish reticence and restraint in ourselves and to see 
others do so brings out the more fundamental traits 
of character. We know and are known better. “The 
bonds of friendship tighten when they are wet.” To 
drink a “Prosit” with a companion breaks up the dead 
level of utter chronic sobriety. It gives to conversa- 
tion a heart-to-heart frankness, and the festive spirit 
thus engendered irrigates the rest of the week and 
makes the dull routine of a simple life more tolerable, 
while, as the world is now seeing, to be robbed of a 
mild tipple that has become habitual tends to breed 
a spirit of social, industrial, and even political unrest. 
3. Hitherto girls had played an extremely small 
220 GERMANY, ANTIOCH COLLEGE 
part in my life, but more than one German Fraulein 
appealed to me in a new way and I cultivated several 
and found them surprisingly interesting and even re- 
sponsive. Their great sentimentality gave them a 
new charm and I lost my obsession of bashfulness in 
their presence. Indeed, with two of these Madchen, 
one after the other, I first realized what love really 
meant and could do. Both were as susceptible as I 
was and many were the walks, talks, and excursions 
we had together. There was no engagement and no 
plans of life together but we were devoted to each 
other with a carpe diem abandon to the pleasure of 
the passing hour, and with the last of them a corre- 
spondence was maintained for some time after our 
tearful parting when I left for home. This experi- 
ence had a profound effect upon my character. I 
realized that I was a man in the full normal sense 
of that word. Certain old shackles had been shaken 
off and I compared myself to the Marquis of Penalta 
and acquired a deeper sense both of sin and righteous- 
ness and virtue than I had ever attained before. I 
have never seen either of these girls since but both 
married not long afterward and both had large fami- 
lies. I still have two faded photographs and certain 
memories which have prompted much thinking along 
lines too taboo to indicate here. I learned how great 
an enlightener love is and what a spring of mind Eros 
can be, how its idealization is effected, how essential 
it is for a complete life, and how in the process of 
years its object can be changed and it can become in 
the end all the stronger and deeper for having had its 
initial fling in the earlier years of nubility when its 
physical urge is nearest its apex, especially if it is 
followed by years of chaste sublimation. Not only 
did these companions facilitate my use of German but, 
what was vastly more important, they awoke capac- 
ities hitherto unusually dormant and repressed and 
221 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
thus made life seem richer and more meaningful. If 
passion was aroused, the power to moderate and con- 
trol it was also gained and I have never had regret 
but only a sense of enlargement of soul from it all. 
4. I came home feeling that I had also attained 
maturity in my religious consciousness, where most 
suffer such dwarfing arrest. I had felt the charm 
of pantheism, which has inspired and exerted so much 
of its subtle influence, especially through the medium 
of poetry, in those whose creed abhors it; of agnos- 
ticism, more or less common but so strangled by re- 
ligious affirmations; of even materialism, for I had 
read Buchner and Moleschott; had wrestled with 
Karl Marx and half accepted what I understood of 
him; thought Comte and the Positivists had pretty 
much made out their case and that the theological if 
not the metaphysical stage of thought should be tran- 
scended. But the only whole-hearted scheme of things 
which I had accepted with ardor and abandon was 
that of an evolution which applied no whit less to 
the soul than the body of man. This was bedrock. 
Darwin, Haeckel, and especially Herbert Spencer 
seemed then to me to represent the most advanced 
stage of human thought. 
My remote ancestors, I suppose, were Saxon and 
not Norman and I sometimes wondered if I had be- 
come so ardent a Teutonophile by way of atavistic 
regression, although this would be a far cry. Perhaps, 
on the contrary, it was because beyond the Rhine I 
found, so highly developed, qualities that I lacked but 
admired; namely, a capacity for sentiment, Gemiit or 
the power of abandonment to the moods, feelings, 
ideas, and companions of the present moment. At 
any rate, I longed to spend the rest of my life in that 
country and planned several quite unpractical ways of 
doing so. Crude as some, at least, of my German 
friends both in and out of the university thought me, 
222 GERMANY, ANTIOCH COLLEGE 
and only partially verdeutscht as I was, when I came 
home I felt the whole atmosphere of this country, and 
especially that of staid old New England, most op- 
pressive and not only unappreciative of about all I 
most cared for but distinctly critical if not derisive 
of the new views, tastes, and mores which I brought 
back. 
It is no wonder that this was the period of my 
life when the youthful spirit of revolt was most in- 
tense. The narrow, inflexible orthodoxy, the settled 
lifeless mores, the Puritan eviction of the joy that 
comes from amusements from life, the provincialism 
of our interests, our prejudice against continental 
ways of living and thinking, the crudeness of our 
school system, the elementary character of the edu- 
cation imparted in our higher institutions of learning 
•—all these seemed to me on my first, and still more 
on my second, return from Europe not only depressing 
but almost exasperating. Most of all, we were so 
smugly complacent with our limitations, so self- 
satisfied with our material prosperity, and so ignorant 
of Europe save as tourists see it. I fairly loathed 
and hated so much that I saw about me that I now 
realize more clearly than ever how possible it would 
have been for me to have drifted into some, perhaps 
almost any, camp of radicals and to have come into 
such open rupture with the scheme of things as they 
were that I should have been stigmatized as danger- 
ous, at least for any academic career, where the motto 
was Safety First. And as this was the only way left 
open, the alternative being the dread one of going 
back to the farm, it was most fortunate that these 
deeply stirred instincts of revolt were never openly 
expressed and my rank heresies and socialistic leanings 
unknown. This was largely because I found in the 
family of the Seligmans, where the parents were Ger- 
man born and bredTand later at Antioch, so liberal and 
223 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
congenial an atmosphere. Long after my second 
homecoming I clung to the title of the old farm as 
a refuge of last resort, and when all the buildings 
were destroyed by fire, as late as 1890, I felt that a 
retreat in possible disaster was cut off and that I had 
only then landed high and dry on the hither side of 
my Rubicon. CHAPTER VI 
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 
Charles Pierce, George S. Morris, and William James my prede- 
cessors—Origin of The American Journal of Psychology— 
Pedagogy added to my title and work in that field—The first 
American laboratory in psychology—The epoch-making higher 
story built on our educational system by this university— 
German influence and methods—Distinguished group of stu- 
dents in psychology—Its previous low estate in this country— 
Scope of my courses—Relation to other departments—Impres- 
sions of colleagues: Sylvester, Gildersleeve, Rowland, Remsen, 
Martin, Brooks, Haupt, Adams, Ely, Wood, Williams, Warren 
—Woodrow Wilson—Attitude of Baltimore toward the Uni- 
versity—Distinguished lecturers from outside—The relations 
to government science in Washington; to the Peabody Insti- 
tute—The religious environment—Characterization of Gil- 
man’s policy—Research fellowships—Journals and other 
modes of publication—Efforts against excessive or premature 
specialization—The higher pedagogy—The Hopkins trustees 
—Death of my parents—Scope of my course and list of origi- 
nal publications of this period. 
In 1881 I was surprised and delighted to receive 
an invitation from the Johns Hopkins University, 
then the cynosure of all aspiring young professors 
throughout the country, to deliver a course of twelve 
semipublic lectures on psychology. The University 
at that time was adding another story to our educa- 
tional system. I understood that this opened the 
ultimate possibility of a chair and spent the entire 
summer in the work of preparation. At the close of 
these lectures I was asked to teach a half year, after 
which, to my great delight, I was appointed full pro- 
fessor for five years with the salary of four thousand 
dollars, then very generous. Thus in 1882 ended what 
225 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
might be called my long apprenticeship of fourteen 
years since graduation, during much of which I had 
been very uncertain of my future. 
Charles Pierce had been for years at the Hopkins 
occupying a tentative position, one of the ablest and 
most original philosophic minds this country has ever 
produced, and I think at one time an intimate friend 
of Chauncey Wright and John Fiske, two of the most 
brilliant men in the Harvard circle' though not of the 
faculty. My old friend, George Morris, had taught 
several half years at the Hopkins, and William James 
had given lectures there. Each of the three was older 
and abler than I. Why the appointment, for which 
all of them had been considered, fell to me I was never 
able to understand unless it was because my stand- 
point was thought to be a little more accordant with 
the ideals which then prevailed there. To the 
companionship of these three men, particularly that 
of Pierce, who lived for years across the street from 
me and of whom I saw very much, I can never express 
my indebtedness. 
Against my own wish, my title was “professor of 
psychology and pedagogy” although my activity at 
the Hopkins in this latter field was limited entirely 
to semipublic Saturday lectures to which teachers 
were admitted. I think that at that time there had 
been no chair of pedagogy in the country save at 
Michigan, and of the many patterns Johns Hopkins 
set to other institutions this was one destined to 
remarkable development. Pedagogy is now repre- 
sented in practically every institution for higher edu- 
cation in the land by a chair, department, or even an 
entire school which attempts to be as professional as 
the schools of law, medicine, and theology. My lec- 
tures here were very largely confined to the history 
of education and its philosophy and psychology, with 
a description of contemporary systems of primary, 
226 JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 
intermediate, and higher education in different lands 
with also historical surveys. 
My chief time and effort, however, were focused 
on psychology. I was given a laboratory, first in the 
physiological building and then a more generous one 
in the physics building, and one thousand dollars a 
year for its equipment. I was enabled to develop not 
only the first but by far the largest and most 
productive laboratory of its kind in the country up 
to the time of my leaving, although of course at the 
present writing there are a number that exceed it. 
Toward the latter part of my stay here I had a mem- 
orable call one Sunday from J. Pearsall Smith of 
Philadelphia, an entire stranger to me who had 
learned something of the Hopkins work in psychology. 
He suggested that I found a journal and then and 
there gave me a check for five hundred dollars “as 
a starter.” I had long desired to do this and Presi- 
dent Gilman favored it, for the establishment of de- 
partmental journals was one of the prominent items 
in the program of the Johns Hopkins, so that at last, 
with great trepidation, I printed and circulated a 
prospectus, gathered material, and issued the first 
number, printing, if I am not mistaken, the enor- 
mously excessive number of 3,000 copies and finding, 
when this number was distributed, that the bills for 
it alone footed up to seventeen hundred dollars. There 
were few subscribers and the deficit had to be made 
up from my own savings. I went through another 
period of disillusion and depression but brought out 
the successive numbers, changing publishers and 
slowly learning how to cut down expenses. But the 
subscribers were still few. 
To continue here the later history of The Ameri- 
can Journal of Psychology, the first in its field in 
English, I may add that at one time it had cost me 
eight thousand dollars more than it had brought in, 
227 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
and although we were not able, after we entered the 
war, to publish the six hundred pages a year planned, 
it now in its thirty-second volume (1921) has paid for 
itself and brings a modest profit—all without adver- 
tising itself or anything else. It was also very difficult 
to find good material. As the earlier volumes show, 
most of the small-type part of it, a half or more, 
which was devoted to reviews, was written by myself. 
I read voraciously and epitomized over a wide field, 
always insisting for myself and for the many others 
who in later years contributed to this part, that the 
writer should first and chiefly resume in his own most 
salient phrases the chief positions and results of the 
author, adding more briefly and set off in another para- 
graph whatever criticisms he saw fit to make. In the 
early years especially I sought to give the Journal 
wide scope, including the most salient tendencies in 
religious philosophy, logic, aesthetics, the significant 
work in the domain of psychiatry, child study, anthro- 
pology, etc. 
In my experience and observation, journals of this 
kind go through three stages more or less marked by 
years: first, there are many subscriptions from libra- 
ries, other institutions, and individuals who take it 
more or less experimentally; the second year many 
of these drop off, not finding in it just what they 
expected (to this class belonged my patron, Pearsall 
Smith, whose chief interest was in psychic research 
and who gave up even his subscription when the 
Journal criticized this movement) ; while those who 
subscribe the third year generally stay on, and only 
then is it possible to make more or less reliable esti- 
mates for the future. As a journal of this kind con- 
tinues, and if it does represent a successful movement, 
the sale of sets as the years go by becomes an increas- 
ing source of revenue, and to my persistent sanguine 
expectations of a larger field I owe the fact that we 
228 JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 
have an abundance of left-over copies of nearly every 
number from the first so that we are still able to 
supply sets.1 
Johns Hopkins, who died a bachelor at the end of 
a very successful business career in Baltimore, was 
said to have given little consideration, even in the 
latter part of his life, to the disposition of his estate 
and to have at first treated as chimerical the sug- 
gestion of a friend that he found a university, so that 
it was said to have been a great surprise to most of 
his acquaintances when at his demise he was found 
to have left some seven million dollars to be divided 
equally between a hospital and a university, leaving 
his trustees very large discretion and prescribing 
almost nothing as to the character of the institution. 
The Board decided not to infringe upon the capital 
for building but to use only the income. Accordingly, 
while the hospital put a great deal into buildings and 
delayed its organization, the University was very 
speedily opened with only three small new ones, and 
most of the departments were quartered in dwelling 
houses rented for their various purposes. 
The first Board of Trustees was happily selected 
from among the very best citizens of Baltimore and 
they realized that the chief of all their duties was to 
select the right president. Therefore, after much 
travel and counsels widely and wisely sought and 
given, they invited D. C. Gilman, a Yale man who 
had been one of the pioneers in the effort to establish 
physical geography as an academic course and who had 
had three most successful years in building up the 
University of California, to take charge of the uni- 
versity part of the new foundation. As the sequel 
1 Since writing the above, I have (not without certain pangs like 
those of a parent who has brought a child to maturity) transferred 
the Journal to Professor E. B. Titchener of Cornell, with whom it 
seems to be having a new lease of life and achieving a larger useful- 
ness in its field. 
229 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
proved, it was probably the wisest selection that could 
have been made. Dr. Gilman was profoundly im- 
pressed with the low standards of American education 
which had for many years compelled so many of those 
who wished to specialize to pursue their postgraduate 
work in Europe where, in his phrase, the apex of our 
entire educational system had too long been found. He 
felt, therefore, that this new foundation should be 
devoted chiefly to graduate work and that professors 
must be chosen with special reference to their promise 
or achievements in original research, that their 
salaries should be higher than were paid elsewhere, 
and that his first task was to comb the country for 
the best talent. In this he proved to be a sagacious 
judge of men and did not hesitate in several cases 
to bring experts from Europe, so that for years the 
quality and productiveness of this faculty in their 
modest quarters were far and away beyond anything 
the history of this country had aiTorded. 
It was also necessary to attract fit student gradu- 
ates. Hitherto the few who had pursued nonpro- 
fessional graduate studies at home had done so at 
their own alma mater, where they could receive but 
little attention and were often obliged, especially in 
the larger institutions, to do drudgery as assistants 
at a barely living wage. Promising young men of 
this class who wished to go on and could not afford 
to do so abroad had thus had a pitifully hard time. 
Accordingly, another of Gilman’s innovations was to 
establish twenty fellowships paying four hundred 
dollars each, on which it was then possible to live the 
nine academic months in comfort. This scheme 
President Eliot disparaged as “paying students to 
come.” This policy thus attracted a remarkable if 
not very large group of the most gifted young men 
from all parts of the country intent upon taking the 
higher degree of Ph.D., which had almost never been 
230 JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 
given here. In this Gilman was inspired by German 
ideals hardly less than the founders of most of the older 
American universities had been by the English, or 
Jefferson in the founding of the University of Vir- 
ginia, which set the fashions for southern institutions, 
by the ideals of the French. 
Thus during my stay, which covered most of the 
decade that, I think, marked the acme of Johns Hop- 
kins* preeminence and leadership, the student body 
was hardly less remarkable for quality than was the 
teaching force which, with a few exceptions, was 
made up of young men. At any rate, the intellectual 
activity here was intense and the very atmosphere 
stimulating to the highest degree. 
The inception of the University (1876) occurred 
so soon after the Civil War that there was much 
sectional feeling. Many of the most intelligent citi- 
zens of the city could not understand why there were 
so few southerners or even Baltimoreans and so many 
northerners in the faculty, and some of them did not 
scruple to apply the term “Yankee” or “carpet- 
bagger” to us, while our social recognition by the 
natives came slow and late. Even this was perhaps, 
on the whole, favorable for devotion to work. I often 
had occasion to remember the fact that immediately 
after the Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck rebuilt the 
University of Kiel to show Denmark what Germany 
meant by the higher education. So, too, he rebuilt 
Breslau as an object lesson for the benefit of Dor- 
pat, a Russian university, and lavished French 
indemnity money upon the splendid new instal- 
lation, the University of Strassburg, to make plain 
his purpose to the French. He adopted a policy that 
looked toward making the University of Berlin almost 
as central for Germany as that of Paris was for 
France and accordingly had called from outlying uni- 
versities many of their very best men to Berlin, giving 
231 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
the professors there, for the first time, free entry into 
court life. But these new social diversions did not, 
on the whole, contribute to intellectual productivity, 
a fact that Lotze noted and sadly commented on. 
At Baltimore I was allowed almost absolute free- 
dom to teach not only as, but what I would. I even 
held weekly clinics at the Bayview Hospital for the In- 
sane, of which until the hospital was complete and the 
medical staff organized I was made locum tenens 
superintendent, perhaps the only layman in medicine 
to occupy such a position. Here I not only had to 
determine what patients should be discharged, engage 
the purveyor, but appoint the resident physician in 
charge, at first Dr. Noyes, who was also my student. 
When I began I found in my department a group 
of students drawn there mostly, I presume, by the 
fame of my predecessors. Some of the students came 
later and nearly all of them have since attained emi- 
nence. Among them were John Dewey, J. McKeen 
Cattell, H. H. Donaldson, E. C. Sanford, W. H. 
Burnham, G. W. T. Patrick, Joseph Jastrow, James 
H. Hyslop, Y. Motora, E. M. Hartwell, Hume, M. 
I. Swift, and J. Nelson. Many others from other 
departments took courses and minors for their degree 
with me. The only criticisms of which I felt con- 
scious and embarrassed were those of Professor 
Martin, who felt that experimental psychology, es- 
pecially in dealing so largely with the senses, infringed 
upon his department of physiology; and of Professor 
Gildersleeve, who always questioned my right to teach 
Aristotle and particularly Plato in English, and com- 
plained of interference because he sometimes read 
with his Greek classes some of Plato’s Dialogues in 
the original. But these strictures, though genuinely 
felt and reiterated, were never seriously urged in a 
way to in any degree modify the work as I had 
planned it. 
232 JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 
During these years, in addition to psychology I 
taught the history of philosophy. The history of the 
work in this field in our country and its colleges is 
of remarkable interest, and of it I have twice at- 
tempted a survey.2 In the beginning, in the seven- 
teenth and during the early part of the eighteenth 
centuries, almost nothing but deductive logic was 
taught, and this, even at Harvard, was an appanage 
of theology and Biblical exposition on the principle 
bonus grammaticus, bonus theologus. After the ad- 
vent of Whitfield and the great religious awakening 
which followed, it was felt that every study of man 
and mind should focus on the heart and result in 
conversion, and even the place of logic was sometimes 
challenged. This stage is well represented in Durfee’s 
Early History of Williams College, which is so largely 
devoted to revivals, which he makes of central im- 
portance, saying that its dark years were those of 
spiritual drought when “professors were hardly dis- 
tinguished from the body of the impenitent.” Hitch- 
cock in his Reminiscences of Amherst said that “its 
religious history is more important and interesting 
than anything pertaining to it” and he enumerates 
fourteen revivals up to 1863. The third period 
marked the advent of the study of ethics, which came 
in despite much opposition because it was thought to 
imply that morals were sufficient for salvation and 
that a good life could be lived without piety. It was 
even called impietas in artis formam redacta. It soon, 
however, became the leading topic in this field. Many 
colleges were denominational and theology has always 
been jealous of philosophy, while in the most advanced 
institutions and among our most scholarly writers in 
2 See my “Philosophy in the United States,” Mind, vol. 4, p. 89 
et seq.; also “On the History of American College Textbooks and 
Teaching in Logic, Ethics, Psychology, and Allied Subjects,” Proc. 
Amer. Antiquarian Soc., April 25, 1894. 
233 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
this field there was almost always a strong polemic 
motive against pantheism, materialism, and other 
heretical opinions. Where the best work was done in 
this field it was, I think, always focused upon some 
group, most commonly Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and 
Kant, with epistemological implications. I tried, how- 
ever, to teach the whole field of the history of philos- 
ophy in such a way as to incline my students to a 
sympathetic attitude toward all philosophical systems 
and to make them in turn idealists, positivists, sen- 
sationalists, pantheists, materialists, associationists, 
and all the rest to the end that there be no indoctrina- 
tion or effort at discipleship but that each should 
choose his own position intelligently and according to 
his own predisposition, an ideal which I freely ex- 
pressed and which was never opposed. Accordingly, 
in the seminary we focused our reading and discussion 
one year upon a few of these attitudes and the next 
year upon others. 
The psychology I taught was almost entirely ex- 
perimental and covered for the most part the material 
that Wundt had set forth in the later and larger 
edition of his Physiological Psychology. Here I 
spent much time in my laboratory, where there were 
always students engaged upon specific problems of 
research, some of the first of which were published 
in Mind and most in later years in the early volumes 
of my American Journal of Psychology. Dr. Edward 
Cowles, who had already done notable work at the 
MacLean Hospital in Massachusetts, of which he was 
the head, a much older man than I, was enthusiastic 
enough to spend a term or two with me, and all the 
above students did their best to add to the sum of 
human knowledge. Many others, too, from outside 
were more or less interested in this new departure, 
and I remember particularly brief and sometimes re- 
peated visits from Major Powell, the head of the 
234 JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 
anthropological bureau in Washington, who did more 
than any one to establish that department on a solid 
foundation and to have the life of the American 
Indian duly studied and set forth before it was too 
late. He was marvelously successful in winning large 
grants from Congress. Other welcome visitors were: 
Dr. Weir Mitchell of Philadelphia; Dr. Beard of 
New York, who was one of the pioneers in this 
country in the study of hypnotism and of whom I 
saw much both in Baltimore and New York; Dr. 
Billings, the distinguished head of the medical library 
in Washington; Lester Ward, who repeatedly came 
over from the Capital, sometimes taking charge of 
my seminary at my request; and Professors-James 
and Palmer of Harvard who were more than once 
my guests and to whom I always insisted on giving 
over my lecture hour, a courtesy which, I remember, 
they explained they could not reciprocate, because of 
certain rules, when I visited Harvard. 
I saw a great deal of Simon Newcomb, who was 
for years Hopkins lecturer in astronomy and deeply 
interested in psychological topics. He once joined me, 
with President Gilman, in starting a systematic visi- 
tation to all the advertising spirit mediums, astrolo- 
gers, fortune tellers, etc., in Philadelphia, where 
Gilman left us after an interesting private demonstra- 
tion along this line by Keller, who then had a theater 
of his own for magic. We also spent an interesting 
afternoon with Yost, who dealt in all kinds of sleight- 
of-hand material, being himself an adept. Newcomb 
and I continued these visitations as far as New York. 
Interest in these matters was then greatly stimulated 
by the Seybert Commission for the investigation of 
occult phenomena which, I believe, financed this trip. 
Among my colleagues here I became most intimate 
with the following: Herbert Adams, whose depart- 
ment was one of the largest and, with Richard T. Ely, 
235 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
the economist and sociologist. They had a well- 
equipped suite of rooms. Ely was one of the pioneers 
in the study of contemporary social and industrial 
conditions and, with Adams, kept a very elaborate 
system of clippings. Adams’s method was to have 
each student study the history of the locality from 
which he came, and in that way he produced an im- 
posing series of volumes, in the publication of which 
he had outside assistance from Washington and some- 
times from other cities and states. Adams was a 
disciple of Blunchli, whose library came to him and 
whose motto, “History is past politics and politics is 
present history” was printed on the wall. 
I saw much, too, of the brilliant Paul Haupt who 
had already done signal work in the department of 
Semitic languages and who every summer made a 
trip to Europe, bringing back the latest information 
concerning men and things, philosophical and psycho- 
logical. Of the great Sylvester I saw but little. He 
was the only man in the faculty who was venerable 
with age. When he was brought to this country he 
had an international reputation as one of the leading 
mathematicians of the world. He was unmarried and 
a man of remarkable eccentricities who even essayed 
poetry and, on social occasions, would sometimes re- 
tire silently to a corner or suddenly leave, even a 
dinner, because a new idea had come to him. On one 
occasion, I remember he told us, the idea had such 
force that to work it out adequately he had to sit up 
a good part of the night with his feet in warm water 
to check the rush of blood to his head. Sometimes 
these new concepts visited him on the street, where 
he would stand like Socrates in the market place, 
apparently forgetting to go home or even unaware 
of where he was. He was later recalled to Oxford, 
England, and I last met him by chance at a railway 
station in Cologne very late one night, with many 
236 JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 
pieces of baggage scattered about him. He had 
missed one or two trains and seemed rather helpless, 
and I was able, by missing my own train to Paris, 
to gather his belongings and see him safely aboard 
for his destination. He died soon afterwards. 
Professor Rowland, then the most brilliant physi- 
cist in the country, stood out prominently among his 
associates, and in my time devoted his attention 
mainly to his famous “gratings.” I should have seen 
little of him but for the fact that my laboratory was 
in his building. He was erratic and moody but super- 
charged with new ideas, and was in the most vital 
mental touch with everybody in his field throughout 
the world. He even made it almost a boast that he 
neglected his students for his researches, but he 
always inspired them and they constituted a coterie 
by themselves. To hear him conduct an examination 
for the higher degree was an experience never to be 
forgotten, such was his mastery of his subjects. A 
very characteristic incident told of him was that when 
the Niagara Construction Company, financed largely 
through the agency of my college classmate, F. L. 
Stetson, had built its tunnel and constructed the enor- 
mous turbine at the bottom of it, the weight of the 
turbine and that of the heavy steel shaft which came 
to the surface were found to cause such friction that 
the power produced was disastrously less than had 
been calculated. They appealed to Rowland, who 
studied the subject one evening and gave them a 
formula to turn over the turbine and have the water 
strike it from below, after turning upward, in such a 
way as to exactly balance the weight and remove all 
friction. For this work he charged ten thousand 
dollars, which they refused to pay. When the case 
came to court the counsel for the company called 
Rowland and, thinking to embarrass him by challeng- 
ing his modesty, asked him who was the first physicist 
237 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
in the country. He replied “I am,” which was true; 
and so made it impossible for them to argue that his 
services were those of a second-rate man. When we 
asked him afterwards how he could make such an 
answer, he replied that he was under oath and had 
to tell the truth. 
H. Newell Martin, a brilliant Englishman and, like 
Bowditch, a former pupil of Ludwig, established at 
Baltimore the second chair in physiology in this 
country, according to the stricter experimental school 
which sought to base it more rigidly upon chemistry 
and physical experimentation to a degree that some- 
times suggested the old iatric stage in the history of 
medicine. He had also had a good training in the 
basal field of biology, which Bowditch lacked. I 
always felt that he was never fully acclimated in this 
country or quite happy in Baltimore. His early de- 
mise was a great misfortune to the institution, but 
during his career there he trained a very able if not 
large group of students who passed on the light to 
others. 
Walter K. Brooks I had known in Williams un- 
dergraduate days, where he had been the life of the 
Natural History Society. Very inept socially and 
disinclined to society, so that he never felt the partial 
ostracism of the old southern families toward us 
northerners, he was able to devote himself more assid- 
uously, not only days but nights, to his work. He 
must have known all of Darwin’s writings almost by 
heart for they and their implications were the chief 
theme of his seminaries. He was not only a born 
naturalist and a diligent investigator but also a thinker 
who always impressed me as masterly in his ability 
to handle ideas. I saw more of and owe more to him 
than to any member of the faculty there. 
As a younger man in this group I was immensely 
impressed by Gildersleeve, the famous Hellenist, 
238 JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 
although I had very little personal contact with him. 
A hero of the Civil War on the southern side, he was 
not only the oldest American member of the group 
but was a favorite in Baltimore, and I always sus- 
pected that his friends, if not he, felt that he should 
have been the president of the institution. He was, 
however, always most loyal to Gilman and his policies, 
and with the very able Ira Remsen, head of the de- 
partment of chemistry, who later became president, 
was perhaps most influential in their support. He was 
a very brilliant conversationalist, witty and quick at 
repartee, could be very satirical, and was the idol of 
all his pupils. Not only an able and productive Greek 
scholar, he had a keen and very highly cultivated 
literary sense and was a man of wide general reading. 
The University had tried to bring back to this 
country my most intimate friend in Leipzig, Caspar 
Rene Gregory, a remarkable man with a no less re- 
markable career. Going to Germany at an early age to 
study the New Testament with Tischendorf, he became 
almost infatuated with German life and ways, and 
when his great master died he became his literary heir 
and from docent rose very slowly to the dignity of full 
professor, the only pure-blooded American to ever 
achieve this distinction. Harvard had sought in vain 
to bring him back to fill the chair left vacant by Pro- 
fessor Thayer, an eminent American scholar in this 
field whose daughter Gregory later married. Nothing 
could wean him, however, from his Teutonophile 
sympathies, and in the late war he espoused the 
German cause and, old as he was, was appointed to 
decorate the graves of German soldiers, in which 
act he was fatally shot. An able substitute, however, 
was found for this chair at the Hopkins in J. Rendel 
Harris. It was, I think, while he was at Baltimore 
that he discovered in the East and edited an important 
New Testament manuscript. His stay at Baltimore 
239 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
was not long, however, and he later returned to Eng- 
land. It had been the university policy to establish, 
with his chair and that of Haupt and that of ecclesi- 
astical history given under Adams, a kind of fore- 
school of theology, but the country was hardly ripe 
for this more severe scientific departure. 
I was also more or less intimate with Professor 
Henry Wood, head of the German department, and 
his very cultivated German wife; also with the 
brilliant George Williams, who had just come from 
a protracted study of petrography in Germany and 
was invited to represent that department, which he 
did for some years until his most untimely death; 
and with Professor Minton Warren, the Latinist, 
who had been called from Harvard, which eventually 
won him back. 
Among the students who took minors with me 
was Woodrow Wilson, older and more advanced than 
most men in Adams’s department. I well remember 
a long Sunday afternoon walk and talk with him in 
which he debated with me the question of majoring 
in psychology, although I felt that his mind was 
already made up not to do so for his previous studies 
and his southern instincts and family traditions 
already inclined him too strongly toward the historical 
and political field. Had he chosen psychology, he 
might never have been President; but, on the other 
hand, if he had, he might have learned to do better 
teamwork and have been more ready to compromise 
and concede. Nothing could have been more sublime 
than his lofty moral leadership during the war, and 
when the party prejudice of the hour is forgotten the 
country will be proud of most of the history that he 
made. No one was ever received with such acclaim 
by the people of England, France, and Italy as he, 
for it was felt that he represented a new stage of 
democracy into which so many countries where it was 
240 JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 
unknown before were entering. Of all the score of 
nations involved in the war we alone, despite the 
enormous sacrifice of blood and treasure, sought 
nothing whatever in the way of territory or indemnity 
but insisted solely upon equity between nations and 
security for those that were small, striving only to 
apply the simplest precepts of morality between man 
and man to nations, in place of the law of the jungle 
which had hitherto prevailed. We warred only against 
war, and it is inevitable that sooner or later the Ameri- 
can people will cooperate in some effective insurance 
policy against the cruel law of might against right, 
and will then give to Wilson 3 a sublime place in 
history. 
At Baltimore it was the custom to hold stated 
evening meetings at which the professors or younger 
investigators in each department tried to set forth the 
results of their inyestigations in a way to make them 
intelligible and interesting to specialists in other de- 
partments. This organization was maintained with 
some difficulty against the tendency for those in each 
department to confine their entire activity and limit 
their interests to it, and despite President Gilman’s 
favor it languished and was given up. There was 
also an informal faculty club which met evenings at 
different houses, at which each of us in turn provided 
not only refreshments but presented some topic in our 
own field. I well remember one occasion at my own 
house on Eutaw Place when the interest in telepathy 
was perhaps at its height and was more or less in- 
teresting to men of science in general. I was able 
to communicate thought from one corner of the room 
to its diagonal opposite by a very simple trick which 
3 From him I received a personal note of reminiscence of Hopkins 
days written, very significantly, on November 2, 1920, the election day 
on which his party and policies were so overwhelmingly defeated at 
the polls. 
241 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
it baffled the ingenuity of even Professor Rowland to 
detect and which led him, with the facility that has 
so often characterized physicists (Crookes, Barrett, 
Lodge) to have speedy recourse to belief in occult 
forces. 
It was one important item in the Hopkins policy 
to attract distinguished men from other universities 
and from foreign countries for brief courses of lec- 
tures, which were generally open to the public as well 
as to students. Among those who came thus were: 
Herbert Spencer, Huxley, Cayley, the distinguished 
mathematician, friend and, in a sense, rival of Sylves- 
ter; Lord Kelvin (Sir William Thomson), Matthew 
Arnold,‘'James Bryce, E. A. Freeman, the historian; 
Wallace, whose name will always be associated with 
that of Darwin; James Russell Lowell, and many 
others. In the early days, I believe,The brilliant and 
lamented Sidney Lanier, a favorite son of Baltimore 
and the south, was one of these, and in my day Corson 
gave literary courses for years lasting several 
months. Indeed, nearly every one of note who visited 
Baltimore was invited to speak in the public hall, 
where all the professors who could be persuaded to do 
so also gave brief public courses two or three times 
a week for some weeks. The register shows that I 
gave three of these courses. At all of them the 
average numbers attending were always a matter of 
permanent record in the bulletin, which was another 
unique stimulus to us to hold our audiences. 
Gilman was particularly fond of bringing to 
Baltimore and exploiting there in this way not only 
all men who had already attained eminence and whom 
the repute or the resources of the University could 
induce to come, but he always had an eye for young 
men who had done something that marked them as 
promising, so that despite the relatively isolated intel- 
lectual situation of Baltimore the atmosphere was 
242 JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 
always charged with stimuli and emulation. He 
always apparently believed that outside the field of 
the severe training which modern specialism requires 
there was a wide penumbra of the mind, the cultiva- 
tion of which was accomplished by suggestion, apper- 
gus, hints not too elaborated or methodical, the rousing, 
exciting quality of which is a little like a tickle when 
compared with the tactile sense; and here, too, his 
intuitions, as in so many other respects, were sound 
and more or less original and he had the courage to 
trust them. 
The proximity to Washington and its vast collec- 
tions and libraries was a great stimulus to some of the 
departments, as it certainly was to mine, although the 
sentiment of the leaders of Hopkins’ physical science 
always tended to maintain a critical if not de haut en 
has attitude toward the governmental representatives 
of science. To several of the latter, however, I am 
greatly indebted, perhaps most of all to the late Otis 
T. Mason, the venerable anthropologist, with whom 
during most of my Baltimore days I was more or less 
intimate. 
It was a delicate matter to make a normal and 
wholesome adjustment between the University and 
the richly endowed Peabody Institute, which had a 
library far exceeding that which the Hopkins would 
be able to gather in a decade and which also, under 
the guidance of its able and sagacious if not a trifle 
jealous administrator, gave every year popular 
courses of public lectures to which the most eminent 
men were attracted. Gilman, at the outset, renounced 
the policy of duplicating the Peabody books at the 
Hopkins, only three blocks away and, not without 
some difficulty, secured for us professors some slight 
modifications of the rather strict rules for the use and 
especially the drawing out of books, so that we had, 
under certain restrictions never wholly removed, 
243 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
rather free access to the Peabody shelves. Perhaps 
still more tact was required to have the University 
men occasionally appointed to give Peabody courses, 
which were well paid for and which it was the fashion 
of Baltimore to attend—as it never became, save for 
a certain group of intellectuals, with the open Hopkins 
lectures. Gilman had the sagacity, however, to more 
or less overcome the difficulties here, and several of 
us gave lectures in the large Peabody hall and thus 
made a larger surface of contact between town and 
gown, a matter in which Gilman was always intensely 
solicitous.4 
He always seemed to me remarkably successful in 
the difficult task that would have confronted any New 
Englander at that time in winning the goodwill of the 
citizens of this metropolis so southern in its senti- 
ments. Not only, however, were the Board of Trus- 
tees broad-minded men and above all local prejudices 
but there were many others who were both intelligent 
and wealthy whose goodwill it was of the utmost 
importance for the University to win. In this task 
I think, if the story of these days is ever fully told, 
it will appear that Gilman was remarkably successful. 
Although he and even his very tactful and cultivated 
wife were never able to penetrate quite to the heart 
of social Baltimore, and although a few of even the 
wealthy citizens were never entirely won over, Gil- 
man’s success in this field is well attested by the many 
gifts and donations from old residents, and the suc- 
cess of the University later in raising funds in connec- 
4 On one of these occasions, with much apparatus on the stage I 
demonstrated association time with my assistant, later an eminent col- 
lege president, as my subject. I shouted “dog,” thus starting the 
Hipp chronoscope with a lip-key, and he was to respond with the very 
first word mine suggested, and as quickly as possible for the time was 
measured in thousandths of a second. He, as most would do, re- 
sponded “cat”; to “boy” he reacted with the word “girl”; but to “glass” 
he shouted back “beer,” to the great merriment of the audience, and 
it then and there came out that he was an entirely unsuspected mem- 
ber of a Kneipe. 
244 JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 
tion with its transplantation to a suburb of the city 
was to no small extent an after-result of his wisdom; 
so that any one looking over the reinstallation of the 
University with its new grounds and buildings might 
well exclaim with thoughts of Gilman, Si quaeris 
monumentum, circumspice. 
The religious barrier to complete sympathy was 
another difficulty. Rather extreme conservatism in 
religion focusing in Presbyterianism was character- 
istic of Baltimore, as of so much of the south, and the 
difference in the attitude of believers in such creeds 
and the standpoint of nearly every member of the 
faculty was immense. And here, at least in more than 
one case which I know, the situation might have been 
gravely aggravated but for Gilman’s tact. Occasion- 
ally a clergyman went out of his way to attack evolu- 
tion, materialism, or pantheism, with more or less of 
an implication that the University stood for them. A 
few of the professors were inclined to “talk back,” 
but these differences never came to the point of open 
antagonism. Several of the members of the faculty 
affiliated with church work—Haupt, Harris, and 
Wood, for example, with the Quakers, a sect with 
which the founder was affiliated; Morris and others 
with the Episcopalians; and the very founding of the 
Semitic and exegetical departments focusing in Bible 
study, liberal though their chiefs were, contributed to 
this end. A few of us conformed by attending some 
church. This I did at Gilman’s request, and listened 
to Dr. Slocum, later for many years president of 
Colorado College; and to the very able and eloquent 
Dr. Gonsalus. He perhaps more than any one else has 
for three decades been the leader and light of the 
more liberal but not Unitarian religious life of 
Chicago, and has exerted his influence even more per- 
haps—at least more popularly—than has Dr. George 
Gordon in Boston, my pupil for a short time in the 
245 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
Harvard period. Thus many possible sources of 
friction were mitigated or obviated. 
There could, of course, be no compromise on the 
negro question, and I do not think that any student 
with colored blood was ever admitted to the institution 
in my day. Several of us joined clubs, especially the 
most important one, “The Baltimore Club,” and thus 
in every way practicable the points of social contact 
were developed. Thus the very slow and hard work 
of educating a large and intelligent community to 
appreciate what was at first a somewhat exotic uni- 
versity was most auspiciously inaugurated, and Balti- 
more has surely, if slowly, learned to be proud of this 
great foundation. 
True history in the field of higher education was 
perhaps never so hard to write as in this country, per- 
vaded as it is with insidious biases for competing insti- 
tutions, and the day of impartiality and competency of 
judgment will dawn late; but just in proportion as love 
of the highest learning and research prevails, Dr. Gil- 
man’s qualities will become the ideals of leaders in our 
American system. 
Gilman was essentially an inside president. His 
interest in the work of the individual members of his 
faculty did not end when they were engaged, but be- 
gan. He loved to know something of their every new 
investigation, however remote from his own specialty, 
and every scientific or scholarly success felt the stimu- 
lus of his sympathy. His unerring judgment of men 
was triumphantly justified in the achievements of 
those he appointed; and although in selecting young 
men he had to walk by faith, he nowhere showed more 
sagacity than in applying individual stimuli and 
checks, so that in this sense and to this extent he was a 
spiritual father of many of his faculty, the author of 
their careers, and for years made the institution the 
paradise and seminarium of young specialists. This 
246 JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 
made stagnation impossible, and the growth of pro- 
fessors there in their work was, I believe, without 
precedent. When petrography, a pregnant new de- 
parture in science, knocked at the Hopkins door in the 
person of the brilliant and lamented George Williams, 
it was opened in welcome, and the country was 
stocked with young professors from his laboratory. 
The new psychology, for which other institutions had 
shown only timidity, was here given its first American 
home. Now the productivity of our scores of Ameri- 
can psychological laboratories rivals, if it does not 
exceed, in volume that of Germany. Clark University 
is, in a sense, an offshoot of the Johns Hopkins, for 
here, small as it has so far been, the inevitable next 
step of attempting university work was first tried 
although here there was no undergraduate section. 
History, biology, mathematics, physics, chemistry, the 
Romance and Teutonic languages, Sanskrit, Semitic 
studies, and, more lately, several departments of med- 
ical and other study, have all felt the new life that 
came from the seminaries, clinics, laboratories, lec- 
ture rooms, and journals which began at the Hopkins. 
In every one of all these lines of work the personality 
of its president was an active and beneficent influence. 
Dr. Gilman was not preeminently an outside presi- 
dent or an outside organizer. He was never known 
as an apostle of uniformity. It could never be said of 
him that there were dollars and students in all or 
even in anything he said, in the sense that these con- 
siderations determined either what was said or left 
unsaid. He had, I believe, no place on any committee 
of ten, twelve, or fifteen, and had no share in the 
unhappy business by which in some parts of the coun- 
try secondary education has been dominated by or 
subordinated to college interests or requirements. He 
believed in individuality and held that institutions 
were made for men, and not men for institutions. He 
247 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
knew no selfishness or interinstitutional rivalry; nor 
did he take part in the tendency to absorb or incor- 
porate other foundations into a great educational 
trust. His faith and services were for the university 
invisible, not made with hands, which consists in the 
productive scientific work of gifted minds wherever 
they are, sympathetic by nature and made still more so 
by the coordination of studies, as one of the most 
characteristic features of our age. 
As a member of his faculty I smarted not infre- 
quently under the faithful wounds of this friend; but 
these were only wholesome and made me all the more 
his debtor, and the state of my department in the 
country now owes more to him, I think, than to any 
other man as our American system of education is 
organized. To advance even a little what he did 
would satisfy all my own administrative ambitions. 
He had optimism enough to sustain his own spirit and 
that of those about him under painful disappoint- 
ments and idealism enough to make a long and mag- 
nificent fight against the materializing tendencies too 
prevalent here in higher education, and to demon- 
strate that often the most ideal thing is also the most 
practical. 
The new policies which mark Gilman as the most 
creative mind in the field of the higher education that 
this country has yet produced may be summarized as 
follows. First of all, he realized that as civilization 
advanced, all critical decisions and new steps must be 
made by experts who could command all the available 
knowledge in their field and perhaps add something 
new to the sum of the world’s knowledge. To have 
made a contribution to this, however small, marks the 
real attainment of majority in our world. Scholar- 
ship is a prime condition but erudition is not enough; 
each must have had the unique experience of having 
contributed some tiny brick, however small, to the 
248 JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 
Temple of Science, the construction of which is the 
sublimest achievement of man. In everything else 
there may be docility but at some point each must be 
an authority and have passed beyond apprenticeship, 
and be able to light his own way with independent 
knowledge. Then alone is he a real citizen in the 
culture world of to-day. Thus intellectual creative- 
ness must be made the real standard and test of any 
system of higher education of to-day. Anything and 
everything must be subordinated to this, and Gilman 
must have had great satisfaction in realizing that in this 
kind of productivity the Hopkins University, at least 
for a decade or two, was the leader and pioneer in this 
land. He was never dismayed to be told that this 
ideal was “made in Germany.” It found the warmest 
response in every able and original mind in all aca- 
demic America, as is abundantly witnessed by the fact 
that the Hopkins fashions have been so generally 
cultivated in later years by all our higher institutions. 
And although this tradition has been sedulously 
maintained and so far as possible is ever advancing at 
Baltimore, the leadership of this institution is now 
relatively less pronounced only because its ideals have 
been so infectious in so many other centers. 
Another item in the Gilman policy was to avoid 
excessive or premature specialization. It was to this 
end that so many popular courses were established 
and so many eminent men were brought to the Johns 
Hopkins for brief periods; that the interdepartmental 
scientific club was established, where specialists tried 
to interest those in other lines in their own work; and 
that the Bulletin and Circular, in which each was 
urged to present in brief and popular form the results 
of his own investigations, were maintained. This 
work, although welcomed by broader minds, always 
encountered some opposition and more inertia. Stu- 
dents were prone to focus on their major subject and 
249 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
neglect the larger opportunities thus provided. Some 
of the professors found it irksome to summarize their 
technical studies in a way intelligible to cultured 
minds in other fields. A few thought it rather be- 
neath their academic dignity to explain in courses 
open to the public what they were doing. But these 
methods of mutual acquaintance were always dili- 
gently fostered by Gilman. 
A college course was established as a link between 
the stage of intermediate education represented by the 
City College and real university work, and this was 
done not without some latent rivalry. It made largely 
a local appeal and grew in recognition and favor 
slowly but surely, until it became not only a very im- 
portant bond between the city and university but gave 
the unique kind of training that real university work 
needed and presupposed and without which it would 
have been an air plant. 
The religious policy of the University had, of 
course, to be acceptable to the Quakers or Friends, 
which was the sect of the founder and was dominant 
in the Board and very influential in the community. 
Fortunately, however, this faith stressed dogma but 
little although it revered the Scriptures and the inner 
light and was friendly and sympathetic to the philo- 
logical study of both the Old and New Testament, and 
not unduly appalled by the higher criticism. 
There were those who advocated that the Hopkins 
should make special efforts to affiliate with the 
southern colleges, so many of which had been fash- 
ioned more or less upon the University of Virginia, 
which Jefferson had built on French models and which 
was the most formidable competitor of the Hopkins 
in the south. This policy Gilman never favored be- 
cause he wished the institution to make a national 
rather than sectional appeal and because he would in 
no way interfere with the prestige of the University 
250 JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 
of Virginia. He realized also that the standards in 
most southern institutions were not so high as those in 
the best northern ones, and so shrank from having 
Hopkins regarded as in any sense a southern institu- 
tion, which it never became. 
He never entered the mad race for dollars and 
students, which was the ultimate aim of nearly every- 
thing that college presidents said and did. His appeal 
always was to quality rather than to size and numbers, 
and his very temperament made him keenly sympa- 
thetic with the nonbelligerency and cult of peace 
which characterized the Quakers, so that he shrank 
constitutionally from all antagonisms. Just why he 
never introduced physical geography, a subject of 
great significance and academic possibilities already 
so well developed in Germany, and which he himself 
had represented in his early days at Yale, no one ever 
knew unless it was that he felt that any manifestation 
of partiality for his own chair might be construed as 
selfishness. 
Again, I never quite understood why he opposed 
my earnest wish to give a course on the history of 
universities and learned societies, which seemed to me 
an essential part of the work of pedagogy, but pre- 
ferred that I should limit my activities here to pri- 
mary and secondary education. Perhaps he dis- 
trusted my competence, and if so he was probably 
wiser than I, although I always felt that it would 
require a remarkable degree of self-abnegation in any 
college or university president to develop such a 
course in which his own policies might perhaps be 
shown to be imperfect in the larger light of history. 
Or perhaps he felt that if such a course were given 
it really ought to be by the president himself, although 
I had no reason whatever to suspect Gilman of want- 
ing to preempt this field. 
After his resignation and shortly before his death 
251 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
he spent a few days with me in Worcester, where he 
gave us a memorable address, and talked far more 
freely with me as a more humble endeavorer in his 
own administrative field than he had ever done before. 
He loved the Hopkins so much that neither he nor his 
very accomplished wife, both northern born and bred, 
were ever able to leave it, and both, I believe, died in 
Baltimore. He had suffered intensely from the finan- 
cial reverses the University had met with owing to the 
fact that the founder had insisted that so large a por- 
tion of its funds should remain invested in the B. and 
O. Railroad. This the elder Garrett, a magnate in 
that field, had made successful with the aid of gov- 
ernment loans during our Civil War but it later, 
partly owing to the mismanagement of his son and 
successor, came to grief, so that Gilman’s ulterior 
plans, much as he had done, remained unfulfilled; 
while the twin institution, the hospital and medical 
school, was but little affected and grew in importance 
in later years to a degree Gilman had never antici- 
pated. Just how much he had to do in the early shap- 
ing of these ideals no one ever knew. The history of 
both these foundations, if it is ever adequately writ- 
ten, will show the epoch-making significance of 
Gilman’s ideals, even nowhere yet fully realized. It 
is a great pity that he himself left no very intimate 
story of his life work.5 
5 Gilman established, if he did not introduce, the custom of printing 
in the Register the academic record of each professor and graduate 
student, and also calling attention in his annual reports and otherwise 
to the special achievements in research in each department, one year 
stressing some and in other years other of the branches, and always 
publishing the names and number of student attendants upon each 
course. This was another fine psychological spur to wholesome emula- 
tion so characteristic of the first president of the Hopkins. He also 
arranged the order of the courses in a somewhat Comtean, hierarchic 
way, for example, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, language, 
literature, history, sociology, with psychology last, and always favored 
early publication of every result of investigation, so that besides the 
journals established in various departments there were often long series 
of monographs. He was always sympathetic and glad to listen to any- 
thing we would tell him about our work and always seemed to be doing 
252 JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 
The Board of Trustees was certainly very saga- 
cious in trusting and giving him a free hand to the 
very end. Judge Brown, the famous war governor of 
Maryland, who presided over the Board, always in- 
spired his colleagues with the sentiment that it was 
their duty, having wisely chosen their president, to 
follow his lead in all matters, so that I think the 
faculty always felt that there was never any possi- 
bility of a successful appeal from the executive head 
of the institution to the Board; nor, so far as I know, 
was there ever any disposition to make one. The 
faculty to a man, I think, were loyal, both to the poli- 
cies and to the personality of their president, whom 
they learned to trust no less implicitly than did the 
Board. 
It was during the latter part of my stay in Balti- 
more that my mother and, two years later, my father 
died. Both were in comfortable health nearly up to 
the last. They had both passed through so many 
years of great anxiety for me that it has always been 
a source of great satisfaction that they lived to see 
me settled and my children born; and even my father 
and uncles, at first skeptical, were finally convinced 
that I could “earn a living without working on a 
farm.” My mother and, to a less extent, my father, 
were always keenly interested in everything I did and 
even attempted to read everything I wrote, and in one 
of her letters my mother describes the mingled pleas- 
ure and pain with which she at length came to realize 
that my effusions were in a field where she could not, 
with the best effort, follow or understand. She also 
never entirely outgrew the suspicion that I was wan- 
dering from the ways she thought orthodox, but even 
with this fear there was later blended a certain com- 
his best to understand it, no matter how technical it was, so that we 
all felt, along with a sense that he always had the final decision with 
regard to all our appointments and promotions, that he had a personal 
as well as official satisfaction in anything we did. 
253 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
pensation in the growing trust that even if I had 
departed from the ancient faith I might, after all, be 
right. She once told me that she tried very hard to be 
my disciple, but with only partial success. My father 
in his later years seemed to quite capitulate, I thought 
rather suddenly, from a critical attitude which he long 
felt but never undertook or was able to bring to full 
expression, to a feeling that about such matters I 
really was much more likely to be right than he, and 
one or two later expressions of this general trustful- 
ness, characteristic probably of his age, I shall always 
remember as somewhat pathetic. 
Near the end of my stay in Baltimore, Dr. George 
H. Emmott came from England to teach logic and 
ethics, and a little later Edward H. Griffin, who had 
years before been my Latin instructor at Williams, 
was appointed to teach ethics to the undergraduates. 
The former was, in a sense, my assistant, while the 
latter was more or less independent and in a few years 
developed a course that was admirably calculated to 
introduce young men to the study of moral, epistemo- 
logical, and historical problems of philosophy. 
The range of my courses, which seem now more 
extensive than intensive, is set forth in the Eleventh 
Annual Report (1886) as follows: 
I. A two years’ course of Pedagogy of one lecture per 
week with reading directed by the professor. The work 
of the first year is mainly historical and that of the second 
year is mainly devoted to the special topics of school work. 
The chief subjects treated and reference-lists used in this 
course have been printed (“Descriptive Bibliography of 
Education,” Boston, 1886, p. 309), in a form which may 
serve as a report of progress in the effort to work out an 
educational course adapted to the needs of an American 
university so largely engaged in preparing young men for 
the work of higher and special instruction; and as a printed 
illustration of the way in which the instructor desires to 
254 JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 
treat each topic, reference may be found in my booklet 
entitled How to Teach Reading and What to Read in 
School, p. 40, Boston, 1886. 
II. Historical philosophy, in a three years’ course of one 
lecture and a seminary per week, with reading courses and 
other exercises. The first year’s work ends with Plotinus; 
that of the second year with Hegel; and the third year is 
devoted to recent and contemporary philosophical thought, 
including, as in the previous years, ethical, aesthetic, and 
religious philosophy, all treated from the standpoint of 
modern psychology and, so far as is practicable, with refer- 
ences and reading in English. 
III. A three years’ course in Psychology, consisting of 
two lectures with reading club and seminary weekly and 
daily laboratory work. The first year is devoted to the 
senses considered experimentally and anatomically, but 
from the standpoint of Psychology, with reference to 
aesthetical and educational applications and to morbid phe- 
nomena, and concluding with an extended treatment of the 
field of binocular vision, with parallel reading of Helmholtz 
and Hering. The second year takes up first the four topics 
of space, the time-sense, physiological time, and the psycho- 
physic law, on each of which the vast body of recent experi- 
mental literature is epitomized as far as possible. The last 
half of the second year is devoted to association, memory, 
habit, attention, the will, and feelings successively, and 
treated experimentally. The third year is occupied with the 
topics of instinct in animals, psychogenesis in children, the 
psychological parts of anthropology (including animism, 
the chief mythic cycles, traditions, rites, and ceremonies), 
and morbid psychology (especially aphasia, hypnotic and 
allied states, paranoia, epilepsy, hysteria, paralysis, etc.) 
with constant reference to their anatomical correlations 
where such are made out, and to their educational, hygienic, 
and prophylactic applications. 
Activities of the Baltimore period are represented by the 
following papers by my students and myself: 
How to Teach Reading and What to Read in School, Bost., 
Heath, 1886. 
255 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
Methods of Teaching History, Ginn, Heath and Co., 1883. 
The New Psychology, Andover Review, 3 :i2o-35:239~48. 
Optical Illusions of Motion, Jour, of Physiology, 31297-307 
(With H. P. Bowditch). 
Motor Sensations of the Skin, Mind, 11 1557 (With H. H. 
Donaldson). 
Bilateral Asymmetry of Function, Mind, 9:93, 1884 (With 
E. M. Hartwell). 
Studies of Rhythm, Mind, 11:55, *885 (With J. Jastrow). 
Hints Towards a Select and Descriptive Bibliography of Edu- 
cation. Arranged by topics and indexed by authors. 
Bost., Heath, 1886 (With John M. Mansfield). 
Intermittent and Variable Sensory Stimulation (With H. B. 
Nixon). 
Dermal Sensitiveness to Gradual Pressure Changes, Amer. 
Jour, of Psychology, 1172, 1887 (With Y. Motora). 
W. H. Burnham.—Memory: Historically and Experimentally 
Considered, Am. Jour, of Psychology, 1:39~90; 2:225- 
270; 431-464; 568-622. 
J. McKeen Cattell.—Experiments on the Association of Ideas, 
Mind, 12:68 (1886). 
Mental Tests and Measurements, Mind, 15:373 (1889). 
The Time It Takes to See and Name Objects, Mind, 11163 
(1885). 
The Time Taken Up By Cerebral Intelligence, Mind, 
11:220, 377, 524 (1885). 
Edward Cowles.—Insistent and Fixed Ideas, Am. Jour, of 
Psychology, 1:222. 
John Dewey.—Psychology of Kant (Ph.D. Thesis). 
The Psychological Standpoint, Mind, 11:1 (1885). 
Psychology as Philosophic Method, Mind, 111153 (1885). 
H. H. Donaldson.—On the Temperature Sense (Ph.D. Thesis), 
Mind, 11:399. 
J. H. Hyslop.—On Wundt’s Theory of Psycho-synthesis in 
Vision, Mind, 13:499 (1887). 
The Problem of Space (Ph.D. Thesis). 
Joseph Jastrow.—The Perception of Space by Disparate 
Senses, Mind, 111539 (1885). 
William Noyes.—Paranoia. A Study of the Evolution of 
Systematized Delusions of Grandeur, Am. Jour, of Psy- 
chology, 1:460-78; 2:349-475. 
G. W. T. Patrick.—Fragments of the Work of Heraclitus of 
Ephesus on Nature, tr. from the Gr. text of Bywater. 
Balt., Murray, 1889. 
256 JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 
Further Study of Heraclitus, Am. Jour, of Psychology, 
i :557-690. 
E. C. Sanford.—Personal Equation, Am. Jour, of Psychology, 
2:3-38; 271-298; 403-420. 
Relative Legibility of the Small Letters, Am. Jour, of 
Psychology, 1 -.402-435. 
L. T. Stevens.—On the Time Sense, Mind, 11:393 (1885) 
(Ph.D. Thesis). 
M. I. Swift.—On the Ethics of Idealism as Represented by 
Aristotle and Hegel (Ph.D. Thesis). CHAPTER VII 
CLARK UNIVERSITY 
My first knowledge of Clark University—The personality of the 
founder, Jonas Gilman Clark—The call and my acceptance—■ 
Closing up at the Hopkins—Pedagogic trip to Europe: the 
Universities of Holland, Belgium, Scandinavian countries, 
Russia, Austria, Italy, Germany, France, and England—Inter- 
views with distinguished professors: Helmholtz, Lord Kelvin, 
Jowett, Pasteur, German Kultus minister, Pobedonostsev, 
Bilroth, Klein, Von Holst—ficole Libre—Musee Guimet— 
First disappointment—The embarrassment from too great ex- 
pectations—The Clark trustees, Judge Devens, Senator Hoar, 
Stephen Salisbury, John D. Washburn, Thomas H. Gage, 
Frank Goulding—The personnel of our original faculty: 
Story, Michael, Michelson, Whitman, Neff, Sanford, Burn- 
ham, L. N. Wilson and others—Financial strictures—Mr. 
Clark’s reticence and withdrawal—Growing discontent of 
the faculty and resignation of many members—The ad- 
vent of President Harper—Unique difficulties of my posi- 
tion—The seven lean years—The Pedagogical Seminary— 
The summer school—Child Study—Celebration of the tenth 
anniversary with European savants—Mr. Clark’s death in 1900 
—His will and the litigation that followed it—The establish- 
ment of the college—Its first President, Carroll D. Wright— 
His death and the election of Dr. E. C. Sanford—Attempts 
to affiliate with other institutions—The Journal of Religious 
Psychology—The library and its problems—Licentia Docendi 
—Theses—My Monday evening seminary—Celebration of the 
close of the second decennium—My university policies—Grad- 
uate work and research—Fellowships—The war—Boards of 
T rustees—Retirement. 
Early in the spring of 1888 I was surprised to 
receive a letter from Senator George F. Hoar request- 
ing me to call upon him at his committee room in the 
Capitol at Washington or set a time when he might 
call on me. I lost no time in presenting myself to him, 
258 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
and he told me then the story, of which I had of 
course learned something from the press, concerning 
a new university already projected in Worcester, 
Massachusetts, asking me if I was free to consider an 
invitation to be its president in case it should come to 
me. I replied that I would do so with an open mind 
although I was already well established in Baltimore, 
having served my term of five years and been re- 
appointed, my tenure to continue “during the pleasure 
of the Board.” This meant permanence during good 
behavior and efficiency and I had purchased a house. 
Shortly after this, on coming home one afternoon I 
found Senator Hoar, John D. Washburn of Worces- 
ter, later American ambassador to Switzerland, secre- 
tary of the new foundation; and Jonas Gilman Clark, 
the founder himself, conversing with my wife and 
children. Here the plans and prospects of the new 
institution were unfolded at length, and I was invited 
to be the guest of Mr. Clark for a few days in 
Worcester and attend a meeting of the Board at his 
house, and in due time I received and accepted a 
formal call. 
My departure, I think, was somewhat of a dis- 
appointment to the authorities of Baltimore, for they 
offered me an increase to their maximum salary and 
certain other inducements to remain. The Hopkins 
had already invested considerable money in my de- 
partment, and had I anticipated that my chair would 
be left vacant for years and the apparatus of my 
laboratory distributed among other departments, so 
that my successor, James Mark Baldwin, would have 
some special difficulties in reinstalling it years later, I 
should certainly have hesitated even more than I did 
about leaving. Of this, however, I at the time had no 
intimation, and I always felt that the authorities 
treated me very handsomely in the special induce- 
ments held out for me to stay, despite the fact that 
259 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
financial stringency was already just beginning to 
loom up in the future. 
Mr. Clark, born February i, 1815, in the little 
town of Hubbardston, near Worcester, was the third 
of seven sons and represented the fine old first growth 
of the American stock. His schooling had been 
limited to the opportunities afforded in a small rural 
community, and his experience later had given him a 
very high appreciation of the importance of education 
for success in life. In early years he left the farm, 
was first apprenticed to and then became proprietor 
of an establishment for making wagons, in which he 
was successful. He then went to California as a 
“forty-niner,” where he engaged not in mining but in 
selling mining tools and implements, which then had 
to be shipped around the Cape of Good Hope. In this 
business he was also very successful. Here he formed 
the acquaintance of Leland Stanford, whom he highly 
respected, and was an active member of the famous 
Vigilantes that purged the state of the lawlessness 
which attended the early rush of adventurers there in 
quest of gold. In his genial hours in conversation 
with friends he sometimes revealed some of the 
drastic methods by which law and order were estab- 
lished and the fear of God put into the hearts of the 
thugs and robbers that infested the region of San 
Francisco Bay, although the full history of this move- 
ment has never yet been written. He also was very 
active in all the proceedings by which California was 
kept in the Union in the early days of our Civil War. 
Here he became a very prominent and influential citi- 
zen and established himself in a fine residence on Nob 
Hill. He later moved to New York and still further 
increased his fortune by dealing in real estate, and 
purchased a house on Fifth Avenue near Forty-second 
Street. As he advanced in years he retired from 
business and returned to Worcester county, erecting 
260 President William De Wit Hyde 
Thomas M. Balliet 
President Francis A. Walker 
William T. Harris Pres. Daniel Coit Gilman 
Senator Geo. Frisbie Hoar 
Jonas Gilman Clark CLARK UNIVERSITY 
an elegant granite home for himself on Elm Street, 
which he ultimately bequeathed to the University. 
He had already built two large business blocks in 
Worcester and a library in his native town, Hub- 
bardston, and had planned, with the aid of a local 
architect, Delano, the main building of Clark Uni- 
versity, constructed of brick and limestone and with 
the same general features as his other buildings. He 
spent the entire day overseeing the construction of 
this building, selecting with great care and discretion 
all the material, especially the interior woodwork, and 
made everything so solid and substantial that it ought 
to be in good condition at the end of its second 
century. 
He was a man of great reticence, and having never 
had a partner in business found it very difficult to 
communicate his plans even to the Board of Trustees 
whom he had himself selected. In vain they strove to 
learn something of the extent of the resources he in- 
tended to put into the institution. He was only able 
to give them somewhat indefinite answers, and in the 
latter part of his life this trait grew upon him and he 
seemed to have lost confidence in his Board, ceased to 
attend its meetings, and communicated with the mem- 
bers only by infrequent and somewhat formal letters. 
He was, however, profoundly impressed with two 
ideas; first, the necessity of giving young men an 
education that would fit them for “good citizenship 
and their work in life” and, second, the establishment 
of a university which, like the Johns Hopkins, should 
add to the sum of human knowledge. This, too, he 
was bent upon doing in Worcester for his native 
county, and strongly resisted the earnest efforts of 
several other neighboring institutions to convince him 
that his fortune would do more good with them than 
as a separate foundation. Three near-by institutions 
in particular had made very strong appeals of this 
261 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
kind to him, representing the danger of waste by 
duplication and the enormous cost of a new installa- 
tion. But to all this he turned a deaf ear. His own 
childlessness and the example of Leland Stanford 
always seemed to me to have great weight with him. 
The formal call to me contained the following 
most liberal sentiment: 
“They desire to impose on you no trammels; they have 
no friends for whom they wish to provide at the expense 
of the interests of the institution; no pet theories to press 
upon you in derogation of your judgment; no sectarian tests 
to apply; no guarantees to require save such as are implied 
by your acceptance of this trust. Their single desire is to 
fit men for the highest duties of life, and to the end that 
this institution, in whatever branches of sound learning it 
may find itself engaged, may be a leader and a light.” 
My letter of acceptance was as follows: 
Baltimore, Md., May i, 1888 
Hon. John D. Washburn 
My dear Sir: 
The invitation conveyed to me by your official letter of 
April 3 to become the President of Clark University finds 
me absorbed in a department of academic work which is 
new and full of promise, and attached by strong official and 
personal ties to an institution where the stimulus to research 
is strong and the enthusiasm for science is great, where 
much has already been done and the hope of future achieve- 
ment is high. 
Such a field, the work of organizing another college of 
the old New England type, or even the attempt to duplicate 
those that are best among established institutions old or 
new, would not induce me to leave. 
But as I have come to know the rare educational wisdom 
as well as the rare munificence of your Founder, the single 
and express desire of the corporation that in whatever 
branches of sound learning it may engage the new Uni- 
262 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
versity may be a leader and a light, the many advantages of 
location afforded by your city which seem to make the 
place of this great foundation no less auspicious than is the 
time; the public cooperation, interest, and goodwill of your 
citizens; and as I realize how inevitably these influences, 
once fairly organized, must lead in this day to still further 
university progress along old lines and to the opening of 
new ones, I am drawn with hope and enthusiasm too strong 
to resist from this present to the future service to which you 
call me. 
Believing that because so much has so lately been done 
in the advancement and diffusion of knowledge among men 
still further progress is made possible, and animated by the 
hope that we may together have the wisdom and the 
strength to take the next step in academic development, I 
accept the great charge you confide to my hands. 
I trust the Board you represent will never forget that I 
shall need their constant counsel and active cooperation, and 
I bespeak in advance the indulgence and sympathy that a 
plain man under such responsibilities and in the presence of 
such a task is certain to need. 
I remain, 
Respectfully yours, 
G. Stanley Hall. 
After winding up my affairs in Baltimore, teach- 
ing and conducting examinations to the end of the 
term, with a single week’s absence kindly granted me 
by President Gilman, I made educational tours among 
colleges and universities of the east and middle west, 
seeing many men and gathering much advice, giving 
an evening address at the American Association of 
Arts and Sciences at Cleveland, and occasionally 
spending a few days at Worcester with Mr. Clark, 
who was intensely interested in everything I could 
report concerning men and institutions. I made no 
final engagements for the staff save in one or two 
important instances, notably that of Dr. Sanford, who 
was to edit my Journal for a year. It had been Mr. 
263 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
Clark’s intention, and it had so been publicly an- 
nounced, that the institution should open in the fall of 
1888, but he very readily yielded to my suggestion that 
we defer the opening a year that I might go abroad 
and study foreign institutions. I left in August and 
returned shortly before the following May. 
When I left, the situation and prospects for the 
new institution seemed to me and to the Trustees 
brilliant and unprecedented. Mr. Clark’s own gifts, 
although only in notes and the building and grounds, 
totaled something like one million dollars, which was 
then the largest single gift ever made to education 
in New England. Although no one knew the extent 
of his fortune it was variously estimated all the way 
from eight to eighteen and even twenty million dol- 
lars. There were always very vague rumors of large 
interests outside of Worcester, especially with the 
Barings and in California and New York, and it was 
realized that if these larger estimates were correct we 
should ultimately have the richest foundation in the 
country. Therefore the Trustees advised me to 
gather what information I could upon all forms of 
higher academic and even professional education be- 
cause, they said, “it is better to be prepared for all 
eventualities that we may do later all that the funds 
at our ultimate disposal shall make seem legitimate.” 
Mr. Clark, too, charged me to examine all the law, 
medical, and technical schools I could, although focus- 
ing on “all departments of university work proper.” 
I had already conferred with many of the most 
eminent men of science in this country—the younger 
Agassiz, both the Gibbs, Newcomb, President A. D. 
White; the astronomer, Gould, and E. D. Cope, to 
name only those who had taken most active interest 
and written me most fully on plans and needs, as 
well as scores of others. Senator G. F. Hoar gave 
me a letter to American ambassadors, and Secretary 
264 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
of State Bayard gave me another to all ministers of 
education, government and diplomatic and consular 
agents, with the seal of the United States upon it. 
Thus, and in view of my previous years and 
acquaintance abroad, I was equipped as no one else 
had ever been for a pedagogic tour entirely, so far as 
I know, without precedent in the history of education. 
As a result of much advice I had formulated the fol- 
lowing plan. First of all, I would interview leading 
men in science in regard to their ideals in their own 
departments and secure, if possible, any general state- 
ments regarding the higher educational and cultural 
needs of science and learning. Second, I would see all 
the institutions, laboratories, etc., I could and collect 
photographs and plans of the main buildings wherever 
possible. Third, I would ascertain all I could concern- 
ing administrative methods as seen from the inside 
and gather confidential etats, statutes, and ordinances, 
charters, and histories of the more important institu- 
tions. Fourth, I would cover all the ground possible 
in as many countries as possible, travel nights when I 
could to save time, and more or less incidentally visit 
bookstores everywhere and collect and send home in- 
teresting pamphlets and other printed material of a 
more transient nature and more difficult to secure 
through the book trade. This plan I rigidly adhered 
to, taking rather voluminous notes (which came to fill 
eight quite sizable pocket memoranda) and also writ- 
ing Mr. Clark frequently any data that I thought 
might interest him, and sending him such material as 
I could pick up. I was also to visit instrument makers 
at the various institutions and collect apparatus for 
my own department. 
I landed at Amsterdam, visited every institution 
of higher education in Holland save the small Univer- 
sity of Groningen, spending the most time at Leyden, 
where I had letters to the venerable Professor Kunen 
265 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
of Old Testament fame and the younger Thiele, the 
latter of whom especially seemed to me to command a 
remarkable acquaintance with the organization and 
working of all Dutch institutions. I then visited Bel- 
gium, being particularly interested in the ancient 
Louvain and in the University of Brussels, making 
detours to Liege and Aix-la-Chapelle to see the tech- 
nical and educational institution of the latter with its 
unique points of interest. I then passed to Rostock, 
which was then unique among German universities 
in not having surrendered its independence to the gov- 
ernment in return for the copious subsidies Germany 
was then lavishing upon her institutions from the 
French indemnity fund. It preferred to be independ- 
ent and its income was chiefly derived from the very 
large estates under the control of the university 
Syndicus, who administered them, collected rents, etc. 
I spent a day or two with him in the visitation of the 
peasants and wealthier landowners, observing the de- 
tailed knowledge and minute directions he gave all 
these tenants of the university about crops, animals, 
etc. Kiel had been greatly enlarged as if to rival the 
Danish University of Copenhagen, at which latter I 
met Hofding. Passing to Sweden, I attended the 
interesting annual reunion of the newer University of 
Lund with its Danish associate, from which I think 
more than one hundred attended, where I was induced 
to take a modest part in the speaking at a banquet 
presided over by my host, Baron Von Schwerin, who 
was very lavish in his hospitalities. 
At Stockholm I was entertained by the famous 
neurologist, Retzius, whose wife was the daughter of 
the well-known novelist, Fredericka Bremer, and both 
were my guests later in Worcester. He was a wealthy 
man and largely responsible for the new scientific 
development of the university there. One day a 
journalist friend I made there introduced me to Ibsen, 
266 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
a very impressive, stocky, gray-haired man sitting on 
the porch of the hotel, with whom and Bjornson I had 
a brief but not memorable conversation. I only re- 
member that Ibsen spoke in high terms of the great 
possibilities of the world which ought to be, but which 
he feared might not be, realized in America, a country 
he had often longed but never expected to see. 
From here I passed to Upsala, the most northern 
university in the world, I believe, except that of 
Tomsk in Siberia, the plans and a lengthy account of 
which latter were given to me. Here I was the guest 
of the noted physiologist, Holmgren, who had already 
done most of his notable work on color blindness. I 
was greatly impressed with the site of the institution 
and its imposing new aula. Thence by sea I visited 
the university of Helsingfors in Finland, where I 
spent a day or two as the guest of Professor Palmen, 
the naturalist, who had already published his remark- 
able memoir on the migration tracts of birds in 
Europe and, to some extent, in Asia. 
Up to this point I had been entirely alone, but at 
St. Petersburg I met by chance my old Baltimore 
associate! Dr. E. M. Hartwell. We spent several days 
together, although his mission was almost entirely con- 
fined to public and school hygiene. I found that to see 
institutions here I must obtain the permit of our min- 
ister and we had here only a charge d'affaires who 
was unable to help me. Accordingly I presented 
myself with my general letter from Secretary of State 
Bayard at the University and was given an official 
escort, who showed me about the buildings, answered 
questions, and gave me the rather secret new constitu- 
tion of Russian universities under the law of 1884. 
But I was not satisfied with this officially conducted 
tour. Almost by chance I met Professor Setchenov, 
the noted physiologist, who passed me on to the later 
very distinguished Paul Vinogradov, the historian 
267 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
and economist, who spoke not only German and 
French but English. He was deeply interested in 
political problems and was already looked upon some- 
what askance by the authorities. He was most cordial 
and confidential and entertained me repeatedly at his 
house, having, as I thought, rather a penchant for 
Americans. By the aid of his influence I was able to 
visit several of the secret political clubs—one of them, 
as I remember, met in a poorly furnished back cellar 
(with documents kept in a secret vault) which it re- 
quired a pass word to enter. The proceedings, how- 
ever, instead of being very revolutionary, as I ex- 
pected, seemed, at least according to my interpreter, 
to be very tame and even commonplace. 
One of the most pathetic scenes I have ever wit- 
nessed was in attending the closing session of a very 
large popular school for the higher education of girls 
of the upper classes. It had already been in operation 
for many years and there was a very large assembly 
of former graduates and friends. The government 
had felt that its teachings were too liberal and that it 
had become an organ of dangerous tendencies, and 
had decreed its final close. I could not follow all the 
proceedings but I was told enough of them to realize 
the intense pathos of the occasion. Almost every one 
was in tears. I was particularly impressed by the 
remarkably fine physique and self-control of these 
young women, despite the fact that their fondest 
aspirations so long cherished were dashed to the 
ground by this arbitrary act of a despotic govern- 
ment.1 
I had long been curious to see something of the 
higher military education in Europe and, as my cre- 
dentials seemed so effective here, I applied to the 
higher authorities of the government. I heard 
11 understand that this institution has been reopened, but on a new 
basis, by the Bolsheviki. 
268 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
nothing from my request for several days until 
one morning early, before I was up, on answer- 
ing a rap at my hotel door, three uniformed 
officers entered my room. One stood like a statue 
at the door, another sat down at my table and non- 
chalantly looked over letters and memoranda that 
I had left there, while the third, coming to my end 
of the long room, as if to divert attention from his 
comrade at the table, asked me many questions as to 
the object of my visit to Russia and especially why I 
wished to see the military schools. He was very cour- 
teous and we chatted on various topics, as he spoke 
excellent English. My examination was evidently 
satisfactory to the authorities for a week later I was 
notified to be ready at a certain early hour, and with 
Dr. Hartwell, who had been subjected to a similar 
inquiry, I was taken in an elegant equipage drawn by 
six plumed horses, with two liveried outriders and 
two generals in full uniform. We drove at great 
speed through the streets, every squad of soldiers we 
met and all policemen standing at salute as we dashed 
by, and were taken to a cavalry school a short distance 
outside the city, where a special all-day programme 
had been arranged for us. We visited the rooms and 
classes, met the various instructors, were taken 
through the stables, and saw a wonderful perform- 
ance in a large arena by Cossack riders who stood up 
or picked handkerchiefs from the ground while riding 
horses at top speed and performed various evolutions. 
We were shown through the officers’ rooms, enter- 
tained at dinner, and found the officers and their wives 
extremely accomplished, well informed, and alto- 
gether delightful. Only when the shades of night fell 
were we returned in state to our hotel. A few days 
later we were invited to inspect the higher or graduate 
military school in the city itself. Here, too, we met 
several distinguished generals, who took us through 
269 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
each classroom, explaining to us in excellent French 
each course of study, and gave us, as the cavalry 
school authorities had done, a number of souvenir 
pamphlets, programs, etc.; so that we left with a very 
high opinion of the advanced training of officers of 
the line. 
To my surprise and delight I was at last given an 
interview with Pobedonostsev himself. He was the 
power behind the throne oFThe Czar and at the very 
height of his influence, ultraconservative, extremely 
militaristic, full of the conceptions of the greatness of 
Russia and of her future supremacy in Europe. Al- 
though an enthusiastic student of Emerson, he spoke 
in severe terms of the radicalism that was slowly per- 
vading the universities and justified the severe meas- 
ures he had taken to suppress revolutionary clubs, to 
unseat certain obnoxious professors, and on more 
than one occasion to close temporarily the universities. 
He advised me to see two or three of the chief digni- 
taries of the church, giving me his card to them. 
These gentlemen I found living in state but in what 
seemed to me surprising isolation. They explained to 
me how religion was the soul not only of the muzhik 
but of Russia itself and how essential it was as a con- 
servator of law and order. Here, for the first time, I 
indulged for a few days in sight-seeing, and then 
passed to Moscow on a railroad so straight that it was 
said that Czar Nicholas had laid it out on the map 
with a ruler. Here, of course, there was more sight- 
seeing as well as a visit to the university, into the 
details of which I will not enter here. 
I was very anxious to see a primitive Russian 
village, and with a friend I had found at the hotel 
hired one of the unique Russian vehicles to take us 
many versts into the country to a group of peasant 
houses, where we got a good glimpse of primitive life. 
The family and the cattle generally lived on the main 
270 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
floor, the pigs below, with the hay and fodder above. 
We also saw a meeting of the mir, where the people 
gathered in the market place and~without formal or- 
ganization but with very moderate talk and gesticula- 
tion chose the local officers and transacted the other 
business of the hamlet, for here in this land of czarism 
local democracy was almost complete and ideal. 
We passed thence to Prague with its two faculties 
—Czech and German—where very much of the recent 
outbreak, which seems to have been animated by racial 
hostilities as intense as those of the feuds in the Alle- 
ghenies, has taken place. Thence we went to Vienna. 
Here, although the Kultus minister was absent, I was 
given free access to everything I wished to see and 
spent some weeks in inspecting the vast museums and 
academic institutions which adorn the “Ring.” As 
elsewhere in Europe, the government here, since the 
Franco-Prussian War, had awakened to the impor- 
tance of giving all its university departments a splen- 
did architectural installation, and the new university 
building, at a cost of some four million dollars in our 
money and of a magnificence that dwarfed all about, 
had lately been completed. My old friend, Professor 
Bilroth, the surgeon, told me that medicine soon ex- 
pected a building for itself no less magnificent. Here 
I found most of the professors whom I had known 
years before as a student there, and I gave some 
attention to the studies within my own sphere of 
interest. The hospital organization at Vienna was at 
that time by far the best in Europe, for provision for 
the treatment of all diseases from the entire city was 
focused at one point so that the clinics made this city 
the mecca of young physicians from Europe and 
America. The docent system also seemed here to 
have come to its most perfect flower for almost every 
young doctor who had a specialty in which he had 
done anything of note was allowed to give a brief 
271 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
course in his own line, with all the facilities of the 
institution at his command, although these brief 
courses were more attractive to the many foreign 
students than were those of “ordinary” or full pro- 
fessors. Vienna was one of the great centers of 
art, and it was customary then to speak of it in 
Viennese as “klee Pari” (small Paris). 
In Berlin I found many old acquaintances. Every- 
thing I wished to see, save only the higher military 
school, at the doors of which I knocked in vain, was 
freely accessible. My former teacher, Helmholtz, 
was greatly interested in the new Clark project and 
even gave me memoranda of what he believed to be 
next steps in the development of the department of 
physics. He had himself, however, just yielded to 
the overwhelming current which was everywhere set- 
ting from culture to Kultur, and accepted the head of 
the new Reichs-Anstalt at Charlottenburg, where a 
splendid corps of experts devoted themselves to re- 
search in the service of industry and the practical 
arts. The then Kultus minister, Von Gossler, was 
kind enough to invite me on an official tour of inspec- 
tion to Gottingen and Halle. We had a special train 
and were gone several days. At each institution he 
was received with great formality by the Rector Mag- 
nifies in his official robes, and plans for the new 
buildings, courses, appointments, promotions, etc., 
were discussed and agreed upon, as was also the trans- 
fer of several professors. 
Mr. Clark had desired me to see a “very few”— 
two or three—of the very best German professors and 
if possible to induce them to come to Clark. When I 
broached this matter to the minister of education he 
replied that the government would be somewhat re- 
luctant to permit its good men to leave and that there 
were many precedents for refusing this permission, 
unless, indeed, it be for a short time and for pro- 
272 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
fessors whose departments were not intimately con- 
nected with the industrial development of the country; 
but that such was the good will of the empire toward 
America that he would give any definite proposition 
I might make the most careful and favorable con- 
sideration possible. We both understood that under 
the alien labor law, however, it would be necessary 
to make no exact and final engagements with any 
professor until he had actually landed here, and this 
seemed likely, as indeed it proved later, to be a serious 
stumbling block. I first of all opened negotiations 
with Professor Felix Klein, the unexcelled mathema- 
tician who had declined an appointment at the Johns 
Hopkins, which he had visited, but looked favorably 
upon Clark. The salary was agreed upon and he 
consented to come for a term of three years, when 
to his and my surprise difficulties were placed in his 
way at Berlin which were never overcome, although 
he did visit us briefly later for a short course of lec- 
tures. The Berlin final ruling was that professors 
might spend one semester in this country for three 
years without losing standing or their old-age pension, 
a very important consideration. But this was not 
what we wanted. 
Professor Von Holst of Freiburg, author of The 
Constitutional History of the United States in several 
volumes, which was the leading authority upon the 
subject, had visited this country, married an American 
wife and was a friend of Senator Hoar, who was 
very anxious to have him brought to Clark. He was 
the next man I desired to import, as head of the de- 
partment of history. His government, unlike that of 
Prussia, made no objection, at least to a three-year 
term, and he expressed a willingness to come to this 
country permanently provided satisfactory arrange- 
ments could be made for an old-age pension. I saw 
much of him and his family for some days and we 
273 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
considered the matter as nearly closed as it could be 
under the above law, and I wrote Mr. Clark enthu- 
siastically of my success. In his reply, which reached 
me some weeks later, I had the first of a long series 
of bitter disappointments that later followed each 
other in such rapid succession. Mr. Clark wrote in 
substance that on further deliberation, and after 
taking advice of others, it had seemed best to wait 
a year or two, “until we are a little farther along,” 
before importing any foreign professors. As this 
seemed almost a mandate and was somewhat peremp- 
tory in tone, although it was exactly counter to all 
our understanding and to Mr. Clark’s written in- 
structions when I left, there was nothing for me to 
do but to make another pilgrimage to Freiburg and 
explain as best I could the entire situation to Von 
Holst, who was evidently grievously disappointed and 
angry, as I thought, at me. It was a most painful 
interview. I immediately sent a copy of Mr. Clark’s 
letter to Senator Hoar and asked him to write Von 
Holst, explaining and placating as best he could, 
which he did so effectively that years later, after the 
Von Holsts had come to Chicago, he told me that he 
fully understood and sympathized with my position. 
To make matters worse, I had already begun nego- 
tiations with Victor Meyer, the distinguished chemist, 
whom Bayer of Munich had told me might be in- 
duced to visit America for a few years, either despite 
or perhaps because of the fact that he already had 
a very large income outside that of his chair from 
various chemical processes on which he had patents. 
Fortunately for me, however, the Kultus minister, 
whom Meyer had informed of my intention, positively 
forbade him to leave the country, for Germany could 
not jeopardize her supremacy in the chemical indus- 
tries which employed so many experts and which led 
the world. 
274 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
I visited each of the twenty-one German universi- 
ties, two of those of Switzerland, and five in Italy. 
I was particularly interested in those of Turin, under 
the guidance of my old friend, Professor Mosso; 
Rome, as the guest of Sergi; and Naples, as the guest 
of Dohrn; and the great biological station at the 
latter place, the best of its kind in the world. Hap- 
pening upon an old American friend, David Jayne 
Hill, later our ambassador to Berlin, we spent a few 
days together at the famous medieval monastery on 
the summit of Monte Casino, and then sailed together 
from Brindisi for Crete and Athens. We were sur- 
prised to find what excellent work was done in several 
of the departments at the university of this new-old 
city and were particularly impressed by the splendid 
new building of the Greek Academy of Parian marble, 
with its most imposing and elaborate architecture and 
its finely carved white marble seats cushioned with 
red velvet. Here I visited the lower and higher 
schools and heard the little children read and recite 
Homer, while the boys and girls studied the three 
great dramatists. We made a brief visit to Smyrna, 
admiring its beauties and never dreaming of the awful 
fate which awaited it in 1922. In Constantinople, 
too, I found something like a university (Dr. Hill 
had been suddenly called home by illness in his family) 
and visited the higher Turkish schools there under 
official guidance, making, of course, a trip to Robert 
College. 
I then passed to Budapest on a slow train which 
took two nights and a day. There had just been acts 
of brigandage and English travelers had been seized 
and held for ransom, so that our train carried a strong 
military guard, and we saw, I remember, the heads 
of two bandits stuck up on poles near one station. 
I inspected, as thoroughly as I was able, the remain- 
ing universities of Germany, always adhering to my 
275 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
plan of seeing first men, then institutions, and third 
bookshops. 
To be still more brief concerning the rest of this 
tour, at Paris I was most impressed by the Lcole 
Libre des Sciences Politiques, already well established 
by its founder, Boutmy, where were educated the 
great majority of the higher French officials although 
it was privately founded and conducted for many 
years before the government took it over; by the 
Musee Gnimet, established first at Lyons, whose gen- 
erous founder, when it had outgrown its quarters 
there, offered to give it to France if the government 
would properly install it in Paris. This was done in 
a building admirably adapted for the purpose near the 
Trocadero. At the time of my visit there were no 
less than thirteen professors and instructors, and I 
attended a very formal ceremony, to which I was in- 
vited by a scented card, where a Buddhist religious 
service was performed by native priests in costume, 
the meaning of which was explained to us on the 
program. The purpose of this institution and its vast 
library and museum was to give not merely to mis- 
sionaries but to all government and business emis- 
saries in various Oriental countries a better under- 
standing of the spirit of the great religions of the 
East, especially Buddhism, Brahmanism, Confucian- 
ism, and Mohammedanism. Many of these courses 
were taken by the representatives of French business 
in these lands. Altogether it was by far the most 
elaborately organized school of comparative religions 
in the world, quite as unique as the school of Boutmy 
in its field. Its vast library and collections of re- 
ligious objects filled several spacious halls. 
The 1Scole Normale, of course, with its splendid 
history and great achievements; the Sorbonne, and the 
great Salpetriere and its wonderful clinics, where I 
first saw Dejerine and Janet, heard Charcot, and met 
276 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
Ribot again, occupied several weeks. I visited none 
of the seventeen provincial universities in France save 
that of Nancy, but in Paris made a very memorable 
call on Pasteur, who must have talked with me two 
hours on the general educational situation in France 
and took pains to express his very friendly feeling 
for his co-savants in Germany. He expatiated on the 
idea that the work of organizing a new university in 
a new country was a task that would fill him, if he 
were a younger man, with more enthusiasm than any- 
thing else in the world. I spent several days in the 
famous Pedagogical Museum, which filled many 
rooms and was far larger than those at either Berne 
or St. Petersburg. It contained not only a very large 
library but hundreds, and I think thousands, of peda- 
gogical charts, pieces of apparatus, and illustrative 
devices of all kinds demonstrated in the lectures there 
and which could be used by teachers in their schools. 
I was also much impressed by two other institutions, 
one by Berillon where hypnotism was used on school 
children and others, the results of which were pub- 
lished in his Journal; and the institution of Bertillon, 
with its enormous collection of finger prints. 
I had stayed so long on the continent that my time 
was getting short and my plans for Great Britain had 
to be somewhat abridged. I saw and learned what 
I could of the new university in London, which was 
then only an examining body; spent a few days each 
in Cambridge and Oxford, in the former being en- 
tertained by the distinguished physiologist, Foster, at 
his charming residence just outside of the town, and in 
Oxford by Burdon Sanderson. I was fortunate in hav- 
ing interesting interviews with many others and was 
given a special “breakfast” by Jowett, the great master 
of Balliol. I gave only a few days each to the universi- 
ties of Dublin, Edinburgh, and Glasgow, and at the 
latter place was entertained by Lord Kelvin and his 
277 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
wife, whom I had met previously in Baltimore and 
who was good enough to write out in some detail his 
conceptions of what an ideal department of physics 
might be and do. I was greatly impressed by the 
splendid new edifice of the University of Glasgow. 
I came back to Worcester near the end of April 
with my head full of the loftiest academic ideals and 
overflowing with enthusiasm as to what a vast fortune 
devoted to their realization might mean and do for 
this country, and, despite the disappointment about 
importing professors, with high hopes that even this 
obstacle might soon be overcome. 
The amazement to me was to find how lavish 
everybody was of advice, how cherished and often 
how elaborate were the ideals of university men, 
many if not most of whom seemed to have imagined 
instaurations of their own departments rivaling not 
only Bacon’s House of Solomon but sometimes almost 
suggesting apocryphal vision. From my notes of this 
trip could be compiled ideals lofty and far-reaching 
enough to inspire all the universities of the world for 
a century and to organize a new one here for the 
development and conduct of which many times ten 
million dollars would be sadly inadequate. The 
harvest home-coming with all these sheaves of sug- 
gestion and inspiration marked the apex of great 
expectation, of hope tiptoe on the mountain top. For 
years and sometimes even now, European savants 
who heard of our projected work only from their 
conferences with me and assumed that many of the 
ideals which we discussed together were realized in 
this golden land of promise, have caused us great 
embarrassment. I came home perhaps slightly in- 
toxicated with academic ideals, and disappointment 
was doubtless inevitable without the tragic via crucis 
or descent into Avernus to which we were subjected 
three years later. 
278 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
Although I had gone about as quietly as possible 
and been as modest as I could on such a quest, owing 
to the magnitude of our hopes it was inevitable that 
such an errand and my own idealism would have ex- 
cited, wherever I went, great interest and high hopes 
for the new institution in the western world, so that 
among the most painful embarrassments during the 
lean years that followed were the inquiries from the 
foreign friends I had met as to how we were getting 
on and the often uncritical assumption that Clark 
University, which in fact proved to be a very small 
institution, was a leader if not the capstone of the 
entire American educational system. The only dis- 
tinction we clung to was that we took only graduates 
and devoted ourselves to research. That was the 
chief unique feature we could plead. These great 
expectations of European friends and other acquaint- 
ances made during this trip gave us even in advance 
of our opening a reputation so vastly beyond our 
achievements or deserts that it was itself for many 
years one of the most prominent of the many sources 
of mortification which I was to undergo.1 
I shall make no attempt here to present the full 
history of the earlier or later years of Clark Uni- 
versity. This has been carefully, fully, and, I think, 
impartially written under the direction of the Board 
by Dr. A. E. Tanner, with a collection of documents 
and records from various individuals including a hun- 
dred-page statement of my own, and filed among our 
archives “lest we forget” and intended, perhaps, for 
eventual publication. 
Despite my disappointment in not being able to 
1 Many notes, reviews, and articles in the early volumes of the 
Pedagogical Seminary are based upon the experiences, data, and first- 
hand observations made on this trip. If I had had time to write these 
out in detail and with some systematization while they were fresh in 
my mind I believe it would have made an interesting and valuable 
contribution to the subject of higher education at that time. 
279 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
bring back a few foreign and distinguished profes- 
sors, the selection of whom I had been instructed to 
make one of my chief quests, I came home, as I have 
said, surcharged with academic idealism and with the 
very highest hopes and expectations, with, of course, 
no dream of the nadir of disappointment and morti- 
fication that awaited me at the end of the first eventful 
triennium of the institution. It seems fitting, how- 
ever, at this point to characterize very briefly the 
gentlemen who constituted the Board of Trustees 
with which I was henceforth to have such intimate 
relations. 
This Board which Mr. Clark selected could not 
possibly have been better chosen. After his last visit 
to Europe, during the third year of the University, 
he practically withdrew from all connection with it, 
leaving it in their charge. These men, association 
with whom resulted in some of the most valued friend- 
ships of my life, were the following: 
Charles Devens, a native of Worcester but a resi- 
dent of Boston, stood at or near the head of the bar 
in Massachusetts and had been attorney-general in 
the cabinet of President Hayes. He was unmarried, 
a man of commanding stature and presence and some- 
what formal manners, whose life seemed to be per- 
vaded throughout by a high moral purpose. He, 
first on the Board and more strongly than any one 
else, realized that the fact that the Trustees had in 
their hands no assets whatever, save a note of seven 
hundred thousand dollars from Mr. Clark, and that 
the expenses during the early years were far in excess 
of the income of this fund, rendered the Trustees not 
only morally but financially responsible for the Uni- 
versity, and he first developed a strong resentment 
against Mr. Clark for putting his Board in that posi- 
tion and refusing them his confidence while thus de- 
manding from them the very utmost confidence in 
280 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
him. At the first meeting of the Board which I 
attended on my return from Europe he gave expres- 
sion to these views and asked Mr. Clark somewhat 
pointedly to make some statement to the Board con- 
cerning his plans for the University, and to give them 
some intimation of how much he intended to do for 
it. This almost precipitated a crisis, for Mr. Clark 
was not ready or disposed to make any such statement 
at that time and felt that the philanthropic foundation 
he was establishing justified him in delaying his 
answer. After the meeting Judge Devens and I 
walked the streets of Worcester till we were tired and 
then sat long and late in his hotel, he insisting that 
for one he could no longer remain on the Board and 
must resign and I urging that he, as a member of the 
Board that had called me from an attractive position, 
was bound not to desert but to stand by me and see 
the trouble through. To this latter view he at length, 
but very reluctantly, assented, and Mr. Clark never 
seemed to realize, until after the death of the Judge 
which soon followed, the depth of his discontent. 
Another prominent member of the Board, so 
active later in mitigating the calamities that befell it 
that he has often been spoken of as its second founder, 
was U. S. Senator George F. Hoar. Of a very dis- 
tinguished family and pedigree, he entered the prac- 
tice of law and soon became its leading representative 
in Worcester. Twenty-eight years before he had been 
elected to the lower house of Congress and soon after- 
ward to the Senate, of which he became one of the 
most marked and distinguished of all its members, 
respected by all—as not a few of them to whom he 
later introduced me said—not only for his very ex- 
ceptional scholarship in history and the classic lan- 
guages and literature but as a man of absolute and 
incorruptible integrity who always strove to look upon 
political questions from an ethical point of view. 
281 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
Senator Hoar always kept open his very attractive 
residence in Worcester and spent practically all his 
time here when Congress was not in session, and for 
nearly a decade and a half I became very intimate 
with him. He was very fond of long drives in Wor- 
cester and the adjacent towns and we took together 
many scores of rides all over the hills in every direc- 
tion. He was also very fond of inviting a few of us 
to informal dinners in Boston and various points on 
the coast and in adjacent towns, and once I enter- 
tained him for a few days at my native town of 
Ashfield, where he met his old college friend, Charles 
E. Norton, and where with Judge P. E. Aldrich we 
spent the days in long drives, taking our midday meal 
at country inns. From the first Senator Hoar was 
intensely interested in the University and was intent 
on showing me every kindness. In general he did 
most of the talking and I was an attentive listener 
and became deeply interested in all his personal and 
public affairs. He often read me speeches he was 
preparing, discussed his colleagues in the Senate, was 
full of fascinating incidents and reminiscences, and 
was altogether one of the most genial and charming 
of men, although, as I had reason to observe (though, 
happily, never to experience) he could be the most 
implacable and persistent of enemies. Our intimacy 
was always the stranger to me because I could very 
rarely interest him in any of the problems which occu- 
pied my mind save those directly pertaining to the 
welfare of the University. Mr. Clark’s reticence and 
his delay in transferring funds to the Board, and the 
smallness of those which he did transmit during his 
life, were a source of increasing irritation to Senator 
Hoar, and he also not once but often expressed a 
desire to resign, though I think he was always at 
bottom resolved to see it through. In the end, after 
Mr. Clark’s death, it was really his efforts in inter- 
282 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
preting the will, as we shall see later, that saved the 
University. Many an afternoon and evening we 
spent in his large, unique, book-lined study on Oak 
Street with its Greek and Latin mottoes painted on 
the wall, its many posters, portraits, presents, relics, 
of which he was such a collector, looking over his 
very remarkable collection of autographs from all 
over the world and discussing books. Sometimes he 
read favorite selections, and Mrs. Hoar was often 
present. But our main theme was usually the Uni- 
versity, and it was his buoyant, sanguine spirit despite 
all our discouragements that did more than anything 
else to keep me heartened and that prevented me from 
accepting the offers to go elsewhere which I had, one 
from President Harper himself at the time of the 
great hegira and two others that came later and be- 
fore Mr. Clark’s death in 1900. 
Stephen Salisbury, a bachelor in the sixth decen- 
nium of his life in the early days of the University, 
was by inheritance the richest man in Worcester and, 
with able assistants, gave his entire time to the man- 
agement of his estate. His father had been one of 
the founders and benefactors of the Worcester Poly- 
technic Institute, of which he was also president of 
the Trustees, so that his family traditions, which were 
strong with him, inclined him to that institution. He 
was also the president and liberal supporter of the 
American Antiquarian Society and the benefactor of 
nearly all the charities in the city, for very few good 
causes appealed to him in vain. He felt very deeply 
the responsibilities of wealth, was old-fashioned in 
his habits, living in great simplicity in the old mansion 
his father had erected, genial, warm-hearted, but 
always modestly distrustful of his own abilities and 
even of his personality. It became increasingly evi- 
dent that Mr. Clark had hoped to enlist not only his 
interest but his active financial cooperation in the de- 
283 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
velopment of the University. During my early years 
in Worcester I saw very much of him, and Mr. Clark 
was always very solicitous to know exactly what we 
discussed and confidentially presented considerations 
for me to lay before him. As Mr. Salisbury slowly 
became conscious of Mr. Clark’s large hopes from 
him he naturally became restless, although he never 
quite felt that he could withdraw. In fact he alone 
of all the Trustees maintained more or less cordial 
outward relations with Mr. Clark to the end of his 
life, never entirely discouraging Mr. Clark’s hopes but 
doing little for the University except in one case later 
subscribing twenty-five thousand dollars. It was, 
therefore, Mr. Salisbury that was chosen by the 
Board to make the last personal appeal to Mr. Clark, 
when he was in Europe the third year, to give the 
Board some intimation of his ultimate intentions, 
although even this failed to elicit any definite re- 
sponse. In our many talks on University matters Mr. 
Salisbury never discouraged me as to his own ultimate 
intentions toward it, and though he never made any 
promises I was sanguine up to his death, so that we 
(even though perhaps less than the Polytechnic In- 
stitute) were disappointed when at his death, which 
occurred soon after that of Mr. Clark, he was found 
to have devised so large a portion of his property to 
an art museum, a step believed to be largely due to 
the great influence over him in later years of the Rev. 
Dr. Merriman and his wife. 
Mr. Salisbury was profoundly interested in music 
and was for years the most generous benefactor of 
the annual music festival here, one of the proudest 
and oldest features of Worcester life. He was also 
deeply interested in all things Spanish, having trav- 
eled and explored in Spain and especially in Yucatan, 
from which he had imported many relics. 
The Hon. John D. Washburn, one of the most 
284 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
genial of men, a lawyer who had also been much in 
public life, in Congress, and was later our ambas- 
sador to Switzerland, and who lived almost across 
the way from Mr. Clark, was in the early years by 
far the most intimate with him of all his associates 
on the Board, of which he was the secretary. He 
was astute and understood Mr. Clark better than any 
of us and was always very sanguine and buoyant. 
As I reread his letters to me during the darker period 
of the University, his interest continuing even when 
he was in Switzerland, and especially his extremely 
diplomatic letters to Mr. Clark during this period, 
importuning him to state his plans, I realize afresh 
how much the institution owes to his tact, sagacity, 
and diplomacy in avoiding a break that so long seemed 
imminent. He held longer than perhaps any one to 
the belief that Mr. Clark had very large resources in 
reserve, and after Mr. Clark had broken with the Board 
and ceased to attend its meetings or to communicate 
with any of the members he did maintain some re- 
lations with Mr. Washburn up to the time of the 
latter’s death near the middle of our first decennium. 
W. W. Rice was another influential member whom 
Mr. Clark had selected for his original Board. He 
was a man of wealth, of very judicial temper, with 
much experience in public life in the city, state, and 
nation, having served two terms in Congress, and it 
was hoped that perhaps through the influence of his 
brother-in-law, Senator Hoar, he might ultimately 
become a benefactor of the institution. His attitude 
through all our troubles was, perhaps more than that 
of any other member of the Board, to try to see the 
other side of the question, although on all essential 
matters he finally agreed with his colleagues. 
To Dr. Thomas H. Gage, who was elected to fill 
the place of Dr. Sargent and who became treasurer 
during the third year when Mr. Clark withdrew from 
285 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
that office, the University will always owe an immense 
debt. Mr. Clark had kept almost no accounts save 
in scraps here and there, often on the back of letters, 
and it was Dr. Gage who with the efficient help of 
Louis N. Wilson devised and established a system of 
accounts, and also relieved me from the responsibility 
which I had for some time of signing all the checks 
for every sort of equipment and supply for the Uni- 
versity. His sagacity, financial acumen, and conser- 
vative but effective administration of our funds 
brought all the clarity possible under the circum- 
stances to the situation. And I may add here that 
the masterly brief of his son, Mr. T. Hovey Gage, in 
interpreting the extremely voluminous and complex 
will of Mr. Clark with its five codicils, was one of 
the chief factors in securing the final and just settle- 
ment of the more difficult portions of the will in 
court. 
Mr. Clark appointed also his nephew, George E. 
Swan, a lawyer and his agent, as a member of the 
Board, and invited me as president, who by the charter 
could not be a member, to name one. I accordingly 
designated my older friend and former student, Dr. 
Edward Cowles, a man of large experience, the cre- 
ator and long the head of the magnificent hospital 
for the insane at Waverley, and who, I thought, would 
perhaps take more interest in the internal and aca- 
demic affairs of the institution, which he did until 
he resigned in order to take the place of Lecturer on 
the staff. 
Frank P. Goulding was perhaps, after Senator 
Hoar’s public life in Washington began, the leader 
of the Worcester County bar—a man of great force 
of character, of almost coercive power with a jury, 
blunt, honest, and efficient. He was too much occu- 
pied with his professional duties to give the Uni- 
versity a great deal of time, although a great help to 
286 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
the institution in litigations that followed Mr. Clarke's 
death, and although he was urged to conduct a move- 
ment that looked to the breaking of the will and was 
perhaps somewhat tempted, he very fortunately re- 
mained loyal to the institution. 
With these gentlemen, all of whom at the present 
writing have passed away, as well as with their suc- 
cessors, my relations were always most cordial and, 
with nearly all of them, far more than merely official. 
Upon them in the first triennium of the existence of 
the University fell burdens incalculably greater than 
any that their successors have been called upon to 
sustain, and to their wisdom the University is largely 
indebted, not only for what it has done but for its 
very existence. 
Upon my return from Europe near the end of 
April, I found the large main building of over a hun- 
dred rooms approaching completion and another very 
plain structure of sixty-three rooms finished without 
and in a very active state of preparation for work. 
This building Mr. Clark had himself designed as a 
composite of many plans of such buildings that I had 
sent him, and he had also laid the foundations for an- 
other building quite as large, which was to be devoted 
to biology but the superstructure of which has never 
been begun. I was a guest at his house for six months 
and he spent the entire day at the institution directing 
the work of the carpenters, plumbers, etc. I had 
stipulated for a secretary and Mr. Clark had selected 
Louis N. Wilson, for many years connected with S. 
Slater & Sons of Webster, for this position. He 
and I then began the work of active organization 
in a large room furnished with two chairs and 
a desk. Mr. Clark’s contract with Mr. Wilson had 
been that he was to work from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., 
taking his lunch on the premises, for fifty dollars a 
month, and he was to give his spare time to helping 
287 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
Mr. Clark with his accounts, correspondence, etc. 
Mr. Clark saw no need of elaborate book-keeping, but 
Mr. Wilson purchased a set of books himself and, with 
the aid of Mr. Hamilton of the bank, began the estab- 
lishment of a system of accounting.2 
It had been, most fortunately, decided to limit the 
activity of the university at first to five departments, 
although our interpretation of the scope of these made 
them exceptionally broad. After much correspond- 
ence and many trips for visitation and interview 
during the summer the following personnel was 
assembled during the first and second years. At the 
head of the department of mathematics was W. E. 
Story, who had been my associate in the faculty at 
Baltimore and who has made many contributions in 
his field, aided by Oskar Bolza, a scholar of German 
training who later had an eminent career, as asso- 
ciate; Henry Taber and J. de Perott as docents, and 
H. S. White as assistant. At the head of the depart- 
ment of physics was A. A. Michelson, whose epoch- 
making work on the measurement of light waves had 
already attracted world-wide attention and who later 
won the Nobel prize, and under whom A. G. Webster, 
a young man of remarkable ability and learning just 
home from four years of European study, was, the 
second year, appointed docent. F. L. O. Wadsworth 
was assistant. The department of chemistry was 
headed by Arthur Michael, one of the most eminent 
Americans in this field. He and his wife, also a chem- 
ist, were wealthy and had given their services to 
Tufts, where they were allowed exceptional academic 
freedom. He was ably assisted by J. U. Nef, later 
head of his department in the University of Chicago; 
by Morris Loeb, F. W. Muthmann, a man of Ger- 
2 At the earnest request of this modest and devoted man I delete 
from the last proof what I have said of his great services, not only 
to the University but to me personally. 
288 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
man training, and J. W. Williams, who devoted him- 
self entirely to crystallography, as docents; with M. 
Ikuta and V. Papcke as assistants and T. S. Clark as 
honorary fellow. 
C. O. Whitman was the head of the biological 
department. He had been very efficient in the organ- 
ization of the laboratory at Woods Hole and had 
already founded his Journal of Morphology, but he 
had never taught and found the requirement of our 
minimum of two hours weekly somewhat irksome. 
In this department H. H. Donaldson represented 
neurology; W. F. Lombard, physiology; F. P. Mall, 
anatomy, and they were later aided by G. Baur in 
geology and paleontology. Dr. Baur conducted an 
expedition to the Galapagos Islands, financed by our 
trustee, Stephen Salisbury, and brought home a large 
collection of material which was efficiently utilized in 
exchange and described in monographs by various ex- 
perts. J. P. McMurrich was a docent in morphology. 
Later C. F. Hodge was appointed assistant in biology; 
J. C. Cardwell in physiology, and S. Watase in 
morphology. 
Although I was full professor of psychology I did 
no teaching but devoted myself entirely to Mr. Clark 
and to organization for the first three years, and E. C. 
Sanford took charge of the laboratory. W. H. Burn- 
ham was appointed docent in pedagogy, Arthur 
MacDonald in ethics, C. A. Strong and later B. C. 
Burt and A. Cook in philosophy, and Franz Boaz, who 
has since become our leading American authority in 
this field, in anthropology. Dr. Walter Channing was 
made honorary fellow in psychology and A. F. Cham- 
berlain was the first fellow in the department of 
anthropology. 
The above list shows that we had brought together 
a teaching force in these departments then nowhere 
equaled in the country. The list of fellows and even 
289 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
scholars during these first three years contains names 
of many who have since achieved eminence. All the 
appointments save my own were limited to a term of 
years—professors, five; assistant professors, three; 
while all the others were annual appointees. I had 
been allowed absolute freedom in the selection of men, 
and in this matter no suggestion ever came either 
from Mr. Clark or any member of his board. The 
heads of departments had seen to it that their labora- 
tories and library shelves were well stocked. 
At the opening exercises October 2, 1889, which 
were attended by an enthusiastic audience of more 
than fifteen hundred that crowded the large aula, 
while many could not even gain admittance, there was 
an interest as deep as it was widespread which I be- 
lieve no one present will ever forget. In my inaugural, 
in the preparation of every paragraph of which Mr. 
Clark showed great interest and approval, I stressed 
the fact that we should need large and ever increasing 
sums of money and that the quality of those who 
studied here would be inversely as their numbers, as, 
indeed, the sequel proved. As Mr. Clark, with a high 
and just appreciation of the opportunities here of- 
ered, insisted that the tuition fee should be two hun- 
dred dollars, which was unprecedentedly high, we had 
very few in statu pupillaris save the thirty scholars 
and fellows for whom fees had been remitted or 
stipends provided. The necessity for this latter I also 
stressed at length and with all the emphasis I could 
in my inaugural. Mr. Clark in his own address had 
intimated that other departments were to be estab- 
lished soon, and the institution, limited as was its 
scope, opened most auspiciously. There were notable 
addresses by Judge Devens, Senator Hoar, and Dr. 
E. E. Hale. 
The key to the history of all the troubles of the 
early years may, in a sense, be anticipated from the 
290 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
following simple figures. During the first year we 
spent for salaries and equipment, $135,000; the sec- 
ond year, Mr. Clark contributed $50,000 above the 
income of the $600,000 that had actually been trans- 
ferred to the board, making a total income in round 
numbers, of $92,000; the third year, he gave $26,000, 
making it $68,000; the fourth year, $12,000, making 
it $54,000; and the fifth and subsequent years of his 
life he gave nothing, so that the whole institution sub- 
sisted upon the income of its funds, namely, the 
$600,000 for the University and $100,000 for the 
library. Undoubtedly the University was costing 
more than he expected, students were fewer, and the 
income from their fees was practically nil. There 
were vague but I think never substantiated rumors 
that he had lost heavily in the misfortunes of the 
British firm, Baring Brothers. At any rate, the chief 
solicitude of the board and myself was focused upon 
Mr. Clark’s resources and his immediate and subse- 
quent intentions, but upon these topics he gave us no 
ray of light although repeatedly urged by the board, 
individually and collectively, to do so. He had sanc- 
tioned every engagement and knew exactly the liabili- 
ties we were incurring, and the optimistic view was 
that he could not possibly bring men here or start 
departments and then fail to sustain them. As he 
himself had encouraged us to commit ourselves to a 
budget so far in excess of our regular resources it 
was constantly hoped that additional permanent gifts 
from him would be forthcoming, so that when even 
his annual “donations” began to diminish there was 
hardly less than consternation in the board. When 
any question of reengagement occurred we had to 
consider carefully whether, in view of all the circum- 
stances, it ought to be made at all, and some of our 
best appointees were dropped, when their terms ex- 
pired, for no other cause. 
291 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
During the first year Mr. Clark himself had an 
acute personal disagreement with the head of the 
chemical department regarding the details of its 
equipment which led him to demand his immediate 
resignation for no other cause, and I had to ask it and 
the board to approve it, which we did with the greatest 
reluctance. He believed in the concentration of 
authority and had provided by a special by-law that 
all requests or communications between the faculty, 
individually or collectively, and the board be through 
me. He would always listen to instructors who im- 
portuned him for supplies, smilingly refer them to me 
after hearing all they had to say, and then often for- 
bid me to grant their request. In his daily contact 
with the members of the staff incident to his directing 
the finishing and equipment of rooms he acquired a 
very unfavorable impression of the practical common 
sense of professors generally and began to feel that 
they were devoting much of their time to devising 
ways for spending his money. 
The leading daily paper of the city, whose repre- 
sentative Mr. Clark had somewhat curtly dismissed 
from his house, opened a most violent attack upon the 
University and especially upon the vivisection prac- 
ticed in the biological laboratory, and several times a 
week for about six months published bitter and for the 
most part fictitious accounts of the cruelties per- 
petrated upon animals—so that I had personally to 
answer scores of calls by day and by night from those 
who had lost pet cats and dogs. None from Worces- 
ter were ever used and those were always for research 
and not for demonstration, with anaesthetics when the 
condition of the experiment made this possible. We 
remained silent for months but at length invited the 
S. P. C. A. to investigate us, which it did, and its 
president, Mr. Angell, published a letter completely 
justifying all we did; upon which the animosity of the 
292 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
paper was directed against the society itself. The 
abuses thus heaped upon us so unjustly doubtless had 
some effect upon Mr. Clark, who nevertheless insisted 
that we should not modify our practices. Dr. C. F. 
Hodge issued an admirable and much quoted pamphlet 
upon the subject which in the minds of intelligent 
people did much to set matters right. 
In May, as the first academic year was drawing to 
a close, a tragedy with few parallels befell me. I was 
quarantined in my own house with a severe attack of 
diphtheria and, as soon as I was able, was sent to the 
country to recuperate and for weeks could not articu- 
late but had to communicate by writing on a slate. 
One night while I was away, by an accident in the gas 
fixture my wife and younger child of six were 
smothered to death. This was a blow that for months 
seemed to me to justify my entire withdrawal from 
the work at Clark and I spent the summer in Cali- 
fornia. But by the opening of the second year I was 
sufficiently restored in health and spirits to take it up 
again with what resolution I could. 
As the second year drew to a close and the trustees 
fully realized that Mr. Clark would almost certainly 
not maintain expenditures on the basis on which they 
had been begun and as there was already much dis- 
content in the faculty, their anxiety focused on the 
future, and I was instructed to do everything possible 
not to alienate Mr. Clark to such a degree that he 
would bestow elsewhere the remainder of his fortune, 
still believed to be very large. To this end I must, 
with what grace and tact I could, accept the situation; 
and when asked, as I often was when I was trying to 
get his wishes carried through with the faculty as a 
whole or individually, whether it was my will or the 
founder’s that I was trying to enforce, must give them 
to understand it was my own and thus shield Mr. 
Clark. This was most humiliating to my honor and 
293 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
even to my conscience but the situation demanded 
nothing less, for the entire future of the institution 
seemed to hang upon this. Accordingly, I became a 
kind of Winkelried “gathering a sheaf of Austrian 
spears” into his own breast. I had been most san- 
guine about the resources of the institution and had 
held out hopes that many things would be done at 
some time which it proved impossible to carry out at 
the present. The individual members of the faculty 
grew pessimistic and discouraged and felt at last— 
only too justly from their point of view—that I had 
deceived them by great expectations. Thus the third 
year brought a tragedy unprecedented, so far as I 
know, in the history of academic life. The trustees 
and I were convinced that we must face one of two 
alternatives, either that of dismissing at least half 
our force or cutting salaries in the same proportion, 
and we had prepared a schedule accordingly, knowing 
that we faced a dreadful crisis. 
As the year advanced, the inevitable happened. 
Led by the more discontented, a majority of the 
faculty, after interviewing every member of the 
board and stating with the greatest fullness their 
grounds for dissatisfaction, offered their resignations 
because they “had lost confidence” in me. A meeting 
of the board was immediately called, at which I stated 
that as its members all knew the situation I had 
nothing further to say and as my personality was con- 
cerned I should withdraw from the meeting, which I 
did. 
After long deliberation the trustees passed the fol- 
lowing unanimous vote: “That the Trustees of Clark 
University receive with great regret, through Presi- 
dent Hall, a communication from several members of 
the Faculty, under date of January 21, 1892, in which 
the gentlemen whose names are appended tender their 
resignations of the positions they have severally held 
294 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
as instructors in that institution; and that the Board 
avails itself of the opportunity to express to those gen- 
tlemen its high appreciation of the service each and 
all of them have rendered the University. That the 
extreme and concerted character of the action pre- 
sented in the paper containing the resignations not 
only gives it precedence over all other matters but if 
formally acted on by the Trustees would seem to leave 
them no recourse but to accept the resignations ten- 
dered. It is, however, voted That the Trustees refer 
the communication to which allusion is made to Presi- 
dent Hall, in whose impartiality, good judgment, clear 
understanding of all interests involved and devotion 
to the interests of the University they have entire con- 
fidence, with full power to represent the Board, and 
to take such action with regard to any or all of the 
resignations tendered as he may deem advisable.” 
I had to read this to the faculty but followed it by 
the statement that I wished all of them to remain if we 
had the means, though there might have to be a cut- 
down, that there were elements of the situation which 
I could not impart to them (referring of course, to the 
financial situation which had been sedulously kept 
secret, so far as possible, so as to save Mr. Clark from 
censure). I said that despite their present bitter feel- 
ing toward .me I felt confident that when they knew 
the entire situation they would understand that I had 
pursued the only possible course and that with my 
justification their friendship would be renewed, and I 
exhorted them all to devote themselves to their work, 
with the assurance that the board would do the utmost 
possible for them. This, of course, seemed to them 
lame and ineffective, but it was the best I could say 
under the circumstances. 
Very soon after this, President Harper of the 
University of Chicago appeared upon the scene. He 
had made many proposals to eminent men to join his 
295 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
staff but they had been turned down because of a 
critical attitude toward a “Standard-Oil institution,” 
a very grave obstacle at that time to that very able and 
sagacious organizer but which has long since been 
forgotten in the splendid work the institution has ac- 
complished. Dr. Harper, learning of the dissatisfac- 
tion here, had at Professor Whitman’s house met and 
engaged one morning the majority of our staff, his 
intentions and even his presence being unknown to 
me. Those to whom we paid $4,000, he gave $7,000; 
to those we paid $2,000, he offered $4,000, etc., taking 
even instructors, docents, and fellows. This proved 
really to be the nucleus and, I think, the turning point 
in the early critical stage of the development of the 
Chicago institution. 
When this was done he called on me, inviting me 
also to join the hegira at a salary larger than I was 
receiving—which of course I refused—and then told 
me what he had done. I replied that it was an act of 
wreckage for us comparable to anything that the 
worst trust had ever attempted against its competitors 
but he asked, “What could I do?” recounting the 
above difficulties he had had in gathering a staff. I 
finally told him that if he would revise his list, releas- 
ing a few of our men and taking one or two others 
whom he had omitted, I would bear the calamity 
silently and with what grace I could, although I felt 
his act comparable to that of a housekeeper who would 
steal in at the back door to engage servants at a higher 
price. To this he demurred, and I finally threatened, 
unless he would make such few revisions of his list as 
I suggested, to make a formal appeal to the public and 
to Mr. Rockefeller himself to see if this trust magnate 
(who was at that time about at the height of his un- 
popularity and censure and who was said to have 
driven many smaller competing firms out of existence 
by slow strangling methods of competition) would 
296 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
justify such an assassination of an institution as had 
that day been attempted here (for Harper had made 
advances to nearly all of our staff, even those who 
remained loyal, and was evidently ready to make a 
clean sweep). He finally assented, even taking at 
least one man here who covered the exact field of 
another he had previously engaged and canceling his 
engagements with one or two of the younger men I 
particularly wanted, although to my surprise and re- 
gret he felt himself justified in informing those whose 
status was changed by this revision that it was at my 
direction. 
I had spent much time, travel, and effort in gather- 
ing this very distinguished group of men, and I told 
him that his action was like that of the eagle who 
robbed the fishhawk of his prey. The accession of 
these men to the few whom President Harper had at 
that time enlisted, I have often been told, as indeed 
was evident, marked an epoch in his endeavors. 
Their action in enlisting with the new institution by 
the lake gave the public assurance that it would not 
be Chautauquaean but would have a solid scientific 
nucleus, and, moreover, their influence at Chicago 
would of course be important for advanced work and 
research, as indeed it so abundantly proved. Three of 
these men were made heads of the large and admir- 
able buildings and departments devoted respectively 
to chemistry, physics, and biology. Thus Clark had 
served as a nursery, for most of our faculty were 
simply transplanted to a richer financial soil. 
All the details of this sad story have been so well 
written up in Dr. Tanner’s unpublished history that I 
will not dwell upon them here. Despite the tragedy 
of it all, it was, in a sense, a happy relief from a situa- 
tion that might have been even worse. With the rem- 
nant of the staff that remained loyal, and with a few 
additional appointments and advancements of younger 
297 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
men, we closed up the ranks as best we could and 
settled down in a spirit of exceptional harmony and 
close fellowship to make the most and best we could 
of the only income, namely, $24,000 a year, plus that 
of the library, that we had until Mr. Clark’s death, 
when it would be clear to us whether we must close 
up, live along feebly, or enter upon the realization of 
our large and high initial hopes by finding that, after 
all, he had vast means and had not diverted them to 
other sources. 
It was fundamentally essential to this end that we 
should be absolutely reticent in regard to all our 
troubles, and we were so until his death. I think no 
one outside the Board and myself and two or three 
others who were in our confidence knew or even sus- 
pected the dwindling scale of our income or realized 
how all-determining was the policy of “shielding Mr. 
Clark.” This policy was desperately hard for me and 
this the trustees fully realized, and but for their sym- 
pathy with me several of them would have withdrawn 
entirely from the enterprise. It was very hard for 
me to keep silent under all the censure meted out when 
I felt that I had ample justification, but it was hardest 
of all to have to seem to be the sponsor for everything 
Mr. Clark did, not only in the way of retrenchment but 
otherwise; and this he himself never realized. It was 
perilously like the Jesuitical policy of the end justify- 
ing the means, for I had to suppress and sometimes 
negate in many items many of my own most cherished 
ideals. It was not only that hope deferred makes the 
heart sick, but I felt myself placed in an utterly false 
position which I should never submit to again. Never- 
theless I take some though only partial satisfaction in 
the fact that Mr. Clark, however serious his frequent 
threats were of going elsewhere with what remained 
of his fortune, never carried them out but in the end 
almost everything he possessed, including his resi- 
298 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
dence and even furniture, came to us. This great 
fear of us all seemed later to have been unshaken.3 
When the crash came at the end of the third year 
Mr. Clark was in Europe, where he had at various 
times spent some six or seven years in all, and 
although he was doubtless dismayed at the issue he 
accepted it with, I thought, a great deal of unex- 
pressed compensation and consolation, writing me 
from Paris that “men may come and men may go” 
but institutions, like Tennyson’s brook, “go on for- 
ever.” If the initial expenses had made larger drafts 
upon his resources than he anticipated he was now 
relieved from these, and he gave us nothing more. 
During the third year he had entirely withdrawn from 
the board and never afterward attended its meetings, 
and felt a strong and growing censure for its mem- 
bers which was entirely unjustified because his course 
had thrown upon them an exceptionally heavy burden 
which they took up and maintained with singular 
fidelity to what they believed to be his highest purpose. 
No words can ever begin to describe my own 
anxiety during the latter months of the third year. 
Almost every day there were new rumors, some of 
them wild and senseless, others only too well-founded. 
I moved my bed and slept with my face against the 
window opposite the University, to be readily awak- 
ened in case of any accidental conflagration, and when 
it was all over, although we worked from morning to 
night upon the wreckage of fond anticipations, there 
was a certain satisfaction that nothing worse had be- 
fallen us and that we had really touched bottom. 
It is quite clear now in the light of all subsequent 
events that Mr. Clark, with his high noble purpose, 
8 As stated in the Introduction, the sequel convinced us all that 
the danger, by which we were obsessed for years, that Mr. Clark 
would bequeath the bulk of his fortune elsewhere was entirely 
baseless and that he never had any serious thought of so doing. 
299 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
had little conception of the cost of a university as com- 
pared with that of a college and that when it began to 
be apparent he was alarmed and drew back at our 
scale of expenditure. If he had only given any inti- 
mation, even the remotest, to the board or to me as to 
the extent of the means the institution would ulti- 
mately receive, all this trouble would have been 
averted. Despite all his growing antagonism to me 
there remains, in my mind, after all these years, only 
a sense of deep appreciation of his lofty purpose and 
of great respect for his character, which will always 
be a precious asset; and my only regret is that he did 
not select some one of those he chose to help him in 
the execution of his plan to whom he could confide 
something with regard to its dimensions. 
For the men who left us I do not, and never have 
felt—unless with the exception of one of the older of 
them who seemed to me to have acted with a duplicity 
which nothing could justify—the least resentment. 
They were honorable, high-minded, very able gentle- 
men, and if I had been in their place and known the 
situation only as they did, I should probably myself 
have acted and felt in a similar way. 
Mrs. Clark later summed up the whole situation in 
the homely phrase, “They thought there was more 
than there was.” Several younger men whom we were 
now able to invite to occupy the larger places filled by 
those who had left us, refused to come because of the 
rumors of collapse that had been insidiously circu- 
lated, but despite many dissuasions, Dr. C. F. Hodge, 
who had left us the year before as an assistant pro- 
fessor, returned and now was the sole representative 
in the department of biology, which had been the most 
expensive and elaborately organized of all. 
We had promptly been accepted, in the second 
year, as a member of the New England Association of 
Colleges and were also one of the twenty-one members 
300 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
of the Association of American Universities organ- 
ized in 1900. 
In 1891 I had, at my own expense, started the 
Pedagogical Seminary, a quarterly printing six hun- 
dred pages a year, in the first volumes of which a very 
large part of the contributions came from Clark or 
were from my own pen. Small as we were, we still 
had what was to us a very heartening realization that 
we were the only purely graduate institution in the 
country, and as I look back upon the eight years that 
followed before Mr. Clark’s death I am amazed at our 
productiveness and the grim determination with 
which we all settled down to hard work to “make 
good.” One of the first things we did was to start a 
summer school, with a fee of twenty dollars, which 
continued for eight years and brought a small revenue 
and a certain favorable publicity. The sessions were 
brief, only two weeks, but intensive, with something 
every hour in the day from eight in the morning to 
nine in the evening. This was conducted by the in- 
structors in education, psychology, and biology, and 
we at last were able to enroll some four hundred 
students and with the aid of a large and representative 
committee of interested citizens made provision for 
social entertainments, etc. This brought a slight ad- 
dition to our revenue and was abandoned only because 
our instructors, partly by its means, became more 
widely known and were in demand for summer work 
elsewhere at far more attractive terms than we could 
provide. Professor Story established his bi-monthly 
Mathematical Review in 1896, which, however, lasted 
but a short time. 
During these years of “watchful waiting” we were 
still able to offer thirty fellowships and scholarships 
as before, but the stipends attached to the former 
were reduced by one half, so that as students seeking 
graduate work generally apply at several institutions, 
301 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
we were their last choice. After much experience in 
having those we had appointed decline because they 
had received better paying appointments in other in- 
stitutions, we afterwards placed our date for appoint- 
ments latest. But despite this disadvantage the few 
who came to us on these terms were, on the whole, 
men of a very superior quality, as their subsequent 
careers have shown. They were, for the most part, 
men who appreciated the advantage, greater here than 
in large institutions, of close, personal, daily contact 
with the instructors, and we forgot our troubles in 
doing the most and very best we could for them and 
realizing that the best thing we had here was our 
standard. We also made it almost a point of honor 
never to advertise. 
After a few years of continuance under an in- 
structor it was found necessary to abandon the chem- 
ical department entirely and close the building. Dur- 
ing all these years our strongest or largest department 
was psychology and education, and although—with I 
think only three exceptions—we have never received 
into the institution any who had not graduated from a 
reputable college, it was necessary to be a little lenient, 
especially in the educational department, as to tech- 
nical requirements for admission—more so at least 
than was feasible in mathematics or the physical 
sciences. 
Senator Hoar had secured a promise of $100,000 
from his friend and admirer, Mr. Carnegie, on con- 
dition that we would raise a like amount. This we 
tried to do, but in vain at this most unpsychological 
moment, and when Mr. Carnegie was told why we 
succeeded in raising only $37,000 he kindly withdrew 
his conditions and gave us the above sum outright. 
We also simplified our faculty organization, aban- 
doned the Senate and found faculty meetings neces- 
sary only rarely. I had always been impressed with 
302 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
the superfoetation of rules, precedents, and the waste 
of time in discussing details, and so took upon myself 
the decision of most matters usually submitted to the 
faculty, not, however, without conference; and thus 
we have always had, I think, far less rules, commit- 
tees, or faculty meetings than any institution, even in 
proportion to our size. My policy has always been to 
decide each individual case, as far as possible, on its 
own merits, unhampered by prescriptions or prece- 
dents, and to allow each department almost absolute 
freedom and independence and avoid the waste of 
submitting its decisions and wishes to the revision of 
the larger group of the faculty. 
Under all these conditions it was nothing less than 
amazing to me to see how the little group of young, 
often very young, men who studied and especially 
those who taught here grew intellectually as if by 
leaps and bounds. In our small sphere we certainly 
had a seminarium which in both its soil and atmos- 
phere stimulated all to grow at a stage in their devel- 
opment when academic practices had so generally 
been averse to their advancement. This and our 
standard, the absence of undergraduate work, and the 
very slight requirements of professors in the way of 
stated teaching (the minimum requirement being two 
hours a week), together with the spirit of research, 
have always been an asset of even high financial value, 
for not a few have come and stayed here at salaries 
pitifully small and despite better positions open to 
them elsewhere. 
During the first three years all my time had been 
absorbed with Mr. Clark and in the work of the devel- 
opment of administration, but now the withdrawal of 
Mr. Clark, the hegira to Chicago, and the peace and 
harmony that followed left me free to take up my own 
work as professor, which I did with enthusiasm, 
although as I had delegated the experimental labora- 
303 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
tory work to my colleague, Dr. Sanford, who was de- 
veloping it so successfully, my chief activity was 
henceforth in other fields of psychology. But this I 
shall describe in another chapter. I had acquired a 
distaste for administrative work and realized that 
there was now very little for a president to do and that 
I could earn my salary only as a professor. 
During these years, and even up almost to the 
present, I spent a large part of every summer, and 
often a week or two of the Christmas vacation, in out- 
side lecturing, occasionally being assigned a tour by 
an agency but for the most part addressing university 
and other summer schools. Occasionally I have had 
eight- or even ten-week stands of twelve lectures each 
in a place, changing to another institution during the 
week-end. In this way I find that I have given, in 
all, over twenty-five hundred lectures and have been in 
every state of the Union except seven, these mostly the 
extreme southern ones. This has given me a wide 
acquaintance with educational men and methods and 
has been more or less effective as a recruiting service 
for the student body and helped to make the Univer- 
sity known. Included in the above estimate there 
have been scores of more incidental addresses to 
women’s clubs, churches and associations of ministers, 
religious bodies, anniversaries, etc., so that I feel that 
although my work in the University has been more or 
less technical I have also done my “bit” in the field of 
university extension. But all this seemed to me more 
or less necessary under the circumstances. 
In the summer of 1899 we decided to mark the 
tenth anniversary of our opening in a way then more 
or less unique, and accordingly brought to this coun- 
try and to Clark University distinguished men from 
Europe, who gave lectures for a week to which ad- 
vanced students and teachers of science were invited, 
and which were printed in a volume of 564 pages. 
304 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
These men and their departments were as follows: 
Emile Picard, Professor of Mathematics at the Uni- 
versity of Paris; Ludwig Boltzmann, Professor of 
Theoretical Physics at the University of Vienna; 
Santiago Ramon y Cajal, Professor of Histology and 
Rector of the University of Madrid; Angelo Mosso, 
Professor of Physiology and Rector of the University 
of Turin; and August Forel, Late Professor of Psy- 
chiatry at the University of Zurich and Director of 
the Burgholzli Asylum. At the close of the course 
we conferred degrees upon our foreign guests. The 
expenses for this celebration, which were consider- 
able, were generously met by our trustee, Stephen 
Salisbury, and other citizens of Worcester. 
The year after the migration of so large a portion 
of our staff to Chicago, and immediately upon his re- 
turn from Europe, Mr. Clark drew up his final will, 
dated February, 1893, although none of us had any 
intimation of its content until after his death in 1900. 
To this will five codicils were added at various times, 
the last in 1897. He had often expressed the wish 
that we start a collegiate department, which I felt 
justified, in view of the terms of my letter of accept- 
ance, in at first gently opposing. Nothing could dis- 
abuse him of the impression that it would be quite pos- 
sible to add this at any time by delegating an added 
teaching function to the younger members of our staff 
and utilizing the F ellows and buildings we already had. 
But as we then had only five departments and these all 
Scientific, with no work in language, literature, his- 
tory, or the humanities generally; and as, if we used 
Fellows and docents as professors, they would—in 
some cases at least—not be successful as department 
heads in a college and would also require more pay 
than they were receiving, and would have little time 
for research, this was obviously impossible without 
added funds. I held very many conversations with 
305 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
Mr. Clark on this subject but we never came to an 
understanding. I, finally, however, in 1895 submit- 
ted a somewhat detailed plan of such an institution 
embodying our previous conversations, which was 
exactly what he had, unknown to me, already em- 
bodied two years before in his will, including even the 
item of the three years’ course, save that whereas my 
scheme was drawn up for both sexes his was rigidly 
limited to men.2 Thus the plan of the college which 
he established by his will was based not upon my 
memorandum but upon our earlier conversations 
which led up to it, in which we had spoken of the 
eventualities and possibilities that the will made 
actual. Since, for the above reasons, I felt the estab- 
lishment of a college at that time to be impossible, 
Mr. Clark in the body of his will declared that he 
had lost confidence in my administration of the insti- 
tution and made the establishment of the college 
contingent upon my withdrawal. My attitude had 
always been that I did not wish a college but that 
if Mr. Clark saw fit to finance one and insist upon it 
I would do the best I could to develop it. 
When the will was first made public after Mr. 
Clark’s death, by some strange accident in the office 
of his lawyer the fifth codicil, revoking all his stric- 
tures of me and stipulating only that the College 
should have another head, did not appear, and until 
this was known some days later it seemed that my 
withdrawal had been made a condition of all that Mr. 
Clark had bequeathed to the institution. I felt that 
I had saved his bequest from going elsewhere, but at 
the cost of being dismissed as an unworthy steward 
myself. I shall always remember with mingled pain 
and satisfaction the visit of Senator Hoar and his 
wife at my house the evening the will was made 
2 For my original document see Appendix to the Tanner history. 
306 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
known. Both were moved to tears, and he declared 
that the trustees would insist upon my remaining and 
allow everything given by the will to lapse to the heirs 
—an eventuality which, of course, I could never ac- 
cept and accordingly drew up and insisted on giving 
him my resignation. The final codicil withdrawing all 
his animadversions against me and saying that he had 
misunderstood me, which was later made public, 
seemed to make it my duty to remain, despite the 
financially more advantageous Chicago and two 
offers of presidencies. The next duty of the trustees 
was, therefore, to seek another head for the collegiate 
department, for the will barred me from having any- 
thing to do with the College, and the Board was first 
of all disposed to seek a man friendly and loyal to me. 
They hoped to find some one who, like me, would 
be more professor than president because of the econ- 
omy thus involved. Accordingly, overtures were first 
made to E. Harlow Russell, long principal of the 
Worcester Normal School, to organize the college and 
he accepted; but later, on maturer thought—and I 
think wisely on the whole he revoked his acceptance 
and remained where he was. It was a serious task to 
find a fit man, but at last Senator Hoar felt that he 
had almost an inspiration and laid the matter before 
his long-time friend in Washington, Carroll D. 
Wright, who had been the successful and efficient 
head of the Bureau of Labor, keeping it above and 
outside of politics and independent of other bureaus 
under three administrations. He was a New Eng- 
lander by birth and had practiced law in Boston as a 
young man, had fought through the Civil War, was a 
man of nation-wide reputation as a statistician, older 
than I, and already somewhat impaired in health. He 
accepted the invitation to be president of the collegiate 
department and also professor of economics in the 
University, although his activities in this chair were 
307 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
greatly limited by his health and by outside public 
duties. 
He was not himself a college graduate but was a 
man of rare common-sense who had a very wide 
acquaintance with public men, an eminently judicial 
mind, and although in the very first years of his stay 
in Worcester he had other important duties outside, 
he organized the college, manned by a promising 
group of young men. It opened in the fall of 1900 
and up to the present writing has been very suc- 
cessful although, unlike the University, very largely 
local in its patronage. It had from the first 
the high ideal of doing four years’ work in three, as 
required by the will, which was a matter of some criti- 
cism on the part of the four-year colleges about us 
and brought some complications with states like New 
York that require a four-year college course for its 
high school teachers. The admission of girl students 
was, however, forever barred. The college prospered 
and even soon began to yield a substantial increment 
to the income of its endowment, and a goodly propor- 
tion of the graduates are already on the way to success 
or have actually achieved success and even eminence. 
Mr. Wright’s national reputation contributed 
much to make the college widely and favorably 
known, and in the very delicate relations which condi- 
tions beyond our control brought us he was always 
most considerate and tactful. His wide acquaintance 
brought several distinguished men here to our public 
occasions, among them President Roosevelt during 
his second term. His activity in the state, especially 
in the comprehensive study of the needs of secondary 
technical education, and his success in arbitrating coal 
strikes brought the college favorable notice through- 
out the country at large. 
Words cannot describe the anxiety with which 
every one had awaited Mr. Clark’s will upon his death 
308 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
in 1900. No one knew the extent of his resources and 
there was no less anxiety to know whether he had 
given them all to us or bestowed them otherwise. It 
was, therefore, with the greatest satisfaction that we 
learned that the institution at once came into posses- 
sion of nearly all, and at Mrs. Clark’s death would 
receive, with a few minor gifts to relatives, his entire 
estate. There was in some quarters great regret that 
he had established a college department, although this 
had been more or less anticipated. After a large be- 
quest to our library, which was thereby given an 
annual income of some $32,000 (which was more than 
we have ever needed or spent so that it has always 
been rich compared to the rest of the institution) half 
the residue was devoted to the establishment of a col- 
lege, which Mr. Clark declared had always been his 
intention, and half of the remainder was given to a 
department variously designated in the will as “arts” 
and “arts and sciences.” If these two oft-repeated 
phrases were interpreted as the same, all this fourth 
of his estate could go to the University; if not, the 
latter would receive nothing and we should have an 
art department. This issue involved somewhat pro- 
longed and expensive litigation. Senator Hoar was 
at first strongly of the opinion that the letter and the 
spirit of the will were against, while I believed they 
were for, the interests of the University; and he and I 
had many long arguments upon the subject. One 
memorable Sunday he proposed that we spend the 
afternoon, and if necessary the evening, arguing, each 
for his own interpretation, which we did for hours. 
He had a strong will to believe with me and at the 
end of our discussion declared that he was convinced, 
and argued the case on that basis so successfully in 
court that this interpretation prevailed and the final 
decision was in our favor. It was his signal and 
arduous service here that acquired for him the title 
309 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
of the second founder of the institution, so that a year 
or more after Mr. Clark’s death we were able to 
materially enlarge and strengthen our work. 
Almost immediately the new library building was 
devised and erected on the most modern lines by 
Librarian Wilson, under whose wise and efficient 
management the library has come to play a somewhat 
exceptional role—as this generous endowment made 
it possible for it to do—in all our work. A liberal sum 
was expended in remodeling the grounds, Mrs. Clark 
contributing twenty-five thousand dollars for a steel 
fence around the campus. The physics department 
was moved to a wing of the chemical building, new 
rooms were finished off and old ones assigned respec- 
tively to college and university work, the same depart- 
ments in the two institutions were coordinated and the 
waste and friction of divided leadership minimized, 
and graduate and post-graduate work were made, so 
far as possible, to stimulate and to help each other. 
The anomaly of two more or less independent 
institutions in the same buildings brought many com- 
plications. Several of the most promising college 
instructors were given a lower place on the stalf of 
the University, from which they received an addition 
to their college salary, so that several budding new 
departments were introduced into the University, 
notably history, economics, and sociology. On the 
other hand, some of the University Fellows and 
docents received from the college added remuneration 
for assistance in collegiate instruction. Before the 
advent of the College the University had always given 
its degrees privately and there was some feeling 
against academic ceremonies and millinery, etc. But 
Commencement exercises were necessary for the Col- 
lege and in these the University participated, confer- 
ring its degrees in public also for the first time. 
In the later years of Dr. Wright’s administration, 
310 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
as he was gradually enfeebled and left more and more 
of his functions to the dean’s office, a spirit of rivalry 
and even antagonism was fostered between the two 
institutions. The funds devoted to college work could 
never be diverted from that end while those given to 
the University could at any time, if the Trustees so 
decreed, be entirely given over to undergraduate 
work, and this fostered in the University camp a cer • 
tain dread lest the College should attain undue pre 
eminence. There was also fear that its three-year 
graduates would not quite reach University standards 
for admission to it. The purposes of the College 
would never admit its being chiefly a feeder to the 
University, although it has discharged this function 
in the case of not a few of its graduates who continued 
in the University. In the latter, some of our pro- 
fessors were opposed to any coordination, insisting 
that Clark Bachelors fell below their standards. 
On the other hand, there ,were also those in the 
College who strongly likewise resisted coordination 
and advocated autonomy, so that at Mr. Wright’s 
death in 1909 this had become a paramount issue and 
the situation held abundant material for trouble. 
After considering several score of names for Mr. 
Wright’s position it was at length, after very mature 
deliberation, decided by the trustees to install a Uni- 
versity professor, my colleague, Dr. E. C. Sanford, 
as head of the College. It was with great reluctance 
that he decided to abandon his chair and guide the 
destinies of the collegiate department, which he did 
for eleven years with great success, resigning when I 
did only as a point of honor to allow the trustees to at 
length unite the two institutions under one head, as 
Mr. Clark’s will provided they might do. Dr. San- 
ford, who had been my pupil in Baltimore and the 
very first man I had engaged from that institution to 
come with me to Worcester, and I have always been 
311 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
close and intimate friends, so that friction was grad- 
ually superseded by an entire harmony which laid the 
foundations for the amalgamation of the two which 
is being so wisely and ably effected, as I write, under 
our successor, President Wallace W. Atwood, the 
Harvard physiographer and successor there of the 
noted Professor Davis, the latter an able pioneer in 
this country of a department almost new but greatly 
needed in our academic life. Under Dr. Atwood the 
combined institutions, it is to be hoped, are entering 
upon a new period of prosperity and public favor. 
As to the relations between the University and 
College, we were brethren, children of the same 
parent; or, to change the figure, a married pair, 
although unlike them we could never be divorced. 
Neither must encroach upon the other, and our two- 
in-one dual unity was unique and involved both new 
responsibilities and new possibilities. Up to the pres- 
ent, when both are united under one administration, 
each was a noble stimulus to the other. The period of 
duality was indispensable for the due development of 
each, and yet we all always knew that the union of the 
two, when ,the psychological moment should come— 
as it has as I write—would itself bring great advan- 
tages. 
During the lean years before Mr. Clark’s death 
and since, I made many attempts to affiliate with other 
local institutions in various ways, but always with 
very limited success. Negotiations were opened with 
presidents of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 
Fuller, Mendenhall, and Engler, to avoid duplication. 
There were always upper-class students there and 
occasionally instructors who desired to pursue pure 
science here. These we welcomed, and in a few cases 
courses were especially adapted to their needs; while 
those of our students who desired more work in ap- 
plied science were permitted to avail themselves of the 
312 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
opportunities at the Institute. Although we then con- 
cluded that any kind of amalgamation was out of the 
question, our relations have always been exceptionally 
cordial and cooperative. 
The College of the Holy Cross, a large Catholic 
institution here of excellent rank, often had graduates 
who desired courses offered here, and after consider- 
able deliberation, because the nature of the studies 
there was so different, it was decided to admit their 
graduates on the same terms as others. This has 
brought not only harmony between the two institu- 
tions but has attracted to us a number of brilliant and 
able men, while we have fitted some of their graduates 
for teaching and other positions, to which we have 
assisted them. 
The Natural History Society with its own building 
and museum and organization has cooperated with 
the biological department, which has always striven 
to be helpful to it, and we have profited in various 
ways by the interest in these subjects which it has 
created. 
The Worcester Art Museum with its fine marble 
building and its rich endowment from our former 
trustee, Mr. Salisbury, is another strong and inde- 
pendent institution in which the University has been 
deeply interested. Its policy was chiefly to collect 
choice works of art, but it later attempted to make 
helpful contact with individuals and other art associa- 
tions and especially with this department in the 
schools, under the guidance of its able director. Here, 
too, there is a possibility of closer cooperation, espe- 
cially as the University has an art fund of $100,000, 
the expenditure of the income of which in the spirit 
of the will has been a source of some embarrassment. 
Part of it, however, has been spent in portraits by 
eminent artists of presidents Wright, Sanford, and 
myself, and Col. A. G. Bullock, long the able and 
313 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
efficient president of our Board who was elected as a 
successor of Senator Hoar. 
With the well-equipped Worcester Library we 
have also established the most cordial relations and 
done whatever seemed possible to supplement rather 
than duplicate purchases. For a public library it was 
unusually rich in scientific works under the wise direc- 
tion for some forty years of its able head, Mr. S. S. 
Greene, and this has been a material help; while our 
library is open to the patrons of the Public Library 
for the more special and technical literature. Here 
I may add that the New England Association of Col- 
lege and University Librarians was suggested, organ- 
ized, and held its first meeting at Clark, and in its 
work we have profited and been able, I think, to con- 
tribute our share. 
With the large state hospital for the insane we 
have always maintained the closest relations. In the 
early days I gave weekly clinics there to my classes 
in psychology, selecting patients to illustrate the main 
types of psychopathology. Later, Dr. Adolph Meyer 
began his eminent American career as resident pathol- 
ogist there and lectured in the University, and his 
successors, when there have been such in that position, 
have been employed also in the work of instruction 
at the University. Dr. Edward Cowles, our former 
trustee, gave clinics there for the benefit of our stu- 
dents in psychology for, I think, fourteen years and 
up to his death in 1920. It is an inestimable advantage 
for students in this department to profit by the results 
of nature’s cruel experiments upon the insane, many 
of whom illustrate tendencies found in us all and only 
“writ large” in their symptoms. 
What in later years has become one of the most 
important problems of cooperation has been that with 
the American Antiquarian Society here, the oldest, 
largest, and strongest of its kind in the country, now 
314 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
installed in an impressive building, with a library of 
some one hundred and fifty thousand volumes and 
many original documents, so that these collections are 
really indispensable to students of earlier American 
history. The trustees of the University and I long 
strove to bring about a positive affiliation of these two 
institutions, even offering the Antiquarian Society a 
building site near the University. We felt, as our de- 
partment of history grew, that not only our graduate 
students could derive great help from familiarity with 
its alcoves but that it would itself be invigorated and 
made more productive by closer contact with young 
specialists in this field who were studying here. 
Various schemes and devices were at different times 
talked over to this end, but the Society at length con- 
cluded that it must safeguard its perpetual independ- 
ence and chose a site for the erection of its new 
building accordingly. Nevertheless, especially by the 
efforts of Dr. Hulbert, who was for several years on 
our staff, ably seconded by Professor Blakeslee and 
welcomed by the Society, there was established a most 
wholesome and vital rapport between the Society and 
our department of history. 
On several occasions I have attempted to gather 
from other cities, and especially American cities, ex- 
amples of the great gain in effectiveness and economy 
of effort and means brought about by coordination of 
institutions devoted to the advancement of learning, 
but the University has not been large or strong 
enough as yet to overcome the conservative influences 
which always tend, perhaps especially in New Eng- 
land, to make independent foundations shrink from 
any kind of amalgamation, despite the many instances 
in which such federation has been of great mutual 
advantage. 
The University has always striven to do its full 
share in all public and civic matters. Not a few of 
315 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
the instructors of the College and University have 
accepted city offices and done their best to discharge 
their duties effectively. A few times some of them 
entered with zest into political discussions where the 
occasion Geemed to them to justify it, although realiz- 
ing in general that institutions must hold aloof from 
these. The Board of Trade was really started in my 
house, where I invited a score and a half of the more 
eminent citizens of Worcester to meet and reconsider 
such a scheme after it had been more than once pro- 
posed and even started but abandoned. This time it 
was successful, and out of it has grown an organiza- 
tion of something like one thousand members, which 
has long been in great need of larger and better 
quarters. One former professor at the Institute of 
Technology, also a student and lecturer here, was 
lately dubbed “Worcester’s most useful citizen” be- 
cause he has for years devoted so much of his time to 
comparing our charities, the organization of our gov- 
ernment, effectiveness of school board, etc., with 
those of other American cities of similar size. 
Although a by-law drawn by Mr. Clark expressly 
forbids our instructors to engage in any kind of outside 
work “of a kind or an amount likely to lessen their 
full efficiency to the University,” and although the 
Institute of Technology furnishes most of the experts 
for our local industries, not a few of our men have 
also rendered signal service in solving industrial prob- 
lems which require expert knowledge. It was a for- 
mer instructor here, Dr. R. K. Duncan, who later at 
Pittsburgh made himself known favorably through- 
out the country by establishing there the most fruitful 
of all relations between the Mellon Institute and 
every chemical industry of the city in a way extremely 
helpful to both parties and thereby setting a fashion 
that has been widely followed. Dr. Floody was a 
student at the University when he established here 
316 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
the Garden City that has been so widely copied, and 
everywhere proven so efficient. 
The University and especially the College have 
in their history provided not only scores but hundreds 
of lectures and courses open to the public by men 
of eminence from outside, and members of our staff 
have given many single lectures or even courses before 
local organizations, so that despite our devotion to 
research no one can accuse us of isolation or of not 
doing all in our power to advance the culture and 
material interests of the city in which we are located 
and which exempts our property from taxation. 
With the aid of the University I was able to start 
The American Journal of Religious Psychology and 
Education in 1904, which with volume V was changed 
to the Journal of Religious Psychology in its anthro- 
pological and sociological aspects and thereafter 
largely edited by Professor A. F. Chamberlain, until 
his death in 1914, when its publication ceased. This 
was established with the conviction on my part that 
so much had lately been done in developing the psy- 
chological aspects, not only of Christianity and the 
great ethnic but also the primitive religions that an 
organ that did not then exist in the world was needed 
in which epitomes of the most important books and 
articles from whatever source could be gathered and 
which should also be available for the publication of 
scientific memoirs in this field, combining thus in some 
slight degree the functions of a Zeitschrift, Central- 
blatt, and Archiv. It was hoped, too, that this venture 
might appeal to those of all denominations interested 
in Sunday school work. During the years of its 
existence it did find a list of subscribers who were 
greatly interested, and abundant material was forth- 
coming, but the journal never became quite self-sup- 
porting; and since Dr. Chamberlain had given it the 
broadest anthropological scope and no one else could 
317 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
be found with his incomparable erudition in this field 
to succeed him, it seemed advisable to suspend it, 
despite every prospect that had he lived the journal 
would have grown to a degree to justify all our initial 
hopes, and more. Its career shed one of the most 
interesting, if not entirely encouraging, lights upon 
the attitude of religious thinkers, workers, and 
preachers toward attempts to provide for their themes 
a substantial basis and to shed the light of science 
upon them. 
The University has always admitted women 
graduate students on the same basis as men, although 
there was always more or less opposition to this even 
in the board. There were fears at the outset that the 
number of women might exceed that of men but this 
soon proved to be utterly groundless because, as com- 
pared with the large number of women that are in 
college work, very few, indeed, desired to specialize 
or even take post-graduate work in the departments 
we had established. Thus we have always had a very 
few women in nearly all our departments and it is a 
pleasure to state that, on the whole, they have been 
quite as able, as well-trained, and as productive in 
scholarship as our men. Not a few of the best mem- 
oirs issued here have been done by women or based 
on their work. They are, as a class, more cooperative 
and amenable to suggestion and less likely to waste 
energy by the pursuit of methods and goals which 
are not entirely approved by heads of departments 
and which not infrequently issue in failure. Thus, 
in my opinion it would have been a great mistake had 
we entirely excluded them, as we have several times 
been nearly on the point of doing. 
Our library is one of our distinctive features, as 
indeed it should be because of its endowment. The 
classification of books in each department was 
wrought out with great assiduity by the head of each. 
318 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
By judicious purchasing; by cooperation that enables 
us to bring, by way of loan, books needed from every 
great library in the eastern part of the country; by 
the display of new books fresh from the publisher’s 
twice a week on our tables, which each member of 
the university is free to order; by our open alcove 
system which allows every student his own place in 
the library and free access to all the shelves; by the 
privilege open to each of drawing any number of 
books for practically any length of time; the very 
large average of books used by each student per year; 
the increasing realization by the professors that one 
of their most important functions is to guide and in- 
spire discreet and very active reading and to save the 
pupil from the waste of reading second- or tenth-class 
material—all this, I think, has made the library here 
a relatively more important part of our work than 
elsewhere; and if the ideal of the future academic 
faculty is to direct reading, to give the class the benefit 
of his own, and to devise ways and means of pooling 
for the benefit of all what each has read, this ideal 
may be nearer to its realization here than elsewhere. 
One item quite prominent in our early programme 
and always of great interest to me was represented 
by our efforts to establish here the docent system. In 
Germany almost any young Ph.D. two years, more 
or less, after receiving this degree, if he has done any 
signal work and has academic aspirations is allowed 
to give lectures in the university. Here, in theory at 
least, he is absolutely free. True, he receives no com- 
pensation whatever save the fees from the students 
he may attract, so that he must, for the most part, 
support himself. The subsequent career of these men 
thus, again at least in theory, depends entirely upon 
their own ability and success. Occasionally they have 
boldly competed with aging or inefficient professors, 
and by lecturing in their field with perhaps greater 
319 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
skill have won their students, and thus put them upon 
their mettle and introduced the wholesome stimulus 
of competition. At the other extreme are docents 
who have brought new subjects which they have the 
ability to develop into courses that the university 
adopts. Not infrequently, too, they have labored for 
long years and almost starved themselves, with no 
recognition whatever. Sometimes they have met with 
official opposition because of their independence and 
criticism of current tendencies and opinions. In a few 
cases they have been allowed not only university 
rooms but the use of apparatus and clinics, and have 
been assigned favorable hours. Thus, on the whole, 
they have constituted a most wholesome influence, 
and very many a leader in Teutonic institutions has 
done this and been advanced either rapidly or slowly, 
in proportion to his merits. The institution has thus 
been a kind of seminarium for professorates and also 
a palladium of academic freedom, the docent occasion- 
ally teaching doctrines in the sharpest contradiction 
to those of the heads of departments and maintaining 
entire independence of them. 
It seemed that this institution might be tried out 
in this country. Accordingly, several such appoint- 
ments were made and many such positions have been 
held here, although it was found necessary under 
American conditions to attach a small salary to them. 
They were our highest annual appointees. We stipu- 
lated that they should be “not assistants and their 
relations be directly with the president of the Uni- 
versity.” While they were to give a certain limited 
number of lectures their work was to be mainly re- 
search. This licentia docendi we hoped might be re- 
garded by other institutions seeking occupants to chairs 
as a kind of brevet professorship, and we stated that 
“good men of this class are desired by the University 
above all others.” They were not members of the 
320 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
faculty and were therefore not supposed to interest 
themselves in academic politics but to illustrate in the 
most eminent degree the liberty of both investigation 
and teaching.3 
Theses. Most of the scores of guilds which were 
so prominent a feature of not only the industrial but 
the social organization in the Middle Ages required 
of each novice that at the close of his apprenticeship 
he present a masterpiece which would show to others 
and to himself the degree of proficiency he had at- 
tained in his trade or art. And in all the medieval 
universities a student on taking his degree had to pro- 
pound and expose some thesis at length and append 
a number of others which he was ready to defend 
in public against all comers. Only having done this 
could he become Master or Doctor. Most American 
institutions require a thesis as an integral part of 
the preparation for their higher degrees, although 
there is a vast difference in the relative importance 
attached to this work at different institutions. Some 
insist that it shall contain something deemed by the 
authorities to be a real addition, however small, to 
the sum of human knowledge. Some require its pub- 
lication, so that it marks the appearance of the novice 
before the larger public. 
In Germany it is no less diverse in different de- 
partments and institutions. A few of these theses 
have been even epoch-making, not merely for the pro- 
pounder himself but in the history of thought, or have 
blazed the trail or at least pointed the direction which 
the subsequent life work of the author was to take. 
On the other hand, many German professors assumed 
that the candidate in their department was little more 
than their own famulus and the thesis was assigned 
to help along their own work. Some years ago a 
8 See above the names of these appointees. 
321 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
German publishing house advertised 63,000 of these 
printed theses for sale, and I have selected and looked 
over perhaps several hundred of them at various 
times. Very many are devoted to points so detailed 
and special that their preparation could have had little 
more significance for their own department than if 
they had been hired assistants of the professor. Any 
new idea or discovery thus made was almost always 
assumed to be the property of the professor. It was 
against this custom that in a case brought to court 
there by a brilliant American student a somewhat 
epoch-making decision was handed down, that the 
results of such work, if clearly the product of the 
student’s mind, were his own intellectual property. 
In France there was hardly less diversity of 
opinion and practice, and the same is true, as I write, 
in this country. In various discussions in private and 
in the Association of American Universities it has 
appeared that some institutions lay vastly greater 
stress upon the thesis than others, and the opinion 
has even been expressed that the average graduate 
student is incapable of producing anything worthy of 
publication and to think otherwise was to inflate his 
mind with a dangerous and arrestive conceit; while 
others have urged that without publication of theses 
the assumption that the student’s mind had reached 
the stage of independent action could have no validity 
beyond the actual conferring of the degree upon him 
by the faculty. Thus there is perhaps almost nothing 
in the whole field of graduate work here in which de- 
partments, individual professors, and institutions dif- 
fer more than in their conception of what a thesis 
should really be. 
In stating my own ideas and practices on this sub- 
ject I realize that they would not apply to other de- 
partments in the same way or degree, and perhaps 
not even to my own in other institutions. As a result 
322 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
of my experience of nearly forty years the following 
general plan has been evolved. First of all I lay very 
great stress upon the thesis and would have even 
Masters, insisting far more strongly, of course, in 
the case of Doctors, devote to it a considerable part 
of the year or two required. To choose it right has 
come to seem to me almost as important, at least in 
many cases, as choosing a wife. The instructor must 
first of all, after considerable personal conference, 
find out along what lines the native interests or attain- 
ments have been most developed. He must also con- 
sider with no less care the probable future career of 
the student and find, if possible, that topic which will 
best enlist all his powers and be most helpful to him 
in his career as an academic teacher. Very many a 
student, during his critical initial year as instructor 
elsewhere, has been saved from failure because, 
although his attainments and skill in some of the fields 
he was required to teach were inadequate, he could, 
nevertheless, speak with authority and show himself 
fully up to date in some part of it. 
Thus there must surely be considerable prelimi- 
nary study of each student and an inventory of all 
that he has done, together with an estimate of his 
capabilities. In this individual students and those 
coming from certain institutions are vastly behind 
others. Some, having served a long apprenticeship 
devoted to mere acquisition, have become so abjectly 
and habitually subject to authorities that they are 
at first shocked at the idea that they themselves must 
now become authorities upon something. Some very 
able men deem this impossible because they have no 
confidence in their own abilities. With some stu- 
dents the choice of a subject is easy and obvious for they 
have already developed definite inclinations which the 
professor can approve. With others, weeks and even 
months of personal conference fail to discover any- 
323 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
thing in which the individual can begin with any initial 
advantage of position. I always endeavor to have 
a number of topics which seem to me fruitful but I 
hesitate to impose these without some inner personal 
inclination lest, at the close of the year, the harvest 
be nothing but leaves and the student, as sometimes 
happens in such cases, turn upon me with the accu- 
sation, which I fear is only too just, that I have given 
him the wrong subject. 
The prime consideration should be the real ad- 
vantage to the student himself, and a very close 
second to this (and I would always place it second) 
should be the prospect of adding something to the 
sum of human knowledge. If the theme is not chosen 
with due reference to this latter object, or if I have 
assigned a problem which is found later not to admit 
of a definite solution, I am to some degree responsible 
for the loss of a golden year or two of academic 
opportunity which will probably never again come in 
the student’s life. This matter of selecting the right 
subject for the right individual is something that has 
filled me with a sense of responsibility that has 
steadily increased with years. On the other hand, 
with a topic rightly chosen it is often amazing to see 
the amount and even the quality of good work ac- 
complished. The student often has not realized before 
the strength and depth of his own interests or has 
not found a focus for many of them which had 
hitherto seemed to him diverse and unconnected, but 
having found it, he can tap sources of reserve energy 
and unsuspected insight that enable him to triumph 
over many difficulties. 
Having between us chosen a subject, I always in- 
sist that the student must, first of all, put himself 
abreast of the best that has been everywhere done or 
said and that he must diligently read and take notes, 
and I feel it incumbent upon myself to give him a 
324 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
goodly list of references on which he must, from time 
to time, report his progress in mastery of them. I 
have no sympathy with the conception of some in- 
structors that it is best, first of all, for the student to 
work out his own ideas before encumbering his mind 
with the knowledge that others have contributed, 
although this latter, of course, brings some initial 
sense of difficulty and perhaps discouragement. But 
here, as everywhere else, everything must be adapted 
to the individual. I have for many years read and 
epitomized and have a really vast collection of out- 
lines and abridgments, and by giving these to students 
I can often facilitate their acquaintance with litera- 
ture they should know, especially if in foreign lan- 
guages, of which their knowledge is so often 
inadequate. 
At length the student begins to have views of his 
own, at first perhaps very timorous and precocious, 
and these must be discussed until at length we develop 
a method and begin to collect more specific data (or 
perhaps, if in laboratory work, devise the apparatus) 
by which he can focus toward his goal. Thus, almost 
always in the end he develops positive or negative 
attitudes toward pioneers in his field and then the 
work goes on of itself. He becomes more or less 
independent of his instructor and is enabled to, in 
turn, instruct him. Thus with a successful thesis a 
student has often found himself. He has at some 
point reached the frontier and endeavored to advance 
it, and his interest in this particular topic never abates. 
He realizes for the first time that he has actually 
contributed something, however small, to the world’s 
progress, and thus he has not only attained his mental 
majority but has become a real citizen in the democ- 
racy of learning. This mastery of a subject brings 
another most wholesome and indispensable result. 
The young investigator realizes his ignorance in all 
325 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
other fields and how inadequate his unmatured views 
and his knowledge of even adjacent fields are, so that 
he has a wholesome and stimulating sense of ignor- 
ance and a proper attitude of docility toward other 
authorities. One of the most pleasing recollections of 
my long experience in this work is the statement of 
so many of my former pupils years afterward that 
their thesis made them, while the realization that in 
some cases there has been abortion—owing sometimes 
I fear, to my own misjudgment—is one of my more 
painful memories; but although occasionally these 
mismatings of man and theme have been almost tragic 
and the only too just source of bitter complaints, I 
am happy to realize that such cases have been rela- 
tively few. 
We have not been able, as I think, unfortunately, 
to print all our theses, as we originally proposed to 
do. There are scores of these typewritten and bound 
in our collection which ought to be made public in 
order thus to submit them to the consensus of the 
competent and to avoid the academic waste of dupli- 
cation of work which the publication of Doctors’ at 
least, if not Masters’, theses would prevent. Many, 
even of those finished long years ago, would prove 
real contributions to the sum of human knowledge, 
and funds sufficient to publish these is one of our 
great needs. 
The very word “seminary” has had in the past, 
and has to-day, many meanings quite different. In 
German institutions it designated originally a group 
of students who were intending to teach the classics, 
mainly in the Gymnasia. The idea was so fruitful that 
it soon extended to other departments. I had already 
participated, as mentioned in Chapter V, in four of 
these German seminaries. In two of them advanced 
students read great standard works which were made 
326 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
the basis of long discussions by the professor. In 
the physiological seminary of Ludwig each student 
epitomized the latest articles for the benefit of all. 
Each student had his own subject or group of sub- 
jects to present and here methods and results were 
compared and criticized. The members of Wundt’s 
group read voraciously and reported for their 
master’s benefit, and incidentally for that of each 
other. 
At Baltimore the seminary was a vigorous feature 
in every leading department and I, of course, had 
my own in which alternate weeks were devoted to 
the field of the history of philosophy and experimental 
psychology. At Clark, for nearly thirty years, I have 
met my students at my house every Monday night 
from seven, often to eleven, occasionally till twelve 
and even later. In the early days, when the institution 
was small, we sometimes read, the leader of the even- 
ing epitomizing, Kant’s Critique, Jowett’s Plato, 
Schopenhauer, once (but not very successfully) 
attacking Wallace’s Hegel, Darwin, Spencer, and 
going into the originals with Locke, Descartes, 
Spinoza, Hume, and others, and also reading 
Nietzsche and Bergson. But as the seminary grew, 
nearly all our time was devoted to the reading of 
generally two papers an evening, each student taking 
his turn (the sessions separated by a fifteen-minute 
recess for ventilation and light refreshments) with 
distinguished men brought in from outside several 
times a year for our edification. 
No one was ever required or urged to attend so 
that the numbers fluctuated according to the interest 
in the man or the subject presented—itself a whole- 
some stimulus. From perhaps a dozen to seventy-five 
or more would be present, and as outsiders were 
allowed to come in only by invitation of a member, 
the gathering was given only a slightly esoteric char- 
327 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
acter. Each regular member was expected to take 
his turn, once at least, for half a session during the 
year, and one of the older members, under my direc- 
tion, arranged the programme each week for the next. 
Educational topics were often presented in this way, 
although psychology had the leading place, and I 
deemed it advisable to give to the discussions and 
even to the topics presented the widest possible range. 
It would be interesting to look over, had it only been 
preserved, the list of themes actually before us, some 
seventy a year, but even from these the debates often 
ranged very widely. After each presentation, which 
was almost always written and must never exceed an 
hour, the discussion was open to all, and after per- 
haps a slight initial embarrassment during the first 
weeks of each year there was always the most active 
participation. I stood always ready myself to fill any 
gap on the programme, and almost everything I have 
ever presented either here or in lecture has been freely 
and sometimes even bitterly challenged, so that I have 
often had to defend my own pet views against very 
able, as well as indifferent adversaries. Thus this has 
been a real and great stimulus to me personally. I 
have often afterward made notes of appergus that 
came to me in these discussions or of facts and ideas 
presented by my students, to whom I am much in- 
debted. 
The seminary has been a workshop for theses, 
most of which have been read here, perhaps in sec- 
tions, and thus the candidates for degrees have been 
able to draw upon the sources of information pos- 
sessed by all other members so that it has been a 
pooling institution. Among these candidates there 
have been Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Armenians, 
Chinese, Japanese, Germans, Frenchmen, English- 
men, Negroes, and representatives of nearly every 
other nationality. There have been ultra-doctrinaires 
328 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
for anarchism, extreme socialists, Mormons, believers 
in telepathy, materialists, idealists, and spiritualists. 
Several times there have been discussions between 
Negroes and students from the south and there has 
been every shade of religious opinion from the ex- 
treme of devotion to a no less extreme of pantheism, 
skepticism, and materialism of every kind and degree. 
Of course these discussions have often become more 
or less bitter and personal but I have always insisted 
that every one had a right to his “say” and I believe 
that this method has, on the whole, tended to moderate 
ultra and doctrinaire views, while it has had the most 
liberalizing influence upon conservatives to have their 
most cherished opinions flouted and to be challenged 
to stand forth and give a reason for the faith that is 
in them. The core of all these discussions has, of 
course, been philosophical and more specifically psy- 
chological, but as scores of former members have 
written or told me that, on the whole, they derived 
more good from the seminary than from all else, I 
am convinced that the largest latitude has been abun- 
dantly justified. A great many of the discussions 
were educational, ranging all the way from the care 
of babies and even prenatal regimen to the work of 
universities and learned societies, and in this domain, 
too, I think the method has enriched the mental soil 
and brought lucidity. 
From the obstetric art of Socrates and his pupil, 
Plato, down to Berkeley and many since, the method 
of dialogue has always been a very effective quickener 
and sharpener of mind by mind, and discussion, de- 
bate, and dialectic, as the Jesuits knew so well, have 
always stimulated minds to their greatest activity. A 
question is a method of challenge that few can resist, 
even a criminal when subjected to the third degree. 
Conference makes men compare, clarify, and often 
modify their views, so that many a thesis put forth 
329 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
here has been, to some slight extent, the product of 
joint authorship, and not a few men have found them- 
selves and all have gained new insight into their 
themes. To subject cherished views to this kind of 
dialectic, to realize how few beliefs cannot be more or 
less successfully impugned, to be able to see the other 
side, and to submit one’s own findings to the revision 
of his compeers gives each a sense of his own com- 
parative knowledge and ability which is an essential 
part of true self-knowledge. 
The seminary also, to each member and perhaps 
especially to the leader, affords opportunity for fasci- 
nating observations of temperament, intellectual 
character, and disposition, besides, of course, giving 
better data for sizing up his knowledge of each 
man’s attainments, thinking power, and reading, than 
any examination could ever do. Very often discus- 
sions started here have been carried on actively by 
the students at their meals and in walks, and have 
often sent them to the library. The seminary has 
always been characterized by a spirit of cameraderie 
and has had much to do in establishing and cementing 
friendships. No matter how acrimonious the debate 
it has rarely degenerated into personalities, at which 
I have always drawn the line, and still more rarely 
produced lasting enmities. I always felt it essential 
to evoke something from every member upon every 
topic in which I thought him informed or interested 
so that even the most diffident sooner or later learned 
to find his voice here; while, on the other hand, the 
forward and too loquacious had to be “called down” 
by irony or given a conviction of ignorance, but very 
rarely by reproof, in which I felt it necessary some- 
times to be unsparing in the case of careless work 
or inadequate preparation, occasionally refusing to 
discuss a topic if too crudely presented or even check- 
ing the leader in the midst of his presentation by 
330 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
telling him in plain terms that the work he was laying 
before us was unworthy of himself, the subject, or the 
seminary. 
The last seminary of the year has always been 
given some social features, a committee of students 
preparing the programme, with many a skit, satire, or 
mock examination of me or my colleagues by the 
students themselves in which a kind of Mardi Gras 
spirit has often run riot. At these last meetings 
there have also generally been brief formal exercises 
arranged by the students, with presents and souvenirs 
of many kinds, of which I now have quite a collection, 
all of them suggestive of pleasant memories, indi- 
vidual and collective. Man is so gregarious that the 
quest of knowledge in common in its many forms is 
one of the most delightful of all human occupations, 
and after nearly forty years of experience at a weekly 
seminary, which has brought so many of the intimate 
relations of friendship between my students and my- 
self, there is nothing that I miss as much on laying 
down my academic work as this. In fact there seems 
almost to have been established in my mind a weekly 
rhythm so that I feel a peculiar lonesomeness Monday 
evenings. I often think in this connection of Lotze’s 
famous statement to the effect that the only ideal of 
heaven that would be attractive to him would be just 
such discussions of the highest themes with the lofti- 
est minds, even if it were only on some “boathouse on 
the Styx.” 
We commemorated the close of our second de- 
cennium in the summer of 1909 by another series of 
conferences, to which we were again able to bring a 
number of the most eminent pioneers in science from 
Europe and elsewhere besides many from this country, 
believing that this type of academic celebration and 
festivity is more dignified and more worthy of a 
331 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
real American university than processions, banquets, 
and merely formal public exercises. The first week 
we brought together representatives of twenty-seven 
distinct types of child welfare organizations, with fif- 
teen sessions and forty-seven addresses published 
later in a volume,4 and at its close a national associa- 
tion of these agencies was effected, which was sadly 
needed because they had hitherto in general worked 
with little cooperation and little knowledge of each 
other. Another week was devoted to scientific con- 
ferences in each of our chief departments. The de- 
partment of mathematics brought W. F. Osgood of 
Harvard, J. Pierpont of Yale, E. P. Van Vleck of 
Wisconsin, Percival Lowell, and E. H. Moore of the 
University of Chicago, who constituted the nucleus of 
work in this department. In chemistry we imported 
Andre Debierne of the University of Paris, while 
T. W. Richards, J. A. Steiglitz, A. Michael, M. T. 
Bogert, W. A. Noyes, and A. A. Noyes also gave lec- 
tures. In physics we had V. Volterra of the Univer- 
sity of Rome, E. Rutherford of Manchester, England, 
A. A. Michelson, formerly of Clark but now of 
Chicago (both the latter being Nobel prize men), 
C. Barus, E. F. Nichols, and R. W. Wood. As in 
chemistry, these gentlemen lectured to each other and 
to a fit advanced few for a week, and we published 
both series of lectures in a volume, as we did also those 
in mathematics. Biology was represented only by 
C. O. Whitman and H. C. Bumpus, and history by 
L. W. Wilfley. 
In psychology we were fortunate in inducing Sig- 
mund Freud of Vienna, W. Stern of Breslau, C. G. 
Jung of Zurich, E. B. Titchener of Cornell, F. Boas 
of Columbia, Adolph Meyer of the Johns Hopkins 
(both the latter formerly at Clark), H. S. Jennings of 
4 Proceedings of the Child Conference for Research and Welfare, 
Stcchert, 1909. 251 pp. 
332 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
Hopkins, H. Ferenzi of Prague, Ernest Jones of 
Toronto, and William James, to be present and speak. 
The conferences in this department were attended not 
only by psychologists but by eminent psychiatrists, 
and the influence of Freudian views in this country, 
where they had been little known before, from this 
date developed rapidly, so that in a sense this unique 
and significant culture movement owed most of its 
initial momentum in this country to this meeting. 
Professor Burnham of the department of education 
brought no less a leader in hygiene than Leo Burger- 
stein of Vienna.5 Nearly every day was spent in lis- 
tening either to formal lectures and demonstrations 
by these and other eminent experts or in more infor- 
mal conferences, which were facilitated by provisions 
by which all could take their meals with those of their 
own group. 
At the close of this commemoration the University 
departed from its custom of being very chary in the 
conferring of honorary degrees and bestowed thirty 
doctorates of no less than nine kinds, according to the 
preference of the men to whom they were given. This 
was more than three times as many honorary degrees 
as we had given in the preceding twenty years, but it 
was the desire of the faculty to emphasize the policy 
that even the LL.D. should be bestowed only upon 
those who had done signal work for the advancement 
of science and not for general eminence or as a com- 
pliment, or in recognition or hope of benefactions. 
The close of the third decennium in 1919 was not 
commemorated because of the confusion brought by 
the war, but the close of the twenty-fifth year, in 
1914, was marked by an effective and permanent or- 
ganization of the alumni in an academic celebration 
5 See Lectures and Addresses Delivered Before the Departments of 
Psychology and Pedagogy in Celebration of the Twentieth Anniversary 
of the Opening of Clark University, Worcester, 1909. 180 pp. 
333 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
limited to one day and evening, at which I attempted 
to set forth the general university situation in the 
world and also the Clark ideals. 
The University has always favored and subsidized 
the attendance of its professors at scientific and other 
meetings, expeditions, etc., and although it has had no 
sabbatical year it has both encouraged and assisted 
not a few of its instructors to more or less prolonged 
terms of study elsewhere, both in this country and 
abroad. Among others it assisted Professor Blakes- 
lee of the history department to make three prolonged 
excursions, one to the Near and another to the Far 
East, and one to Latin America. In addition to the 
conduct of his Journal of International Relations he 
has organized and held seven conferences at the uni- 
versity, beginning with our second decennial in 1909, 
on the following topics: China and the Far East; The 
Near East and Africa; Japan and Japanese-American 
Relations; Recent Developments in China; Latin 
America; The Problems and Lessons of the War; and 
Mexico and the Caribbean. Altogether these con- 
ferences have listened to 215 papers by those who 
could speak with authority. Sixty-three represented 
the faculties of over 32 universities, 53 have held im- 
portant government positions, 74 were authors of 
more or less important books on the subject, and 30 
were citizens of the land discussed. These were 
largely attended and attracted much attention in the 
press and the proceedings of all have been published 
in as many volumes. 
Dr. Blakeslee conceived the purpose of these 
meetings in substance as follows: They are to bring 
about a more intelligent understanding of interna- 
tional relations, to teach all to see the other side of the 
question, and thus to discharge one duty which a uni- 
versity owes to the public, especially in a democracy. 
Prejudice of any kind and partisanship of any degree 
334 Wilson 
Sanford Goddard 
Hayes Holx Brill Kanda Chamberlain 
Cattell Drew Burnham Jennings 
T— Po„EE 
Boas 
Dawson Ferenzi Karlson 
Baldwin Buchner 
Seashore Jastrow Jones Jung Kakis 
Burgerstein .. 
James Wells Kirkpatrick Freud Meyer 
Stern Katzen Ellenborger 
Hall 
Group of Psychologists at Clark Conference of 1909. Brill Jones Ferenzi 
Freud Hall jung 
A Group at the Clark Conference of 1909 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
have no place in such a forum, which really should be 
a kind of laboratory for the development of broad 
international views and sympathies. Although very 
many delicate questions, even those involving race 
animosities and particularly those in the two con- 
ferences just as we were entering the war and in the 
final one, were discussed, and very many diametrically 
opposite views expressed, there has been through 
them all, with but very rare exceptions, an entire ab- 
sence of antagonism or bitterness. Dr. Blakeslee 
desired not only to have upon his programme experts 
and leading actors in the events described but to have 
burning present-day problems discussed in the same 
spirit of candor and fairness with which we now dis- 
cuss the Napoleonic wars. The expenses of these con- 
ferences have always been borne by the University.6 
I have felt in later years that I did not appreciate 
at its full worth the work of my colleague for more 
than twenty years, Prof. C. F. Hodge, who after the 
hegira to Chicago had the entire biological field here 
to himself. He had done brilliant experimental work 
on various topics, perhaps the most important and 
original being on the effects of fatigue upon the micro- 
scopic structure of brain cells. He had the rare 
felicity of combining with his purely scientific inter- 
ests a real zest for economic zoology and its pedagogy, 
even with young children, and he was always the idol 
of his students, feeling that the studies of life should 
teach man how to live. Besides directing always a 
few investigators he found time not only to interest 
school children in nature but to write a most attractive 
and novel textbook for upper grammar grades which 
set new fashions, had a wide influence, and inciden- 
61 may add now, in January, 1923, that Dr. Blakeslee’s journal 
has been merged into Foreign Affairs, an American quarterly review, 
and Williams College has held two sessions of a summer school 
devoted to topics and methods similar to those which Professor Blakes- 
lee originated here, but with far larger sums at its disposal. 
335 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
tally brought him unexpected financial gains. On 
leaving here he had nearly completed a high-school 
text on similar original lines which was no less impor- 
tant. He was a passionate lover of nature in all her 
aspects and based all his work on the assumption that 
every one had this passion, and that even in those in 
whom it seemed latent it could readily be evoked. As 
these subjects have, unfortunately, in the public 
schools been subordinated to the more exact sciences, 
especially physics, the influence of such a man has 
been as good as it has unquestionably been great. In 
successive seasons he interested most of the school 
children in the city in anti-fly, mosquito, and clean-up 
campaigns, school gardens, school and home cultiva- 
tion of flowers, war upon caterpillars and browntail 
moths, etc., issuing himself and providing from gov- 
ernment sources various instructive leaflets for both 
school and home use. 
Perhaps there is no class of cultured men to whom 
our ideals and somewhat unique organization seemed 
more anomalous than to college and university presi- 
dents, although to this rule there are a few and but 
few very striking exceptions. To most academic ad- 
ministrators an institution that was not under the 
necessity of showing an increase of its student body 
and its budget in every annual report, failure to do 
which for a series of years would have, in general, 
meant their own withdrawal; the subordination at 
every point of size to quality; our practical disregard 
and independence of student fees; the fact that if the 
total expenses of the University were divided by the 
number of students the quotient would show that 
vastly more was expended for each here than any- 
where else; the absence of all college work during 
the first decade, and the very sharp line of demar- 
cation later drawn between graduate and under- 
graduate work and the independence of and greater 
336 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
stress laid upon the former as compared with 
the latter, safe-guarded by our dual organization; 
the predominance of the teaching function for the 
presidents of both institutions; our insistence not 
only upon including higher education in the scope 
of pedagogy but the fact that it was the presi- 
dent himself who gave courses upon the history 
and present organization of the higher institutions of 
learning; the stress we always mildly laid in the Asso- 
ciation of both the New England Colleges and of the 
American Universities that their policy should include 
international considerations and a comparative view 
of what other leading foundations for the advance- 
ment and diffusion of knowledge the world over were 
providing; the requirement of only two hours of 
teaching; the very few rules and faculty meetings; 
and the primacy we gave to research, seemed 
to most of these heads of institutions and the 
majority of deans to be something passing strange 
and anachronous. Fruitful investigators the world 
over who knew of our aims have always expressed the 
keenest sympathy with them, but to officials, as we had 
too often occasion to realize, we were only a voice 
crying in the wilderness. And yet I think we have all 
always felt that, despite our insignificant size, the 
modesty suggested by this which I think we have 
never lost, that voice should always be heard on cer- 
tain occasions. 
In looking back upon our very checkered fortunes 
during my thirty-one years as the head of the Univer- 
sity, nothing impresses me more than our courage 
during the dark period ending in 1900. Almost no 
one outside suspected our dire poverty and we had 
such intense faith in our ideal that we commemorated 
our tenth anniversary, in 1899, when things looked 
blackest, by inviting, as we saw above, distinguished 
savants from abroad and at home for a week and 
337 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
were heartened by spontaneous congratulations from 
over a hundred different academic institutions, 
twenty-eight of them in Europe including leaders in 
science from the Universities of Paris, Cambridge, 
and Berlin (which latter cabled us its Vivat, Crescat, 
Floreat) so that we felt overwhelmed, like Tarpeia, 
by the quality and source, even more than by the num- 
ber, of the good wishes and hopes that poured in upon 
us. What was it that thus kept up our spirits ? 
It was nothing less than the conviction that we 
represented—small, weak, and unworthy as we were— 
the very highest vocation of man—research. We felt 
that we belonged to the larger university not made by 
hands, eternal in the world of science and learning; 
that we were not so much an institution as a state of 
mind and that wherever and to what extent the ideals 
that inspired us reigned we were at home; that re- 
search is nothing less than a religion; that every 
advance in knowledge to-day may set free energies 
that benefit the whole race to-morrow. We believed 
that there was no joy in the world like the eureka joy 
of discovery in the heart of an investigator who has 
wrung a new secret from nature and advanced ever so 
little the gospel of truth, whether to confirm faith, 
prevent illness, deepen self-knowledge and that of so- 
ciety, or give man mastery over the physical, chem- 
ical, biological, social, and psychic energies that con- 
trol the world to-day and will do so more to-morrow. 
We realized that the professor in a university is a 
very different man from one in a college; that he must 
specialize more and keep in vital rapport with every- 
thing that every creative mind in his field is doing the 
world over; that he must hear every syllable that the 
muse of his department utters to everybody every- 
where and invite it to speak new words through him; 
that there is a vital sense in which he stands in closer 
relation to his coworkers in other lands than to his 
338 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
colleagues in the same building; that the momentum 
of the elan vital, which has animated the whole evolu- 
tionary process and made every advance, has its high- 
est expression in him and impels him to penetrate a 
little farther into the unknown, to erect some “kiosk 
in Kamchatka” where he can wrest some new secret 
from the sphinx, realizing that she has far more to 
reveal than all she has yet told; that whenever he 
grows impotent to do this he becomes only an emeritus 
knight of the Holy Ghost of science; that it is perhaps 
the hardest thing in the world to become and remain a 
productive investigator, up to the minute in all the 
journals and books he must read, observations he 
must make, and experiences he must give himself, 
alert in the incessant alterations and adaptations need- 
ful to put home to her the questions he asks nature 
and to get her answer. 
There is so much that is new to-day and will be 
obsolete to-morrow that it is very hard to maintain 
la fonction du reelle and resist the inertia that impels us 
all to take some kind of flight from reality and its 
ever pressing devoir present by lapsing to the easy 
life. Thus research is hard and the life it demands is 
beset with dangers, so that many are always falling 
by the way without giving any sign of their demise to 
others. But for every soul charged with the spirit of 
adventure, which has impelled every great advance of 
the race in the past and takes this supreme form 
to-day, all these dangers have their abundant compen- 
sation. The best experts who devote themselves to 
this work do so because they love it. Many of them 
might have achieved large worldly success in other 
fields and utilized the patent office to the uttermost. 
But they know the price they pay and are willing. 
They are and must be absolutely free, not only to 
teach, investigate, and specialize perhaps narrowly, 
but also to develop their individuality to the limit with 
339 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
entire freedom. The university ought to be the freest 
spot on earth, where human nature in its most varie- 
gated and acuminated types can blossom and bear 
fruit. The factory type of efficiency has no place 
here. Of course each must make himself as efficient 
as possible, but in his own way and independently of 
all outer constraint, and the organizer from without 
who imposes administrative mechanism upon such 
minds may be an almost unmitigated curse. 
To my mind one of the most pathetic and cogent 
illustrations of the fact that the university is becoming 
the real church of the future is found in the most 
elaborate parliamentary report ever published in 
Great Britain, containing some forty volumes and 
which was nearly nineteen years in the making, cover- 
ing every British charity of every kind, some twenty 
thousand in all. The conclusion of this committee is 
that of all the objects of charity the highest education 
has proven wisest, best, and most efficient, and that 
for two chief reasons: first, because the superior 
integrity and quality of the trustees who consent to 
administer such funds, together with the intelligent 
appreciation of those aided by them, combine to fur- 
nish the best guarantee that they will be kept and per- 
petually administered in the purpose and spirit of the 
founder whose name they may bear; and, second, be- 
cause in improving higher education all other good 
causes are most effectively aided. 
Since the first endowment of research in the Greek 
Academy, Porch, Grove, and Garden, from which all 
our higher institutions have sprung, thousands of 
spontaneous, free-will offerings have borne tangible 
witness to the sentiments so often and vividly taught 
by Plato, that in all the world there is no more worthy 
object of reverence, love, and service, and none that 
it pays a civilization better to help to its fullest devel- 
opment than well-born, well-bred, gifted, and trained 
340 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
young men who desire to be masters in an age when 
experts decide all things, since in them is the hope and 
the future leadership of the world, and to help them to 
more of the knowledge that is power is the highest 
service one generation can render the next. And how 
this has appealed to all ages! Oxford and Cambridge 
have i,800 separate endowed fellowships and scholar- 
ships, to say nothing of the smaller “exhibitions.” 
Leipzig has 407 distinct funds, the oldest dating 1325, 
and wherever the higher academic life has flourished 
we find scores of memorials bearing the names of hus- 
bands, wives, parents, children, and providing for 
students of some special class, locality, or establishing 
or benefiting some new department or line of investi- 
gation, theoretical or practical; and now that the rap- 
port of business, government, and all social and cul- 
tural institutions is so close with science, all who give 
greatly and wisely to its advancement, or who make 
or suggest bequests, have a new noblesse oblige to 
consider. 
Our courage was great because we felt that, com- 
pared with our means and size, we were fitting more 
men for higher degrees and chairs in other institu- 
tions; were publishing more original contributions; 
maintained closer and more inspiring contact with our 
advanced students and gave them more help outside 
the classroom; were freer, because no one here had 
ever suffered in any way for his opinions; had more 
autonomy in our departments, each of which was a 
law unto itself; had fewer rules and formalities; had 
a president who was more professor than adminis- 
trator ; and spent less time and energy in seeking con- 
tributions and publicity, than any institution in the 
land. 
Leadership of a university thus conceived requires 
not only the widest but the wisest and most incessant 
orientation, more so, in a sense, than does statecraft, 
341 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
because its function is to train leaders, since, as uni- 
versities go, so the country will go a generation later. 
The really wise and competent head of a modern, and 
especially of a new university ought to attain and 
retain close and vital rapport with similar institutions, 
not merely his immediate competitors but throughout 
the world. The time is at hand when university rec- 
torates, presidencies, chancellorships, or whatever 
their name, can no longer be filled by any professor or 
even outsider who can secure election, but will require 
men who, whatever else they are or know, are experts 
in the history of the higher culture and its institutions 
who know the lessons of ancient Greece and Rome, the 
story of medieval universities, first under the Church 
and then the State, of the guilds of scholars, the rise 
and present status of learned societies and academies, 
the great reforms of the past and the yet more signifi- 
cant reconstructions now evolving, the governmental 
patronage of learning and research from the day of 
the Medici down to contemporary legislation for 
higher institutions, national and state, present-day 
centralization and the efforts against it in France, the 
many universities lately established by colonial poli- 
cies, the world-wide movement of university exten- 
sion, etc. He must suggest to his colleagues ways and 
means for achieving their own ideals, even if they are 
unconscious ones; help free investigators to be the 
supermen they are called to be, each in his own way; 
have a minimum of arbitrary authority and a maxi- 
mum of faculty cooperation; catch and sympatheti- 
cally respond to and find his chief inspiration in the 
fondest, highest, if secret, aspirations of each of his 
coworkers, who must not be content with the stale 
ways of the present perfervid competition for dollars 
and students or with mere horizontal expansion, the 
multiplication of machinery or devices for efficiency 
of factory type, but study precedents, culture trends, 
342 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
and believe profoundly in the power of faculty democ- 
ratization and do his utmost to develop it, regardless 
of his own personal or official prestige or authority. 
On the continent of Europe, mayors are trained 
professional experts and cities vie with each other 
competitively for their services and find they can well 
afford to do so, for their special training means vast 
economies. Universities in this country, if not the 
world over, would surely profit quite as much as cities 
by this method. To my mind there should always be 
a specialist in every institution in what might be called 
higher pedagogy and in academic history, whose busi- 
ness it should be to keep keenly alive to all that is 
doing in academic life the world over. Especially now, 
when these changes are so rapid, some one must spend 
much time in the outlook tower, and I would even 
hazard the strong opinion that had foreign institu- 
tions had a specialist in the conning tower, intent on 
studying the ever changing signs of the times and 
trained in academic statesmanship, many, if not most, 
of the errors that have caused our own and foreign 
universities so much waste of energy in recent years, 
might have been avoided. As the academic field be- 
comes larger and its problems more intricate, this sur- 
vey must be ever wider and ever renewed. 
Just before the war, academic unrest was greater 
than ever before, and the future never promised so 
many important changes. Certain abuses, both large 
and small, had crept in and there were vicious tenden- 
cies, and a great reform seemed impending. Begin- 
ning with the Teutonic countries, since 1907 the as- 
sistant professors and docents had developed a strong 
interinstitutional organization against the head or full 
professors. The unprecedentedly rapid growth in the 
size of the student body everywhere had resulted in 
what Eulenberg called a lush “Nachwuchs” of assist- 
ants of all grades. Statistics show that on the average 
343 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
the Extraordinarii or assistant professors received 
this apointment at the age of 37, at an average salary 
of $523, and remained in this position nearly 20 years, 
attaining an average salary of $1,200, before promo- 
tion, at the average age of 57. These constituted, 
with the docents, about half the teaching personnel of 
German institutions, and they often had neither seat 
nor vote in the faculty and little participation in the 
corporate life of the institution. (In the municipal 
university which opened at Frankfurt in 1915 it was 
even proposed to have a president of the American 
type so as to safeguard the assistants from the oppres- 
sion of the full professors.) Some years ago Tubin- 
gen, and later Zurich, radically revised their ancient 
statutes to remedy these evils, and the projected uni- 
versity at Hamburg planned to go yet further. The 
two newer universities in Hungary, at Pressburg and 
Debreczen, and the private one at Hongkong, pro- 
posed more liberty and showed more appreciation of 
the enthusiasm and ideals of the younger members of 
the faculty. 
Even students in Germany caught the spirit of 
unrest, if not revolution, and had a strong interinsti- 
tutional organization. Their pamphlets boldly de- 
manded better methods of teaching and printed out- 
lines of professors’ lectures. An attempt was made to 
develop a sentiment that no instructor should ever 
repeat in a lecture anything he had published. They 
called for more options, especially greater freedom of 
choice in the selection of subjects for their theses and 
more meaty topics for them, that their work be not 
made merely ancillary to that of the professor. They 
further demanded personal rights to what they pro- 
duced or discovered in their work, a longer period of 
hospitieren or of trying out each course before they 
finally signed for it, more and better seminaries with 
better tests for admission, more practical courses, bet- 
344 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
ter access to books, journals and library facilities gen- 
erally, less overcrowding and more elimination all the 
way from Ober-Sekunda in the Gymnasium to the 
doctorate; better social opportunities, dormitories, 
more personal contact with the professors, less restric- 
tions on their personal liberty, reform of the corps, 
honor system, and the Mensur. This unrest, although 
it seemed ominous to conservatism, could not fail to 
prevent waste and bring reform. 
In the English universities agitation took many 
forms, from Lord Curzon’s demand for reforms in 
1909 to Tillgard’s in 1913. Here the protestants 
argued that these institutions were still breeding that 
flower of national life, the English gentleman, but de- 
manded better library facilities than the individual 
colleges, with their wasteful duplication, afforded, and 
especially more of what the critics so strenuously in- 
sisted was lacking and that parliament should enforce, 
namely, teaching and research. Thus the deepening 
sense that something rather radical had to be done 
seemed crystallizing into just what that something 
should be. In France and in Russia unrest was 
greater and reforms even more loudly demanded. 
In this country academic unrest has been largely 
directed against organization and administration. In 
old days the college president, though he usually 
taught, was supreme and autocratic, and as leading 
institutions grew and he ceased to teach, the concen- 
tration of power in his hands became altogether ex- 
cessive. The foundation of new institutions, the 
Hopkins, and a little later Stanford and Chicago, 
greatly augmented his power under our system. He 
had to determine the departments, select professors, 
fix their status, build, organize, represent the institu- 
tion to the board and public and perhaps the legisla- 
ture, plunge into the mad, wasteful competition for 
students and money, and lay supply pipes to every 
345 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
institution that could feed his. Never was the presi- 
dential function so suddenly enlarged nor its power so 
great and uncontrolled as a decade ago. Even the 
University of Virginia and other southern universi- 
ties, which had only a president of the faculty elected 
by its members, fell into line, and a reaction toward 
democratization, which in its extreme form seemed 
sometimes almost to adopt the slogan, “Delindus est 
prex” was inevitable. In the Cattell movement abun- 
dant incidents of arrogance and arbitrary, if not 
usurped, power were collected, and it was even in- 
sisted that although charters or conditions of bequest, 
to say nothing of American tradition, would have to be 
revised, the president should be only chairman of the 
faculty, elected perhaps annually by them, and in the 
literature of this movement we find occasionally the 
radical plea that some or all of the powers of the board 
should be turned over to the faculty, who should at 
least be given control of the annual budget. 
More lately the movement of protest here was 
against the autocracy of the dean, whom the president 
had created in his own image and who sometimes ex- 
ercised a power that he would never dare to do, and 
who in large institutions constructed a mechanism of 
rules, methods, procedures, and standards that have 
almost come to monopolize the deliberations of the 
Association of American Universities, which fortu- 
nately cannot prescribe or legislate for its individual 
members. University deans have often created rules 
which they themselves can suspend for individuals, 
and this has greatly augmented their power. It is 
they largely who have broken up knowledge into 
standardized units of hours, weeks, terms, credits, 
blocking every short cut for superior minds and mak- 
ing a bureaucracy which represses personal initiative 
and legitimate ambition. Just before the war perhaps 
we heard most remonstrance against head professors, 
346 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
and statements that the assistant professors and 
younger instructors in their departments were en- 
tirely at their mercy, that they were burdened with 
the drudgery of drills, examinations, markings (all at 
small pay) while their chiefs took the credit, so that 
the best years of the best young men, who are the most 
precious asset of any institution, or even of civiliza- 
tion, were being wasted. Indeed, we have vivid pic- 
tures of the hardships which often crush out the 
ambitions of young aspirants for professorial honors 
and tend to make them, if they ever do “arrive,” parts 
of a machine with no ideals of what sacred academic 
freedom really means. Happily the best sentiment of 
,the best professors now organized interinstitutionally 
to safeguard their own interests and those of their 
institutions represents a most wholesome and needed 
movement which is sure to prevail. 
Thus at the outbreak of the war, with all these and 
many more problems pressing for solution, with the 
wholesome influence of de-denominalization and stim- 
ulus to higher standards and comparative views 
emanating from the Carnegie Foundation, and with 
the very slow and hard but real progress we were 
making in developing the true university spirit in this 
practical and material age and land, it seemed as 
though we were slowly but surely entering upon a new 
era. 
Then came the war with all its perturbations and 
distractions. When we entered it, faculties and, still 
more, student bodies were depleted, the S. A. T. C. 
was introduced, and although our institutions suffered 
less than those in Europe, nevertheless most of the 
above problems were forgotten and their promise un- 
realized, and necessarily there was a great deal of 
marking time while all our academic machinery ran 
on a loose pulley. The rapidly increasing high cost 
of living gave financial problems the supreme place in 
347 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
every academic institution. Hence the first result of 
the war was necessarily fevered “drives” to augment 
funds, especially for professorial salaries. Although 
academic halls were again crowded and as never be- 
fore, the pressing question was not the extension of 
academic work or the solution of prewar problems but 
an active and almost desperate struggle to live. Many 
instructors were unable to continue teaching and left 
for more lucrative fields. 
Meanwhile the practical applications of science 
received indirectly a great stimulus from the war, and 
some departments, particularly perhaps those of 
chemistry and psychology, found themselves more or 
less in the situation in which geology had long been, 
where pure science must compete at great disadvan- 
tage with applied science. In this situation not only 
these departments but, to some extent, physics and 
economics also were subjected to the strongest tempta- 
tions to turn from culture to Kultur. Perhaps in no 
field was this temptation stronger than in psychology, 
for the demands of business in the way of advertising, 
salesmanship, fitting the man for the job, etc., were 
importunate and sudden. Scores of the best minds in 
this department were stimulated first of all by the 
war, which had shown the vast economies of personnel 
work for the army, to devote themselves to devising 
innumerable tests for every kind of excellence or de- 
fect and measuring native or acquired ability for 
scores of occupations, and even fitness for college 
entrance. The sudden realization by psychologists 
and by the public of the vast economic importance of 
assaying human nature as a chief factor in production 
has given this science a very wide currency in popu- 
larity and a real usefulness which it never enjoyed 
before. But, on the other hand, it must not be for- 
gotten that all this work has added very little, if any- 
thing, to our real knowledge of man, and in that re- 
348 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
spect this movement inclines far more to Kultur 
than to culture. 
The present situation, thus, is unprecedentedly full 
of possibilities good and bad. Never was so much 
sagacity demanded on the part of leaders in real uni- 
versity work as now. The problems now facing us 
are not chiefly those of 1914 but new and larger ones. 
Funds have poured into all coffers but there are new 
demands and openings for usefulness for which the 
present is the psychological moment. The future was 
never so pregnant and never so uncertain. No really 
great academic statesman, which the hour so impera- 
tively demands and who proverbially ought to appear 
if needs make men, has arisen. Our religious life and 
institutions need a new soul; our national morale, so 
high during the war, has sunk to an ominously low 
level; national, corporate, and individual selfishness 
are striving to get into the saddle; the solution of the 
problems of labor and capital needs intelligence of a 
higher order than we have yet been able to produce; 
our statecraft should take on international dimen- 
sions; our school system needs not more mechanism, 
which scores of experts have lately developed to such 
ominous proportions, but a new vital inspiration in the 
spirit of the great reformers of the past; in the prob- 
lems of sex, children, and the family everything bids 
us go back again to first principles; in the domain of 
technic and inventions, in all the arts of war and 
peace, competition is to be international as never be- 
fore ; the great problems of race and immigration con- 
front us; the question of the relative value of the 
international and national ideals demands an answer; 
and how can we set a backfire to bolshevism or to the 
violent programmes of the “Reds”? 
Have our higher educational institutions found or 
can they make the pioneers which the exigencies of 
the hour demand? This is the present form of the 
349 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
great problem whether or not democracy, to which the 
world has so rapidly and precipitately come, is, after 
all, the best form of government; whether this coun- 
try, its chief representative in the world, is setting the 
fittest pattern for others to follow, and whether its 
achievement and success have been so signal as to 
convince the world that on the whole it is the best for 
all mankind. It is to solve such pressing problems of 
the hour, where the highest interests of mankind are 
involved, that universities were first created, and it is 
this alone that gives them their present raison d’etre. 
They should feel it their supreme duty to assume such 
tasks and grapple with such problems, and should feel 
responsible for seeing to it that they are solved up to 
the very limit of human capacity, while even the in- 
vestigator should feel that science itself is only an 
organ for the further development of the human race, 
to which even its interests must be subordinated. 
Under our American system the difference be- 
tween the board, which administers and, subject to 
the condition of the gift, owns all its funds, and is 
made up of business and professional men, on the one 
hand, and the faculty on the other, is generally very 
great, greater usually than either suspects, and to the 
president falls the often very difficult task of media- 
tion between the two. He has to represent each to the 
other. When I first came to Clark, Senator Hoar told 
me in the presence of the board that one of my chief 
functions was to educate him and its other members. 
In a no less pregnant sense faculties, especially 
younger members, have to be educated in ways that 
involve no less tact and watchfulness to enable them 
occasionally to glimpse the attitude of the board. 
Sometimes the latter may be swept by a special senti- 
ment or public opinion to drastic action that results in 
the most critical tension, and there are also groups in 
every faculty that are capable of any folly. 
350 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
If in 1893 our dissatisfied instructors had had the 
sagacity to press home upon Mr. Clark himself, as 
Judge Devens had done as a representative of the 
board, the question of just what his ultimate inten- 
tions were, our crisis might have had a very different 
issue. I once had the experience in later years of a 
formal visitation by a majority of our staff, led by an 
able but disaffected new member, with a list of de- 
mands inspired by him which were utterly impossible 
and which, if persisted in, would have precipitated the 
gravest issue between the two bodies. Yet less than 
two years later these very professors, when I with- 
drew leaving the fate of their quondam leader in their 
hands, voted unanimously that he should leave the 
university. On another occasion the board would 
have passed a vote excluding women from the uni- 
versity in any capacity but for my earnest plea to wait 
until the next meeting, when I was able to show that 
their presence had been recognized and provided for 
by more than a dozen previous votes they had passed, 
and that such drastic and immediate action would 
greatly cripple some of our departments and involve 
the breaking of engagements to which we were bound. 
On another occasion I had to present certain summary 
demands that I could not restrain the faculty from 
making, which would have involved abdication of cer- 
tain powers given to the Board by our very charter. I 
could only resort to the Fabian policy of delay, and 
with time these demands were partly forgotten and 
partly waived. Thus even in a small institution where 
the president is two thirds professor, where each de- 
partment is a law to itself, and with a board which has 
always exceptionally refrained from interference in 
the internal or scholastic management, the adminis- 
trative officer often finds himself between the upper 
and the nether millstone. 
Faculty representation on the board is inevitable 
351 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
and has begun in many places, and this is sure 
to be a method of rapprochement between the edu- 
cational and financial functions. It is of basal 
importance that the faculty control all teaching ap- 
pointments. But, on the other hand, a presiding offi- 
cer responsible to the board, even if appointed by the 
faculty, will always be necessary. It is, therefore, in 
my view a grave fault that in the unprecedented de- 
velopment which departments of education have lately 
had in this country no provision whatever is made in 
any of them for training for presidencies or even 
deanships, to which there are now scores of appoint- 
ments made annually in this country. It would almost 
seem as though university should be, to some degree, 
separated from college administration, so diverse are 
the methods and aims of the two. 
We have already a formidable and growing list 
of institutions in this country devoted solely to re- 
search in which little or no teaching is done, like the 
Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, Woods Hole, 
astronomical observatories, etc., and the problem of a 
vast national university at Washington, coordinating 
the theoretical and practical and utilizing the vast 
museums and libraries of the Capital, is always recur- 
ring. Our ablest scientific leaders, however, differ 
widely as to how and to what extent the functions of 
investigation and teaching should be united or sepa- 
rated. 
Another perennial problem discussed at every 
pedagogic meeting is the relation of academic to sec- 
ondary education. Of old, the college dictated and 
prescribed to fitting schools to a degree that made 
them abjectly servile, but of late the wholesome senti- 
ment has grown apace that these latter institutions 
have their own independent ends and must do for the 
boys and girls who frequent them the best they can to 
fit them at their stage for life. It is this almost more 
352 CLARK UNIVERSITY 
than anything else which has interfered with real 
democracy in education and prevented the high school 
from becoming, as it should, the people’s college. 
As I close this record, made upon my own retire- 
ment after thirty-one years of service, it is a great 
satisfaction to believe that Clark University is about 
to enter upon a new and larger career. If there has 
been any waste—and I think this very slight as the 
heads of both University and College have been also 
professors—it will now be entirely removed. Small 
as Clark University is, it has really an enviable record. 
Its two products are, the one represented by its gradu- 
ates and former students who are found in nearly 
every faculty of the country and so many of whom 
have already achieved signal distinction, since nearly 
every one who comes here is preparing for a teaching 
position in some higher academic institution. Our 
alumni are, as compared with the graduates of other 
institutions, without large wealth and only three of 
them are reputed millionaires, so that we can never 
expect to draw largely upon this body for additions to 
our resources. But, on the other hand, their loyalty 
to the institution is, I believe, altogether exceptional, 
as I have had very special reasons to observe since 
my retirement. Some conviction of this has been 
gained from the several hundred letters that have 
come to me from the alumni. 
Our other distinction is our scientific productivity 
which, as many outsiders have testified, has been, in 
proportion to our size and wealth, far in excess of that 
of any other institution. The one hundred and four 
feet of shelving filled with journals, books, memoirs, 
and other publications by Clark men it would be ab- 
surd, of course, to measure by quantity, but we believe 
that in quality it compares favorably with the output 
of other institutions. 
353 CHAPTER VIII 
PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
I. At the Johns Hopkins—The field of instruction there and the 
researches undertaken by the department. 
II. Evolution—My early passion for the genetic view of things 
which began with Hegel and culminated in Darwin, Spencer, 
Haeckel andWeismann—History of developmental^stages with 
links bridging all gaps as the most perfect form of knowledge 
—Psychology now in a pre-evolutionary age, studying a cross- 
section of the adult mind, hyper-methodic, and based more on 
physics than on biology—Juvenile experiences favoring this 
penchant—The soul as truly a product of evolution as the 
body, which has no organ or function not found in animals— 
My general course on the development of life and mind—Its 
great educational value despite its superficiality—The main 
topics treated. 
III. The courses on animal life, habits, and instincts—Method and 
ground covered—The approach of the naturalist and the method 
of the laboratory—The species described from protozoa to 
the Java man—Ideals and needs in this field but lack of inter- 
est on the part of students—Original work here. 
IV. Child study—Brief history of the movement—Merit and de- 
fect of its methods—Description of the latter—Pioneers in 
this field—Topics of questionnaires and papers on the subject 
at Clark—Attempts to coordinate child study with the scores 
of child welfare organizations listed—The reminiscent and 
observational approach—The Binet-Simon method—The con- 
ferences at Clark—The Children’s Institute and its personnel 
—The Pedagogical Museum—The Journal of Applied Psy- 
chology—Ulterior plans and disappointments. 
V. Sex psychology and pedagogy—Causes of the hyper-function 
of this element in man—How sex differs from all other peda- 
gogy—Freudianism: its advent, value, and defects—Pedagogic 
dangers here—Experience and conclusions on teaching sex 
subj ects. 
VI. Food and appetite—The function of hunger in natural selec- 
tion and in the history of the animal world—Appergus from 
various sources-—The contributions of the Pavlov school in 
contrast to that of Wundt—Its value as a method—The con- 
354 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
tributions of the new endocrinology to psychology—Concep- 
tions of appetite—The conditioned reflex and its pedagogic 
value—Its resolution of psychology into physiology, the real 
source of behaviorism—The sialogic reflex—The inferences 
for epistemology—What is cerebral hunger?—Result of fast- 
ing experiments—Culmination in morale. 
VII. Religious psychology—The development of this course the 
consummation of eclaircissement—Religious psychoanalysis as 
the basis of new affirmations—Completion of the eschatology 
of Schweitzer—The quintessence of my Jesus, the Christ, in 
the Light of Psychology—The death and resurrection motif, 
its value for life and its normative influence in literature— 
Berkeleyism a symbol of emancipation here—All the super- 
natural a symbol. 
VIII. Some Outlook Tower views of present-day psychology— 
Five insoluble problems: the psychophysic law, Lange-James 
theory, parallelism and interaction, structural and functional, 
introspection versus behaviorism—Current trends, present 
prospects, and needs in this field—Group souls as real as those 
of individuals—Enumeration of the points which the psychol- 
ogy of the future will have in common with sociology— 
My experiences in trying to know myself—The eight deeper 
tests: (i) health, (2) second breath, (3) free movement up 
and down the pleasure-pain scale, (4) sympathy, (5) love 
of nature, (6) sublimation, (7) activity vs. passivity, (8) 
loyalty—The type of man needed for psychological leadership. 
I 
Up to the time of leaving the Johns Hopkins, 
besides my own experimental work in psychology and 
that of my students as reported at the end of Chapter 
VI, I had published the following: A Study of Volun- 
tary Muscular Action, with Professor Kronecker; A 
Study of the Reaction Time in Indirect Vision, with 
Von Kries; a myological study with Ludwig of Leip- 
zig (these three printed in German) ; a paper on color 
perception; The Muscular Perception of Space; and 
Recent Researches on Hypnotism. 
I had been intensely impressed with the idea, to 
most a novel one then, of subjecting psychic processes 
to the control of scientific and experimental methods, 
an idea that had originated in physiology, which had 
355 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
thus studied vital processes and within the domain of 
which originated what was then called the new or 
scientific psychology. It was then in the golden period 
of its development. This ideal owed much to Fechner 
and to the great attention then given to the psycho- 
physic law, which we have now almost forgotten and 
which had perhaps its earliest and most classic illus- 
tration in the epoch-making studies of tactile sensa- 
tions by Weber and Fechner which had been so labori- 
ously carried out and written and rewritten in Latin 
and German. Of the further development of this im- 
pulse Wundt was the pioneer. 
This idea of subjecting psychic processes to exact, 
objective, and experimental methods had become al- 
most an obsession with me, and along with this was the 
ideal of going back to genetically elemental processes 
like the dermal sensations and subjecting all these to 
measurements in terms of space, time, number, etc. 
We glimpsed dimly the wider biologic background 
which should never be lost sight of in this field, and 
the Hopkins papers show abundant traces of the 
burgeoning of introspection, although none of us then 
ever dreamed of the great role it was later to play. 
We did not, even in these experimental papers, limit 
ourselves very rigidly to the actual findings under con- 
ditions we prescribed but always felt it necessary to 
give expression somewhere to hints, appergus, and 
suggestions for future work. 
Moreover, it was then impossible in general, and 
perhaps particularly for me, to entirely eliminate 
philosophical and even educational interests so that to 
this period also belong several other much belabored 
papers, especially “The Moral and Religious Training 
of Children,” 1 “Chairs of Pedagogy in our Higher 
Institutions of Learning,” 2 “The Education of the 
1 Princeton Rev., io :26-48. 
2 Bur. of Ed. Circulars of Information, No. 2, 1882, 35-44. 
356 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
Will,”3 “The Contents of Children’s Minds,”4 “New 
Departures in Education,” 5 and perhaps especially 
“The New Psychology” 6 and “Experimental Psychol- 
ogy” ;7 “The Story of a Sand Pile,”8 and three 
volumes, namely, Hints Towards a Select and De- 
scriptive Bibliography of Education (with J. M. 
Mansfield), which listed and evaluated the chief 
works on education by topics and grades; Methods of 
Teaching History, in which seventeen of our leading 
academic teachers of this subject described at length 
their methods. (It was my purpose to make this lat- 
ter volume the first of a series on different academic 
topics, but there was so much mutual criticism, not to 
say rivalry, developed by a method so comparative 
that the work of editing such a series became too diffi- 
cult and even painful and the plan was abandoned.) 
To this period also belongs my How to Teach Reading 
and What to Read in School. 
Thus the Hopkins activities, although they were 
intense and had a definite or experimental focus, were 
nevertheless diverse and somewhat scattered. 
II 
As soon as I first heard it in my youth I think 
I must have been almost hypnotized by the word “evo- 
lution,” which was music to my ear and seemed to 
fit my mouth better than any other. I cannot conceive 
why I seemed thus predisposed to an interest in every- 
thing that could be brought under that term. Of 
course on the farm I was constantly realizing that 
everything animate grew, but every country boy knew 
this. As a lad my mother remembered that I had 
8 Princeton Rev., 10:306-325. 
* Princeton Rev., 111249-272. Same in Ped. Sem., June, 1891. 
* No. Am. Rev., 140:144-152. 
8 Andover Rev., 1885 (3:120-135; 239-248). 
7 Mind, 10:245-249. 
*Scrib., 3:690-696. 
357 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
been rather unusually inquisitive about the origin of 
babies, as indeed every child is more or less at the 
same period; and I used to ask if God, whom I 
always conceived as an old man, had ever been a 
baby, and the same of the devil. I think my curiosity 
somehow got an early tilt toward origins, and even 
in college I brought much censure upon myself by 
advocating the view that man had sprung from ape- 
hood. Myths and fairy tales of metamorphosis, too, 
had a fascination. One of my boyish collections was 
of seeds of every kind I could gather and one of my 
most frequent marvelings was at their potency to be- 
come complete plants or trees. I often looked for 
embryos among the entrails of animals butchered on 
the farm and of birds and beasts I shot. I wrote 
a crude college essay on the nebular hypothesis and 
was immensely impressed by my first sight of the 
Hitchcock saurians in the Amherst museum, so much 
so that I was stimulated to dabble in paleontology. 
But it was in the field of philosophy that this 
penchant found its first deployment. For my Ger- 
man teacher, Trendelenberg, as I have said, werden 
or “becoming” was the prime category and the mother 
of all others, and this helped to predispose me to 
accept all I could understand of the Hegelian logic, 
in which all innate ideas evolve by an inner necessity 
from those that precede, by his three steps—thesis, 
antithesis, synthesis—which gave the key not only 
to his history of philosophy but to his philosophy of 
history, as God coming to consciousness in man. To 
conceive the Divine as a system of ganglia of reason 
which underlay and shaped all things seemed to me 
the consummation of philosophic endeavor. Schel- 
ling’s system in my mind ranked next because it 
treated all organic and even inorganic nature as steps 
in the unfoldment of a mighty process. Matter was 
sleeping mind. Mind was matter awakened, and 
358 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
vegetable and animal life and mind showed the stages 
of this awakening. Thus there was a kind of mystic, 
poetic stage of prelusion by which Darwin, Huxley, 
Spencer, Haeckel, and even Tyndall were, it seemed 
to me, prepared for in my philosophic history, and 
when these latter loomed large upon my horizon they 
were devoured with the utmost avidity. This was a 
stage of my development that was perhaps most rapid 
during the Antioch period, at which also I became 
most deeply interested and read most widely in the 
higher criticism which began with the Tubingen 
school. 
To conceive the whole world, material and spirit- 
ual, as an organic unity, to eliminate all breaks and 
supernaturalism, and to realize that everything within 
and without was hoary with age, so that in most 
experiences we were dealing only with the topmost 
twigs of vast but deeply buried trees, gave me a to- 
tally new aspect of life. Inconsistencies troubled 
me little but I was everywhere in avid quest of illus- 
trations of developmental stages to span all chasms, 
and I~conceived all creative processes as still active, 
all about me, and above all felt that there was nothing 
really dead but that there was everywhere life 
abounding, filling all possibilities everywhere, which 
gave and still gives the deepest intellectual satisfac- 
tion that I have ever known. I was bat-eyed to diffi- 
culties and impatient at objections, and had a blind 
spot in my mind for every break in the developmental 
order and implicit faith that if there anywhere seemed 
to be gaps it was only because we lacked adequate 
knowledge. Somehow, sometime it would be proved 
to the silencing of all doubters that all worlds and 
all in them had developed very gradually and by an 
inner and unremitting impulsion from cosmic mist 
and nebulae—and perhaps even this would be resolved 
into something more primitive—while all religions, 
359 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
gods, heavens, immortalities, were made by mansoul, 
of which a perfect God was perhaps the noblest cre- 
ation; that man sprang from primeval amoeba of 
which chemistry would some time tell us the origin 
and perhaps be able to reproduce; that every human 
institution, organization, and even science itself were 
but the unfoldment of infantile impulses in man, the 
sources of which could be tracecT back to the very 
dawn of the psyche in the lowest forms of animal 
life; that spontaneous generation, although not 
proved, must somehow be true; that life had a chem- 
ical basis; and that perhaps even atoms, like 
Haeckel’s plastidules, had souls of which the human 
psyche was only an aggregation. And I could even 
sympathize with Fechner’s dreameries about souls of 
molecules, plants, and planets. 
In the days when my interest in child study was 
at its height I was once introduced to an audience 
by an overzealous friend as the Darwin of the mind, 
and extravagant and absurd as I knew thisTo be, it 
gave me more inner satisfaction than any compliment 
ever paid me by the most perfervid friend. To con- 
tribute ever so little to introduce evolutionary con- 
cepts into psychology, where they were practically 
unknown, and to advance the view that there were 
just as many rudiments and vestiges in our psychic 
activity and make-up as in our bodies and that the 
former was just as much a product of slow evolu- 
tionary tendencies as the latter, comprised about all 
my insights and ambitions. Along with this went 
an ever deepening realization that psychology had felt 
the influence of Darwinism vastly less than any other 
science that dealt with life; that it lived, moved, and 
had its being in a preevolutionary age; that genetic 
studies here were not appreciated; and that psycho- 
logical orthodoxy had no scintilla of interest in the 
ulterior and to me ever recurring problem of how 
360 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
psychic traits and trends arose in the phylum or even 
in the individual. The study of a cross-section of 
the mature mind and a description of how it responded 
to the general incitements of the environment or even 
to the controlled conditions of the laboratory, valuable 
and interesting as these were, seemed to me only the 
first stages of any inquiry and to be applicable only 
to a very small part of psychic life. 
I was also early impressed with the very fruitful 
conception that psychic degenerations could never be 
completely understood unless we also considered them 
as always involving more or less devolutionary 
changes; that instincts, feelings, emotions, and senti- 
ments were vastly older and more all-determining 
than the intellect; and that scientific psychology 
was becoming more and more prone to flout the good 
old Aristotelian dictum to the effect that it was only 
affectation to treat any subject by more exact methods 
than the subject matter required. Hence I felt that 
laboratory psychology had been influenced too much 
by the exact physical sciences and not enough by 
biology, not only in its quest for psychic elements by 
analyzing controlled experience in the laboratory but 
also by hypermethodic mathematical treatment of its 
findings, which should have laid to heart more than it 
did the results that had sprung from the collapse of 
Herbartian and later the Fechnerian equations. 
From this point of view, too, it seemed that the im- 
portance being attached to the differences between 
structural and functional had been overestimated and 
that in this respect, as in so many others, psychology 
had emancipated itself from metaphysics hardly more 
than the psychic researchers had from the religious 
problem of the perdurability of the soul after death. 
It seemed to me just as necessary for a scientific 
psychology to be as independent of the questions of 
philosophy as the latter had so effectively sought to 
361 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
free itself from theological influences. From this 
standpoint I always had a very warm interest, too, in 
the Comtean hierarchy of sciences,~and I confess to 
a warm side always for even the radical reconstruc- 
tions of sociology laid down in his Politique Positive 
and his worship of the intuitive elements of the soul, 
which he ~ found best embodied in Das Ewige 
Weibliche. 
With such appergus I naturally felt profoundly 
that the taboo which the Church and many higher 
educational institutions laid upon the teaching of evo- 
lution was hardly less than an emasculation of the 
ephebic mind. It interdicted the application of the 
greatest intellectual stimulus of the modern age. It 
conducted youth through its most active nascent 
stages of growth up to maturity sheltered from the 
most stimulating of all modern culture influences and 
brought it into active life crippled and deformed. I 
felt that biology in its large scientific aspect and with 
its rich practical results for hygiene and mental, 
moral, and physical regimen and its immense per- 
spective and unprecedented spur, ought to be taught 
in every high school, and it seemed to me anticultural, 
mechanical, and even materialistic to have made, as 
we did, physics the door through which young people 
entered the vast temple of science. It seemed to me 
a culture calamity without precedent that the enthu- 
siasm that every able and trained mind the world 
over felt for evolution, which was really their con- 
fessed or unconfessed religion, was not encouraged 
to spread its benign infection wherever adolescents 
were taught, for where it had free course it brought 
an eclaircissement from which so many dated the birth 
of a new intellectual life. I believed that the culture 
historian of the future would rank the ban now being 
placed upon the teaching of evolution as no whit less 
noxious, if not in a sense more so, than the inter- 
362 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
diction of the church upon science at its dawn. It 
even seemed to me that evolution rightly and broadly 
interpreted gave a new basis for democracy and gov- 
ernment of, for, and by the people because the basal 
assumption of this political ideal is that the folk-soul 
can be trusted, and this trust can never be complete 
until we fully realize that everything great and good 
in the world, including religion, science, and the social 
and industrial order, has sprung out of the unfathom- 
able depths of human nature. All this fadged in 
with the view that the history of philosophy as gen- 
erally taught was one-sided and narrow because it did 
not include the history of science—due recognition 
to which is just beginning to be given, as I write, 
by a few of our most advanced institutions—and be- 
cause it should go hand in hand with culture history 
generally. 
Thus when I resumed teaching at Clark in 1893, 
having turned over the laboratory work to my col- 
league, Dr. E. C. Sanford, I started and have given 
ever since one course which I generally call psycho- 
genesis, in which, beginning with the general concepts 
of time, space, and energy as the backgrounds, I have 
tried to trace roughly the stages by which the soul 
has evolved, briefly and very superficially sketching 
the scientific conceptions of nebulae and the stages 
of planetary evolution. Here I touched upon theories 
of the origin of life as well as of mind and the eozoan 
theory, comparing foams and crystals with cells; the 
reaction formula of paramecia and other unicellular 
organisms to light and chemical, thermal, and electri- 
cal stimuli, so symbolic and so charged with the 
promise and potency of all higher forms of reaction 
as is this “if-at-first-you-don’t-succeed-try-try-again” 
formula. I discussed tropisms and the mechanical 
theories and objective nomenclatures of the Naples 
school; Weismannism, De Vries, Bateson, etc.; gave 
363 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
a crude outline of the findings of paleontology; traced 
the vertebrate plan from the amphioxus up, showing 
its advantages over the crustacean method of molting 
and helical growth. I rudely characterized the rela- 
tions and distributions of land and sea at different 
geological ages; dwelt a little upon the early origin 
and development of the life of insects, perhaps the 
first tenants of the land; the development of streams 
and bodies of fresh water and their population by 
inland fish, with something of the habits of the best 
known forms of piscene life. The story was continued 
through the golden age of the great saurians when 
they in turn seemed to be lords of creation, till some 
of them backslid into the sea and others dwindled, 
teaching us the sad moral of hyper-individuation 
which neglects the proper care of the young. Brief 
mention was made of the rise of the carnivora; gre- 
gariousness; the pedigree of the best-known modern 
animals like the horse and camel; the evolution of 
the inferior and then of the anthropoid apes from 
the lemurs up, and the remnants of the extinct fossil 
apes; what we know about the “big four” that are 
still extant (gorilla, gibbon, orang, chimpanzee); 
culminating in the story of the anthropopithecus of 
Java; and noting some of the theories of distribution 
not only of these but of some higher and extinct apes 
known to us only by a few fossil remains. I then 
sketched the rise of modern anthropology and the 
troglodytes of the paleolithic age, the theory of 
Lemuria and other cunabula, the Neanderthal man, 
who vanished before the better-organized society of 
the Cro-Magnons. This was followed by the problems 
of man in the ice age and its effects upon him; the 
earliest human arts by which man came to use the 
stick, point, edge, and the string principle, to throw, 
and finally to use the bow; Rutot’s eoliths. I gen- 
erally mentioned imaginary, and often even wild, 
364 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
romances of this age like the story of Pic, Tarzan, 
Stanley Waterloo, Miss Dopp, Conan Doyle,' etc., 
with the attempts made by those like Gabriel Max 
and Rutot to artistically reproduce early human 
racial types. A glimpse of not only the old and new 
Stone Age but of that of bronze, and a rough 
characterization of the prehistoric data afforded by 
kitchen middens, pile-dwellings dolmens, menhirs, 
alignments, monuments, cromlechs, mounds, the 
images of the Easter Islands, the prehistoric remains 
of the Viking age, some of the findings in Crete and 
Anau, etc.; and the more or less clear demarcation 
of the three great races, Alpine, Mediterranean, and 
Nordic, concluded the study. 
This nondescript course touching so many differ- 
ent fields, extremely superficial and inadequate as it 
always and necessarily was, had, I believe, a very 
high pedagogic value. Interest, like steam in an engine, 
must be developed over a large surface, although 
when put to work it has to be applied to a small one. 
No course I have ever given sent so many of my 
students to the library or, I think, contributed quite 
so much to give them a general and wholesome con- 
ception of man’s place in nature. I never thought 
of venturing into print with any of this material and 
never did save with two sections of it,9 and although 
it was called for and given more often than any other 
course it was more varied from year to year. Now 
the study of animal instinct was mainly stressed; 
again, much attention was given to theories of the 
origin of language with emphasis upon the light that 
child study had shed on this problem; at other times 
religion was emphasized, especially its lower forms, 
beginning with animism or later with Durkheim, 
9 “A Glance at the Phyletic Background of Genetic Psychology,” 
Amer. Journ. of Psychology, 1908, 19:149-212, and “What We Owe 
to the Tree-life of Our Ape-like Ancestors,” Ped. Sent., 1916, 23:94- 
119. 
365 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
and the Mana concepts, and the dawn of 
social and industrial organization. Almost anything 
could be given in connection with such a course as 
this and twice, at least, I specialized on degeneration 
illustrated by Lombroso’s early theory of the identity 
of the criminal and savage type, and even by Nordau, 
and the literature he inspired; by Hughlings Jack- 
son’s and Mercier’s conception of epilepsy and the 
three levels; and later by Jung’s views of dementia 
praecox and the Freudian regression, and the study 
of morons and deviates versus "precocity and genius. 
This course was always illustrated by charts and 
drawings from many sources, so numerous that they 
occasionally covered both sides of my long lecture 
room. I gave it from the first with great and grow- 
ing trepidation for I knew that to every expert in the 
many wide fields traversed my treatment would seem 
inaccurate and utterly inadequate. Hence I was 
always profuse in my disclaimers to my class of 
thorough knowledge in any of these fields and was 
always very self-conscious when I examined students 
on it in the presence of my colleagues. But despite 
all these handicaps the interest with which students 
always followed the work, which was greater than 
I have ever been able to arouse in any other course, 
made me feel that elementary though it was, fitter 
in some parts of it for minds at the high school or 
perhaps college than at the university stage, I must 
nevertheless keep it up, which I did to the end, be- 
cause of the perspective and intellectual emancipation 
it always brought. 
I think no other course of instruction I have ever 
undertaken left my students with a deeper sense of 
ignorance or keener curiosity and interest, which 
latter not only remained with them in later life but 
often animated and perhaps even prompted work in 
other special but related fields with the aid of the 
366 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
momentum here acquired. At any rate, few things 
have struck me more forcibly in the several hundred 
letters I have received from former students since 
my retirement than this, and I doubt if there is any 
greater intellectual need of American students than 
that which would be supplied by a properly made and 
judiciously illustrated sketch of evolution with special 
reference to that of the human psyche, written of 
course with conformity to the findings of science but 
with pedagogic edification and stimulus as its supreme 
end. A perfect picture of evolution is the final goal 
of history in every field, but one must always re- 
member that it is just as necessary to study what is 
lowest and first in the light of what is highest, best, 
and most evolved as vice versa; and while climate, 
soil, and mother earth must always be reckoned with, 
it must be borne in mind that these are only the bases 
and conditions of development and that we can never 
escape the all-pervading urge that expresses itself in 
Janet’s excelsior instinct of perfection as well as in 
Adler’s horror of inferiority and mediocrity. Nor 
must one forget that of the two_aims of education, 
namely, to give exact and finished results that satisfy 
and give a sense of finality, on the one hand, and that 
which, on the other, aims chiefly at the excitement 
of interest and curiosity, which measures the success 
of teaching not at all by the volume of acquisition but 
by the strength and many-sidedness of mental zests 
and appetites aroused, the latter, although its results 
can never be weighed and measured by examinations, 
is by far the higher. 
Ill 
There is a sense in which all my active conscious 
life has been made up of a series of fads or crazes, 
some strong, some weak; some lasting long and re- 
367 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
curring over and over again at different periods of 
life and in different forms, and others ephemeral. The 
best illustration of one of the strongest of these was 
my early intense interest in animals, as indicated in 
Chapter III, fostered not only by close intimacy with 
many domestic animals but by my early passion for 
hunting and trapping and by a number of fascinating 
animal books, including Aesop, LaFontaine, and sev- 
eral more popular works on birds and beasts with 
colored illustrations. To this day I never lose an 
opportunity to visit menageries and zoological parks, 
and have a strange fascination for sitting or stand- 
ing for hours watching the activities of all kinds of 
beasts in captivity. This is the most effective fore- 
school of psychology for the young because the ant, 
bee, spider and fly, peacock, eagle, lion, lamb, wolf, 
and almost all the Canidae and the Felidae and many 
more represent to the child’s mind, if it has had any 
kind of introduction to the animal Muthos or has 
ever caught the echo of the medieval bestiaries, 
human qualities dissected and magnified, so that ac- 
quaintance with animals makes the best pedagogic 
introduction to the study of human character. There 
is no doubt, too, a genetic element here because it 
seems from all we know of primitive life that there 
was a very long period during which it was more 
or less doubtful whether man could survive in the 
long struggle with the numerous beasts which preyed 
upon him and the killing or domestication of which 
was such a stimulus to and formed so large a part 
of human culture. 
This boyish fad no doubt enriched the soil for and 
gave momentum to the great interest I have always 
felt in comparative psychology and has made this 
one of my favorite lecture themes for many years, 
prompting researches in this field to which I have 
directed my students and impelling me to hire several 
368 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
assistants to make this work more complete by help- 
ing me epitomize everything I could which shed light 
upon the habits and activities of animals from the 
amoeba to the great apes. In all this work I have 
always felt it essential to keep tab on not only the 
experiments in which animals were subjected to tests 
under controlled conditions but also afield, and in my 
courses I have not felt it justifiable to entirely ignore 
even the myths, in view of the great role animals have 
played not merely in early religions and totemism but 
also in folk cult and mores, as illustrated by the leg- 
ends of Reynard the Fox, which for centuries had 
such an influence upon the medieval mind. Even 
fabulous creatures—dragons, the phoenix, the sphinx, 
and all the rest, add their testimony to the fact that 
psychology has thus far only just entered a vast field 
full of rich possibilities as yet unrealized and demand- 
ing not only a great new synthesis of all these ele- 
ments but containing, when our work here is sugared 
off and its pedagogic facet shelled out, a rare wealth 
of educational material and stimulus. 
If the individual does or ought to rapidly repeat 
the history of the race in his development, this is the 
real beginning of every truly genetic psychology. 
Animals, which have been vastly longer in the world 
than man, have taught him not only many of the 
useful arts but have given him ideals of social organi- 
zation, and the more we know of them the narrower 
becomes the gap between the brute and human mind 
and the more unsatisfying become all the many dis- 
tinctions that have been proposed between them. In 
my opinion science does not sufficiently honor those 
pioneers and enthusiasts who have devoted their lives 
to the study of life in formicaries, hives, or other 
forms of insect instincts, the very oldest inhabitants 
of the dry land and whose psychic activities have 
therefore become most automatic; or those who de- 
369 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
vote themselves to the very difficult problems of mi- 
gration, hibernation, hestivation, the various animal 
societies from colonies of unicellular beings (Espi- 
nas) up to the highest expressions of the gregarious 
instinct in man’s nearest forbears, or in general to the 
habits of those species of life which had been in the 
making for eons before man appeared and from 
which every one of his own faculties took their origin, 
without knowledge of which man can never know 
himself aright because the completest knowledge and 
definition of anything in the whole biological world 
is the full description of all the stages of its de- 
velopment. 
I realize, despite the recurrence of this zest to 
the foreground at intervals for more than forty years 
and the large body of material that I have accumu- 
lated, that I have only made a beginning in a field 
too vast for me and that even if I had the strength 
and years to mature it according to the very best of 
my ability and ideals it would itself fall very far short 
of what really now could or ought to be done here. 
What is supremely needed just now is a large, bold, 
and new synthesis of the material from all these do- 
mains of knowledge about the animal soul, and this 
would give us a new and sounder view of man’s place 
in nature. 
Some years I have grouped this material by ani- 
mals, treating insect life rather fully, then taking up 
successively what is known of the crayfish, lobster, 
snail, tortoise, pigeon, pelican, crow, hawk, lemming, 
porcupine, coon, penguin, chick and hen, goat, buffalo, 
gopher, horse, emu, seal, beaver, bear, musk ox, 
squirrel, the great carnivora, monkeys and the larger 
apes extinct and contemporary, and many more. An 
assistant exploited the library for standard and even 
lighter periodical literature upon the subject. At 
other times I have cross-sectioned this material, tak- 
370 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
ing up such topics as animal homes, modes of re- 
production and treatment of the young, ornamentation 
and secondary sexual qualities, hibernation, hestiva- 
tion, migration, animal industries, social organiza- 
tions, rise and distribution of a few species of which 
this is best known, animal play, dwelling sometimes 
upon the economic aspects of pests and parasites—in 
which latter I had an able coadjutor in my colleague, 
Prof. C. F. Hodge, who interested all the school 
children of the city in the conservation of toads and 
engaged them in antifly campaigns, as above, and 
collected with their aid hogsheads of dead flies, etc.; 
while another colleague, Professor J. P. Porter, did 
much experimentation upon various forms of animal 
life, particularly spiders. This work throughout the 
country was greatly stimulated by The Journal of 
Animal Behavior. 
I mention this interest and the work prompted by 
it because I have always felt it in a sense abortive. 
Much as I belabored these topics and copiously as I 
often illustrated them by charts and drawings in the 
class, I was never able to excite as much general 
interest on the part of the students as in other topics, 
and some at least of those who have done the best 
original work in this field—Yerkes, Thorndike, Wat- 
son, Haggerty, etc., have also, I think, been disap- 
pointed that they were not able to excite a deeper and 
more sustained interest or give to this subject the 
prominence in their requirements for degrees in psy- 
chology they desired or hoped for. Something of 
this disappointment, I know, has also been felt by 
those who strove to develop to the dimensions they 
deemed it deserved the topics of child study and even 
anthropology, which deals so largely with primitive 
man. I have often been baffled in surmising the 
reason for this and have concluded that it lies not 
entirely in the fact that these courses do not open 
371 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
as tempting or certain a career to students as others 
but that it is also in part due to a vestige in the human, 
and especially the youthful, soul of the old conceit 
that the human and particularly the cultured adult 
had almost nothing in common with these more un- 
evolved stages of psychic life, that they had been far 
and away transcended; and that, especially during 
the seasons of most rapid mental development, young 
people are more concerned with the future than with 
the past and with modern man rather than his for- 
bears. At any rate, I have succeeded in developing 
far greater student interest along other lines to which 
I have given less labor. Despite this, however, it has 
always been one of my most cherished academic 
dreameries, which I never have expected and do not 
expect to see realized, that there should be somewhere 
a well-equipped, endowed, and facultized institute to 
be devoted entirely to animal behavior in the above 
broad sense, with a well-furnished library and abun- 
dant apparatus and collections of animals, which 
should be a central clearing house for all that has 
been done and a power house for new ventures in 
this field. 
Sometime, too, the world will see an organization 
that will bring into useful and sympathetic rapport 
the standpoints of the experimenter and the field 
naturalist. I have been thought uncritical because I 
advise my students to read, along with the former, 
the works of Buckley, Lovell, Badenach, and even 
Maeterlinck, and because, in addition to Peckham, 
Lubbock, Romanes, Forel, Fabre, Espinas, Van 
Benaden, Palmen, Graber, Lucas, Wheeler, McCook, 
etc., I advised them to acquaint themselves with 
Wood’s Homes Without Hands, Pfungst’s studies of 
clever Hans, Cesaresco’s light work on the psychology 
of the horse, Burroughs, Cornish, Morley, Robinson, 
Buchner on the love life of animals, the description 
372 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
of the habits of pests in Comstock, Sanders, Flint, 
Hunter, Carpenter, and even Uncle Remus and the 
works on animal mythology, and have referred them 
to the old work of Pierquin on animal insanity. But 
if in following this course I have failed to distinguish 
sufficiently between popular and scientific work, it has 
been because I found that the former did help to 
generate interest, since I could assume less of this 
here than in any other field. 
My dream includes a society for the advancement 
of the study of animal psychology which shall bring 
together workers of all these types, not excluding 
representatives of the best of the many Audubon 
societies the country over, so that each may get into 
more sympathetic rapport with the work of all the 
others. We have as yet no dictionary or encyclo- 
pedia of even animal life, much less of mind, for 
Brehm’s ten ponderous tomes, although still useful, 
are hopelessly inadequate and behindhand. It has 
always been amazing to me to see how many very 
acute and special observations are scattered through 
popular and scientific magazines which fail to reach 
those who would be most interested in them and hence 
are ineffective and practically lost, so that although 
we have plenty of general and theoretic treatises on 
instinct they are, without exception, limited in range 
and highly tendenzids in character. The teacher of 
this subject, thus, has no good textbook to supplement 
or reenforce his lectures, and no one is impartial in 
the relative weight he lays upon the work of the field 
observer and the laboratory expert.10 Craig has, how- 
10 To this work Clark has made the following contributions which 
I recall, the list of which is, however, by no means complete. 
Kinnaman’s study of the reactions of monkeys to the puzzle box was 
one of the first in this field and was supplemented by a similar study, 
much later, by Davis on the coon, while Small published several 
studies on the white rat. Also under Dr. Sanford, Triplett published 
an interesting study of the perch. Dr. Hodge, who did more than 
any one else in the country to introduce interest in and study of ani- 
373 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
ever, lately undertaken valuable resumes of current 
work in this field. 
IV 
I shall never cease to deem it a great good fortune 
that my early years were spent in the country on a 
farm, and that a mile or more away from the village 
so that there was much isolation and abundant ex- 
posure to all the influences of nature. Of all her 
incentives I think I was most responsive to cloud fan- 
cies. In their forms and colors I have seen all sorts 
of ships and argosies sailing on tinted seas, battle 
scenes, faces and forms of men and animals, corpses 
and funerals, processionals, festooned pageants, 
angels, and even God Himself. There are certain 
places where I often sat watching gorgeous sunsets, 
absorbed in reveries. 
The thought of infinite space, too, often came over 
me with almost stunning violence as I tried to conceive 
how one could go on and on forever and find no limit 
in any direction, till I would almost grow dizzy and 
fear I might drift off and be lost in infinity. The moon 
was my nearest and dearest celestial companion and I 
sometimes caught myself, as a child, actually talking 
to it. I always imagined its markings to represent 
a woman sitting bowed as if in grief over a child at 
her feet. To trees, and particularly to the forest, I 
was exquisitely impressionable. As I entered it I 
mals in the schools and also to bring economic biology in line with 
laboratory experiments, made here his continued studies of alcoholic 
dogs, published his memoir on the toad, studied the vorticella with 
Aikin, the amoeba with Dellinger and Gibbs, bees with Gates, and 
English sparrows brought up with canaries, with Conradi. Dr. Porter, 
who has made many experiments with various varieties of birds in 
the maze and with the puzzle box, studied the porcupine with Sackett 
and the dog with Conant, and has made many observations and 
studies on spiders, squirrels, and alligators and, as I write, has various 
unfinished studies. In this connection, too, should be mentioned the 
painstaking studies of children’s reactions to the dog by Bucke and 
to the cat by Browne. 
374 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
always became subdued and often walked almost on 
tiptoe, generally wanting and perhaps imagining a 
companion with me. 
I was also very susceptible to the intimate rapport 
between trees and wind. The latter, which though 
unseen has such power and has always been a spirit- 
ual influence, giving in most etymologies its name 
to the soul itself, always strangely impressed me. As 
a child, and to this day, I have taken great delight in 
being out in a storm on land or sea, buffeted by it, 
facing and often trying to shout it down if I was 
alone. Although I was not an anemophobiac I 
always had the consciousness, especially when storms 
and gusts made the house shake, that it might increase 
in fury and sweep me and everything away; but this 
never became an obsession, as it did with at least two 
of my intimate friends, one of whom at my own age 
has never been able to overcome it. Before the open 
fireplace I saw pictures in the flames and glowing 
embers, although this type of fancy was far less de- 
veloped than in many children I have later studied. 
To the impressions that come to boys from animal life 
I think I was unusually susceptible, and it has always 
since been a source of regret to me that I was never 
allowed to have a dog, man’s closest, oldest and most 
universal animal companion. I was never much in- 
terested in flowers or gardens but left those to girls. 
To snow in all its forms and to all human re- 
lations with it, the culture influence of which is now 
so well understood, I was abundantly exposed in every 
way. It sometimes drifted in upon our beds; it was 
a common “stunt” to take a run in it barefoot; there 
was endless shoveling, with forts, images, etc., and 
in sugaring season we had to wade through miles of 
it, now on crust that bore us and now slumping per- 
haps to the waist. We did everything with water, 
fluid and frozen, a generous stream of which flowed 
375 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
near the house, and there were countless dams, little 
canals, sluices, water wheels, etc. 
In each of my chief homes there was, very fortu- 
nately, a shop with a bench and a good many tools 
which I was always free to use as I would. These 
and the multifarious activities of the farm did much 
to make me motor-minded and perhaps even laid the 
basis for my rather strong voco-motor trend. One 
idiosyncrasy here that deserves mention is that I was 
from early boyhood very strongly inclined to act or 
dance out not only my impressions but even rhymes, 
and to hear music with my muscles. The nursery 
jingle, “Bean porridge hot” for example, meant three 
steps in each of three definite directions, and the last 
two words “days old” were marked by kicking up 
both feet in the air as high as possible and bringing 
them down successively, each to coincide with one of 
these words. A concert I am prone to interpret and 
illustrate by visual images of one or more people 
dancing and performing often utterly impossible evo- 
lutions, perhaps hovering in the air, but always in 
cadence to the conductor’s baton. Eye-mindedness is 
with me a close second to motor-mindedness, while 
I am perhaps a little deficient in ear-mindedness. 
Thus I have always regarded my early passion and 
my later impressionableness for music as perhaps 
compensatory of native defect, and this may be con- 
nected with the fact that I am, as noted in Chapter III, 
unusually dolichocephalic, so that all my stiff hats 
have not only to be stretched but padded on the side. 
As a student of childhood it has naturally always 
been a source of vain regret that no paidologist like 
Preyer, Miss Shinn, Harlow Gale, or Mrs. Nice, had 
been present to record the stages of my own develop- 
ment, which would have added so immeasurably to my 
self-knowledge. As it is, I shall never know which of 
the several methods of creeping I chiefly followed, 
376 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
when I sat up and assumed the erect position, when 
I began to walk, how I teethed, the stages of my 
early development in speech, anything of my height 
or weight, or even how long I nursed, so that I have 
no idea whether there was any ludeln or lutschen 
which psychoanalysis makes the precursor of every 
kind of mental and physical erethism. My first quad- 
rennium, which memory does so little to salvage and 
the supreme importance of which for the most funda- 
mental traits of disposition Freudians have so con- 
vincingly shown us, is thus almost a blank to me. 
There were, too, of course, no Binet-Simon or other 
tests, so that I have no idea of the relations between 
my physiological and psychological age at any stage 
of life. 
Probably I had a rather unique combination of 
what is now often called, from its extremest form, 
sadistic and masochistic trends. At any rate, as 
stated above, I had for a few years in the earliest 
teens an almost mortal fear, on the one hand, that 
my heart might stop any time and about the same 
time I was infected with the superstition that pre- 
vailed in the neighborhood that the world would sud- 
denly come to an end. I have always had a certain 
though not acute dread of lightning, and at an early 
stage of life had a mild form of what is now called 
the castration complex, while more than once in the 
revivals which prevailed my imagination was realistic 
enough to make something of a fear fetish of hell. 
I think no one ever suspected any of these fears for 
I never told but, on the contrary, instinctively con- 
cealed them all. No dread was greater from the very 
dawn of adolescence on than that of inferiority and 
mediocrity, which most of the greatest efforts I ever 
made in life were to escape. On the other hand, I 
was a most execrable bully of my younger brother 
and sister, dominating them by threats and by force 
377 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
to a degree that I now realize must have wrought 
injury to them. In school I was engaged in many 
fights and was, I fear, often cruel to those I could 
whip; for every boy knew exactly whom he could 
best and who could best him. I think I was some- 
what formidable with my fists and in wrestling of the 
various kinds which were then in vogue, and I re- 
member several occasions on which I attacked, some- 
times to my grief and sometimes victoriously, older 
and bigger boys. I know that my parents thought 
me very self-willed, although I was always deemed 
good-tempered. I never coquetted with thoughts of 
death, so common to pubescents, and always abhorred 
kissing games and, at least up to the time of my 
Antioch professorate, never spontaneously kissed a 
girl but have always been called a boy's boy and a 
man’s man. 
This has sometimes been called, in the language 
of Ellen Key, the century of the child, and I have often 
been dubbed the father of child study. Both are false, 
especially the latter. True, the end of the last and the 
beginning of the present century were marked by a 
very wide and strong interest in child study, but this 
had shown signs of waning even before the war and 
since its outbreak very little has been done. The 
pioneers in child study in this country were H. P. 
Bowditch, who made his memorable contribution to 
the height and weight of Boston school children in 
1879, which was closely followed by Porter’s no less 
painstaking studies, while the work of Preyer ante- 
dated mine. Even the questionnaire method in the 
study of children, of which I have made great use 
since, originated with Prof. Lazarus,11 who in 1872 
studied the contents of the minds of children on enter- 
ing the Berlin schools. It was from this study that I 
11 Der Vorstellungskreis der Berliner Kinder beim Eintritt in die 
Schule in Berlin und seine Entwicklung. 
378 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
derived the idea of making a similar inventory of the 
contents of children’s minds on entering school in 
Boston, published in 1883, although this differed quite 
materially in scope from the work of Lazarus. And 
it did furnish the incentive for a great deal of other 
work along similar lines for the next decade or two, 
during which this country led the world in this move- 
ment, until it was later taken up in a more specialized 
and systematic way by German savants. 
For some years it promised to be, and I am san- 
guine enough to think it did to some extent become, a 
movement that deserves a place in the history of 
human culture. In the last decades of the nineteenth 
century this country was probably behind all others 
in the world, if not in history, in its interest in child 
nature and nurture. The home had abdicated more 
and more of its functions to the school, and parents 
were exceptionally absorbed in the struggle to get on. 
With urbanization home life had shriveled, city chil- 
dren were left to the street and, as various studies 
showed, they knew even almost no games. Not only 
were there hundreds of thousands of childless homes 
but school life and work were mechanical, and mass 
methods that ignored individuality and even child 
nature were everywhere prevalent. It sometimes 
seemed almost as if parents regarded the nascent 
stages of childhood as a necessary evil which must be 
accepted with what grace they could. Therefore, the 
gradual realization of what infancy and childhood 
really were, and the new appreciation of the fact that 
children’s natures and needs should be normative and 
determine their treatment in both the home and the 
school, came almost like a new gospel, and in recent 
decades the country and the world have slowly but 
surely come to a new appreciation of the value of the 
naivete and spontaneity of every juvenile stage and 
trait and recognized the pregnant if partial sense in 
379 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
which every child, from the moment of conception to 
maturity, recapitulates, very rapidly at first and then 
more slowly, every stage of development through 
which the human race from its lowest animal begin- 
nings has passed. It was something like these con- 
ceptions that animated all this work, and the history 
of it since 1880, if ever fully written, will at least 
make a fascinating chapter in the history of culture. 
Seven states formed associations for child study, 
there was first a round table and then a department 
devoted to it in the N. E. A., and it found its way 
into various normal and collegiate courses. Dr. 
Chrisman, who has given us a text on the subject that 
entitles him to be called the American Ploss, gave it 
the name of paidology. Earl Barnes published two 
volumes of papers based upon a very extensive con- 
spectus including many thousand children. Miss 
Shinn began the publication of her observations upon 
her niece, which were more accurate and extended 
than even those of Preyer. E. H. Russell was per- 
haps the very first to make this topic an integral part 
of the course in a state institution for the training of 
teachers, and his unique method, which furnished 
complete or partial data for a number of our memoirs, 
deserves brief mention. Printed blanks of different 
hues to designate, respectively, children’s traits ac- 
tually observed at first hand by his pupils, hearsay 
incidents, those read in books and those based on 
memories of their own childhood were supplied, and 
for a quarter of a century all students were requested 
to note and hand in anything they deemed interesting 
or important. These data were classified and, as soon 
as they had become sufficiently numerous, were made 
the sole basis of all the instruction in psychology. 
Upon his retirement from office he bequeathed to me 
more than 60,000 of these papers, which a group of 
our students here reclassified and which have often 
380 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
been utilized in the educational work of my depart- 
ment. A sample of the use he desired to make of 
these data is seen in “Knowledge from the Standpoint 
of Association” (Educ. Rev., 1898J by T. L. Bolton 
and E. M. Haskell, and in other papers. 
In 1883 I published at my own expense an 
eighteen-page pamphlet, chiefly made up of topics 
which I thought might be profitably investigated, and 
in reading this over now it is surprising to me to see 
how many of them have since been made the subjects 
of published papers. 
In my first paper on child study Mrs. Quincy 
Shaw, the generous patron for years of the Boston 
kindergarten, allowed four of the best members of 
her staff, whom I had selected, to spend months at the 
opening of the school year in questioning those who 
had just entered, generally in groups of two or three 
in the dressing room, on each of the circa one hundred 
points designated in my first printed questionnaire, 
trying to find out what conceptions of nature they 
had, including animals, plants, celestial phenomena, 
their own bodies, ideas of number, stories, games, 
things they could do, had seen about them, and their 
ideas in the field of religion. The results seemed 
almost to suggest a new science of ignorance and 
were extremely important for teachers as to what 
they could presuppose and how often all their instruc- 
tions miscarried because of the width and depth of 
the chasm which yawned between the infantile and 
the adult mind. 
“The Contents of Children’s Minds” attracted 
more comment, was translated into more languages, 
and set the pattern for more similar studies than any- 
thing I have ever written.12 A special edition of it was 
published by Kellogg in New York and had a wide 
12 See reproduction of it, with other papers, in my Aspects of Child 
Life and Education (Appleton). 
381 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
sale. For the next ten years I was absorbed in labo- 
ratory work at the Hopkins and in organizing Clark 
University so that it was perhaps natural that I should 
again revert to this field when I resumed the full 
burden of teaching in 1893. Thus in October, 1894, 
I printed the first questionnaire from Clark on Anger, 
which in subsequent years was followed by many 
more, so that up to 1915, at least 194 on nearly as 
many different topics had been issued. The complete 
list of these, with the names of my coadjutors in this 
work, if any, is as follows: 
TOPICAL SYLLABI13 
I. Anger, October, 1894. 
3. Dolls, November, 1894. 
Dolls (supplementary questionnaire), A. C. Ellis, June, 
1896. 
3. Crying and laughing, December, 1894. 
4. Toys and playthings, December, 1894. 
5. Folk-lore among children, January, 1895. 
6. Early forms of vocal expression, January, 1895. 
7. The early sense of self, January, 1895. 
8. Fears in childhood and youth, February, 1895. 
9. Some common traits and habits, February, 1895. 
10. Some common automatisms, nerve signs, etc., March, 
i895- 
11. Feeling for objects of inanimate nature, March, 1898. 
12. Feelings for objects of animate nature, April, 1895. 
13. Children’s appetites and foods, April, 1895. 
14. Affection and its opposite states in children, April, 1795. 
15. Moral and religious experiences, May, 1895. 
16. Peculiar and exceptional children, E. W. Bohannon, 
October, 1895. 
17. Moral defects and perversions, G. E. Dawson, October, 
1895. 
18. The beginnings of reading and writing. H. T. Lukens, 
October, 1895. 
13 All these were issued by myself when not otherwise specified, 
or with the student or assistant whose name is given. 
382 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
19. Thoughts and feelings about old age, disease and death, 
C. A. Scott, November, 1895. 
20. Moral education, N. P. Avery, November, 1895. 
21. Studies of school reading matter, J. C. Shaw, November, 
1895- 
22. School statistics, T. R. Croswell, November, 1895. 
23. Early musical manifestations, Florence Marsh, Decem- 
ber, 1895. 
24. Fancy, imagination, reverie, E. H. Lindley, December, 
1895. 
25. Tickling, fun, wit, humor, laughing, Arthur Allin, Febru- 
ary, 1896. 
26. Suggestion and imitation, M. H. Small, February, 1896. 
27. Religious experience, E. D. Starbuck, February, 1896. 
28. A study of the character of religious growth, E. D. 
Starbuck, February, 1896. 
29. Kindergarten, Anna E. Bryan and Lucy Wheelock, 
March, 1896. 
30. Habits, instincts, etc., in animals, R. R. Gurley, March, 
1896. 
31. Number and mathematics, D. E. Phillips, April, 1896. 
32. The only child in a family, E. W. Bohannon, March, 
1896. 
33. Degrees of certainty and conviction in children, M. H. 
Small, October, 1896. 
34. Sabbath and worship in general, J. P. Hylan, October, 
1896. 
35. Questions for the study of the essential feature of public 
worship, J. P. Hylan, October, 1896. 
36. Migrations, tramps, truancy, running away, etc., vs. love 
of home, L. W. Kline, October, 1896. 
37. Adolescence and its phenomena in body and mind, E. G. 
Lancaster, November, 1896. 
38. Examinations and recitations, J. C. Shaw, November, 
1896. 
39. Stillness, solitude, restlessness, H. S. Curtis, November, 
1896. 
40. The psychology of health and disease, H. H. Goddard, 
December, 1896. 
41. Spontaneously invented toys and amusements, T. R. 
Croswell, December, 1896. 
42. Hymns and sacred music, T. R. Peede, December, 1896. 
43. Puzzles and their psychology, E. H. Lindley, December, 
1896. 
383 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
44- The sermon, A. R. Scott, January, 1897. 
45. Special traits as indices of character, and as mediating 
likes and dislikes, E. W. Bohannon, January, 1897. 
46. Reverie and allied phenomena, E. Partridge, April, 1897. 
47. The psychology of health and disease, H. H. Goddard, 
May, 1897. 
48. Immortality, J. R. Street, September, 1897. 
49. Psychology of ownership vs. loss, L. W. Kline, October, 
1897. 
50. Memory, F. W. Colegrove, October, 1897. 
51. To mothers, F. W. Colegrove, December, 1897. 
52. Humorous and cranky side in education, L. W. Kline, 
October, 1897. 
53. The psychology of shorthand writing, J. O. Quantz, 
November, 1897. 
54. The teaching instinct, D. E. Phillips, November, 1897. 
55. Home and school punishments and penalties, C. H. Sears, 
November, 1897. 
56. Straightness and uprightness of body, December, 1897. 
57. Conventionality, A. Schinz, November, 1897. 
58. Local voluntary association among teachers, H. D. 
Sheldon, December, 1897. 
59. Motor education, E. W. Bohannon, December, 1897. 
60. Heat and cold, December, 1897. 
61. Training of teachers, W. G. Chambers, December, 1897. 
62. Educational ideals, L. E. York, December, 1897. 
63. Water psychoses, F. E. Bolton, February, 1898. 
64. The institutional activities of children, H. D. Sheldon, 
February, 1898. 
65. Obedience and obstinacy, Tilmon Jenkins, March, 1898. 
66. The sense of honor among children, Robert Clark, 
March, 1897. 
67. Children’s collections, Abby C. Hale, October, 1898. 
68. The organizations of American student life, H. D. Shel- 
don, November, 1898. 
69. Mathematics in common schools, E. B. Bryan, February, 
1899. 
70. Mathematics in the early years, E. B. Bryan, February, 
1899. 
71. Unselfishness in children, W. S. Small, February, 1899. 
72. Mental traits, C. W. Hetherington, April, 1899. 
73. The fooling impulse in man and animals (conjuring and 
sleight of hand), Norman Triplett, March, 1899. 
74. Confession, E. W. Runkle, March, 1899. 
384 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
75- Pity, March, 1899. 
76. Perception of rhythm by children, C. H. Sears, May, 
1899. 
77. The monthly period, Anna L. Brown, May, 1899, 
78. Perception of rhythm, C. H. Sears, December, 1899. 
79. Psychology of uncertainty and gambling, C. J. France, 
February, 1900. 
80. Straightness and uprightness of body, A. W. Trettien, 
January, 1900. 
81. Pedagogical pathology, Norman Triplett, November, 
1900. 
82. Religious development, G. H. Wright, January, 1901. 
83. Geography, F. H. Saunders, February, 1901. 
84. Feelings of adolescence, E. J. Swift, October, 1901. 
85. Introspection, E. J. Swift, October, 1901. 
86. Signs of nervousness, E. J. Swift, October, 1901. 
87. Examinations, W. M. Pollard, November, 1901. 
88. Sub-normal children and youth, A. R. T. Wylie, Novem- 
ber, 1901. 
89. English teaching, December, 1901. 
90. Education of women, December, 1901. 
91. Heredity, C. E. Browne, December, 1901; (a) January, 
1902. 
92. The conditions of primitive peoples and the methods 
employed to civilize and christianize them, J. E. W. 
Wallin, April, 1902. 
93. Children’s thoughts, reactions and feelings to animals, 
W. F. Bucke, November, 1902. 
94. Reactions to light and darkness, November, 1902. 
95. Children’s interest in flowers, Alice Thayer, November, 
1902. 
96. Reactions to light and darkness (2) Theodate L. Smith, 
December, 1902. 
97. Superstition among children, S. W. Stockard, December, 
1902. 
98. Ideas about the soul, L. D. Arnett, January, 1903. 
99. Children’s prayers, S. P. Hayes, January, 1903. 
100. Religious experiences subsequent to conversion, E. P. 
St. John, January, 1903. 
101. Food and appetite, Sanford Bell, January, 1903. 
102. Development of the sentiment of affection, T. L. Smith, 
March, 1903. 
103. The health of teachers, W. H. Burnham, April, 1903. 
104. Moral and religious influence, Jean duBuy, May, 1903. 
385 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
104. Curiosity and interest, T. L. Smith, May, 1903. 
105. Birds and animals, October, 1903. 
106. Precocity and tardiness of development, October, 1903. 
107. Differences between young and old teachers, October, 
1903. 
108. Predominance of female teachers, October, 1903. 
109. Dreams, October, 1903. 
no. Advertising, October, 1903. 
hi. Stages of religious development, Jean duBuy, November, 
1903. 
112. Nervous children, T. Kuma, November, 1903. 
113. Young people’s Christian organizations, J. N. Rode- 
heaver, November, 1903. 
114. The hygienic condition of normal schools, W. H. Burn- 
ham, December, 1903. 
115. Japan: A study in the pedagogy of missions, F. A. 
Lombard, November, 1903. 
116. The language interest in children, A. W. Trettien, De- 
cember, 1903. 
117. Attention, A. A. Cleveland, December, 1903. 
118. Reaction of pupils to high school work, W. F. Book, 
January, 1904. 
119. Questions for members of young people’s societies, W. B. 
Forbush and J. N. Rodeheaver, February, 1904. 
120. Crying, February, 1904. 
121. Defects in school education, M. W. Meyerhardt, Febru- 
ary, 1904. 
122. Obstinacy, stubbornness and obedience, February, 1904. 
123. Stuttering and other speech defects, E. Conradi, March, 
1904. 
124. Keeping well, March, 1904. 
125. The subnormal or supernormal child, T. Kuma, May, 
1904. 
126. Motherhood, November, 1904. 
127. Psychic reactions to sound, T. L. Smith, November, 1904. 
128. The development of the imagination, H. L. Brittain, 
January, 1905. 
129. The psychology of clothes, February, 1905. 
130. Peculiarly nervous children, B. C. Downing, October, 
1905. 
131. Nervous children, B. C. Downing, October, 1905. 
132. Envy and jealousy, A. L. Gesell, October, 1905. 
133. Topics needing study on children of kindergarten age, 
T. L. Smith, October, 1905. 
386 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
134- The minister and his work, D. S. Hill, October, 1905. 
135. Emotional reactions to the moon, T. Misawa, January, 
1906. 
136. The play interest of children, F. A. Judson, February, 
1906. 
137. The early development of aesthetic interest, J. W. Harris, 
February, 1906. 
138. Fatherhood, R. N. Roark, February, 1906. 
139. Chess, A. A. Cleveland, 1906. 
140. Adult education, T. Misawa, November, 1906. 
141. Spontaneous constructions and primitive activities in 
children analogous to those of primitive man, Febru- 
ary, 1907. 
142. A syllabus for the study of “shock,” W. L. Gard, March, 
1907. 
143. Interest in philosophical and psychological subjects, E. I. 
Keller, October, 1907. 
144. Co-education, C. Reddie, November, 1907. 
145. The prophet of to-day, I. L. Willcox, November, 1907. 
146. The “social study” of the Negroes of the City of Worces- 
ter, G. T. Dominis, November, 1907. 
147. Sex differences in children of grammar and high school 
grades, December, 1907. 
148. Juvenile courts, W. G. Siddell, January, 1908. 
149. Psychology of shame, T. L. Smith, February, 1908. 
150. Drama in education, E. W. Curtis, February, 1908. 
151. The relations of mental and bodily factors in disease, 
C. A. Osborne, October, 1908. 
152. Special defects, A. Wiggam, November, 1908. 
153. Dancing, L. G. Barber, November, 1908. 
154. Psychology of suicide, Y. Nakamura, November, 1908. 
155. Ambition, H. M. Downey, January, 1909. 
156. Teaching of religion, E. S. Conklin, January, 1909. 
157. Some characteristics and tendencies of school children in 
the grades, Mrs. Eben Mumford, February, 1909. 
158. High school physics, H. W. Chase, March, 1909. 
159. Children and language, Genevieve Boland, October, 1909. 
160. A phase of adolescent development in girls, Lucetta 
Crum, October, 1909. 
161. Justice, November, 1909. 
162. Length of daily school session, P. K. Holmes, December, 
1909. 
163. Literature in the grades, J. M. Mclndoo, December, 
1909. 
387 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
164. The psychological effect of music, H. P. Weld, Decem- 
ber, 1909. 
165. School supervision, B. Roethlein, January, 1910. 
166. Teaching of mathematics, F. B. Williams, January, 1910. 
167. The belief in immortality, S. Spidle, October, 1910. 
168. Keeping well, E. Anastassoff, October, 1910. 
169. School superintendents, M. E. Wood, January, 1911. 
170. Suggestion and imitation, S. Yamada, February, 1911. 
171. Medical inspection, G. H. Shafer, February, 1911. 
172. A study of joy, sorrow, and qualms of conscience, G. D. 
Bivin, July, 1911. 
173. Justice, T. Ueda, September, 1911. 
174. The training of teachers in the United States: Critic 
Teachers, School Superintendents, Principals and Di- 
rectors of Training Schools, Departments in Colleges 
and Universities, L. W. Sacket, November, 1911. 
175. Toys and playthings, Dorothy Drake, November, 1911. 
176. Psychology of adolescence in girls, Miriam Van Waters, 
November, 1911. 
177. Emotions in children and adolescents, F. E. Howard, 
November, 1911. 
178. Study in child mind, W. T. Sanger, October, 1912. 
179. Children’s ideas of death, J. H. O., October, 1912. 
180. Food and drink experiences, H. F., November, 1912. 
181. Study in dreams, Raymond Bellamy, November, 1912. 
182. Toys, G. E. Freeland, December, 1912. 
183. Anger and fear, R. F. Richardson, January, 1913. 
184. The psychology of the story, E. C. Wilson, November, 
I9I3- 
185. The model school in education in the United States, J. H. 
Purnell, December, 1913. 
186. The present status of the small college, F. M. McDowell, 
December, 1913. 
187. Public opinion and the teaching profession, G. A. Coe, 
March, 1914. 
188. How to teach the war, C. E. McCorkle, October, 1914. 
189. Dreams, Vance Randolph, November, 1914. 
190. Influence of politics in school affairs, R. N. Elliott, 
November, 1914. 
191. The junior high school, A. A. Douglass, November, 1914. 
192. The relation of the school and home, E. W. Moore, 
December, 1914. 
193. The psychology of industrial efficiency, S. K. Boyajian, 
February, 1915. 
388 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
194- The pedagogy of mathematics, A. O. Griggs, February, 
I9I5- 
From the above list it appears that the years 
1895-97 inclusive were most prolific and that the 
number of questionnaires issued in general diminished 
thereafter. Although many, especially in later years, 
were addressed to adults or officials or pertained to 
school methods and organization, etc., the great ma- 
jority were to obtain data for the collective study of 
children. A few brought only scanty returns, a few 
more on which there were copious data were never 
worked up, and others were only to obtain supple- 
mentary data to make studies by other methods more 
complete. Most of them, however, were not only 
numerously answered but resulted in scores of papers, 
longer or shorter, of which many are to be found in 
the pages of the Pedagogical Seminary. Answers 
received were often very widely scattered; sometimes 
we had data from England, Canada, South Africa, 
and occasionally from Germany, India, Australia, 
China, and Japan. Certain educational institutions 
were always glad to collect the data we wanted from 
their students and instructors. Former pupils and 
others in academic work contributed, and at one time 
we had a list of nearly fifty who had volunteered to 
procure data under our direction. These syllabi were 
often made the theme of instruction and we were not 
infrequently called on to furnish copies by the score 
for class purposes. Thus many people in very differ- 
ent positions and various parts of the country co- 
operated. 
To instance the method of one of our most valued 
contributors I mention that of Miss Lillie A. Williams 
of the Trenton Normal School who in the Pedagog- 
ical Seminary (v. 3, no. 2) describes her method of 
collecting data for studies in genetic psychology. 
She first read and explained to her students each item 
389 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
in the syllabus, pointing out that their cooperation 
might bring valuable results and trying to make all 
feel that they should contribute their mite and be co- 
laborers. In the paper on fears, for example, she 
gave a preliminary talk on the general subject and our 
lack of knowledge of it, how common and injurious 
fears were in childhood, and then instituted some gen- 
eral conversation on special fears—wind, snakes, 
lightning, cloud-forms, etc. Some would then con- 
fess their own childish experiences and this often was 
an open sesame. In this way it was sought to stim- 
ulate interest and awaken memory, and then each 
who desired to do so was invited to write out a rather 
full but very honest record of his own personal ex- 
periences with fear, following the rubrics of the 
questionnaire. Subjects of a different nature and 
those which required not memory but observation 
received, of course, different introductory treatment. 
The necessity of being definite and absolutely honest 
was always stressed. The questionnaire was often 
mimeographed or written on the board. Age, sex, 
and race were always to be specified as definitely as 
possible for each experience. No one was required 
to sign his or her paper although often by general 
consent the results were read in class so that each 
might benefit by the experience of all the others. The 
practical value of knowing more about child life for 
teachers and parents was always stressed, and it is 
notable that, on the whole, most of the best data were 
furnished by women. 
In such ways vast bodies of data were accumu- 
lated and sent to us in response to some of the more 
popular questionnaires, and it was a very perplexing 
question how to make the net resultant of it all into 
anything like a composite photograph of the subject, 
point by point. Sometimes the collaborator relied too 
much upon statistical treatment, as illustrated perhaps 
390 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
in Ellis’s study of dolls. Sometimes too much stress 
was given to epitomizing individual experiences, 
which were selected and perhaps given briefly in 
great numbers as samples, as I perhaps was most 
prone to do. Occasionally we found vital subjects on 
which there was really very little helpful literature, 
as in the case of anger. In other studies we occasion- 
ally worked up large bodies of such data only to find 
that they shed but relatively little new light. But in 
nearly all the topics, especially in those that pertained 
exclusively to childhood, we found a palpitating 
human interest and this was focused and intensified 
by striking concrete illustrations, although there was 
always the danger of deeming exaggerated forms of 
common experience, which for that reason had more 
zest, to be more typical of average childish experi- 
ences than they really were. These studies also 
brought out very clearly the fact that while there were 
many of the inner phases of child life that are very 
common, a great number of these are totally forgot- 
ten in adult years, even by those who had intense 
experiences of them, mothers, for example, testifying 
to prolonged fears in their adolescent daughters which 
the latter denied ever having had. But, on the other 
hand, these records brought home the realization that 
the experience of any single child is very limited, that 
there are vast ranges of experience always untouched 
even in the fullest life, and that most of them are 
represented only by vestiges of nascent states. 
Of course studies of this sort have their very 
grave defects of method. We always strove to recog- 
nize that they were only preliminary or first stages, 
that their chief value lay in their suggestiveness, and 
that little finality should be claimed for our conclusions 
save in those cases involving physical measurements. 
We had abundant occasion, too, to realize that very 
often a little experience in this study opened the eyes 
391 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
of parents and teachers to the nature and needs of 
childhood in an almost revolutionary way. There 
were, of course, many critics. Professor Miinster- 
berg repeatedly declared that he would love his chil- 
dren but never study them, as if the two were 
inversely related while we believed we had over- 
whelming evidence that to know a child better is to 
love it more. Anthropology has recognized its vast 
debt to the nonexpert observer who has first-hand 
contact with the facts desired, and has always made 
great use of the questionnaire. Even Darwin gath- 
ered a very large part of his data by a modified ques- 
tionnaire method through his very wide correspond- 
ence with observers, skilled and unskilled, in all parts 
of the world on the great variety of topics he treated. 
The movement of child study was, however, by 
no means limited to questionnaire methods of collect- 
ing individual memories of one’s own childhood or to 
the study of children collectively. To understand the 
full scope of genetic paidology we may here refer to 
the annual bibliography printed at Clark by L. N. 
Wilson from 1898 to 1911, each year containing from 
three or four hundred at first to nineteen hundred 
titles in 1910, 1911, with an index by subject always 
appended. At first our library strove to procure all 
these papers but their number soon transcended the 
resources we desired to devote to this subject, al- 
though our collection, supplemented by my own, is, 
at least for the earlier years of the movement, fuller 
than any I know. 
Articles on various phases of the subject and of 
all degrees of merit found their way not only into the 
periodical but the daily press, and very many who had 
no qualifications took it up as a fad and brought 
reproach and sometimes ridicule upon it. 
Meanwhile more than a dozen state and scores of 
local organizations were formed to advance the work, 
392 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
and of the early story of these S. E. Wiltse, secretary 
of the national society, has given us the most compre- 
hensive reports.14 The Northwestern Journal of Edu- 
cation and Monthly, beginning 1897, became the 
organ of this work for a group of states, and the 
Illinois Society for Child Study published several 
volumes of transactions. Many mothers’ clubs were 
formed and women’s clubs took up the theme, and 
The Mothers’ Congress and various parent and 
teacher associations endeavored to advance certain 
phases of it. Many of our large public libraries, led 
perhaps by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, 
opened children’s rooms and made a speciality of col- 
lecting literature for them, the Carnegie Library in 
1909 having 2,500 books for children. 
My very able assistant, Dr. Theodate L. Smith, 
undertook to gather data for a handbook of all child 
study and child welfare institutions the world over 
with a view to the eventual preparation of an encyclo- 
pedia on this subject. For years she conducted a 
voluminous correspondence, carefully arranged in 
many hundreds of large envelopes, making as her 
final classification some 80 different types of agency 
devoted to more knowledge or better care of children, 
normal and otherwise, including Dr. Forbush’s 
Knights of King Arthur, the boy scouts, big brother 
and sister movements, juvenile courts, lying-in hos- 
pitals, reformatories, institutions for deviates of 
various kinds, dependents and delinquents, hygienic, 
moral, and religious agencies including the Sunday 
school and ethical culture; protective associations, 
humane societies, child labor, prevention of crime, 
cruelty, and vice; children’s libraries and theaters, 
camps, story telling, school nurses, surveys, savings, 
14 “Preliminary Sketch of the History of Child Study in America,” 
Fed. Sent., Vol. 3, No. 2, a report that was continued for the year 
ending September, 1896 in Vol. 4, No. 2 of the same journal. 
393 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
psychological clinics, organizations for child study, 
etc.,16 and she herself, before her premature death, had 
begun to write brief sketches of the origin and pur- 
port of these institutions, one by one, a project later 
very materially advanced by several years of work 
and publication on the subject by W. L. Dealey. 
Our goal, however, of a compend of all this work 
fell far short of attainment, although had Dr. Smith 
lived I have no doubt that it would have been reached. 
As it is, however, I have to confess to some degree of 
failure and waste here, for no one could be secured 
with the means at our disposal to keep the corre- 
spondence up to date and edit the results in the form 
of a handbook which would show to workers for chil- 
dren in each field what those in others were doing. 
Like the observational, so, too, the reminiscent 
data in this field have, along with great advantages, 
certain grave defects. Stern, Colgrove, and a score 
of others have shown how liable the earliest mem- 
ories of childhood are to be corrupted by hearsay, 
imagination, etc., and of all the two hundred and sixty 
autobiographies included in the list Mrs. A. R. Burr 
studied, not two dozen contribute facts of much value 
about the earlier stages of life, although perhaps the 
majority of them are pervaded with a sense of its 
importance. Life, in a way, does take a new turn at 
puberty, too, and not only the feeling-tones but most 
experiences that precede it tend to fade because the 
real life of the individual begins when the burgeoning 
of sex links him up with the race. Sketches by well- 
known writers like F. H. Burnett, Pierre Loti, C. D. 
Warner, T. B. Aldrich, A. D. White, merely amplify 
the flotsam and jetsam of prepubertal memory for 
literary effectiveness and are of far less value than 
works that are more confessional, like Bashkirtseff, 
15 See her “Correspondence Department of the Children’s Institute,” 
Ped. Sem., 17:176. 
394 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
Miss Hunt’s “Una Mary,” and the interesting affecta- 
tions of Mary MacLane, etc. Writers like Rousseau, 
Tolstoi, George Sand and above all others, Goethe, 
touch a yet richer vein, while many of the intimate 
journals of religious experience are nearly always 
prone to lapse to conventionality and those describing 
youthful philosophical calentures are usually only the 
precocious foregleams of what was meant for normal 
old age. 
The point here, however, is that any and every 
honest effort to conserve and restore any important 
traits or events of our early life helps us on toward 
the self-knowledge which is the goal of the noetic 
impulse and which nowadays culminates in the 
psychoanalysis which many normal men of culture 
are seeking, with the aid of experts, and which should 
be, and seems now to give promise of becoming, an 
essential part of the preparation of life for every 
youth before he fully enters upon his career. Every 
diary spontaneously kept (of which Mrs. Forbes has 
published a list of many hundred in New England 
alone), the now well-understood eagerness of every 
ephebic soul to know how it measures up with others 
in every line of excellence, and the general dread of 
inferiority are common outcrops of the self-same im- 
pulse that perhaps has its culmination in the auto- 
biographic instinct. To challenge the validity of such 
data honestly meant is to impugn both memory and 
testimony. Indeed, writing out juvenile events is 
not only often a very effective method of psycho- 
therapy but there have been minds that have found 
themselves by this means alone and avoided wreckage. 
Not a few of the records of intelligent mothers 
which have come to us, whether they followed one or 
more of the many schedules which a decade or two 
ago were so abundantly supplied to them or simply 
noted points they deemed in any way significant, may 
395 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
have real scientific value, although most of these are 
important only for the parties concerned. Between 
one and two score American mothers have had the 
patience to note down with great fidelity the speech 
developments of their offspring, so that we now have 
dozens of vocabularies of children up to the end of 
the second and sometimes even the third year, and 
very occasionally the later years in life. A study of 
these shows undoubted traces of the very impulse 
from which speech arose, sometimes very strong in- 
deed, as in the case of Stumpf’s child, and I have 
compiled a list of real “words” as truly the original 
creation of the child’s mind, and not its clumsy effort 
to imitate, as anything that Lear or Carroll ever 
devised. 
Again, the studies of children’s spontaneous draw- 
ings, since Lukens really opened this field, have shown 
remarkable similarities between the development of 
the race and the child, with a hardly less marked node 
between the stage of drawing a memory image and 
copying from the object than that which Verworn has 
pointed out in cave drawings (his ideoplastic, which 
he thinks preceded the physioplastic stage) and work 
along these lines has more or less reconstructed our 
teaching here. Play, too, which is now understood 
not so much as practicing for adult activities as Groos 
thought, but as recapitulatory of the whole life of the 
race, is seen to have many elements common to ani- 
mals and savages; while Johnson has drawn up a 
curriculum of scores of plays according to their edu- 
cational values (and thinks that every topic in the 
first few years of school could and should be taught 
play-wise), and Gulick and especially Curtis, by his 
indefatigable activities throughout the country and 
by his books, inaugurated a nationwide playground 
movement. 
The art of story telling, too, is now recognized 
396 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
as a vestige of what before writing was the sole 
method of transmitting knowledge from one genera- 
tion to another, and we have not only a precious 
library of the great epics and traditions of the race 
simplified for children but the Story-Tellers League 
has made us realize as never before that oral narra- 
tion has a charm and an appeal greater than the page 
can supply and enables a master of the art to weave 
more characters and incidents into a unity, fusing 
them all in a climax, in a way that must have greater 
synthetic value for the child’s mind than any other 
and should precede all other systematization of the 
items of knowledge. 
Again, we understand in a new way the value of 
all kinds of associations of children with others—not 
only the disadvantages of being an only child but the 
necessity of giving early play to the group instinct, 
all the way from the spontaneous gang to the scores 
of juvenile organizations, so that those who had given 
attention to this subject found nothing new in Trot- 
ter’s insistence that the instincts of the herd were 
quite as primal and all-dominating as those of the 
ego; while Sheldon pointed out the close similarity 
between college and other secret fraternities and those 
of primitives. 
Another line in which the new interest in child- 
hood has developed at the same time a deeper knowl- 
edge and performed a great service to the rising 
generation is in the early recognition of pathological 
traits before they become ostensive enough to attract 
special attention. We know as never before the 
dangers of excessive automatisms, of the early out- 
crops of imperative ideas, the prelusions of hysteria, 
and the passion for deceit often so strong in pubescent 
girls, as is notably seen in histories of spiritism and 
so-called telepathy. We understand now that auto- 
erotism is a stage through which all pass and we can 
397 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
minimize the dangers of arrest in narcissism, while 
the studies instituted by the juvenile court have gone 
much beyond Lombroso in teaching us the embry- 
ology of both vice and crime. New light has been 
shed, too, upon even slight defects of hearing, sight, 
speech; the significance of faulty adenoids, teeth, 
postures; wrong habits of eating and sleeping; the 
evils of sex precocity and of child labor; and we have 
made great progress in developing a really scientific 
hygiene of the body, intellect, will, and feelings. We 
can also discriminate to a degree between the different 
stages of child development from infancy on, and 
some progress has been made in tabulating the age 
of certain nascent periods in which nature gives, per- 
haps once only in life and never again, a signal im- 
pulse for development in certain directions. We 
realize as never before the dangers of repression and 
the necessity of developing each power in its season 
as a condition for the unfoldment of the next higher 
power, which may have to check or sublimate it.16 
One special phase of child study impelled mainly 
by Binet and Simon but signally developed in this 
country by Goddard and his associates at Vineland, 
still further specialized and utilized in the army and 
now giving promise of a phenomenal development in 
industry and education, is testing. Not only in the 
National Association of Corporation Schools but 
everywhere abilities are being tested, especially in 
young people, for various industrial specializations. 
A more important prelude to this work which should 
be mentioned is that of Puffer, who studied the boy 
and tried to find the calling to fit him, and also the 
16 See Mrs. Elida Evans, The Problem of the Nervous Child, N. Y., 
Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920, 298 pp.; Phyllis Blanchard, The Adolescent 
Girl, N. Y., Moffat, Yard, 1920, 242 pp.; H. Crichton Miller, The New 
Psychology and the Teacher, N. Y., Seltzer, 1922, 225 pp. (the only 
serious attempt to date to draw the lessons of psychoanalysis for 
teachers). 
398 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
work of Meyer Bloomfield, who for years studied 
the qualities that various industries demanded and 
strove, conversely, to fit the boy to the job. Mention 
should also be made of the important spelling, writ- 
ing, arithmetic, and other scales to test the efficiency 
of schools and pupils comparatively, while now we 
have innumerable tests of intelligence, some of which 
are even used as a part of college entrance examina- 
tions. The ideal of having every one placed where 
he can utilize all his best powers is the point at 
which democracy and economy in industry come to 
a focus. 
Thus child study, which began on the broadest 
possible basis, attempting to be first mainly extensive 
and neglecting almost no human trait, has immensely 
increased in accuracy, method, and definiteness of re- 
sult but has at the same time greatly narrowed its 
field. It is in the great stress now laid upon these 
tests, too, that psychology in general has enormously 
increased its utility, but not without grave danger of 
lapsing from culture (the chief impulse at first which 
made the movement predominantly humanistic) to 
Kultur, since the later methods seek practical results 
with individuals and have added little to our knowl- 
edge of child nature in general. In this latter direc- 
tion, however, Clark University has made it a point 
for the last decade or more to have some competent 
authority to apply tests gratis to all children from the 
city sent or brought to it, and in recent years Dr. 
L. R. Geissler gave his entire time to making such 
tests and instructing others to do so here, and we 
founded here the Journal of Applied Psychology, an 
organ for the development of this work which, as I 
write, is in its sixth volume. 
Of child study in its original broader sense we 
have no adequate compend, although Baldwin, Ellen 
Key, Jacobi, Wallin, Forbush, Compayre, Groos, Rich- 
399 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
mond, Oppenheim, Sergi, Wagner’s Youth, O’Shea, 
Kirkpatrick, Drummond, Taylor, Partridge, McKee- 
ver, F. Warner, Mateer, W. A. White, Lay, Grahame, 
Sandiford and, in some respects most symmetrically 
of all, Dr. A. E. Tanner in The Child, and more re- 
cently Hug-Hellmuth, Rasmusin, W. Stern, Luckey, 
Chamberlain, Healey, etc., have sought to bring to- 
gether more or less of the general results of large 
parts of this work. In my own two volumes on 
Adolescence (1904) I sought to epitomize compre- 
hensively and to draw inferences from what had been 
done for this period of life, and in my Educational 
Problems (1911) I attempted to apply some of the 
lessons in this field to pedagogy. What we need and 
lack here, however, is a comprehensive synthetic work 
coordinating all the best of the new insights in regard 
to each stage of human development and drawing 
conclusions for a child nurture that shall better fit 
its nature. Until this is done topic by topic a very 
large part of the data actually gathered will remain 
scattered and ineffective because unknown, even to 
experts. 
Not only in 1909, as described in the preceding 
chapter, but again in 1910 we held at Clark Uni- 
versity a conference for child research and welfare 
lasting several days at which forty-eight addresses 
were given, many of which were followed by inter- 
esting discussions. This was attended and partici- 
pated in by representatives of nearly two score child 
welfare organizations. During this latter meeting a 
national child conference was organized, with a con- 
stitution and officers, of which I was made president 
and H. S. Curtis, secretary. We desired that the 
new bureau at Washington should be directed not 
only to better conditions of child labor throughout 
the country (in the interests of which it had been 
founded) but should also be made the organic center 
400 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
of all child-study activities and should make it one 
of its chief functions to bring together workers in 
all fields, representatives of each of which, as there 
was abundant evidence to prove, often knew very 
little of the work of others, and so pool both knowl- 
edge and interest. The organization we here effected, 
however, made little appeal to those intent chiefly on 
the immediate, practical work of mitigating abuses 
and ameliorating the conditions of childhood, so that 
research and welfare again showed their incompati- 
bility and it was realized that the latter had little 
interest in the former, and the two drifted apart. 
Hence this organization proved to be ineffective and 
soon lapsed. 
Following these conferences, however, we at- 
tempted to organize a Children’s Institute at the Uni- 
versity as follows.17 
The departments were: (i) a collection of litera- 
ture, including the hundreds of educational bills 
passed in this country every year; (2) natality, 
birth and death rates, under Mr. DeBusk; (3) hy- 
giene under Dr. Burnham; (4) subnormal children, 
under Dr. H. W. Chase; (5) crime; (6) vice; (7) 
child linguistics, under Dr. J. A. Magni; (8) anthro- 
pological and sociological; (9) experimental didac- 
tics, under Dr. Tanner; (10) child labor; (11) 
moral and religious training; (12) pedagogical mu- 
seum. Thus, six of the above departments were 
partially organized and the head of each presented a 
report of the work done. Our effort was, as above 
stated, to bring child philanthropy and field workers 
into contact with scientific paidology. In addition to 
this, an investigation of local conditions in Worcester 
was carried on by a group of our advanced students 
1T See my outline (Fed. Sent., June, 1910, 17:160) which is fol- 
lowed by the reports of seven departments and an account of the 
local surveys undertaken here. 
401 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
—A. H. N. Baron, delinquency; B. A. Lanphear, the 
Italian population; Mr. Griggs and Mr. Dominis, 
the Negroes; F. N. Cooke, causes of poverty; E. 
Curtis, local theaters; Mr. Roche, the park system; 
L. Ellison, motherhood, illegitimacy, midwives, etc.; 
Miss Cochran, the milk and later the egg conditions 
in the city; Mr. Acher, sex conditions; Dr. Carri- 
gan, juvenile crime; Dr. Karlson, condition of Swed- 
ish children; Dr. O’Connor, public and social hygiene; 
Mr. Stoutemyer and Mr. Sackett, the Salvation 
Army; Miss M. B. Downey, schoolyards; Mr. Cooley, 
activities of Protestant churches for children; Dr. 
Baff, the social evil; Miss Curtis, holidays, evenings, 
and Sundays; Mr. Cashen, activities of Catholic 
churches for child welfare; Miss Crum, vicious ado- 
lescent girls. To help along this latter work a large 
committee of representative citizens, “The Worcester 
Conference for Child Welfare,” was organized, 
which met for a few years, to each member of which 
was given the supervision of some definite line of 
work. We also secured the services of Paul Kellogg, 
who had conducted the Pittsburgh survey, while Miss 
F. Lattimore, also of the Sage Foundation, made us 
repeated visits to aid the above and other workers 
with her expert counsel and experience. 
We found no less than one hundred and fifty 
fraternal organizations in the city, some of which 
made some provision for children, at least orphans, 
and we sought to devise ways by which the great 
advantages that had everywhere been gained by the 
association of local charities could be extended. The 
results of the above studies were reported on by each 
for the benefit of all the others and for whomever else 
was interested. 
By a generous annual grant of the board we were 
able to develop in subsequent years a pedagogical 
museum, the utility of which had been abundantly 
402 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
illustrated in several European centers, particularly 
in the vast collections at Paris. We collected thou- 
sands of objects designed to facilitate the work of 
education. A few were contributed by their manu- 
facturers but most were purchased, chiefly from 
continental Europe. This collection brought home 
to us the sad fact that this country is relatively far 
behind in nearly all such devices, even Argentine 
making very great and effective use of them. The 
catalogue of the contents of our museum has, as I 
write, been begun by Dr. W. H. Burnham, who 
printed a list of objects useful in the field of school 
hygiene. But this is only a small part of our col- 
lection, which comprises colored wall charts illus- 
trating and vivifying fairy tales and legends, some 
to facilitate the teaching of the vernacular in other 
languages by appeals to the eye, historical charts, 
illustrations of chemical laws and industries, various 
phonic systems, forms of insect and lower and higher 
animal life, the products of children’s spontaneous 
industrial activities, the various methods of industrial 
education, principles of physics, aids in teaching 
number, geometry, astronomy, music, languages (for 
example, the graphophone), stereoscopic views of 
Egypt, Greece, the Orient, etc., many geographic 
charts, models, orreries, puzzles, toy trains that go 
by steam, airplanes, illustrations of ballistics, models 
of many kinds, and finally a library of textbooks. 
These and their use were illustrated in Saturday lec- 
tures open to teachers. There were open days for 
children, with demonstrations, and nearly all this 
apparatus was loaned to teachers as are books from 
a library. The economy of a judicious use of such 
material in the work of education is incalculable, and 
the few teachers who have really made use of it have 
not failed in their enthusiastic appreciation of it. 
We also, since 1909, have had some expert here 
403 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
who tested gratuitously all children from the city or 
elsewhere who are suspected of any form of abnor- 
mality, and some of these have been carefully studied 
individually. Dr. A. E. Tanner for some years gave 
a Saturday course on child study and its methods 
and results in general in much more detail than in 
her book, and I undertook to demonstrate in other 
Saturday courses how to use the material in the 
museum. 
Thus in 1909 and 1910, after many years of en- 
deavor in the field of child study, we strove to give 
this work a comprehensive organization and went to 
the very limit of our resources and launched the plan 
of our Institute, which we were able only in part to 
realize. But in announcing the full scheme of this 
with such abandon we had been influenced by strong 
and, as we thought, well-founded hopes of very ma- 
terial financial support from outside. We had ap- 
pealed to two of the great benefactions within the 
scope of which our work seemed to lie and to several 
very wealthy people, all of whom had expressed in- 
terest from which, as the sequel showed, we hoped 
too much, for their kindness toward us proved to be 
of the unremitting kind, so that slowly we began to 
realize that we had been too sanguine in our expec- 
tations. The graduate students and annual appoint- 
ees who had made such brave beginnings, as above, 
found larger fields elsewhere and we were not able, 
with our resources, to fill their places adequately. Per- 
haps their very ability and enthusiasm had contributed 
to raise our hopes too high. Thus the years that 
followed were those of hope deferred, and again it 
was found that we had planned more than we could 
accomplish. Perhaps we had not sufficiently realized 
that all beginnings are easy and difficulties often in- 
crease in geometrical ratio; at least for a time, in 
all such new departures. But if hopes in one direc- 
404 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
tion were shattered, relief and compensation, partial 
if not complete, were found in another—the new in- 
sights and interests in early childhood which the 
world owes to psychoanalysis. 
Again, as in the early days of the University, I 
had seen a vision and again, although in a less tragic 
or sudden way, I saw it fade. It had done much to 
sustain my courage during the closing years of the 
last century which were institutionally so dark, and 
I had even coquetted with the idea that if at Mr. 
Clark’s death we received nothing more it might pos- 
sibly seem wise to slowly change the character of the 
university and devote all its funds ultimately to the 
cult of the child. This never came to be a serious 
plan and I think was never communicated to any one, 
but as a defense mechanism it did give me personally 
a sense of refuge as a possible last resort. As, how- 
ever, all hopes of realizing ideals in this direction 
failed, I can now see that I passed through something 
of a crisis, though without realizing it at the time, 
and that my interests slowly took a new tack. In 
1904, when I printed my two volumes on adolescence, 
that subject became thereafter more or less of a closed 
one to me. As usual, having printed, I never read 
it again and avoided the subject in my courses of 
instruction, and in 1911 I closed my account with 
child study as applied to education by publishing my 
two volumes, Educational Problems and thereafter 
ceased to lecture upon education. The same year I 
turned over to another instructor the history of phi- 
losophy, which I had always taught, but after having 
a final and more elaborated course typed I printed of 
this material only my lectures on six contemporary 
leaders with whom I had come in personal contact 
in Founders of Modern Psychology, and elsewhere 
my treatment of Kant and Berkeley. (See bibliog- 
raphy.) In 1914 I published under the title Aspects 
405 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
of Child Life and Education a few of our sample 
monographs upon this subject and ceased to lecture 
upon childhood. 
I had for so many years studied the Greek philoso- 
phers that I felt I had a new standpoint and mode 
of approach and sufficient original interpretations to 
justify publication, and so sought and found a pro- 
fessor of Greek who began the final revision of this 
material under my direction but was later diverted 
into other fields, so that here I had to register another 
if less serious disappointment and failure, although 
my last course of lectures in this field was taken down 
in shorthand and typewritten. 
V 
I had long been predisposed to certain special in- 
terests in sex psychology besides those which every 
human being has had since man became man. The 
reasons for the latter, which also make perversions 
so easy, are to be found in the erect position, 
which brings these functions and organs within the 
range of attention and revolutionizes the mode of 
approach; in the development of the manual function 
itself, which makes self-abuse possible; in primitive 
modes of life, dressing and undressing, in certain 
conditions that perhaps first arose in the glacial era 
and the consequent extension of the rutting season 
to all parts of the year, etc. Thus the so-called fall 
of man was indiscerptibly bound up with the use of 
these functions in excess of the needs of procreation. 
Again, early culture history has a phallic vein which 
has pervaded all religions and made not a few of them 
gross to a degree which it is almost impossible for 
us to realize, especially since so many of these ten- 
dencies have been repressed or sublimated. A large 
body of mythology, too, admits of a phallic or erotic 
406 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
quite as much as of an astral explanation so that 
views like those of Max Muller and Cox are as liable 
to be carried to excess as those of Jung, Rank, and 
others now competing with them and asserted to be 
more primitive. 
Moreover, it is now nearly twenty years since the 
subject of teaching sex to young people began to be 
seriously broached, and on this subject the mind tends 
to lose its poise and become dogmatic and fall a prey 
to extreme views, which are always easiest. Perhaps 
my prepubescent observations in one of the schools 
I attended had opened my eyes to the possibilities of 
precocious evil in this field, which my work and read- 
ing in connection with the New England Watch and 
Ward Society, of which I was at one time president, 
had greatly deepened. For some years I was inclined 
to respond to the many invitations to address not only 
teachers but high school and even college students 
upon this subject, once venturing upon a weekly course 
at Clark, in 1904, which I abandoned before its com- 
pletion for two reasons, first, because it was difficult 
to exclude those I deemed unfit since too many out- 
siders got in and even listened surreptitiously at the 
door, and second, because two or three of my stu- 
dents developed an interest in the subject that I 
deemed hardly less than morbid. It is, of course, 
impossible to treat such a theme scientifically without 
at least some plain speaking upon perversions as rep- 
resented by Tarnowski, Krafft-Ebbing, Havelock 
Ellis, etc., and this I found it most unexpectedly hard 
to do although all women were excluded. 
I early reached the conviction that from the 
standpoint of sex hygiene and pedagogy the key to 
the whole situation was that young people must have 
excitement, must tingle and glow, must become men- 
tally erethic to develop the higher powers of man; 
and that everything that generated real intellectual 
407 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
interest set a backfire to temptation here, while 
mechanical and lifeless modes and matter in teaching 
directly predisposed young people to find the excite- 
ment their whole nature craved and needed in for- 
bidden ways. I also realized that mass instruction 
in these subjects specifically was prone to do more 
harm than good and also that on this theme as on no 
other the slightest hints were both understood and 
indelibly remembered so that a radically different 
method of treatment from that used in other domains 
was necessary if this topic was to be given any special 
place in the curriculum rather than being taught inci- 
dentally in connection with botany, which seemed 
better fitted as the open sesame to this field for girls, 
as natural history and physiology are for boys, for 
the apperception organs of the sexes here seem to 
have more or less characteristic differences. 
Thus in this period I fear I had my very worst 
pedagogic experience before attaining this general 
insight and that I did harm while attempting only 
to do good. The many students and auditors of both 
sexes who afterward privately and perhaps by letter 
set forth to me their own problems and revealed their 
own experiences showed me how profound and uni- 
versal were worries in this field and also how secret, 
all-pervasive, and often incessant were the dangers 
to which young people were exposed. Certain investi- 
gators brought to light practices not only in reforma- 
tories and prisons but in schools and colleges, to say 
nothing of the many revelations of the social evil and 
the medical studies and statistics of venereal diseases, 
that still further revealed the magnitude of the evil 
and our ignorance of how to cope with it. Such re- 
ports and even this theme in general were long under 
taboo in the American press, which admitted only 
specific scandals, until by a consensus some years ago 
the ban was more or less lifted. Up to and even 
408 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
during the great war psychological orthodoxy, especi- 
ally in this country and England, almost entirely 
ignored this subject, and in our journals and on the 
programmes of our meetings it was rarely touched. 
Nor had it received much more attention in child 
study circles. 
Thus the advent of Freudianism marked the 
greatest epoch in the history of our science. Not 
only did it bring the element of feeling, which had 
received comparatively little attention from scientific 
psychologists, into the very foreground of attention 
but it made it the prime determinant of human de- 
velopment. If the Freudian claims of the all-domin- 
ance of sex were excessive, as they certainly seem 
to me to be, it was only a natural reaction to the 
long taboo and prudery that would not look facts in 
the face. If the gross and morbid phenomena here 
were taken as the point of departure, made the norm 
and gave the nomenclature, the conclusions here 
drawn were from a solid and wide basis of clinical 
facts which no one could dispute, however much they 
might criticize methods and interpretations. But 
there was always the most insidious danger of in- 
ferring from the morbid to the normal. 
The dicta that all dreams are wish-fulfillments 
and protectors of sleep, that the unconscious is the 
childish and vice versa, the insight into the nature of 
mental imagery afforded by the new interpretation 
of symbolism, the conception that childhood is poly- 
morphically perverse, the interpretation of even in- 
fantile phenomena never before explained as prelu- 
sions of sexuality before it became evolved and its 
elements constellated, the fundamental significance 
ascribed to the first four years of childhood, the ex- 
tremely wide interpretation given to sadism and 
masochism as types of activity and passivity, the 
conception of hysteria as a flight from reality, the 
409 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
enormous role ascribed to repressed concepts, to con- 
flicts, and to the unconscious generally; the slow 
widening of the genetic theories of causation of 
mental and nervous disorders, not only to early in- 
fancy but to the prenatal period and at last by the 
Zurich school to phyletic history; and perhaps most 
important of all, the gradual extension of Freudian 
views into the domain of biography, history, litera- 
ture, religion, hygiene, sociology, and art, so that the 
activities they inspired outside of the medical field 
came to be even greater in volume and importance 
than those within it—all this made it so_genet]£_and 
vital that it came to me to seem almost like a new 
dispensation in the domain of psychology, so that 
from 1910, when Freud visited us, it and its wider 
implications became of central interest to me. 
Now when I have diligently read and kept tab on 
nearly all its important literature to date, involving 
a great deal of the hardest reading I have ever done, 
and having given courses on various aspects of it 
annually since 1908, my sense of its importance has, 
despite the extravagances of some of its followers 
and the lamentable schism which has arisen in its 
ranks, steadily grown. This is despite the fact, too, 
that I cannot believe that normal children show to 
any marked extent the infantile aberrations which 
are postulated; that I especially balk at the Anal- 
erotik and believe that the prenatal Allmacht der 
Gedanken must be at least complemented by the oppo- 
site sense of dependence; that I am convinced from 
years of study of my own dreams and those of my 
pupils that while there is a class of them which pretty 
strictly conforms to Freud’s rubrics there are others 
that cannot possibly be explained by them; that I 
hold that the (Edipus complex is unhappily named 
because CEdipus did not know his father or mother 
and that the phenomena it designates are somewhat 
410 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
less common than this theory assumes, and also that 
the incest notion in general has been still more over- 
worked since Rank; that Jung’s mysticism has quite 
transcended the legitimate bounds of science and some 
of it is not only conjectural but fantastic (and I have 
collected a large number of cases of what seemed to 
be the wildest kind of symbolism) ; that I deprecate 
the evil results which I know have often followed 
from the assumption of Freudian physicians that the 
key to all the symptoms of their patients is to be 
found in sex, so that analysis is prone to leave them 
unduly sexually-minded. Yet I recognize, on the 
other hand, the immense fruitfulness of these new 
methods of exploring the unconscious, welcome the 
new and adequate recognition that this school has 
at length given it—and that in the teeth of a psy- 
chology which ignores and even denies the existence 
and validity of most of the mechanisms, some of 
which I believe are likely to prove as significant 
in the world of psychology as innate ideas and the 
so-called categories have been in philosophic history 
-—and I have the deepest appreciation of the service 
Freud has rendered our specialty by doing more to 
popularize and give zest to it among all sorts and 
conditions of intellectuals than any other man in the 
history of the science. 
In my own experience in teaching it I have found 
over and over again that among those who heard me 
not a few had long been victims of morbid complexes, 
several of them to a dangerous degree; indeed, I 
think the majority of them, to some extent, were dis- 
tinctly helped in their knowledge and regimen of 
themselves, and I am convinced that several of the 
most gifted of them have been saved from mental 
wreckage by it. It appeals to all classes and there 
have always been those outside the department or 
even the university who wanted it. The insight has 
411 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
grown that every one should be analyzed, while intro- 
spection is slowly but surely coming to realize that 
its inquiries do not find their final goal in the most 
accurate or expert description of present states and 
processes of consciousness but that back of this there 
is an ulterior explanation of them all to be found in 
the intimate psychic history of each individual, so that 
in a sense psychoanalysis may begin where introspec- 
tion leaves off and use its findings as its data or 
point of departure and not regard the Anlagen, Ein- 
stellungen, or determinierende Tendenzen of the 
post-Wundtians as ultimate. 
Moreover, we have here a new method of both 
biography and autobiography. So far as history is 
the work of great men it will be better known when 
we have seen the secret springs of action of leaders, 
to a number of whom already these methods have 
been applied with promising results. It enters, too, 
the field of everyday life, shows the psychic element 
and its importance even in physical disease, mitigates 
strain and worry, sets forth the peculiar dangers of 
arrest in later adolescence, gives a new interpretation 
of such fundamental things as character and dispo- 
sition, a new basis for the study of art and aesthetics 
generally, and is pregnant with suggestions of an 
ultimate modification, not only of the religious but 
of social and family life. The number of out-and-out 
disciples of the cult although small is growing, but 
its chief influence and its most rapid growth are 
found outside the circles of specialists, and here, as 
also within its more or less esoteric circles, there is 
no sign of any abatement of its fecundity, which even 
the war hardly diminished at all although it did teach 
the salutary lesson that battle fears and shock cen- 
tered in the instinct of self-preservation and generally 
had little to do with sex. 
Freud himself has lately claimed that there are 
412 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
three great culture epochs in the world: (i) the 
Copernican revolution; (2) Darwinism; (3) his 
own achievements in properly introducing the uncon- 
scious to the world. There are certainly striking 
analogies, as he points out, between these three steps, 
and there are every day more and more who will 
agree with his high estimate of the importance of his 
own and his disciples’ achievements. His views have 
certainly taken a very deep hold on almost all my 
students, as is witnessed by so many of their theses 
during the last decade, by their demand and eager 
use of this literature, and by the fact that a number 
of them are already teaching it in some form or to 
some degree or are engaged in the practice of it in 
some institution or elsewhere. Despite all this, how- 
ever, candor compels me to add that I see very clearly, 
among these graduates, certain dangers which would 
perhaps be much greater with undergraduates in in- 
ducing them to think sexually. Many have testified 
to a new freedom in recent years in speaking frankly 
on subjects formerly tabooed, but I am old-fashioned 
enough to have felt slightly shocked at a few of the 
more frank discussions in which both sexes have par- 
ticipated, even in my seminary, and still franker dis- 
cussions of which I have learned outside it. On the 
other hand, it must not be forgotten that young 
people’s thoughts dwell upon such subjects at this age 
to a degree older ones are prone to forget and that 
to bring them more into consciousness and get the 
herd reaction may, on the whole, be itself a moral 
therapy. I certainly have yet to learn of any immor- 
ality that can be ascribed to our cult of psychoanalysis 
here. 
The time may come, too, when this rejected stone 
will be the chief of the corner and psychology may 
begin or culminate here, and the unconscious prove as 
much larger than the conscious as the race is larger 
413 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
than the individual. This new phylogenetic inter- 
pretation of Mansoul, despite all its extravagances 
and the bitter opposition and perhaps still more 
effective ignoring of it, really marks, more than any- 
thing else, the belated advent of evolution into the 
study of man’s psychic nature, for there is a sense in 
which the oft-quoted distich, “Love rules the camp, 
the court, the grove; for love is God, and God is love” 
is coming to be recognized as only a plain statement 
of fact. 
VI 
According to an old saw, hunger is the co-regent 
of the world with love, and if genetic race psychology 
begins with the latter that of the individual begins 
with the former. The body is a chemical product sub- 
ject to all the laws of the conservation of energy, and 
just as our world is the child of the sun, so all animal 
life is born of chlorophyl and all forms of vital energy 
are regulated by the intake and expenditure of food. 
Indeed, the body is a machine for the conservation, 
distribution, and transmission of energy and there is 
a sense in which every part and even cell is a digestive 
organ, so that we are constantly realizing in an ever 
new and higher way that man is what he eats and 
what he does with it. 
Hunger is the very first expression of the will to 
live and this is true of all the thousands of species 
since life began. A very large part of the total kinetic 
energy of the body goes to digestion and a good part 
of the occupation of all animals is food finding and 
taking. As every one knows, since a cell is fed only 
by absorbing its food from the surface it must, as it 
grows large, either divide or die of inanition. The 
law of most of the world in the struggle for survival 
is to eat or avoid being eaten, for the stomach of its 
414 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
enemies has been the grave of many extinct individ- 
uals and species. The suckling seems to say “The 
world is my food” and has no interest in anything 
else. The very first movements are hunger move- 
ments. Cilia, pseudopodia, fins, legs, wings, tails are 
to find or appropriate food or to avoid being food for 
others, and the same to a degree can be said of 
muscles and even glands. When we know its food 
we can define much of not only the habitat but the 
habits of animals. Food, too, is the first form of 
property and almost everything with any nutritive 
element has been food for something. The baby 
brings almost everything to its mouth as its chief 
sensorium. The primitive gods were mainly eaters, 
with cruel fangs and enormous mouths and maws. 
Feeding is the chief method of training animals. 
The hearth and cooking were the nucleus of the home. 
Roux has shown the incessant struggle for survival 
among different organs in the same individual by 
competing for available nutritive material. Cephal- 
ization was developed about the entrance of the ali- 
mentary canal and the senses were at first food finders 
and testers. The same is true of the primitive noetic 
processes centering in the brain. The lower part of 
the face was developed largely as an apparatus for 
tricherating food, and the bestial muzzle, originally 
prehensile, declined in exact proportion as the hand 
assumed this function. Appetite is a kind of physical 
conscience, and taste a kind of premonitory digestion. 
Circulation is a system for the distribution of the 
finished products of digestion, and respiration is to 
remove carbon dioxide. There is a very pregnant 
sense, too, in which all death is due to starvation, local 
or general. The food supply may be insufficient, the 
energy of assimilation weak, the nutritive elements 
may not reach their destination or may be infected 
with unremoved and noxious products of decomposi- 
415 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
tion, or germs may interfere with the process of 
restoration from fatigue or even with that of main- 
tenance. Every one of the thirteen thousand sensa- 
tions Kiilpe thinks man can discriminate affects 
metabolism. Indeed, education and even religion 
might be defined as a method of raising the plane of 
digestion, making the body an ever more fit living 
temple of the Biologos, imperfection of which involves 
lack of spiritual insight, so that if we are not inter- 
ested in all things we have unused functions. To 
construct the higher compounds out of food is a kind 
of transubstantiation, for we really live by what we 
digest on the highest plane. 
Again, pleasure and pain are very closely linked 
to the digestive processes, and the joy of physical life 
at and after a good meal is near its apex. Dis-ease is 
the chief fear and generally begins by our getting 
conscious of mouth, stomach, kidneys, liver, etc., and 
this hypochondria may be diffuse and not localized. 
All weakened functions tend to come to the front. 
Moreover, in autointoxication one organ’s food or 
excreta becomes toxic for others. All dyspepsias are 
psychalgic, and even cancerous growths are products 
of a low level metabolism or unremoved byproducts. 
Thus nutrition is the background of all things. The 
soul is the most vital part of the total push up and 
heredity is “the voice of extinct generations in us.” 
It is, as some one has said, like a large sum raised by 
small subscriptions, the list of which has been lost. 
If we feed well we pass over the earlier stages of 
growth more rapidly and normally, and thus the 
stages of recapitulation are accelerated, waste 
avoided, lacunae bridged, and the danger of degen- 
eration or arrest is best eliminated. Well-cooked 
food, too, is the best preventive of intemperance, 
while adulterations and scanty supply favor alcohol- 
ism. The above generalities constitute points of view 
416 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
which serve as the biological and physiological back- 
ground for the epoch-making work of Pavlov and his 
school, which began some twenty-five years ago. Al- 
though he claimed that he had eliminated psychic 
concepts and put physiological ideas in their place, his 
experiments proved to be of almost epoch-making 
significance to psychogeneticism, and no one who 
accepts what is called the Unconscious can fail to 
recognize the immense significance of the “condi- 
tioned reflex” for behaviorism, which latter’s specu- 
lative motif really owes nearly all its momentum to 
him. 
As the world now knows, Pavlov showed that the 
perfection of the association of any stimulus with 
appetite can be measured by the quantity of saliva it 
evokes (the sialogic reflex). The hungry dog, at the 
sight and smell of meat, first secretes a rather definite 
quantity of saliva, and nearly this amount can be 
reached by the method of association in a successive 
series of experiments, which develop into a food 
sign, e.g., a square disc. When this is shown and he 
learns that it just precedes the giving of meat the 
secretion may reach its initial maximum, and the com- 
pleteness of the association is measured by the num- 
ber of drops of saliva in a given time. Thus, too, 
thermal, tactual and, by far most finely of all, tone 
stimuli may be developed as effective food signs, 
evoking nearly or quite the maximum of salivation, 
and thus it is possible, too, to explore the discrimi- 
native capacities of the canine mind. The same 
method has been applied by Krasnegorski, Mateer, 
and others to the measurement of the mental capaci- 
ties of human infants. The fading out of these 
artificial associations so voluminously studied has also 
proven a rich mind for the further study of memory, 
and all this fadges well with and makes more ex- 
quisite the speculation of Simon on mnemes and 
417 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
engrams, a point of view too much neglected by- 
students in this field. 
Not only the action of the salivary but that of the 
gastric glands has been studied by Pavlov and his 
disciples, who have developed a mass of interesting 
facts by the clever method of separating a portion of 
the stomach from the rest of it and studying its 
secretory activity and products, which also reveals the 
startling fact that the composition of this fluid differs 
very exactly according to the kind of food adminis- 
tered or even expected. Carlson’s patient with an 
artificial fistula in his stomach, the swallowing of rub- 
ber balloons to measure stomatic contractions in 
hunger pangs, etc., the functions of what even Pavlov 
once spoke of as the “pyloric soul” which determines 
what shall pass into the duodenum and when, the 
Metchnikoff conclusions concerning the large intes- 
tine, and those of Freud on analism—all this has 
served to bring almost the whole of the long alimen- 
tary tract into psychology and has tended to bring us 
again to the Aristotelian concept of a nutritive soul 
as fundamental. 
The Wundtian psychology was mainly based upon 
the higher senses, sight, hearing, and touch, but now 
we are brought back again to physiology, this time to 
its chemical side. The hungry dog’s psyche is so 
exquisitely sensitized that it may seize upon anything 
in the environment as a sign of the expected food, 
even the automatic movements of the make-and-break 
click. His sensitiveness is as great as that of the 
psyche of the learned horse, Hans, to the automatisms 
of his trainer, Von Osten, or as that shown in the 
wonderful feats of so-called mind—which are always 
really muscle-reading, so that the Russian experi- 
menters had to develop an “automatic restaurant” 
eliminating every human influence. 
Thus appetite, which is a very different thing from 
418 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
hunger, is in exquisite rapport with all alimentary 
processes. Injections of sand or sawdust through an 
opening in the stomach cause no secretions, although 
the relation between stomatic and oral hunger is so 
close and cerebrally mediated that a dog whose esoph- 
agus is cut, so that all its food comes out into a dish 
without entering the stomach, keeps on eating for 
hours. The question as to what appetite really is is 
baffling, but it seems to have a prominence which is in 
some respects akin to Angst as the primum movens in 
neurotic and psychic disturbances. The old theory 
that appetite is hunger located in the stomach and that 
the latter is expressed only by its contractions when 
empty, is obviously insufficient because these cease 
after a few days of fasting. Dupuyten and Schiff, 
who place it in the blood, regard its apparent location 
in the stomach as an illusion similar to that which 
makes us project the pain of a stump to the amputated 
finger, and Guelpa’s brilliant experiments that sug- 
gested that it was due not to nutritive material but to 
the accumulation of waste matter, seem rather yield- 
ing to a third theory that takes us back to the cells. At 
any rate, Turro would assume that what we call hunger 
and thirst are the summated feeble cries of every cell 
in the body for nutrition, while it is possible to go even 
further and hold that the ultimate basis of all psychic 
processes is cell-hunger or its opposite state, repletion. 
On this view curiosity and interest are inclinations to 
an intake by certain, perhaps cortical, cells of the 
elements they want from the fluids that lave them. 
Such views even suggest an epistemological the- 
ory to the effect that the edibilia are more real than 
the visibilia, audibilia, or tangibilia because they may 
run the gauntlet of more senses since we not only see 
and touch but also taste and smell our food, each sense 
giving added criteria of reality. However this may 
be, appetite is probably modified by most of the condi- 
419 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
tions and processes, not merely in the digestive organs 
themselves but in the blood and by the need of the 
ultimate elements of the body; and, what is more 
important, it gives or expresses an initial momentum 
to them all. If unperverted it points true as the needle 
to the pole to the needs of the body, and this concept 
dignifies the culinary art and greatly widens our con- 
ception of digestion. On this view it is possible to 
interpret mental zest as the effort to maintain a nor- 
mal nutritive balance in the brain. The ego itself 
grew out of antecedent soul states as different from 
our own to-day as protoplasm is from the developed 
body. Everything is, of course, many times sublated 
or aufgehoben. Even a species is a stage of evolution 
interrupted at a certain point. Again, more or less 
controlled observation shows that all table accessories, 
social converse, etc., increase appetite and food con- 
sumption. Those who habitually eat alone are prone 
to develop phantasies of imaginary companions. 
They masticate less, are more prone to develop dys- 
pepsias, etc. Discord or, for some, even contro- 
versy at table lessens food consumption and impairs 
digestion. 
These roughly indicated appergus which seem now 
focusing from so many different sources, seem to me 
to promise a new basis for psychology in the near 
future, a psychology perhaps dimly glimpsed by Jung, 
who in his libido theory does give a place, although a 
very inadequate one, to hunger. Such views would a 
few decades ago have been abandoned as materi- 
alistic, especially the view that identifies the quest for 
knowledge itself with the hunger of cerebral or 
other cells and with the new epistemology which holds 
that among all objects of knowledge food has a 
unique degree of reality. We know, of course, too 
little as yet of the details of the anabolic and catabolic 
processes to form a very clear idea of them, but it is 
420 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
only the next step beyond the Lange-James theory to 
assume them as the basis of all psychic activity. 
At any rate, these conceptions appealed to me so 
strongly that years ago I had at my own expense a 
number of translations and epitomes made of Russian 
literature on the subject, and developed a course out- 
lining what I generally called nutritive psychology. 
Although I read widely and “digested” as well as I 
could, and repeated and amplified it half a dozen 
times, this course was perhaps the most undeveloped 
of all. Yet even here I venture to believe, from the 
reactions of individuals and classes, that the material 
I was able to give had a rather high stimulating and 
suggestive quality. There is, after all, much at bot- 
tom in common between food and sex despite the fact 
that food hunger is far more commonly gratified and 
normalized. The studies of fasting and starvation 
show that many of the same mechanisms recognized 
for sex are also true of food. Here too, science and 
praxis are still too widely divorced, and those con- 
ducting dietetic researches have little occasion to 
think of the millions just now starving in south cen- 
tral Europe and in China, and vice versa Hoover is no 
dietitian and probably has given no thought to the 
different kinds of food needed by different vocations. 
In fact, when a man passes from happy and torpid 
satiety at the close of a good meal to the active condi- 
tion found after several days of starvation he has 
gone pretty far from one extreme of the algedonic 
state to the other, and character and disposition are 
profoundly affected not only in children but even in 
adults by their habitual position on this scale. 
But in these interests my excessively developed 
synthetic propensities have perhaps led me farthest 
astray, for to develop the ideal of a system such as 
this one slowly evolved in my mind would require the 
carefully concerted activities of a group of experts 
421 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
working on a unitary plan for years. Perhaps I have 
here yielded most to the dilettante’s weakness of study 
for the sake of self-gratification, but at any rate I 
can cite in the defense of my position Lessing’s 
famous thesis that the quest of knowledge is higher 
than its possession. 
VII 
As early as 1895 I had timidly offered a brief 
course on comparative religions and out of this in 
subsequent years grew a more belabored one on the 
psychology of Christianity. This latter was repeated 
and amplified every alternate year down to 1917, 
when I finally ventured to revise and publish it in two 
volumes under the title, Jesus, the Christ, in the Light 
of Psychology. In this work I tried, I think for the 
first time, among other things to apply the principles 
of psychoanalysis to the religious consciousness and 
sought to show that one might to-day be a true Chris- 
tian while rejecting all crass material interpretations 
and of course everything miraculous, and explaining 
the origin and development of the Christian faith as 
a purely psychological projection of the folk and indi- 
vidual soul. 
It was a long and laborious process from the rigor 
of the Puritan faith in which I was reared to complete 
emancipation from belief in all forms of super- 
naturalism, and I believed that the entire story of the 
rise and development of the Christian faith could be 
given a new scientific basis that would enable a psy- 
chologist of insight to reaffirm with entire sincerity, 
but of course with radically changed although intrin- 
sically correct and therefore really orthodox inter- 
pretations, every article of the Apostles’ Creed. I 
had always had clergymen in my classes and it was 
with growing surprise and delight that I found that, 
422 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
with one single exception and that only temporary, 
every one of them who ever heard this course essen- 
tially sympathized with it, although to my great 
regret a few of them went so far in proclaiming it to 
their congregations that they came to grief. 
As a young man I had read Baur, Strauss, Renan, 
Seelye, Matthew Arnold, and even Feuerbach, while 
Hegelism had greatly facilitated my own mental 
emancipation and it was only left for psychoanalysis 
to make it complete, confident, and even exuberant. 
The eschatology of Schweitzer and, in a somewhat 
less degree, the views of J. Weiss were of culminat- 
ing effect on my own eclaircissement, and I sought to 
show how this might be carried still further by the 
assumption that Jesus died in absolute despair, feeling 
not only that He was discredited with all His fol- 
lowers and accursed of God but that He had been the 
victim of a great delusion, so that He died more com- 
pletely than any one else ever began to do, expecting 
no future here or elsewhere; that His resurgence was 
the inevitable result of the tardy realization of this 
by those He left behind; that Paul’s interpretations 
were only sublimations of the great ethnic faiths that 
abounded in the countries bordering the eastern 
Mediterranean, so that not only Judaism but they had 
a redispensation in the Pauline doctrines; that the 
phenomenon of Pentecost could be reinterpreted as 
the sudden resurgence of faith that the spirit of Jesus 
had arisen and was marching on; that the Messianity, 
the sonship and kingdom, and even the nativity could 
now have a new luminous psychological interpreta- 
tion; that the many dramas and romances about Jesus 
were worthy of consideration because they were 
made, warp and woof, out of the same material of the 
imagination as creeds and even the gospels them- 
selves ; and also that we must face, and have nothing 
to fear from, even the extreme negative interpreta- 
423 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
tions of His character, even those that made Him a 
lunatic, a degenerate, or, as Nietzsche taught, a fraud 
perpetrated by the Jews, who plotted and succeeded in 
making the Christians worship One whom they had 
execrated and executed as a criminal. 
To realize that every article of faith, not exclud- 
ing the belief in God and immortality, was an eject or 
projection of the folksoul in the struggle to make its 
own deeper and really subjective processes seem 
clearer and more certain by objectifying them, to 
realize that everything in all this field comes from 
within, as Berkeley thought the esse of the external 
world was its percipi, is the goal of religious enfran- 
chisement and is the very opposite of the crass skepti- 
cism, atheism, and vulgar rationalism that reject all 
these psychic products. The literalists, dogmatists, and 
fundamentalists are the real materialists in this field 
and there is an exultation and a new realization of 
Hegel’s dictum that mansoul cannot think too highly of 
itself. To have made this long “pilgrim’s progress” 
from the crude faith of childhood, in various stages of 
which the vast majority of believers are arrested and 
go through life as victims of religious dementia prae- 
cox, seems to me to be perhaps the very most essential 
of all forms of education, and I believe we shall some 
time have a scale on which we can measure and grade 
intelligence and culture here which will be second in 
value to no other if we ever have a real index with the 
aid of which we can record just how far each soul has 
progressed toward its goal. 
If, thus, everything here really does come from 
within,18 one corollary follows that is not only abso- 
lutely irresistible and ineluctable but of the utmost 
practical consequence because it gives man a new and 
confident orientation toward nothing less than the 
18 See, e.g., a charming illustration of what this does for a man 
in Sir Francis Younghusband’s Within (Lond., 1914). 
424 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
summurn bonum itself. Having once realized how 
anthropomorphic man is and that everything great 
and good has sprung out of his own soul, it follows as 
the day does the night that man’s primal duty is to 
keep himself always as near as possible at the tip-top 
of his condition. Every great step and advance has 
been made by those who, if we understand it aright 
and realize all the polymorphic forms of this condi- 
tion, had attained it and spoke, acted, and created 
from the impulsion of the evolutionary urge that has 
impelled the race in every onward step it has ever 
taken. If this nisus is the great procreative impulse 
that made man first conceive Nature as natura, the 
about-to-be, as ever in labor pangs, it follows that the 
best we can do is to cultivate the supreme hygiene 
that makes us always ready to meet every new emer- 
gency so adequately that all its higher possibilities 
shall be brought out. We can never prescribe for all 
the multifarious exigencies of life, but just as general 
physical training alone can lay the broadest and 
strongest foundation for every kind of special athletic 
victory, so to keep the soul always in its highest state 
is not only the best prophylactic against all physical 
and moral evils but the best preparation for any and 
every new departure or achievement. In this state 
alone we can face and not flee from reality. It was 
this conclusion that I sought to draw in my Morale 
(1920). 
Epistemological idealism has always seemed to me, 
as I have tried elsewhere to show,19 only a diversion or 
abortion of the above culture trends which belong 
really in the religious field. Berkeley did not realize 
it but, in developing his subjective idealism, psycho- 
analysis now sees plainly that the direction of his 
19 “Why Kant Is Passing,” Am. Jour. Psychol. 23:370-426 (1912) 
and “The Genetic View of Berkeley’s Religious Motivation,” Jour. 
Relig. Psychol. 5: 137-163, 1912. 
425 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
thought was only an unconscious Verschiebung or 
switching-off from its main track of the tendency 
within him to inwardize religious faith, which neither 
his training, position, nor the spirit of his time was 
able to recognize, into a very different field—the per- 
ceptual, where his unconscious made him compensate 
for being detraque by overdoing or attempting the 
impossible according to a mechanism which psycho- 
analysis now well understands. If one cannot do a 
thing to which the deepest instincts of the soul impel 
him he finds recourse in attempting a task of a similar 
character in some very different domain in which yet 
more effort is required to carry it out. Thus the 
Berkeleyan subjectification we may now interpret as 
a symbol of what his deeper self really wanted in the 
religious field, with all the “apperceptive insufficiency’' 
characteristic of symbols. 
Perhaps the very deepest appeal which the New 
Testament makes to psychology is found in the fact 
that it gives to the world in concrete form the su- 
preme portrayal of pleasure and pain, which are the 
sovereign masters of life, in their ambivalent rela- 
tions. The progressive humiliation of Jesus as sug- 
gested by the new eschatology (the final conclusions 
of which I have nowhere found but attempted to draw 
and set forth) culminating, as I think, in His realiza- 
tion that He was absolutely forsaken of God and of 
man, that His cause was hopelessly lost, that there was 
no future for it or for Him, that He had been a fool 
and died as animals die, although this extreme of de- 
spair was mitigated in the gospel portrayal, consti- 
tuted the chief theme of preaching that was amplified 
for centuries by the Church, although it had failed, 
if newer views are right, to realize the absoluteness 
of the great renunciation. Thus the story of the 
Cross has always been the world’s masterpiece of 
pathos, and men and women have gone almost mad 
426 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
with pity and have even mutilated themselves to share 
in the sufferings of their Lord or to bring home to 
themselves the more acute realization of them all. 
Thus when the tomb closed upon Jesus’ broken body, 
all that He had said and stood for seemed folly and 
madness, and all who had believed in Him seemed 
convicted of fatuous delusion. 
Then came the great reversal. First there was a 
faint whisper that He had arisen and even ascended 
to God, which at Pentecost flamed forth into a mad, 
passionate affirmation. Paul knew and preached only 
the risen Jesus whom he had not known in the flesh 
and whose death he had not seen or been moved by. 
Now the Crucified One became the great death-killer, 
the veritable object lesson of man’s immortality. The 
victim became Lord over all and He was made not 
only the Messiah and Son of God but slowly became 
invested with all the divine attributes till He attained 
complete parity with the Father, ruling and judging 
all the earth, inaugurating the kingdom of God, and 
perhaps bringing all mundane things to a speedy and 
final end. No wonder, then, that His followers only a 
few short weeks after His death seemed to onlookers 
intoxicated with this new faith in resurgence, so that 
for generations men taunted and defied death, devel- 
oped a certain etiquette of meeting it with bravado in 
its most dreadful forms, seeking martyrdom as a con- 
summation and vieing with each other in courting its 
most cruel aspects. Now the paramount theme was 
not so much the psychalgia that culminated in Cal- 
vary but the euphoria wrought by the contemplation 
of the resurrection and exaltation to God’s right hand. 
This supreme epic of descent, even into hell, and 
of ascent, even up to Heaven, in a sense forms a 
resume and gives the modulus for all human experi- 
ence measured across its greatest, namely, the 
algedonic, diameter. Into it went the best lessons 
427 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
which the cults of Dionysius, Orpheus, Attis, Osiris, 
and even Mythara had for ages groped toward and 
organized and which all their initiations symbolized. 
It is, in a sense, the summation of life. All drama and 
romance put the heroes through a series of trials, and 
just before the breaking point the scale turns and per- 
haps with Herculean labors of body and soul he at- 
tains his goal. Even initiations of primitives follow 
the same norm, as did those into the ancient mysteries. 
Thus to die and rise with Jesus, to participate sympa- 
thetically in all the incidents of the great way, down 
and up, that He followed, when interpreted in the 
light of modern psychology means to be given an im- 
munity bath against abandon to either woe or joy, 
pessimism or optimism. We can bear suffering be- 
cause we know that far greater pains than ours were 
borne by Him and overcome, and we are not swept 
away from our moorings by the ecstasies of joy and 
hope because we have realized that life necessitates 
incessant pains and inhibitions. Thus we are safe- 
guarded from abandon in or even near each extreme. 
The heart is given a temper which enables it to bear 
ill fortune with fortitude and maintain poise and con- 
trol amidst the completest gratification of every con- 
scious or unconscious wish. One who has really been 
through and profited by such an experience, in which 
imagination is vicarious for reality, sees things in the 
right perspective, and every factor that makes for 
control and Aristotelian temperance is strengthened. 
Thus it is not surprising that we already have here 
and there tentatives toward a psychotherapy for those 
in whom melancholic or exalted states have begun, 
the one to unduly predominate over the other, which 
when rightly viewed and interpreted in terms of 
psychokinetic equivalents is nothing more or less than 
the Jesus cult applied to psychopathology. It is the 
world’s great misfortune that this august lesson of 
428 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
the Christian past had become obscured, its grand 
scope lost sight of in attention to details, that it be- 
came mechanized into formalism, materialized in 
dogma, and literalized by exegetes, so that its redis- 
covery by modern psychology is almost itself a new 
resurrection because it gives us for the first time a 
realizing sense of the convictions and insights, too 
large to ever completely enter the narrow field of the 
individual consciousness and hence thought divinely 
motivated, which dominated the founders of the faith 
of Christendom. 
Thus in nearly all my lecture work at Clark I have 
felt that extensive were more useful for my students 
than intensive methods. Most of the work above 
described must thus be judged from a pedagogical 
rather than from a scientific point of view. The 
psychogenetic courses have been more special and for 
several years I gave an exhaustive and detailed course 
on the dermal senses, while the Pavlov course also 
was somewhat specialized. My three larger two- 
volumed books evolved from years of earlier lectures 
on the subjects of Jesus, adolescence, and pedagogy, 
and it was after their publication that the above topics 
were expanded and became exclusive. But in my 
judgment the average graduate student is chiefly in 
need of synthetic views that give general orientation 
and perspective. This, too, helps most in the work of 
collegiate instruction in which most of them will en- 
gage. It is because my theory and practice here 
have been so different from those prevailing in most 
academic teaching in this field that I have tried thus to 
describe and justify them against the criticisms some- 
times made by those who have less horror of pre- 
mature and exclusive specialization than I and a nar- 
rower view of what psychology really is and means. LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
VIII 
If psychology is ever to become a true science it 
must emancipate itself from certain metaphysical 
vestiges which still encumber it in the form of prob- 
lems which it inherited from a past stage of thought, 
problems which have been the center of many discus- 
sions and prompted many investigations but which 
are not yet, and perhaps never will be, capable of solu- 
tion because they were wrongly put. The most insidi- 
ous of these heterae, as Bacon dubbed their analogues 
in his day, are those pertaining to the relation between 
the mind and the body, and are as follows: 
1. The psychophysic law, which held that as sen- 
sation increased in arithmetical, the stimulus must do 
so in geometrical proportion, one increasing by a con- 
stant difference, the other by a constant multiple. 
This was shown in very painstaking experiments to 
hold approximately for most sensations which could 
be experimented on within certain often wide limits 
of intensity. Here Fechner thought that we had a 
mathematical relation established between soma and 
psyche. But with minimal and maximal stimuli this 
law broke down—tickle, for example, seeming almost 
to invert this relation, so that there is a place in the 
scale where the slighter the stimulus, the more intense 
the sensation. Now work in this field has long been 
suspended and the once very important psychophysic 
law occupies very little or no space in our textbooks. 
2. The Lange-James, sorry-because-we-cry the- 
ory, which has long bulked so large, is really only a 
philosophical speculation and entirely beyond the 
present reach of methods of scientific investigation. 
There is much in the domain of affectivity that seems 
to favor it but it is utterly undemonstrable if applied 
to any relation between brain processes and thought. 
430 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
This theory has provoked much discussion and many 
experiments and even gives its own standpoint to the 
treatment of certain clinical data, but it, too, involves, 
if it does not turn on, the old “philosopheme” of mon- 
ism versus dualism and has contributed little or noth- 
ing to the permanent acquisitions of psychology, has 
made no progress in solving its problems, and its fate 
will be not unlike that of the psychophysic law. 
3. The terms, parallelism and interaction, indicate 
another theme fruitful only in “a harvest of leaves” 
with no advance beyond the standpoint of Male- 
branche. Had not the soul been so long and so in- 
veterately considered as a separate entity such an 
issue could never have arisen, and if monism is true 
the problems this antithesis raises are all surds. 
Parallelism is as absurd to-day as it was when it was 
conceived as two synchronous clocks, and interaction 
presupposes a dualism which we can neither affirm 
nor deny. This question has intruded itself not only 
into the study of brain states and changes and circula- 
tion but into the new domain opened by endocrinol- 
ogy, but it has been everywhere impotent of new 
results of value. 
4. The controversy between functional and struc- 
tural psychology is another surd. No two psycholo- 
gists conceive the difference between these viewpoints 
alike and their definitions not only differ but are 
almost equally hard to understand. The one sure 
fact that stands out sun-clear is that if evolution had 
ever really penetrated the minds of those working in 
either camp in a way to show its transforming and 
enlightening power such a question could never have 
even originated. It has at least some of the flavor 
which pervaded the old warfare between innate and 
acquired mental content as conceived in the days of 
Locke, unilluminated by Spencer’s formula, ‘‘innate in 
the individual but acquired by the race,” and still less 
431 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
by the analogous debates between the advocates of 
preformation and epigenesis in biology. In my judg- 
ment the discussions of this question in psychology 
have not only been barren of all results but have dif- 
fused darkness and obfuscation. 
The first three, at least, of the above illegitimate 
centers of apperception sprang directly from, or only 
somewhat indirectly out of, the old body-mind an- 
tithesis, and temperament and preconceptions more 
than facts determined individual standpoints. Each 
made partisans in a way less characteristic of science 
than of the philosophical, not to say the theological, 
stage of studies of man’s nature. It requires little 
knowledge of psychoanalysis to see that a personal 
interest in the postmortem survival of the soul sup- 
plies the background motivation of these quests, 
unconscious though it may be, as it does of all theories 
of a unitary and ipsissimal self. 
5. The present very active discussion between 
introspection and behaviorism is also in part animated 
by the old body versus mind antithesis. The latter 
was inspired by the Pavlov school, which would re- 
duce experimental psychology back to physiology, 
from which it sprang, while Wundt vehemently 
repudiated the post-Wundtian introspectionists. The 
latter stand for a psychic, the former for a material- 
istic, monism. So, too, Freud and his orthodox dis- 
ciples concerned themselves solely with psychic, ig- 
noring somatic structure and functions, which latter 
Kempf, the only American who has done signal 
creative work in this field, has sought to supply. The 
very fact that Wundt should seek to crush the intro- 
spection movement inaugurated by his own pupils 
and that Freud should condemn the work and ways of 
Adler and the Zurich school developed by his disciples 
is hard to understand save as the child-devouring 
Saturn complex which made the primitive father so 
432 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
jealous of the power of his maturing sons. The above 
are both, and to an extent which seems nowhere 
realized, high-level outcrops of the eternal rivalry 
between father and son. 
Extreme behaviorism would repudiate, if this 
were possible, the very word consciousness, which has 
always been the muse of all the philosophical disciplines 
and which Freudians might be said to at least tend to 
regard chiefly as not even a symbol but as only a 
symptom. It has no phobia of the term unconscious 
or of what it designates or implies but ignores inner 
states and processes and is intent upon activities that 
can be observed objectively, adopting thus the meth- 
ods of the study of animal life. Unfortunately, a 
few years ago the devotees of introspection put forth 
the claim of being the only true and pure psycholo- 
gists and would exclude all other investigators, as if 
our science had nothing to do with genetics, neurol- 
ogy, physiology, or even psychiatry and anthropology. 
This, of course, brought resentment and reaction. 
Introspection made no attempt to explain the flitting 
vestigial and marginal states that their theses re- 
corded or to trace the differences in these phenomena 
to their origin in individual disposition or experience, 
and drew few and meager conclusions from the vast 
body of data which they accumulated. They ampli- 
fied, of course, the old distinctions between eye, ear, 
and motor-mindedness, made something like cate- 
gories of Einstellung, determinierende Tendenz, Auf- 
gabe, etc., and discussed whether thought processes 
were always imaginal or could be pure. They de- 
canted old meanings from one terminology into 
another, as we psychologists are so fond of doing, as 
witnessed also in the historic career of such words as 
suggestion (which two decades ago Baldwin and 
Royce made supreme); memory (Hering-Simon); 
association (the British school and later Jung’s ex- 
433 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
perimental, diagnostic use of it) ; apperception (which 
is perhaps the chief contribution of the Wundtian 
school that enabled it to break from the old associa- 
tionism); dissociation (culminating in schizophre- 
nia) ; the self as an independent and undecomposable 
thing (variously conceived by Royce, Howison, Miss 
Calkins, and others); and now sex by the analysts, 
etc. 
Each of these in its day and by its advocates has 
been made supreme, and most if not all other psychic 
activities have been derived or explained from or by 
them. It was exactly thus that Hegel came to con- 
ceive the whole process of culture history as progress 
in the consciousness of freedom; that made Ferenzi 
find it in the infant’s sense of what he termed die 
Allmacht der Gedanken; while, conversely, Schleier- 
macher conceived the evolution of the soul to be meas- 
ured by growth of the sense of absolute dependence, 
which has a rather close relation with the Adlerian 
idea of inferiority (Minderwertigkeit). All this 
shows that psychology has not yet transcended what 
Comte described as the metaphysical, if not, indeed, 
his theological, stage of thought or what Hegel called 
the animal kingdom of mind, where the chief quest of 
every system is for categories. 
If we define psychology broadly as the knowledge 
of human nature, its academic devotees have during 
the last decade or two added but little of scientific or 
culture value and in some respects their work has 
rather dehumanized it. There is far too often a 
pedantry of method and technic with paucity of re- 
sults. The field is so vast that, having barely glimpsed 
it, the young psychologist, as if smitten with agora- 
phobia, is impelled to seek the sessile stage prema- 
turely and dig himself into some specialty as if to 
protect himself on the principle of safety first in a 
carapace of technicalities. Thus it comes that the 
434 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
one answer to those who attempt to criticize is more 
and more commonly that they do not understand, and 
this is increasingly true. Psychologists do not quite 
understand each other so that the further explana- 
tions and even definitions of terms new and old are 
tediously frequent in the current literature. 
Another and graver result of this situation is that 
there is an almost complete lack of what may be called 
the higher criticism that seeks to see and show things 
psychological in a wider perspective, so that not only 
interested laymen but professionals themselves fail to 
grasp the cui bono or the raison d’etre of all this 
armentarium of apparatus in our laboratories, 
whether our instruments be refinements of those first 
devised by physiologists or simplifications of the far 
more elaborate ones of the physicists, or whether we 
borrow rudimentary methods from the mathema- 
ticians. 
For myself, I am convinced that neither the meta- 
physician, philosopher, mathematician, chemist, physi- 
cist, nor, strange as this may seem to some of my 
fellow psychologists, even the mechanic or mere com- 
puter, is or ever can become a good psychologist. All 
of them lack the instinct, insight, or flair needful here 
somewhat in proportion to their excellence in these 
fields. Their influence is de-vitalizing, de-animistic, 
de-anthropomorphizing while psychology stands for 
the progressive refinement and final blossoming and 
fruitage of just these tendencies, which take their rise 
in biology. Thus, too, it comes that contributions are 
addressed to those in the author’s own group—testers 
write for other testers, introspectionists and analysts 
each for his own set—as if authors gloried in being 
esoteric and caviar to the general and would feel 
broadcasting vulgar. The programmes of our meet- 
ings contain too many unripe and minor papers by 
those in the apprentice stage while leaders have rela- 
435 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
tively less and less to say, discussions of fundamentals 
or wider orientations as to first principles are out of 
date, and the differences between the sects seem to be 
accepted as necessary instead of being regarded, as 
they really should be, as challenges to rise higher and 
find some mediating principle. 
The true psychologist born and bred, yearns with 
all his heart for a deeper understanding of man and 
of all his psychic life, past and present, normal and 
morbid, good and bad, at all stages of his life. He 
also regards every human institution as an expression 
of more basal human impulsions and interests because 
they shed light upon these, which constitute his primal 
nature. He feels a peculiar urge to be intensely hu- 
man and to glimpse, feel, or strive in his own brief 
little life for everything possible to man’s estate. If 
things go wrong in human affairs he feels that there 
must somewhere be a psychic cause which it is up to 
him to detect and if possible do his bit to remove. 
Thus he is called to-day to be a sort of high priest 
of souls as in an earlier age the great religious found- 
ers, reformers, and creators of cults and laws used to 
be, for the day of great leadership in these fields 
seems to have passed. If he is concerned, as he should 
be, with the education of the race, nation, or indi- 
viduals, he is not content merely to fit for existing 
institutions as they are to-day but he would develop 
ever higher powers, which gradually molt old and 
evolve new and better institutions or improve old 
ones. He can never entirely forget the eternal chal- 
lenge of the Sphinx riddle. He has a passion to know 
himself as he really is and how he came to be just 
what he is. He has a burning curiosity which may 
intermit and be diverted but which never ceases to 
want to know a little more truly what life, love, the 
deep instincts, interests and typical experiences, and 
birth and death and everything between, really are 
436 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
and mean. He is unhappy if he feels no sense of mak- 
ing some progress towards these goals. 
If we may venture forecasts as indicated by basal 
present trends they would be something as follows: 
Practical psychology, which has done so much and 
will do far more in grading intelligence and in fitting 
men to their jobs, will transcend the fields of business 
and school and address itself to a more comprehensive 
programme. It will refit present institutions, social, 
civic, political, industrial, religious, etc., to the nature 
of man, which is at least one and may be several hun- 
dred thousand years old, and thus relatively, not only 
to the present industrial system, which at the most is 
only one five-hundredth part as old, but to all other 
even far older institutions must be regarded more 
like the unchangeable laws and forces of the physical 
universe. Just as we study the forces of the latter to 
see clearly and in better perspective his fundamental 
traits to remodel our civilization upon them, or to give 
Carlyle’s Teufelsdrockh a wardrobe which fits and 
does not chafe him or impede the freedom of his 
movements or arrest his development. The world 
needs a new psychology larger in all its dimensions 
more than it needs anything else. All the great prob- 
lems of our age are becoming more and more psycho- 
logical the better we understand them, and despite the 
pioneer anticipations of men like Thorndike or Mc- 
Dougall and a few sociologists and historians like 
Parker, Ellwood, Robinson, Barnes, and anthropolo- 
gists like Grant, Stoddard, and many others, we have 
been caught unprepared. Limitations of food and 
drink, of late years so widespread; of the instinct of 
domesticity so often inhibited by our industrial sys- 
tem ; of the noetic urge; of the gregarious impulsion 
to get together; of ownership; the narrowing of the 
pleasure field; restrictions of liberty, and many 
more: it is these that have caused a deep and very 
437 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
widespread feeling of unrest which is so prone to 
deepen to misery, despair, and revolt,20 and which a 
better understanding of mansoul might have pre- 
vented or at least mitigated. Nearly all the disorders 
of our day are thus largely of psychic origin and are 
due to the fact that we have not realized that institu- 
tions were made for man and not man for them. 
Consciousness as we know it is only a port of entry 
and departure for a vast and yet only partially ex- 
plored hinterland, although we already know far 
more here than has yet been put to use. The little 
psychology which advertisers, salesmen, social work- 
ers, some demagogues, and still fewer employers and 
statesmen have lately learned has made the work of 
all of them more efficient than before, while captains 
of big business and politicians generally would profit 
no less and probably far more by what this depart- 
ment could already teach them. 
As we now conceive the self or ego as made up of 
many different and partially independent qualities 
and trends, united in and by an inscrutable something 
far deeper than consciousness, so the conception of a 
collective, Volks, mass, crowd, mob, group, herd, or 
community soul, which we can never come to know by 
the study of any number of individuals but which is 
just as real and even just as unitary as their souls, is 
now everywhere gaining ground. We know the inner 
essence of neither. Both we can define only as Stein- 
thal did languages, Sie sind was sie werden. Both 
have conscious and unconscious factors and processes 
and both are as plastic and receptive, on the one hand, 
as Hering and Simon conceived the mind and, on the 
other hand, are as creative and original, if not more 
so, than Bergson’s philosophy makes them to be. 
20 See my “Psychology and Industry,” Fed. Sem., vol. 27, 1920, 
pp. 281-293. 
438 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
Both can be seen in all stages of development and 
their diseases and forms of arrest are strangely and 
illuminatingly alike. Thus there is a very pregnant 
sense in which all great institutions, organizations, 
and even parties, sects, creeds, casts, localities, races, 
nationalities, and all the countless voluntary associa- 
tions have souls if not bodies, just as have also hives 
of bees, animal colonies, totemic clans or hordes, the 
family, college, home, etc. Like the individual, all are 
deciduous leaves on the tree of life, nourished by the 
same sap but leading a more or less phenomenal life 
of their own or, like the sponge polyp, doing its own 
business but united by a stem with the whole. Insti- 
tutions die and give place to others, and when their 
esprit de corps declines or, like the individual, they 
begin to be pervaded by a sense of their own doom, a 
deeper sense of unity arises and this is the matrix 
from which new institutions develop. 
History really began with the leadership of great 
chiefs, patriarchs, monarchs, who were themselves 
free but could compel their subjects to their will, per- 
haps with the power of life and death. Out of this, 
the old theory of the state, which is to-day replaced 
by the new conception of it as a legal community 
which is “at once a law-creating personality and sub- 
ject to law” but in which the subjection is only to 
public interests,21 an international soul is now slowly 
being evolved. One of the very best scales on which 
to measure progress is the growth of the collectivism 
that goes with democracy. The great assumption is 
that we are all wiser than any one and that the vox 
populi is the only vox Dei. This has gone so far that 
the lack of the world to-day is chiefly that of com- 
petent leaders whereas formerly we had too many or 
21H. Krabbe, The Modern Idea of the State, N. Y., Appleton, 
1922, pp. 74 and Ch. IX. 
439 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
their powers were too great, so that the world, espe- 
cially since the war, has lapsed to a laisses faire atti- 
tude, throwing its burdens more or less upon blind 
fate or upon posterity as men once were enjoined to 
cast them upon the Lord. All this is well illustrated 
by the limitations of representative government, by 
initiative, referendum and recall, and still more by 
lobbies, petitions, etc., so that our legislators tend to 
become mere delegates and often waive their own con- 
victions for those of their constituents. Democracy 
everywhere, thus, tends to the dead level of the 
average man and to the dominance of Faguet’s incom- 
petence and mediocrity. 
Unfortunately, the psychology of mass or herd 
action began with the study of the extreme form of 
the mob (LeBon, 1903) so liable to stampedes like 
animals, with its intense credulity, irresponsibility, 
sense of power in homogeneous groups, immediate 
and direct action, contagion by suggestion, and action 
directed often against the individual’s own interests. 
We have studied, too, some of the great popular delu- 
sions, convulsionnaires, flagellants, witch mania, 
Black Death, the South Sea bubble, the extravagances 
of Jumpers and Barkers, fads and fashions, all of 
which have swept the individual from his moorings to 
do what he would never think of doing by himself. 
For a long time it was not adequately realized that 
collective psychic group activities were even more 
often benign than malign and that they had done some 
of the best as well as some of the worst things in the 
world, so that we have to-day even the theory of 
“Proletcult” which strangely fadges with the Durk- 
heim theory of the corroboree, that many if not most 
of the great creative upward steps in the early culture 
history of mankind were taken, not by individuals but 
by groups of them stimulating each other into a par- 
tially frenzied or inspirational state. Both public 
440 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
opinion,22 which is the supreme arbiter in democracies, 
and propaganda,23 which strives to give it a specific 
direction, are based on collective feeling and thinking 
and work by the methods of contagion. 
Thus the herd instinct, to the study of which we 
are turning from the predominant attention to indi- 
vidual psychology, is, next to hunger and love, the 
oldest and strongest of the many human impulsions, 
and the collective soul is just as real and dynamic, and 
also just as intangible and indefinable, if not as 
unitary, as that of the individual. Most of the great 
institutions which evolved from the folksoul—reli- 
gion, church, state, science, etc., have, like the indi- 
vidual, both a body and a soul. The city consists 
materially of its buildings, streets, drainage, lighting, 
transportation and other systems constructed by 
thousands of laborers living or, most of them, long 
dead. There is no record of how much or what each 
of them did but we daily enjoy the results of the toil 
of generations of them. They made not only our cor- 
poreal city but the manufactured products which are 
the basis of our prosperity. They cleared away the 
forests, tilled the land, constructed harbors and ships, 
and absorbed in the contemplation of this, Karl Marx 
leaped to the extravagant conclusion that all property 
originated in the muscle work of laborers. But those 
who thus built our city had the aid of machines and 
trained mechanics and their toil was planned and di- 
rected by brain workers, and it is they who created or 
constitute the soul of the city. Their insight, fore- 
sight, and oversight, enterprise and energy, utilized 
opportunity for achievement; and their business 
sagacity, experience, integrity, and the contagion of 
their example all entered into the composition of the 
22 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, N. Y., Harcourt, Brace and 
Howe, 427 pp. 
23 E. K. Strong, Jr., “The Control of Propaganda as a Psycho- 
logical problem,” Sci. Mo., March, 1922. 
441 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
municipal soul. It also found expression in litera- 
ture, scientific discovery, reforms, endowments, which 
contributed their quota to local pride, civic tone, 
opinion, and morale, political and other traditions, 
etc. and this gives a communal psyche. To-day Bos- 
ton, New York, Paris, and of old, Rome, Athens, 
Jerusalem, Florence—each has had a pervasive indi- 
viduality of its own which has given its own type of 
character and personality and perhaps its own cult to 
its citizens. Some of them influence the others as 
individuals influence each other in society. Thus 
dead cities live in those of to-day as great men of a 
remote past still rule us from their urns because they 
contributed something to our psychic milieu or con- 
stitution. 
Even each of the great races of mankind, Nordic, 
Mediterranean, Alpine, Negro, Malay, and the rest, 
have their own distinctive traits, sentiments, and tra- 
ditions which outsiders can never understand but 
which unite members by common bonds and prede- 
termine the activities of the whole, and, to a great 
extent, of each. Great industries in the days of the 
medieval guilds did the same and now again there is 
some prospect that we shall ere long be ruled by indus- 
trial “blocs” rather than by parties. Social classes— 
plebeians, patricians, proletarians, aristocrats, all have 
a common esprit de corps which modifies character, 
sentiments, conduct, and thought. Above all this is, 
of course, the soul of humanity itself, the object of all 
true philanthropy, the realm in which only the great 
religious founders have successfully wrought and 
which our psychology of to-day is only just beginning 
to understand. Mansoul itself, of course, transcends 
not only all ethnic but all other distinctions within the 
human race and works in and through only those 
elements which are common to all mankind. The 
literature that appeals to it is farthest from that 
442 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
which is ephemeral, and constitutes the classics or 
bibles of the ages. The racial soul is hardest to de- 
scribe or conceive and whenever man has endeavored 
to form and project an image or even a symbol of it 
into the narrow field of his objective consciousness 
he calls it divine, realizing, as all workers in this field 
do, that the truest god for man to worship is only the 
embodiment of his own fecund, irrepressible, racial 
soul which has made all religions and every other 
institution in and before history. 
Finally, back of all this we know there must be a 
cosmic soul or animus mundi that is the source and 
all-sustainer of nature, out of which not only man but 
the worlds themselves sprang. This all-father-mother 
is also material as well as psychic. “Each star is a 
soul in its body; all forces are acts of this soul.” Here 
perhaps the animism we now know to be inexpugnable 
from the human soul, because one of its most funda- 
mental instincts, celebrates its highest triumphs. 
To the rigorous behaviorist the belief in indi- 
vidual souls is the product of an animistic or anthro- 
pomorphic psychic trend to be outlawed, while to the 
psychoanalyst it is a symbol, “conversion downward,” 
or idolatrous Versehiebung of the deeper and less con- 
scious faith in the soul of the race (Comte’s Grand 
Etre). 
Thus, just as the microscope and telescope are 
now each supplementing the other and while chemists 
and physicists are cooperating at so many points with 
astronomers and finding how many of their problems 
are the same;24 or, again, as history and biography 
and autobiography are needing and shedding light on 
each other, so the psychic microcosm and macrocosm 
are coming into the same relations of mutual aid and 
psychology. So, too sociology must henceforth ad- 
24 See E. G. Hale, The New Heavens, N. Y., Scribner, 1921. 
443 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
vance in span, those in each field progressing most 
who keep in closest touch with the other. 
Thus the child’s revolt from the father in the 
(Edipus complex explains and is itself explained by 
the historic revolutions and revolts against authority. 
Panics in communities are like phobias in the indi- 
vidual. Parties are like intropsychic conflicts which 
may issue in schizophrenia. Mobs are mirrored in 
outbreaks of passion overpowering all control; propa- 
ganda is the formation of a complex. The passion 
for boundless freedom goes back to claustrophobia 
and the dangers of cave life, while dementia praecox 
has analogies with the horror of open spaces, most 
intense in human evolution when our forbears were 
just coming down from the trees and were exposed 
to new dangers if far from these safe retreats. Nar- 
cissism is like the Fourth-of-July spirit of complacency 
with progress. The real war spirit, so hard if not 
impossible to eliminate, is like an outbreak of anger, 
which may be righteous, beneficent, and even sublime, 
or a product of irritability and morbid touchiness. 
The statesman’s dread of grappling with new and 
difficult questions is like the neurotic’s flight from 
reality. Both public opinion and national sentiment 
may swing from one extreme to its opposite in a way 
conforming rather exactly to the phenomenon of 
ambivalence, which may also culminate in schizo- 
phrenia. Conversion phenomena in both have similar 
rubrics. Both have like phenomena of arrest and 
perversion while in both morbid often simply magnify 
normal processes. Stages of development have a 
similar sequence, as recapitulation shows, and the re- 
lations between the conscious and unconscious factors 
in history, which may be shaped by the deliberate 
plans of leaders, on the one hand or the dominance 
of economic, telluric, climatic, and other material in- 
fluences, on the other, are much the same as in indi- 
444 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
viduals. Now both are ruled by new Einstellungen 
and determining tendencies and anon, in laissez faire, 
float with the tide. True races represent types of 
character and disposition. Myths are dreams and 
phantasies of ethnic groups, etc. 
In fine, as an atom, id, a single brain cell, or the 
simplest true psychic element, if such there be, would 
find it hard to conceive of an individual psyche, self, 
or soul, as having any true independent reality or as 
anything more than a convenient general term per- 
missible only for designating the activity of thousands 
of beings of its own order, so do we find it hard to 
believe in collective souls of higher order than our 
own. But this we must do or our science will suffer 
yet more from isolation and the slow processes of 
arrest and desiccation. 
The longer I live and learn, the surer I become 
that the true psychologist (like the mathematician or 
musician) is born quite as much as made and also, 
conversely, that there are many otherwise normal and 
even superior men in this field who are invincibly 
defective in true psychological sense and gift. The 
former, or the elect, are endowed with intuitive or 
instinctive insight into human nature, which the latter 
lack, some of them teachers and even investigators. 
Perhaps some day there may be tests to distin- 
guish between the fit and the unfit. The most ele- 
mental expression of this diathesis is the impulse to 
objectify and perhaps describe one’s own inner states 
and processes, so well illustrated by the introvertive 
temperament of James, for example. It is this that 
gives the appealing humanistic touch so necessary not 
only for carrying conviction but for grappling with 
the larger and deeper problems of the soul. This kind 
of self-knowledge is the key to understanding others. 
It is just this that is impossible for the egoist. It is 
this, too, that gives a sense of one’s own personal 
445 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
limitations and out of it is born the desire to com- 
pensate for these by getting into vital and sympathetic 
relations with as many and as diverse types of per- 
sonality and viewpoints as possible; to glimpse how 
life and the world look and feel from behind the skulls 
and under the heart, not only of those about us but 
of humans of other races, ages, stations, creeds, of 
savages, defectives, the insane, and even of animals, 
for all of these, not excluding the last (the Animal 
Epos, Rostand’s “Chanticleer,” etc.) help to make up 
the personnel of the comedie humaine. 
Once more, the ideal psychologist must have a 
rich and varied personal experience because sym- 
pathy and imagination, however highly developed, 
can never take the place of life itself. He must have 
both believed intensely and doubted radically. He 
must have felt and have occasionally fallen before 
temptation and thus learned the cost and power of 
self-control. He should have felt the depression of 
poverty and the expansion that comes with possession. 
He must have known something of the despair that 
comes from its loss and have learned at first hand 
how failure and success feel. “ ’Tis life of which 
our nerves are scant; more life and fuller, that we 
want.” Once the religionist but now the psychologist 
feels this most profoundly. Wherever human interest 
has been deep, long, and intense, he would not be a 
stranger but more or less at home for it is he who is 
called to be the humanist par excellence in our world. 
No department of knowledge is entirely alien to him 
and none is so comprehensive, difficult, so palpitating 
with pure culture interest, or so all-conditioning in 
its countless practical applications so cryingly needed, 
as ours. A better knowledge of man is the greatest 
of all the great and many needs of the world to-day. 
If the above is at all true, how culpably short we 
have fallen! For it follows that the selfish egoist 
446 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
intent chiefly on founding a school, the cloistered 
academician who knows life only from the laboratory 
or the study window, the partisan of one group who 
cannot appreciate new and opposing views, the me- 
chanician who subordinates results to overelaborated 
technic or methodology, the tester who thinks he can 
already determine general and even innate ability 
instead of really being able only to help in steering 
men to jobs for which they are fit, those who believe 
they have reached finality or ultimate elements, those 
who lose their balance either way between culture 
and kultur, forgetting that nowhere are kennen and 
konnen so inseparable, or forget that there is nothing 
so practical as a good theory—all these have done 
and will yet do useful work but they will never enter 
the additum of psychology. 
As to individual psychology and tests, I have the 
following to say. 
The Delphic admonition, Know Thyself (Gnosce 
seauton), indicates that this is the highest kind of 
knowledge. So, too, taught the Indie philosophy of 
the Vedanta. Extreme subjective idealism or solip- 
sism insists that man can never know anything else 
but self. Emerson says in substance that everything 
on earth and in the heavens is a mirror of Mansoul 
and calls us to self-knowledge. It is a staggering dic- 
tum that this is the ultimate goal of every noetic im- 
pulse, the only blossom on the tree of knowledge that 
ever produces fully ripened fruit. Pope’s “the high- 
est knowledge of mankind is man” only hints at it. 
It is the terror of neurotics who, Freudians tell us, 
always resist it but undergo remarkable cures when 
they are really brought face to face with themselves 
and realize what they truly are. It goes far deeper 
than seeing ourselves as others see us, although this 
sometimes comes in a stunning way. 
447 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
Now* I will say that I really want it, as every born 
psychologist should, and here is the proof. Some fifty 
years ago as an impecunious student I paid five dol- 
lars to have my bumps charted at the Fowler and 
Wells phrenological institute, then on lower Broad- 
way. Mr. Sizer, who did the job, told me that he 
would rather feel for five minutes through a cathole 
the skull of a girl he thought of marrying than court 
her five years. His findings were so pleasing to my 
amour propre that two or three years later I went 
again, with even more satisfaction, so that I had the 
exhilarating sense that in the interim I had “every 
day and in every way” been growing wiser and abler. 
Some thirty years later I chanced to meet the great 
Cheiro, handsome, magnetic, and in his day the pet 
of the New York “Four Hundred,” whose gorgeous 
illustrated volume had been sent me, and I submitted 
my palm to him. But this time with very depressing 
results. He found my life-line so broken that I 
should have been dead about that time; the line of 
intellect was very faint, indicating low mentality; by 
my wealth line I ought to be rich (and from his fee 
he probably thought me so). I was an incorrigible 
bachelor and my character was a complex of incon- 
gruities. In a word, my hand gave the flat lie to 
what my bumps had said, and as evolution teaches 
that man, who descended from tree-dwelling anthro- 
poids, is hand-made quite as much as head-made this 
was most disquieting. 
Lombroso has several score of physical and 
psychic traits which he deems stigmata of degenera- 
tion characteristic of criminals and of these I was 
found to have seven more or less well developed. At 
the Bernheim Institute in Paris I had my finger-tips 
taken and interpreted, for these, some think, have 
high diagnostic significance. Later yet, a Blackford- 
ist tested me on all the, I think, twenty-one points in 
448 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
that system and at the close asked me if it was worth 
ten dollars. It was. In Portland, Oregon, I found 
an expert who had worked years with the MacAuliffe- 
Sorel group of anthropologists and he apportioned my 
points between the four human types (abdominal, 
thoracic, muscular, and cerebral) in a way that I 
regarded most helpful to regimen and which could 
not fail to be suggestive to my physician. I began to 
psychoanalyze myself but, finding the task too hard, 
called in an expert to finish the work, with results 
which nothing would ever tempt me to tell. 
Still far too ignorant of the one I ought to know 
best, I took all the Yerkes army tests and the dozen 
or so shorter series devised for adults, and even put 
myself through the Binet-Simon series and their 
modifications by Terman; also the de Sanctis fool- 
finding series and at least a score of the tests for 
special avocations. In fact, my friends have spoken 
rather slightingly of my passion for collecting and 
trying out tests, of which I have some hundreds. 
Judged by the Edison stunts I was a near moron and 
in the Stenquist series much below the average, while 
I cannot even yet understand the Royce Ring. Some 
college entrance tests would bar me from entering the 
freshman class while in many of the simpler ones my 
I. Q. (intelligence quotient) indicated a psychological 
age of at least a hundred. 
In Harman’s test of the higher mental processes 
and the Bonser reasoning test, for example, I was 
surpassed by a girl of eleven. My order of excellence 
in the simpler tests was: cancellation, completion, as- 
sociation, complication, memory span, assembling, etc. 
The results of all seem, thus, so confusing that I re- 
call the chameleon which when placed on red cloth 
turned red, on blue, green, and yellow, turned these 
colors, but when placed on a bit of Scotch plaid died 
trying to make good. The time limits are hardest and 
449 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
must tend to discredit the slow-but-sure type that 
really does so much of the world’s best work, and the 
premium is, in general, upon a kind of superficial 
mental agility, not excluding accidents of experience 
and information. We have no method of testing test- 
ers, whose competence varies vastly from mere me- 
chanical accumulation of data and the busy work of 
computing correlations up to real insight and sagacity. 
Nor do we find any adequate evaluation of the tests 
themselves as to what qualities they appeal to and 
what these qualities are worth for life. The wider 
the range of individual differences, the less is the 
value of the conclusions for each person tested, no 
one of whom may be an average case. Moreover, as 
Lippmann has shown, we cannot test native ability, 
for when individuals are old enough to be tested, too 
large a proportion of their abilities is acquired from 
experience. Indeed, there is probably no such thing 
as general ability for this is always specific, just as 
we now know there is no such thing as a truly general 
culture, as educators so long claimed. Of this we 
may say to the testers, Zwar I hr Bart ist kraus, dock 
hebt Ihr nicht die Riegel. I would cast no discredit 
upon this work, much as I deplore its present monop- 
oly of psychological endeavor, but to my mind no one 
has made it sufficiently clear just what even the most 
used of them really tests, and still less justified for 
either psychology or for life the value of the powers 
they activate. All of them together have done a great 
work in applying psychology to life and industry but 
have added scarcely a scintilla to our knowledge of 
the human soul. They have already done much and 
will do far more in the great economic task of fitting 
men to their jobs; and we may hope they will some- 
time proceed to the yet higher task, so well begun by 
the experts but so largely forgotten by the testers, 
of fitting the man to the job. I must finally here 
450 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
record my own real appreciation of some of the ap- 
praisers of human qualities whom psychologists are 
too prone to indiscriminately dub as fakirs. There 
are those who are born or find their way untaught to 
most sagacious insights into human nature which 
make them of great service in diagnosing funda- 
mental qualities and in placing men, and from whom 
we experts have yet something to learn. 
I have, however, as a result of long experience 
with academic youth developed a few very definite 
rubrics which are more and more dominant in the 
estimates of men that university dons are so often 
called upon to make for graduates in the process of 
choosing a vocation or seeking positions. These tests 
for estimating a young man’s chances for success 
seek to evaluate far more fundamental traits than 
mere information or mental alertness, and are as 
follows: 
(i) Health. Its etymology means wholeness or 
holiness and inquiries after it are the most universal 
of all forms of greeting. The more we know of 
hygiene, physical and psychic, the longer becomes the 
scale between wellness and illness, not considering the 
appalling percentage of actually sick people and the 
vast losses in time and industry and the accidents 
caused by those below par who should be laid off. 
Imagine a scale so marked that zero is death, ioo the 
very apex of good condition and morale, and 50 the 
point where the average man calls the doctor. Very 
few live out their lives above 70, 80, or 90 on this 
scale and most affect wellness if the doctor is not 
called. 
Now, my thesis is that most of the best of the 
world’s work has been done by men and in moments 
of superb health, that great achievements are products 
of abounding euphoria or joy of living, of super- 
abundant vitality, that is, above 90 on my scale, and 
451 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
that to these superlative degrees of health hygienists 
gave very little and doctors almost no attention. But 
it is position on this scale that chiefly conditions mo- 
rale, whether individual or collective. Man sprang 
from the most active and vital of all mammalian 
forms and he ought to be the most nearly perfect of 
all animals. Ah, you object, you forget Darwin, who 
fought neurasthenia all his life and could work only 
three hours a day; the neurotic Nietzsche, always 
fighting megalomania; Spencer, everlastingly cod- 
dling himself; Stevenson, fighting tuberculosis, etc. 
Yes, the list of great invalids is long but, on the other 
hand, the study of two hundred biographies shows 
that the list of great original minds who were super- 
normal in health is about fourteen times as large. 
Socrates was a prodigy of physical toughness and 
animal vitality; Plato was a prize-winning athlete, 
named from his breadth of shoulders; Jesus, recent 
Christologists assure us, instead of being the haggard 
and anemic ascetic of early Christian art, was a para- 
gon of physical perfection with an unprecedented 
magnetic charm which made Him the most impres- 
sive personality in history. Think, too, of Charle- 
magne, Dante, Peter the Great, Dumas, Garibaldi, 
Goethe, Napoleon, Gladstone, Bismarck, Helmholtz, 
and men like Burbank, Rockefeller, Edison, and 
scores of others who have had so very little to do with 
doctors. Moreover, the great invalids must be re- 
garded as richly endowed with the supreme blessing 
of health (which, by the way, gives a greater joy 
than satisfaction of any special inclination) because 
they not only overcame obstacles and handicaps 
which, like inertia, always tend to inhibit creative 
activity, but also had to resist many of Metchnikoflf's 
disharmonies in the composition of their psycho- 
physic makeup or the slow disintegration caused by 
morbific germs which had found a nidus in their 
452 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
bodies. Kant, his biographer says, spent more men- 
tality in keeping his frail body alive and well up to 
eighty than in writing all his volumes. It is a marvel 
that some of these men accomplished anything. Most 
of them were prodigies of hygienic endowment and 
achievement despite the progressive inroads of dis- 
ease. We must not forget that there is a health sense 
with which some people are born that can be devel- 
oped to some extent by training and of which others 
show no trace through their entire lives, squandering 
health as the spendthrift does money. 
Thus, to succeed one must, first of all, be a good 
animal. Youth must lay up capital of this supreme 
wealth and worth and with years we must grow more 
expert in avoiding not only disease but undue strain 
so that the quantity of energy meted out to each at 
the start be economized; and as we grow old we must 
devote more and more time and wisdom to keeping 
ourselves in condition. How many young men of 
promise, many of them of rare ability for whom I 
had prophesied eminence, after perhaps an auspicious 
start have faltered, grown sterile, made strange mis- 
takes, and perhaps gone down. And the real cause 
of it all was a subtle decline of physical vigor. We 
know now, too, that a large proportion of industrial 
accidents, as well as those on the street, farm, and 
home, are really due to slight and very temporary 
lapses of physical condition that cause a letdown of 
ordinary precautions. A quarter or even a tenth sick 
man is more liable to be run over by an auto, and 
many deaths thought to be suicide are solely due to 
carelessness, or to organisms that have lost their 
tone.25 Many of the great leaders we might call 
innate geniuses in hygiene who without effort became 
past masters in the art of body-keeping. Many of 
s*See, for example, Mental Causes of Accidents, Boyd Fisher, 
Boston, 1923, 314 pp. 
453 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
them, especially those with some flaw in their he- 
redity, developed a most acute consciousness of every 
degree of difference between 90 and 100 on the scale 
of wellness, of which most of us know almost nothing 
but which we must learn to distinguish if we are ever 
to really do ourselves justice in the world. Half of 
the preparation for every great effort is training for 
condition. 
(2) Second breath. This second test is far less 
recognized. Much of the world’s best work has been 
done by men in a certain state of mental exaltation 
akin to what athletes call the second breath. Perhaps 
we work long, hard, or past our usual hour of sleep 
at night and then find ourselves gradually reinforced, 
our work grows easy and does itself, and it is hard 
to stop. There is unusual clarity, celerity, and facili- 
tization. We seem to have tapped some new source 
of reserve energy. We experience a kind of afflatus 
which the Greeks called the visitation of the muse 
that comes at our wooing and which the early Chris- 
tians called the visitation of the Holy Ghost. It was 
this wrapt state called inspiration in which the Scrip- 
tures are supposed to have been written. James saw 
it in part and called it the development of the higher 
powers of man. Psychoanalysis has shed much light 
upon it and deems it mental erethism, the psychic 
vicariate of sex and its highest form of sublimation. 
It is the harnessing of the older, vaster, unconscious 
part of our psyche to help us on to our consciously 
chosen goal. 
It is curious that all the great cults of history as 
well as those of savage and prehistoric times have 
sought this state by many procedures—solitude, fast- 
ing, great hardships and perhaps tortures, excessive 
exertion like frenzied dancing, etc. Sometimes very 
ritualized ceremonials have been resorted to, all to 
provoke trancoidal or ecstatic states. Not only pain- 
454 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
ful initiations but narcotics of many kinds and intoxi- 
cation have been resorted to, for inebriation was long 
and widely thought to bring it. Sometimes great as- 
semblages and great occasions evoke it and there are 
those who hold that most of the great advances of the 
race have thus been made by the exceptional stimulus 
of gregariousness. Occasionally it comes of itself 
when we least expect it. Again, if you read a good 
history of the epoch-making discoveries you will find 
that very often after long lucubration or brooding on 
a problem, fruitless almost to the point of despair, 
suddenly there comes a moment of clarity and in a 
flash the long-sought solution stands sun-clear before 
the mind. 
Thus I would test men by their ability to use this 
power aright. Some live and die and never once draw 
upon this precious deposit which nature has made for 
all of us in the bank of heredity. Psychopaths do it 
and thus dissipate their patrimony, and so we are 
prone to the great mistake of considering all brain- 
storms malign. Another danger is that this temporary 
hyperindividuation may interfere with genesis. In- 
deed, these experiences always bring reaction in their 
train and thus are dangerous for weaklings, but with 
sound organisms they are like storms in nature which, 
while they may do damage, clear the air and fertilize 
everything that can grow. To command this great 
power in human nature, as we are now learning to 
utilize so many of the powers in the physical world, 
is now a vital part of the higher self-education of the 
young. It is especially useful in the circa ten years 
between puberty and nubility for nothing has such 
efficacy for the sublimation of sex. The young must 
not only have calentures of absorbing interest but 
must at times yield to them with abandon and let 
them have free course, and it is during adolescence 
that the power to draw upon these energies can be 
455 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
best acquired. It is high time that this is more ade- 
quately recognized. 
They are also necessary to bring out the physio- 
logical and psychic reactions of recuperation and to 
give these due exercise. If we have developed this 
power we are able to meet the most straining emer- 
gencies by drawing not only upon all that we have 
or have done but upon all that our forbears were and 
did. After a long period of discredit we are just now 
realizing afresh the vastness of the treasure thus 
placed to our credit in the bank of heredity and learn- 
ing to utilize it, not only against many subtle nervous 
and other disorders of our overwrought age but for 
greater efficiency in the intellectual tasks confronting 
us. Perhaps the hard examination crams which youth 
abhors may be of some service in developing this di- 
athesis. The war showed that clerks and often seden- 
tary weaklings were capable, to even their own sur- 
prise, of outdoing themselves and outlasting the 
sturdier muscle workers from the farm and factory, 
fighting on in battle when the others were all in, 
although when at last they did fall spent their recu- 
perative powers proved slow and inadequate; and 
hence they were easier victims of war shock, which 
meant flaccidity or loss of neuropsychic tone. 
This scale is a long one with many degrees or 
grades but it is sure of a permanent and very im- 
portant place in the diagnosis of character, and espe- 
cially in its formation. We must not forget that a 
uniform day’s work is a very novel thing and that 
during most of his long life upon earth man has done 
everything in a spurty way—now inert and lazy, now 
hunting, fighting, and perhaps later planting and har- 
vesting in a way to tax his powers to their uttermost, 
and that it is this diathesis that impels him to orgies 
of having a good time. The young, especially to-day, 
must have periods of excitement to bring out their 
456 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
powers, just as infants must have crying spells to 
develop voice, lungs, and heart and to evoke the 
powers of recuperation. So I must know the calen- 
tures of a young man, inventorying to this end not 
only his ardors but even his interests and not forget- 
ting that this discipline, necessary as it is for those 
who are to evoke all their powers and do great things, 
is perilous for all neurasthenics. 
This is the state in which mystics rise to direct 
communion with the Divine, as Plotinus is said to 
have done nine times in his life. It is Plato’s divine 
afflatus, Wagner’s “in heat” when he would see no 
one, the state in which many writers like Dickens 
were quite carried away by their theme, in which 
Swedenborg and, to some extent, Strindberg did much 
of their best work. It is a godsend in crises and 
emergencies, and yet we are afraid of it. The tedious 
phrase-maker, Chesterton, disparages it, but Mencken 
comes convincingly to its defense. In fact, all artists 
and brain workers have a mettlesome Pegasus in their 
stable which, if they can only break and learn to ride 
him safely, saves them many a weary walk. “Unless 
above himself he can erect himself, how mean a thing 
is man.” 
(3) Free mobilization up and down the pleasure- 
pain or algedonic scale. This scale is a very long one 
extending all the way from despair and suicide up 
to the most transcendent happiness. How this rutty 
old world needs more mobility up and down it so that 
reaction from either extreme toward the other may 
be more assured! Here is where the soul of man 
most often splits asunder. How our mental horizon 
and everything in it changes when we pass from a 
sad to a joyous mood, or vice versa! In all cases of 
dual personality one is somber-hued and the other 
bright, and extreme moodiness shows that our per- 
sonality has begun to crack and that its unity is im- 
457 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
periled, and that a fission into dual personality is al- 
ready possible. 
As we have seen above, all initiation-rites of 
youth into savage totemic clans that we know of, all 
the ancient mysteries, Eleusinian, Mithraic, and the 
other ancient cults about the eastern Mediterranean, 
initiations to about every secret organization from 
the earliest times to our own day, including those of 
college fraternities, etc., involve putting the candidate 
through trying, humiliating ordeals, taxing to the 
very uttermost his patience, endurance, fortitude, and 
sometimes involving torture, and then in the end wel- 
coming him with jubilation, perhaps feasting and bib- 
ulous joy, into full membership. 
This, too, is the modulus of every romance or 
drama. The hero or heroine suffers every kind of 
hardship up to the breaking point and everything 
seems hopeless. Separation, defeat, ignominy, and 
even death seem impending or inevitable. Then the 
tide turns and in the end, always and everywhere, a 
way of escape is opened up, love wins its object along 
perhaps with fame, wealth, etc. 
The story of the Cross is, of course, the world’s 
great masterpiece and regulative of this experience, 
for this is along the line of both the soul’s greatest 
diameter and greatest range. This Wonder-Man was 
put through every humiliation culminating in dis- 
graceful death and, according to the new eschatology, 
with nothing but oblivion, failure, and utter defeat in 
his consciousness at the end. Then first came the 
faint whisperings, then more proofs, and at Pente- 
cost the triumphant affirmation that he had not only 
risen but ascended. This oscillation, both symbolized 
and reinforced by the death of vegetation in the fall 
and its resurrection in the spring, is the best of all 
possible dispositional and mental setting-up exercises 
for safeguarding us against being permanently dis- 
458 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
couraged and hopeless with melancholy if everything 
goes wrong, on the one hand, or being unduly 
exalted toward delusions of greatness by prosperity, 
on the other. It is a striking fact that a modification 
of this often very elaborate and impressive Easter 
service has been found very effective in the treatment 
of psychopaths who had lost their balance between 
pleasure and pain, the sovereign masters of life. 
When we realize the long and tedious pains which 
in ancient and age-long cults Mansoul has taken to 
give itself this elasticity of rebound or to be happy 
and sad aright, to be able to react from the wide 
extremes of optimism and pessimism, it seems strange 
that we have never thought of diagnosing and apply- 
ing tests to evaluate the success of these age-long 
efforts to temper the soul for life. We do know very 
much of the effects of joyless lives upon children but 
much less of the dangers, no less grave, of too much 
gratification or too prolonged or unalloyed pleasures. 
Prosperity is just as hard to bear and just as danger- 
ous as adversity and perhaps more so. Nations and 
civilization itself have lately been mobilized by the 
war on this scale and we may sometime be able to 
measure the fluctuations up and down it. Dying and 
rising with Jesus gives an immunity bath and is a 
regulative which may change our natures from the 
brittleness of iron to the elasticity of steel. The old 
Stoic maxim, “Accept the inevitable with joy,” hints 
at this psychology of the cross and the crown. It is 
a deep instinct of human nature that exceptional 
pleasure or pain must each be compensated by ade- 
quate dosage of the other. Wer nie sein Brot in 
Sorge ass, erkennt I hr nicht I hr himmliche Gewalte. 
And, on the other hand, some, if widely isolated, ex- 
periences with ecstatic joy polarize the soul aright 
on this scale. Great men who have often entered the 
heaven of high success, like Dante (as Maeder has 
459 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
shown), have gone through hell to get there. More- 
over, education began in these pleasure-pain initia- 
tions of adolescence, which was long the core of all 
training, and has spread to other and more intellec- 
tual disciplines both up and down the age scale as 
civilization advanced. Relics of it seem to be inex- 
pugnable from human nature and even the teasing 
of younger by older children, which is to test and 
lower both the cry- and the anger-point, is a vestige 
and has given a great impulse to toughen human 
psychic fiber. 
(4) Sympathy. The next standard by which to 
measure human quality has had universal recognition 
but many names. Confucius summed up his teach- 
ings in the one word “reciprocity” and formulated a 
negative golden rule which Jesus made positive as the 
basis of His ethics. Buddha made pity for the sad 
estate of man the motive of his great renunciation. 
Aristotle and Cicero called it friendship and made it 
the basis of morals, as Plato did of the state itself. 
Paul called it charity and Jesus, love. Adam Smith, 
Darwin, and Sutherland named it sympathy; Comte, 
altruism; Renan, the enthusiasm of humanity; Kro- 
potkin, mutual aid; Matthew Arnold, humanism; Gid- 
dings, consciousness of kind; Trotter, the herd in- 
stinct going back to animal gregariousness. But there 
is a wide-ranged identity in all of these concepts, and 
sympathy or the power to feel with and for others 
seems to me the best designation. 
The Cro-Magnons had it, as the Neanderthal man 
did not and so vanished before them. It is just this 
that the criminal, the egoist, the profiteer, the irrecon- 
cilable who cannot compromise or do teamwork, the 
undesirable citizen, the man always insisting on his 
rights and forgetting that every right must be created 
by a corresponding duty, the soulless corporation, the 
public-be-damned capitalist who regards labor as a 
460 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
commodity, the striker who feels no responsibility 
for the interests or comfort of the community—in a 
word the man who is dominated by selfish personal 
interests—lack. 
Here, too, the scale of merit and demerit is a very 
long one and it is often hard to separate the sheep 
from the goats. One young man chooses a vocation 
in which he can get, another that in which he can do, 
most good. In social gatherings one would monopo- 
lize the distinguished guest while the other is con- 
cerned for the stranger and the wall-flower. One 
always wants to see the other side and feels that to 
know all would be to forgive all; the other admits no 
excuses in those he condemns. 
Thus, there are morbid extremes both ways. The 
patheticism that agonizes over the sufferings of ani- 
mals that are killed for food or domesticated, the 
ultra-pacifist who deems war under all conditions too 
horrible to contemplate illustrate one extreme, and the 
disciples of Stirner or Nietzsche who would subjugate 
or annihilate all inferiors represent the other. 
Now, evolution, even in its antique prelusions and 
especially since Darwin, has vastly broadened and 
intensified sympathy with all that lives, for we realize 
that not only all men but all animals are branches 
from the same ancestral trunk and therefore are, in 
a sense, blood relatives. But what I would here most 
stress is the fact that mobilization up and down the 
evolutionary escalator is now seen to be one of the 
cardinal criteria in evaluating human character. 
Genetic sense or the vitalistic category of werden is, 
in men of true sympathy, so strong that they have to 
believe not only in anthropomorphization but in ani- 
mism, if not, indeed, in hylozoism. This gives us a 
new orientation toward both origins and destinies 
and shows us that the highest knowledge of anything 
is a description of its evolutionary stages. 
461 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
Those who lack this sense have lost rapport with 
childhood, even their own, and with arrested and un- 
developed souls everywhere. To maintain this vital 
contact is essential for all teachers and leaders of men 
or for success in literature, art, poetry, politics. Here 
one must know how life and the world seem from 
under the smallest and thickest skulls. It is the secret 
of the charm of writers like Goethe, Tolstoi, Dickens, 
Hugo, and Strindberg. It anticipates, too, the con- 
dition of old age and provides for it in advance. Bet- 
ter yet, it enables us, when the problems of life be- 
come too hard, to retreat or regress to a more juvenile 
point of view and flee for a time from reality with- 
out the danger of becoming permanently arrested, 
like dementia praecox cases, but rather to be refreshed 
and reinvigorated as by an Antaeus touch of mother 
earth and to gain strength for a fresh advance, which 
thus gathers to itself a new supply of momentum 
from the whole upward push of the elan vital, which 
is behind us all. It also makes us mindful of the needs 
of the countless generations of men yet to be born. 
Thus, as Einstein’s quintessential teaching is that 
time is the fourth dimension of space, so this instinct 
for evolution, which gives a new and vaster historic 
perspective to all things, is the fourth dimension of 
man-soul. It renounces the old quest for ultimates 
or elements as bootless and is not ashamed to be 
frankly agnostic concerning them. It regards the 
direction and measurement of tendencies and of well- 
constellated groups of traits as the highest form of 
the knowledge of himself possible to man, and also 
gives us the normal attitude toward those below us, 
namely, to help them to evolve and advance; while 
to all above and beyond us we become docile and 
aspire to attain their higher levels. It thus keeps the 
freshness of springtide in the heart at all stages of 
the comedie humaine. 
462 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
Men differ here incalculably. It is one trait of 
inferiority in young men to be so intent upon the 
present that they can make no sacrifice of it to pre- 
pare for adult life, having lost or never developed 
the power of prevision, while they are still less con- 
cerned for the welfare of generations to come. Their 
sphere of knowledge is determined by their present, 
perhaps material, interests and they grow up to be 
bad citizens, and worse patriots; and their religion, 
if they affect one, is an inexpensive life-insurance 
policy against annihilation or future pain when the 
grave closes over them. It is a profiteering flier with 
the chance of getting the largest profit from the small- 
est investment, and they abhor evolution because it 
discounts the high valuation they put upon them- 
selves. 
The Chinaman, if he has to flee from reality, finds 
surcease from worry and reinvigoration by contem- 
plating his ancestors and exulting in their virtues and 
successes. But the principle is essentially the same 
when the overstrained city man goes back to the farm 
of his boyhood and reverts to the simple life, getting 
into close contact with mother earth, children, and 
animals, and giving way to all the inherited reactions 
of the human soul to the fresh and first-hand im- 
pressions of nature. 
(5) Love of Nature. We have forgotten that out 
of this sprang nearly all of the old mythologies, which 
express man’s first effort to know his world. The 
phenomena of the heavens—the sun, moon, clouds, 
wind, stones, rain, heat and cold, fire and frost, moun- 
tain, sea, the death of vegetation in the fall and its 
revival in the spring, seed time and harvest, the traits 
and habits of animals, which have been now hunted, 
now domesticated, now worshiped; the twin mysteries 
of life and death—these were their ever-recurring 
themes. Everywhere love of nature came slowly, 
463 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
casting out fear. Even astrology, the mother of as- 
tronomy, was at first purely humanistic because the 
stars, men thought, ruled human destinies; while 
alchemy, the mother of chemistry, was, as we now 
know, a quest not for gold but for the summum 
bonum of which gold was only the symbol, which was 
the successful extraction of the soul from the body 
by subtle distillations, thus proving its surviving 
power. 
Psychology, too, began with the knowledge that 
the hunter and then the domesticator, shepherd and 
breeder, had to have of animal life, wherein human 
qualities are writ so large that even the child may 
read, as the old bestiaries and animal eposes show. 
Then slowly came the sciences, all of them at first 
cultivated by lovers of nature in her various aspects. 
The ancient star-gazers so loved the planets that their 
very souls were drawn upward and their cult was the 
basis of several of the great religions. The old 
herbalists found all human qualities in the flowers, 
shrubs, and plants, as the popular names of so many 
of them testify. Trees were objects of druidic wor- 
ship and in the qualities of plants nearly all cures 
were found. Even Linnaeus, the founder of modern 
botany, felt all this. So did Bufifon for animals. Love 
and awe, then worship, then cold objective study, is 
always the order. 
Poetry and art as well as religion and science also 
have their roots in the love and wonder Nature in- 
spires. Without fine subtle feeling for Nature in her 
various phases both would be crippled, as Biese has 
so well shown for poetry. City life has too often 
aborted this love, even in children, whose natural 
home is the country, so that, as surveys have often 
shown, they know very little of even the most com- 
mon phenomena of nature and this impoverishes the 
very soul as well as the soil from which all these 
464 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
culture products grow, as only those with genetic in- 
sight can understand. Thus, without love of and a 
deep, strong feeling for Nature, science, religion, 
literature, art, and a right conception of man and his 
place in the universe are and must remain imper- 
fectly developed and somewhat factitious. 
The young people in Germany (Die Wander- 
vogel) organized to travel in groups and on foot dur- 
ing vacations through the best scenery of that coun- 
try, slept in the open to get close to it, and sought to 
rebase their patriotism upon the love of the physical 
features of their country. As clergymen of old used 
to appeal with pointed finger, as if to each one in 
their audience, asking, Do you and you really love the 
Lord ? so I would ask every person whether he really 
loves Nature, natura, the about-to-be, out of whose 
heart we all sprang and to which we shall return. It 
is not far from Nature to Nature’s God. 
(6) Sublimation. Teeth, lips, and tongue were 
developed and at first used solely for seizing or mas- 
ticating food, and out of these functions have evolved 
the higher one of articulate speech. The hand was 
once a foot, then used for prehension and later for 
all kinds of manipulation. The senses were originally 
to warn of danger or to find and test food; hence 
their location near the entrance of the alimentary 
canal. If there be anything we can properly call hun- 
ger for truth, righteousness, or a larger life, it is a 
sublimation of the food quest. 
So anger began as blind, bestial, vindictive, de- 
structive rages and was sublimated by repressions and 
the development of stated punishments, and the duel 
and even warfare were bound by codes. We cannot 
and should not eliminate anger but may be greatly 
and righteously angry at abuse and injustice, and 
some learn to penalize those who injure them or 
affront them by the long circuit way of surpassing 
465 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
them in good deeds or superior attainments and 
achievements by way of revenge. Man owes much 
of his aggressiveness to wrath and must give it ever 
more deliberate and fuller scope and more momen- 
tum, but on a constantly higher plane. He cannot be 
too angry if he is angry aright. 
Fear, too, began as a convulsive effort to escape 
anticipated pain; then it devised manifold forms of 
protection, shelter, insurance, medicine, and ever 
wider prevision, for the progeny of fear are very 
numerous. In a sense fear is the beginning of wis- 
dom and man owes many of the best things in his 
civilization to timorousness and to his ability to fear 
aright, while many psychotherapies consist in simply 
reshaping morbid phobias into wiser forms of ex- 
pression. 
Love, too, began on the physical plane and its low- 
est level is very bestial, especially in man, whose fall 
was simply the hypertrophy of this function which 
we now know definitely due to (a) the upright posi- 
tion, (b) the manipulatory power of the”hand, (c) 
clothing and control of fire, which extended the 
mating season the year round. This made man the 
lover bar excellence in all the world. This is a power 
which, if rightly sublimated, produces many of the 
very choicest qualities possible to man. Even in the 
animal world it finds higher vent in all the secondary 
sex qualities, the description of which occupies three- 
fourths of Darwin’s Descent of Man, producing 
rich coloration, nuptial plumage, wattles, ornamenta- 
tion of many kinds, etc. It impels to stridulation, 
vocal and musical performances, courtship antics, and 
makes pugnacity and arms it with the weapons of 
offense and defense in the mating season. 
We now know that with modern civilized man at 
least some ten trying years must pass between pu- 
berty, when savages mate, and the age of nubility 
466 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
best for eugenics, while our complex institutions 
always tend to add years more to the period of youth- 
ful celibacy. But this sublimation, although it is very 
hard, is the chief function of this unprecedentedly 
critical decade ofTife. So many of the higher powers 
of man are sublimates of this instinct that success or 
failure in this process has always and everywhere 
been regarded as one of the chief criteria for the esti- 
mation of character and one of the best scales on 
which to measure the degree of its development. 
When we are able to test and grade instincts, enthu- 
siasms, and ambitions, we can rate the degree of sub- 
limation here, and it is just this process that dissipa- 
tion saps. It robs life of glow and produces indif- 
ference instead of enthusiasm. 
During these years particularly the soul has to 
glow. It craves excitement and must have it, and if 
the school of life cannot supply these on higher levels 
they are almost certain to find vent in lustful pro- 
clivities. If you want to predispose to this, rob life 
of deep and strong interests, and make it dull and 
mechanical drudgery. The quintessence of the lately 
much discussed sex education is that every real in- 
terest sets a back-fire to lust and in this simple fact 
lies the gospel of the whole matter. 
Not only is man the lover par excellence of the 
world but it is of the utmost pedagogical importance 
to realize that nothing in the world is so plastic, has 
so many forms or surrogates as love, and that is why 
it can raise man to his highest estate or drag him 
down to its lowest. Eros must have fervors and rap- 
tures and these may be for the good, the beautiful, 
and the true, or for their opposites. That is why 
this scale is perhaps the best of all on which to 
measure the degrees of human evolution. At any 
rate, the higher anthropology culminates here and 
religion, when it really lives in the soul, here gets in 
467 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
its best work, namely, as a regulator of that passion 
which with no control slowly extinguishes the torch 
of life in families, generations, and nations. The 
problem here, then, is to find and utilize vicariates. 
How far we love aright is thus an even better test 
of human metal and temper than how far we fear 
or are angry aright. 
Some determinations here are now possible with- 
out detailed psychoanalysis and psychological instinct 
(for there is such a thing born rather than made) 
can pretty surely detect undue sexual or other leak- 
age. Here belongs what I call the adolescent romance 
and all the golden idealism, and the old and now too 
often forgotten morality of repression and self-con- 
trol which is its condition. Regimen here begins in 
physical culture and culminates in the cultivation of 
interests, the number and intensity of which are the 
best results of sublimation, while indifference is the 
best sign of moral error in this domain. 
(7) Activity vs. passivity. In nearly all the 
studies of character of the last three or four decades 
which have stressed or at least listed not a few hun- 
dred human traits there is one and only one grand 
distinction in which nearly all students of the subject 
more or less agree, that is, that there are two classes 
of men, the leaders and the led, the active or the 
passive, the doers and the knowers, a distinction 
which the Germans represented by konnen and ken- 
nen. The Greeks thought knowing was halfway to 
doing and a virtue in itself without performance, 
while our morality holds that to know duty without 
doing it only augments guilt. 
All nerves conduct either outward from or inward 
to the centers. They are afferent or efferent and so 
now we hear of centrifugal or centripetal characters. 
This distinction is essentially that between Jung’s 
extrovert and introvert type of thinking, between 
468 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
James’s tough and tender minded, Nietzsche’s Ajyol- 
lonarian and Dionysian, Freud’s sadist and maso- 
chistic, Webb’s and Spearman’s distinction between 
character and intelligence, Bryant and Goldthwaite’s 
carnivorous and herbivorous type of mind, Wein- 
ingen’s male and female, some think between long 
and broad heads, between the artist and the critic, 
Wagner and Nietzsche, Charlemagne and Napoleon 
versus the Hamlet type, hysterics and dementia 
praecox cases, between Alexander the Great and his 
teacher, Aristotle; between the makers of history and 
the writers of it, between the United States and India, 
between the west and the east, materialism and ideal- 
ism, pragmatism and solipsism. 
Some men have too much intellect for their will 
and some too much will for their intellect. We too 
often see changes in individuals and nations, alter- 
nations from one type to another, for example, when 
a college professor becomes a president. We saw it 
in Germany in lier change from culture to Kultur 
after 1870. We see it in legislators who become 
executives. Our educational system in recent decades 
has become less noetic and more efficient, and per- 
formance tests are increasing as compared with those 
of mere intelligence. This country has been in the 
past very largely a land of doers. Our activity has 
not been sufficiently guided by knowledge, as indi- 
cated in the 13,000 annual business failures. 
Now, few races or individuals are equally great in 
theory and achievement. Some are more subjective 
and others more objective, and some greater in 
thought and some in action; but most are dispropor- 
tionately developed in one or in the other direction. 
They evolve great sagacity as to what they or others 
should do but lack energy to do it, while others rush 
prematurely to the execution of ill-formed plans. The 
great scholar is very rarely an executive, and captains 
469 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
of industry lack patience to be sure they know every- 
thing that can throw light upon their problem before 
they act, and are especially uninformed and inconsid- 
erate of the human factors, which are the hardest to 
understand and adjust to. 
Of course no one is purely either noetic or cona- 
tive but it is always a question of the predominance 
of the manifold trends that compose our personality 
that is in point. The scale of disposition here is a 
very long one, extending all the way from abject sub- 
ordination to the lust for power or dominion. 
There are often oscillations here in all of us— 
now we are fallow and receptive and anon there is an 
outburst of activity. After submission to oppression 
and persecution men revolt and become themselves 
persecutors. Alternations here, as Magnan has 
shown, are very typical in cyclic insanities. These 
rhythmic alternations in all their polymorphic shapes 
are ebbs and flows of the great tide of life which all 
of us have experienced, but the habit of the one who 
is prone to look within and the other who is prone 
to look without are fundamentally different. One 
accepts the environment, the other would reconstruct 
it. The one speculates, the other accomplishes. A 
good diagnosis of men in this respect would have the 
greatest value as an appraisal, not only of vocational 
fitness but of success in the larger business of living. 
Only a few great men of history have been able to 
amplify both these fundamental impulsions and com- 
bine them in due proportion. 
(8) Loyalty or fidelity. The last of this octave of 
trait tests here considered constitutes another real 
unit-character of the psyche although it has as many 
varieties as it has objects. First of all, of course, 
comes loyalty to our own deeper selves, to know which 
is the quest of all seekers after supreme wisdom who 
really wish not only to know themselves, as God Him- 
470 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
self does, but to be true to their deeper selves in all 
they do. As we have seen, the majority of mankind 
fear this knowledge and avoid the conduct to which 
it impels, and devise manifold ways of self-estrange- 
ment. Indeed some develop a phobia for the mirror 
of all tests, resist self-analysis, and prefer to wrap 
themselves in illusions, so that to be rid of these often 
brings astonishing cures of body and sanification of 
mind hardly less marked than those of the old fash- 
ioned conversion. Still Shakespeare was right, “To 
thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night 
the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” 
Thus loyalty to self conditions all other loyalties and 
enables us in living from within outward to do so 
with the momentum of all the evolutionary process 
behind us. This is the idea of conscience, which is so 
often perverted. 
Then there is loyalty to parents, mates and off- 
spring, all our other selves, to friendships of the same 
sex, which in classic days before the rise of romantic 
love was thought to be one of the supreme virtues 
and which Aristotle and Cicero glorified. Among 
even criminals it makes “snitching” or “double-cross- 
ing” the most unpardonable of all offenses. Virtue 
is loyalty to what we deem right, conviction and belief 
is faith in what we think true. Patriotism is loyalty 
to country, good citizenship to the community and 
all its beneficent mores and institutions. It is fealty, 
dependableness, the first product of the herd instinct, 
and the condition of all teamwork. It makes men 
true and faithful to the causes they espouse and lays 
its heaviest ban upon spying, welching, betrayal, and 
treason. It gives a social integrity for which all guile 
is impossible. Science is loyalty to the universe and 
its laws. It is the taproot of whatever fealty we have 
for the churches, educational institutions, fraternities, 
or communities which we voluntarily join and to the 
471 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
leaders we elect to follow. It is allegiance to our 
group and subordination of self to its service. It 
involves not only capacity for teamwork but devotion 
to some cause which is above our own personality 
and which we could die for as well as live for were 
that necessary. Majus amicus Plato sed majis arnica 
veritas. “Unless above himself he can erect himself, 
how mean a thing is man.” 
It, too, has many grades of sublimation, from the 
loyalty of partners in crime all the way up to Seneca’s 
loyalty to the universe which was the capstone of his 
ethics. Whoever is more loyal to country than to 
humanity will proceed to become more loyal to his 
party or sect than to his country, will come to place 
his own interests or business above those of party or 
creed, and will end by loving himself best of all. 
Martyrs were loyal to their creed and their blood 
is the seed of the church. The loyal man loves truth 
though it contradicts him; and justice though it con- 
demns him. It is the lesson, too, of the hive and the 
formicary, the very oldest if not in some respects the 
best of all social organizations. It is, of course, 
always and everywhere the good citizenship that 
never fails to place public above private good. It 
recognizes authority from which it will not revolt. 
These eight are the standards by which I would 
measure the cardinal traits of character and disposi- 
tion and by which I would calibrate human nature, 
including feeling and will as well as intellect. Each 
of them is a complex constellated of more elementary 
components but each is a true e pluribus unum and 
may be treated as a generic as well as a genetic unit 
trait. Excess or defect here constitutes the prime 
determinants of success or failure in life. Such tests 
cannot be applied to large groups or with time limits, 
but require careful individual observation and analy- 
sis and the weighing of many items from many 
472 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
sources. We have no accepted methodology as yet 
for such work, but innate psychological common sense 
is already finding orientations here and it is in this 
direction that the way is already opening for a far 
better estimate of the more fundamental traits of 
human nature. 
We already have many analyses of the require- 
ments of many a job but these are generally made 
with a view to fitting men to each, just as of old chil- 
dren had to be fitted to the school. But here, as there, 
we need the same Copernican revolution which the 
school is undergoing and ahead of us lies the larger 
and far more beneficent task of fitting the job to the 
man because human nature is vastly older and shares 
something of the persistence of the laws of physical 
nature. 
None of these are specifically tests of intelligence 
although all involve it. They rather deal with the 
noncurriculizable type of intelligence with which 
present-day schooling has far too little to do. On 
these scales the degrees of development of nations, 
races, and historic periods can also be measured, as 
well as those of individuals. Nor does it make the 
least practical difference whether the trends here 
sought are innate or acquired. Both factors are of 
course involved in all of them. Perhaps the chief 
validification of each one of them lies in the fact 
that all have been recognized more or less clearly 
and striven toward more or less definitely everywhere 
and always by all races and throughout all history. 
Thus they really conform to the venerable rubric by 
which the early church sought to formulate its funda- 
mental beliefs which were or must be held, Semper, 
ubique et ab omnibus. 
Again, if I am right, we come to a new realization 
of why it is so hard to specialize in such a vast field 
and also how important it is to lay a broad basis for 
473 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
our pyramid. “Knowing something of all that is 
necessary and at last all of something” has its unique 
application here. The great world yet lies in darkness 
regarding man’s nature, origin, and the regimen of 
life. Rank superstitions still flourish here as nowhere 
else. Men blindly follow old creeds and observe out- 
grown mores, chase one partial light after another, 
are victims of slogans, and creeds, revive mystic, an- 
tique cults which even their leaders only half under- 
stand, or perhaps roam the world like Jurgen in 
aimless quest of an ideal nowhere adequately em- 
bodied, and grope as mystics or agnostics instead of 
finding the deep joy of really living in the affirmations 
that make life a victory and not a defeat. It 
is pitiful to see how persistently man looks without 
when he should look within, not only for the conduct 
of life but for salvation, or to realize how wont and 
even contagion determine his attitudes, opinions, and 
habits; how subject not only the ignorant masses 
but the half-cultured are to brain_ storms like spirit- 
ism, fundamentalism, Ku Kluxism, A. P. A. and bol- 
shevik agitation, fascisti propaganda, the mad impulse 
for profiteering; or how easily fanatical sects arise 
and flourish—all because extreme views are easiest. 
Perhaps if we had a just and true sense of the dif- 
ference between the normal and abnormal we should 
have to judge the world to be sick or insane, as Jesus 
and His early followers conceived it to be sinful. What 
we need is a new mental and moral hygiene that shall 
give us higher ideals and standards of sanity, both 
individual and social, and a new philanthropy in the 
broad literal sense of that word which makes it 
almost, if not quite, identical with what Renan long 
ago described as the enthusiasm of humanity; Paul, 
as charity; and the Johanneian Jesus, as love. 
But the psychologist must be made as well as born 
and he needs an ever lengthening apprenticeship with 
474 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
focalization successively in different fields—labora- 
tory, genetic, abnormal, observational, introspective, 
etc. The literature in each of these fields is now vast. 
Each member of each group must read diligently and 
pool his findings for other members. The digest of 
books and articles in our journals are sadly inade- 
quate and incomplete and we have no Centralblatt, 
while even our best investigators sometimes work and 
publish in ignorance of important articles or memoirs 
bearing on their subject. Moreover, even our best 
developed academic departments give little or no in- 
struction upon important sections of the subject, 
while many courses are too prematurely special for 
the greatest profit to the generally immature stage 
of even our graduate students. On the other hand, 
many of our introductory textbooks are tendenzids 
so that there is too little agreement as to the most 
important subsections and still less as to where to 
begin. Some of them, too, indulge in platitudinous 
elaborations of the obvious and so fail to generate 
the initial interest that is so important for beginners. 
Thus, teachers of the elements have a hard task for, 
as one of them lately complained to me, there is not 
one of the some twoscore texts he looked over that 
does not leave one or more important domains un- 
touched. We have paid far too little attention to the 
pedagogy of our subject and the efforts that have 
been made in this direction have only resulted in the 
greatest diversity so that there is little approaching 
the approximate consensus here that is found in intro- 
ducing novices into the physical sciences. 
Beyond this, the ideal leader in this field should 
himself be more or less acquainted with certain of the 
great poets, dramatists, novelists, moralists, reform- 
ers, etc., who have most influenced mankind because 
they interpreted and voiced its deepest aspirations, 
as, for example, the Greek tragedians, Comenius, 
475 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
Rousseau, Goethe, Coleridge, Carlyle, Browning, 
Nietzsche, Dostoievsky, etc., not to mention our Bible, 
the life and teachings of Buddha, Confucius, Maho- 
met, etc. This, I know, will seem a far cry to most 
of my colleagues but judicious reading like this quite 
outside the limits traditionally laid down for us 
greatly enriches the psychological soil. I would even 
venture the opinion that Wundt’s Volkerpsychologie, 
far too little known by his disciples, should and will 
some day be seen to be more important for the proper 
training of professors than his psychological text- 
book. I would insist, too, were I an examiner to 
license a professor in this subject, on a good knowl- 
edge of Darwin, Spencer, and Haeckel. 
I would even insist that he should keep sufficiently 
in touch with current events throughout the world 
which to-day is the sport of psychological forces, as 
is now beginning to be understood as never before, 
and that he should attempt here and there according 
to his lights to draw lessons, interpret, apply, influ- 
ence, and inform public opinion, and if possible, now 
and then, at critical moments be, if he can, the oracle 
of the Zeitgeist. 
How each and every department and specialty in 
our field needs just now broad, comparative, syn- 
thetic viewpoints! Perhaps the time is drawing near 
for a many-volumed handbook written cooperatively 
by many representative men, as physiology has twice 
in its history attempted (first in Burdach’s four vol- 
umes in 1848 and later in Hermann’s encyclopedic 
digest and epitome of physiology in eight volumes 
(1883) wherein each subtopic was brought up to date 
by the expert best qualified to deal with it). 
The histories of psychology that have so far ap- 
peared become partial and doctrinaire as they ap- 
proach the actual present, which none of them really 
reach and to come abreast of which in all its domains 
476 PROGRESS IN PSYCHOLOGY 
would require an erudition, a range of sympathy, 
and an impartiality which none of us has yet attained. 
In fact, the historic spirit is yet lacking here, and 
that for several reasons. Partly it is because the 
development has been so rapid and so recent and 
partly because it has been along such diverse lines 
that no one is broad enough to rise above all preju- 
dices and rivalries or even jealousies, both group and 
personal, so as to see all the data in their true per- 
spective. Perhaps it is not too much to say that 
probably no two psychologists would agree as to the 
definition, scope, legitimate methods, the point with 
which teaching should begin, or the sequence and 
relative importance of topics. Never in the history 
of the sciences has there been a stage in any of them 
(with the possible exception of present-day soci- 
ology, if that can be called a science) in which along 
with great activity there has been such diversity of 
aims, such tension between groups, and such persist- 
ent ignoring by one circle of workers of what is made 
cardinal by another (for example, the psychoanalysts 
and the introspectionists). Perhaps these differences 
only mirror the present-day disunity and disharmony 
of the human soul itself, individual and collective, and 
it may be that a stage of redintegration for both will 
come together, just as the process of dissociation for 
both did. But the amplification and justification of 
these views belong elsewhere. 
Meanwhile we can rest certain of one thing, that 
henceforth the great problems of mankind and of 
modern civilization, on the one hand, and those of 
psychology, on the other, are coming into ever closer 
and more vital rapport with each other. We can 
never determine what is man’s fitting estate until we 
know his true nature and we are perhaps equally far 
—just now it would seem very far, indeed—from the 
goal in both these quests. But despite the many un- 
477 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
precedented difficulties and grounds for discourage- 
ment I cannot resist the optimistic conviction that we 
are steadily approaching a true and real trail and that, 
on the whole, it seemes to slant upward. CHAPTER IX 
SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES IN MY DAY 
Changes in teaching reading, writing, and spelling—F. W. Parker 
—Slang—Changes in what children read—Number work— 
Grube—Progress in geography, in history, gradation, draw- 
ing, industrial training, music—The district school as I 
knew it—Programme—Punishments—The story of the public 
high school—Its period of enslavement to the college and its 
progressive emancipation—The dead and modern languages— 
German ideals—Philosophy and the normal schools—Hegel 
and W. T. Harris—The kindergarten, Miss Blow, and others 
—Montessori—Herbartianism—John Dewey—The recognition 
of paidology as normative—Ebbinghaus—Intelligence tests 
and their limitations—Sloyd, manual and vocational training 
—School gardens, the garden city, and agriculture—The edu- 
cation of defectives—The treatment of juvenile criminals— 
Boy scouts—Training of elementary teachers—Normal schools 
and academic pedagogy—Associations with parents—The in- 
fluence of women—Teachers’ organizations—The N. E. A.— 
Summer and correspondence schools—Hygiene—Teacher does 
not teach—The weak point in our system—Size of our educa- 
tional system—Its inefficiency—Discontent of students—Why 
the war is not taught—The calamity of godless schools—The 
mistake of introducing physics instead of biology into the 
high school—The supreme educational value of evolu- 
tion—Crying need of a higher educational statesmanship 
—Progress in medical and legal education and the ob- 
stacles to advance in theological training—University prog- 
ress—Association of American Universities and other aca- 
demic interinstitutional organizations—The proposed national 
university at Washington—The Sterling-Towner bill—Na- 
tional Academy of Sciences—American Association for the 
Advancement of Science—National Research Council—The 
age of exploration ended and a new intensive study of 
man in order—Our chief present need a deeper knowl- 
edge of human nature—Man vastly older than his indus- 
trial or political environment, which no longer fits him— 
Research the center and culmination of the creative im- 
pulse—Its psychological root—The apex of our educational 
479 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
system should no longer be in Germany but we should lead 
in the world of science—The university invisible and con- 
sidered as a state of mind. 
The history of fashions or of religious belief 
shows hardly less conflict between innovators and 
conservatives, heresies and orthodoxies, or more 
changes of both matter and method than those which 
have taken place during my lifetime in this country 
in the field of education. The briefest mention of 
those changes in this wide field in which I have been 
interested, beginning with those of the lower grades, 
will give some indication of the transformations that 
have occurred within my memory. 
I note first those in reading and writing. Once 
this began most logically and with the elements, that 
is, the form and name of the printed capital and then 
the small letters in their alphabetic order. Then 
came their simplest combinations in monosyllabic 
words of two or three letters, including often those 
that did not make words, a-b = ab; b-a = ba, etc. We 
began writing with the printed forms in large letters 
and then the small before we attempted a cursive 
hand, and learned spelling in the old-fashioned way 
of Webster’s Speller, of which nearly two million 
copies are said to have been sold during its career. 
Here were long lists of words of similar length, form, 
and sound, some of which were no words at all but 
which were conned by loud whispering for the spell- 
ing lesson. Then came words of two syllables (lady, 
shady, baby, baker) ; then those with three, etc. With 
the Primer, children spelled and then pronounced each 
word aloud and later whispered the spelling. 
The first effective challenge to this method was 
the phonic scheme. C-a-t did not “spell” cat but 
ce-a-ty. And so we analyzed the word into its com- 
ponent sounds and then combined them, and because 
a number of letters stood for different sounds the 
480 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
phonic primers modified their form so that there were 
some fifty letters and the names of each tended to 
lapse from consciousness. This brought much gain, 
and the crudities and extravagances of the scheme 
were soon toned down. It has now its fullest and 
most effective installation in the schools of France, 
with elaborate phonic charts and drills. 
Then came the write-reading method, for the im- 
portation of which from Germany, where it origi- 
nated, F. W. Parker was chiefly responsible. In- 
struction in the vernacular now began by writing, 
not printed but script forms of a few so-called normal 
words which together contained all the letters of the 
alphabet and began with small m and n. Not books 
but slates and, far more often, blackboards (often 
permanently ruled) were now needed, and writing 
and giving the sound of each letter were central while 
its name was kept in the background. Where and 
when this method was at its height I have been told 
by librarians that children in the eighth or ninth grade 
could not repeat the alphabet and were helpless in 
finding what they wanted in card catalogues or in 
the dictionaries. Writing paper slowly took the place 
of slates and the eye and hand supplanted the ear 
and mouth, where in fact language lives, moves, and 
has its being. But script was at first made far larger 
and there was a preliminary air-writing from the 
shoulder, which was legitimate for the avoidance of 
writer’s cramp, and the use of the old copybook was 
forgotten. Vertical script, however, brought it back 
again. The old “slant-writing” was first condemned 
as causing faulty postures and attitudes, and scoli- 
osis. Extremists told us that verticality was a preg- 
nant symbol of uprightness of character while tipped 
letters made for instability. The new script was open, 
honest, and involved less eyestrain; while some advo- 
cated inaugurating it by a preliminary drill in back- 
481 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
hand writing. This ultra-fashion, however, slowly 
passed and a so-called normal angle was adopted. 
Now that the typewriter has come in, even composi- 
tors seem slowly losing the power of deciphering 
handwriting, too much precocious stress upon which 
has caused many people now in middle life to write 
badly. Now, too, we have scales by which the merit 
of script can be graded in half a dozen degrees, as 
we also grade spelling, sentence structure, number 
work, etc. 
That our children of from ten to fourteen differ 
in their ability to speak and write the mother tongue, 
as compared with those one or two generations ago, 
we have manifold conjectures, but the several com- 
parisons I can find seem to me inconclusive. My im- 
pression is that the children of to-day can describe 
things and happenings better but are far less articu- 
late in stressing their personal reactions to them or 
in expressing their ideas or feelings. There is an 
enormous increase in the use of slang, despite its 
taboo by the school as detrimental to established usage 
and convention, for it is more free and picturesque. 
Slang is the lingua franca of children and youth and 
fits their type of psychic activity as nothing else does. 
The introduction of foreign languages into the high 
school, although it has helped to a better knowledge 
of English has brought deterioration and carelessness 
of style, for translation English is a thing apart. The 
school to-day is doubtless trying to increase the vo- 
cabulary but there seems to be a wider gap between 
understanding and using words. The young student 
to-day has little of the old impulse to introduce into 
his writing all the new words he learns. 
Reform in spelling, despite the efforts of its de- 
votees and the reasonableness of it all, has made rela- 
tively no more headway in the schools than did 
Volapiik and Esperanto, and it is somewhat radical 
482 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
for a school system or publication to adopt even the 
dozen words suggested as the entering wedge of the 
reform. 
As to what children read, changes have been per- 
haps even greater. Sixty years ago there was very 
little children’s literature in this country save “goody” 
and religious books, mostly found in the Sunday 
school libraries, and two juvenile weeklies, also with 
a strong religious trend; and little wisdom was shown 
in selecting the contents of the school readers. Now 
the quality of the latter has improved and their scope 
enlarged, and there is a vast body of juvenile publi- 
cations of all sorts, while many large libraries have 
children’s departments. No country, save Germany,1 
has made any comprehensive and effective effort to 
standardize or grade the merits of juvenile literature, 
but we have most instructive statistics as to what 
boys and girls actually love to read at different ages. 
We knew the Bible far better than does the average 
child of to-day. In the city, in which the majority 
of children now live as they formerly lived in the 
country, although there are better opportunities to 
read there are far more distractions that prevent the 
young from doing so, while the development of the 
movies has materially diverted them from the use of 
books, although the former have had far less effect 
in increasing juvenile crime than had been predicted. 
Their worst effect upon the young has been to give 
them a precocious knowledge of sex and to shorten 
the period of innocence. While their vast educational 
possibilities, almost rivaling the invention of printing, 
have been recognized by a few, the efforts in the de- 
velopment of these possibilities have been so far too 
ineffective. The bookish child may be abnormal, but 
the school could and should do far more than it has 
1 See my Educational Problems, vol. 2, pp. 470 et seq. 
483 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
attempted to cultivate not only a knowledge of what 
good literature is but some taste for reading it, for 
if the habit of reading is not developed in the teens, 
probably in the early teens, it very rarely comes in 
subsequent life. 
In number work the past two generations have 
seen marked changes. In my boyhood mental arith- 
metic held the chief place. We memorized the multi- 
plication tables forward, backward, and skipping-wise, 
and performed all the operations possible upon all 
small numbers, squaring, cubing, fractioning, as well 
as adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, and 
doing sums in proportion, with many exercises in 
concert for the whole school for those who were ma- 
ture enough to join in them. When written work 
came it was very much normalized, with rules to learn 
by heart, and the sums contained often prodigiously 
large numbers. It was assumed that numbers applied 
to everything that could be counted, and supreme at- 
tention was given to number relations rather than to 
their applications. In the “sums” of the higher 
arithmetic many processes were performed labori- 
ously which a little knowledge of the elements of 
geometry and algebra would have enabled us to solve 
far more simply and with more understanding, but of 
these devices we knew nothing. 
Then came the Grube method, by which every- 
thing was done with io, then with 20, then 100, etc. 
Then came the method of counting forward, back- 
ward, and skipping-wise, that is, by two’s, threes, etc. 
Then came the measurements system, and we have 
always had with us the effort of reformers to intro- 
duce the decimal or metric system in place of our 
antiquated tables of weights and measures that had 
to be memorized. But despite the fact that our mon- 
etary system is computed on this basis little prog- 
ress has been made here. Then followed the more 
484 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
recent comprehensive effort to find just how number 
work, which had been greatly exaggerated in our 
school, was done, as a basis for establishing a more 
rational, effective, and unitary system for all schools 
and to break down the wasteful arbitrary distinction 
between the different mathematical branches, hardly 
less arbitrary than the rigid logical distinctions which 
were so long maintained between numeration, nota- 
tion, and the four “species.” These reforms, when 
fully effected, will reduce the excessive time which 
in this country is given to skilled and practical com- 
putation, although even yet there are grave complaints 
of the ineffectiveness of school-trained pupils in all 
the accounting professions and their ignorance of all 
the modern methods which these have brought 
into use. 
At the extremes we have had, on the one hand, 
the attempt to eliminate formal arithmetic and to 
make all number work incidental to other disciplines, 
introducing it into botany, zoology, civics, geography, 
and even history; while at the other extreme we have 
had texts in arithmetic that were purely and from the 
start commercial. But both these efforts left little 
permanent trace. We have never in this country made 
much use of the many auxiliaries and forms of appa- 
ratus often found in European schools—abacuses, 
many forms of counters, illustrations of weights and 
measures, adding and other computing machines, 
magic squares, implements for geometrical drawing, 
etc., although the pupil is taught the use of the ruler 
and shown charts illustrating the metric system. In 
general the American pupil leaves school with little or 
no acquaintance with the many helpful manipulative 
devices found in our Pedagogical Museum and so com- 
mon in Continental schools, and is rarely brought to 
feel the mystic charm of pure number relations. 
In my boyhood, geography, always taught from 
485 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
Mitchell’s lower and higher texts and atlases, gave 
us our only glimpse into the field of science. After 
an astronomical introduction—always helped out by 
a globe on the teacher’s desk, with some explanation 
of day and night and the seasons, which for older 
children by several enthusiastic teachers was reen- 
forced by star-gazing through a small telescope and 
by a map of the celestial constellations—we were 
taught something about the five races of mankind and 
thus given a faint touch of anthropology. Then we 
were almost immediately taken to political and 
national divisions, which were everywhere supreme, 
with much drawing of maps which were usually col- 
ored. After learning the points of the compass and 
memorizing definitions of islands, capes, isthmuses, 
and promontories, great stress was laid upon “bound- 
ing” every state in the Union and most of the coun- 
tries in Europe and perhaps the other continents, by 
way of topography. 
Of every state in the country we had to learn the 
capital, one or more of the chief cities, the principal 
occupations of its people, its products, its more 
salient natural features, etc. A common exercise was 
to describe the course of the great rivers and moun- 
tains of the world, to name the chief volcanoes, to 
go up and down the coastlines of continents naming 
capes, bays, and rivers, and according to one system 
in vogue these were arranged in crude metrical order 
and set to music, which we had to sing. Chief stress 
was laid upon our own country, and industrial were 
almost as prominent as political aspects. Of the ele- 
ments of physical geography there was very little. 
Outside the “three r’s,” geography was, I think, 
introduced earlier, given more time, and was less dis- 
liked than any other study in the old district school. 
A few decades ago a feeble effort was made to intro- 
duce the German method of beginning with the school 
486 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
building and widening to the town, county, state, 
eccentrically, and geographies with this local begin- 
ning were introduced in several centers. But this 
method passed and left almost no trace. One ele- 
mentary humorous geography by Schultze was put 
upon the market, according to which, with some dis- 
tortions, each state and country was given the form 
of a face, an animal, or some other object, with short 
comic descriptive poems. Lastly came the revolu- 
tionary texts of Frye, followed by Tarr and McMur- 
ray, while now what may be called the higher geog- 
raphy is just beginning to be introduced into our col- 
leges and universities. 
History was, so far as my memory and experience 
go, entirely unknown in the old district school. In 
the higher academies, however, it was represented by 
Worcester’s volume of Universal History, which be- 
gan with ancient Babylon and came down to within 
a generation of the then present time. Historic maps 
and atlases were unknown but there were innumer- 
able dates, and especially names, to memorize, with 
wars and battles always prominent. I never saw a 
concise history of the United States until I went to 
college and I think it had no place in the fitting 
schools; nor did modern languages. 
In the above staple subjects I think the children, 
age by age, had more knowledge than a child of the 
same years to-day, when textbooks have so enor- 
mously multiplied in both number and cost and so 
many accessory studies have found their way into 
even the lower grades. Of school hygiene, manual 
training, civics, natural history, and every branch of 
science the boy and girl of fourteen in my day learned 
and heard practically nothing in the school and, as we 
have seen, each town and school district was more or 
less autonomous. Occasionally there were writing and 
singing schools in the evening, conducted as private 
487 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
ventures and carrying small fees. Anything ap- 
proaching gradation, despite the work of Horace 
Mann, was long unknown in the country school, where 
a single teacher did his or her best for two or three 
score of children at all ages from six to well into or 
even beyond the teens. 
In my boyhood we had absolutely no instruction 
in drawing, but this became quite general in the 
American grammar grades some years later, largely 
due to the influence of Prang. His system began 
with lines, angles, and mathematical curves and did 
not depart very far from geometrical ideals toward 
freehand drawing of life and action. This system 
became almost everywhere dominant, although finally 
its limitations were seen and there was in many cen- 
ters an abrupt break with it and a characteristic swing 
to the opposite extreme. In these latter schools draw- 
ing began with complex figures of people and perhaps 
animals in motion. No subject was taboo that the 
child wished to attempt, spontaneous drawing was 
encouraged, and the evolutionary history of it was 
appealed to from the pictographs of cavemen and the 
crude spontaneous drawings of children. It was 
realized that it was one thing to draw from a copy 
which was constantly referred to and a very different 
one to put down on paper the mental image of the 
object. I have had several voluminous collections of 
the achievements of boys and girls who had not yet 
attained the teens who attempted to represent almost 
everything with pencil, crayon, and colors. Most of 
these are as grotesque as the collections of spontane- 
ous things children make of wood, cloth, metal, etc., 
but some always stand out with peculiar preeminence 
and merit. It is certain that a boy interested in ships, 
locomotives, kites, etc., tends to repeat his perform- 
ances in this field until he may acquire a rare degree 
of skill; and the same is true of the girl who is in- 
488 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
terested in hats, dresses, dolls, flowers, etc. I for one 
am convinced that we have not yet found the safe 
middle way in this respect or learned how to utilize 
the interests of children in giving them the habit of 
freehand drawing. Mechanical and architectural 
drawing is, of course, a totally different matter, and 
here we have hit the right trail and gone far along it. 
Music has had a curious development in schools. 
It was almost unknown in my early days and I re- 
member but one teacher who could or would sing— 
she was a member of the village choir. There were 
in various sections of the country devotees of this 
art who saw, if dimly, its educational significance as 
the language of the heart just as much as speech is 
of the mind, and we had an interesting collection of 
songs for school and home, not chiefly religious. 
There were a few very popular songs which every one 
knew after and even before our Civil War. Lowell 
Mason gave the first real impulse to school music 
and later Holt, a disciple of his in Boston, devised 
a system which was austerely rigorous and aimed at 
nothing less than a sanctioned orthodoxy, and this 
was adopted in many parts of the country. The 
tyranny of this system, which had to be severe to 
break the crust of indifference, was checked by the 
tonic solfa imported from Cerwen in England. Some 
of the notes received a new name, the pupils often 
sang from hand gestures instead of from printed 
notes, and colors were introduced, so that we had 
adepts who sold their services to cities successively to 
introduce the cult of the movable do, which for a 
time widely prevailed. 
Meanwhile, almost no attention whatever had been 
given to the character of the music itself or even to 
the words and sentiments which were to be cultivated. 
Music teachers were aghast when told that it was as 
absurd to first teach a child to sing by notes as it 
489 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
would be to teach it to speak by a printed text, and 
that it was just as necessary to have a large repertory 
of songs learned by ear before notes were taught as 
it was to have a vocabulary before reading. The 
recognition of this limitation slowly prevailed and 
attention began to be given to the quality and feeling- 
tones to be cultivated, and the musical textbooks of 
the final decade of the last century showed a great 
change for the better in this respect, although there 
was still much to be desired. Too few music teachers 
have as yet realized the importance of the old ballads 
and folk-songs, the initial significance of rhythm, the 
relations between music and movements, especially 
dancing, and there is still too little use made of the 
phonograph, which does far more to develop the voice 
to sing with it than does the piano. The importance, 
too, of educating children to hear and discriminate 
music as well as to produce it, the former being to the 
average child vastly more important, is too little 
recognized. The perennial themes of music are: re- 
ligion, home, nature, country, story as in the ballad, 
motion as in dance music, and love, and the real merit 
of musical instruction for the average child is to be 
measured by the development of these rather than 
technic. 
From the time I entered our educational system 
at the age of six, near the middle of the last century, 
the effectiveness of the small rural school has im- 
proved but little, if indeed it has not declined. Of 
this I have convinced myself by lately revisiting 
several of the schools I first attended, sitting some- 
times in the very seats I did before I was twelve. In 
the old ungraded, unsupervised New England country 
school, managed by parents and often taught by un- 
trained teachers recruited in the district, I believe we 
learned to spell, write, cipher, read, and knew quite 
as much of geography, age by age, as does the child 
490 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
in the same schools to-day. They were far larger 
in my boyhood and were kept always three and often 
four terms per year. Thus the problem of the rural 
school, now so long a center of so much discussion 
and despite all the administrative changes it has un- 
dergone, is still unsolved and there has been little 
progress, if not actual regression, in essentials. True, 
we had no history, manual training, very little music, 
hygiene was unknown, there were no marks save for 
absence and tardiness, no gradation, and no “busy 
work.” But there was plenty of time for conning 
lessons if we could concentrate, and if we were caught 
not studying we were reproved. For the older chil- 
dren, books were commonly taken home for more or 
less evening study. Parents perhaps helped and not 
infrequently visited the schools, were always wel- 
come, and especially at the closing “examinations” of 
each term the room was well filled with parents and 
friends. 
Punishments included standing in the floor or 
facing the corner, pulling hair or ears; occasionally 
the face was slapped and the ears roundly boxed; in 
more extreme cases there was ferruling, which con- 
sisted in striking a number of blows with the ruler 
on the palm of the hand held open by the teacher, 
and perhaps trouncing with a stick conspicuously kept 
on the teacher’s desk. Some stalwart men teachers 
“shook up” the boys by their shoulders till their heads 
seemed almost ready to snap off; and scolding, indi- 
vidual and collective, was with some teachers almost 
a fine art. Sometimes we were required, either one 
by one with a roll call or by a show of hands at the 
close of school, to declare whether or not we had 
whispered during the day, and some teachers kept a 
record of this misdemeanor and reported with praise 
those who had not whispered for a week. This method 
developed liars, whom we knew if the teacher did 
491 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
not. Boys who showed too much interest in the side 
of the house where the girls sat were sometimes made 
to go and sit with them, and less often vice versa, 
and the giggling thus caused brought great morti- 
fication to the culprit. One teacher brought in the 
device of a dunce or fool’s cap, a tall cone shaped of 
brown paper, which I grieve to say I once had to 
wear. The severest penalty was to be hauled out on 
the floor and drubbed with a stick on that part of the 
body left peculiarly exposed by the short tight-fitting 
“Spencer” or roundabout coats we wore. The in- 
junction hardest to observe was to keep the hands 
away from protecting the body from the stick. We 
were generally flogged till we cried aloud and with 
abandon, and this I, like most of the boys, refrained 
from as long as possible. I shall never forget the 
humiliation on one occasion of having the welts in 
this sensitive part examined and anointed with witch- 
hazel by my father, who I thought felt like protesting, 
but did not; and I was glad for I would rather have 
him conclude that I deserved all I got (as he probably 
did) than to submit to the ridicule of my mates that 
I had peached or tattled at home and that “dear papa” 
came to the protection of “his darling boy.” 
The public high school was then almost unknown 
and came in only after a long struggle, the opposition 
arguing that as so few children would take the so- 
called secondary education it was unfair that it should 
be supported by public taxation. When at length the 
opposition was broken down, high schools multiplied 
everywhere at a very rapid rate and in many towns 
were the finest and most expensive of all public build- 
ings. Their teachers formed associations by them- 
selves and became more or less elite and had little 
connection with elementary instructors, yet never 
attempted to dominate or prescribe for the grades 
that preceded. 
492 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
Thus the high school of a quarter of a century 
ago became more or less isolated. Unaffected by the 
education which the laws of compulsory attendance 
enforced and, as their number increased, intent more 
and more upon the work of fitting for college, their 
freedom from the domination of the latter has been 
their longest and hardest struggle in my day. The 
ambition of its instructors was long satisfied if they 
and their institutions could be called good “fitters,” 
and many of the smaller high schools, as well as the 
weaker, older, yet more independent academies which 
were scattered over the eastern part of the country, 
were chiefly intent upon fitting for college rather than 
for life. The influence of the college upon them, es- 
pecially since the epoch-making report of the Com- 
mittee of Ten, was unquestionably very beneficial for 
a time. Standards of admission, although those re- 
quired by different colleges have never even yet been 
entirely harmonized, were raised, on the whole, and 
scores of college dons wrote high school textbooks, 
the quality of which was thus greatly improved. But 
the later stages of the long dominance of secondary 
by collegiate education in this country have no parallel 
in any other land in the history of education or in 
the influence of any other higher upon the next lower 
stage of training, and this threatened at its height 
to become an almost unmitigated curse. 
The ideal of making the high school the people’s 
college that it should be, doing the very best possible 
for pupils of its age and stage and fitting those who 
leave as well as go on for what is ahead of them, 
has come to a very slow but general recognition, 
especially in the east, and high schools have been re- 
luctant to take the stand, which both logic and utility 
suggested, of saying to the college: Here are our 
graduates for whom we have done what we deemed 
wisest and best; take them or leave them. They 
493 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
would thus bring the college to terms which would in 
the end be for its own advantage. Colleges have, how- 
ever, been more and more liberal both in the number 
of topics they would accept and those they would 
exempt in giving credits for admission, and the dead 
mechanism of points and standards so rigidly en- 
forced for a time by the central examination boards 
is now being happily mitigated; while the junior high 
school movement has made everything far more 
flexible, open, and stimulating. The old tyranny of 
classic languages has been broken, high school teach- 
ing has become much more professional and effective, 
and most of our academic departments of education 
include the pedagogy of not only high school organi- 
zation and administration but have something to say 
of that of the different branches. 
The pedagogy of the so-called dead languages in 
the high school has been very inefficient, and we rarely 
see the very illuminating charts of many kinds and 
other apparatus that in the best foreign schools are 
used to vitalize instruction here. The high school 
child finishes not only his Greek but his Latin courses 
with little knowledge of classic life or history, and 
with almost no conspectus of the authors or even the 
works as a whole (of which they read a part) such 
as might be given by a judicious use of a good trans- 
lation. The drill he receives is almost entirely gram- 
matical and philological, and form has not only taken 
the precedence of but almost strangles zest for con- 
tent. The ultra forms of the so-called direct method, 
while they have increased interest on the part of the 
teachers who became its devotees have utterly failed 
to produce the results expected in arousing interest 
and increasing the efficiency of the pupils; while the 
introduction of the so-called continental pronuncia- 
tion has made Latin seem still more unnatural. 
Modern languages are less frequently taught by 
494 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
natives than a quarter of a century ago and here, too, 
we have had a great variety of methods since Otto. 
Our teachers have not learned that incessant drill, 
with oral work always predominating, and hard me- 
chanical work are the only road toward the goal of 
proficiency. The great reduction and often prohi- 
bition of German, as a result of the war, which was 
coming to be a close rival to French in our secondary 
education and is really becoming more important not 
only for practical and business life but because it 
contains more scientific and other culture material of 
value, has resulted in a great increase, especially in 
the southern and western parts of the country, in the 
teaching of Spanish because of its utilities now that we 
are coming into closer contact with Latin America. 
As this country might be called New Europe be- 
cause most of its inhabitants came from that conti- 
nent, so, too, most of the more important educational 
movements in the new world have been importations 
from the old. The early settlers at Plymouth, New 
Amsterdam, and on the Chesapeake brought the 
systems of their native lands with them. Once estab- 
lished, there was very little change save in numerical 
expansion for several generations and things grew 
very rigid. Thus when Horace Mann, after a study 
of European systems, sought to introduce more 
gradation, supervision, teacher-training, and organi- 
zation, he met with the most violent opposition from 
the teachers of his own state, which he was obliged 
to leave for the presidency of a small Ohio college. 
Another wholesale importer of European, espe- 
cially German, ideas, Henry Barnard, who advocated 
many educational reforms, was for the most part 
simply ignored. His Journal, which was a mine of 
information nowhere else accessible, was allowed to 
lapse. He was too far ahead of his time, and a be- 
lated and not very active recrudescence of his in- 
495 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
fluence thirty years ago served little more than to 
bring a realization of the value of his many-volumed 
journal just as it was going out of print, so that now 
sets of it, important as they are for the history of 
education in this country and even in Europe, are 
very rare and costly. 
If one looks over the early history of normal 
schools here he will be surprised to find how large 
a part of all the so-called theory and philosophy of 
education which so long prevailed came indirectly 
from Sir William Hamilton. His conceptions and 
definitions of faculties in man filtered down to the 
level of the minds of normal pupils and gave them 
the smuggest primness and complacency, and really 
did little more than to substitute formulated ignorance 
for knowledge. It is this that, strangely and unfortu- 
nately, for a long time kept all forms of association- 
ism, which has so many fruitful pedagogic implica- 
tions, from exerting much influence upon the theory 
and practice of education. 
On the above basis of British thought have been 
superposed many special importations, most of which 
have passed through the same three phases: (i) 
that of rapid expansion and propaganda, with new 
leaders greatly to the fore; (2) excessive claims of 
completeness and finality; and (3) decline, although 
not without some more or less permanent and benefi- 
cent results in nearly every case. I content myself 
here with a bare enumeration of a few of those I 
have seen at first hand in my career. With most 
of these in educational lectures, addresses, and writ- 
ings I have tried to come to terms and to exert my 
own modicum of influence on them. 
The first was the Hegelian movement introduced 
by William T. Harris, elsewhere referred to. Few 
if any teachers in this country understood it and I 
always felt that even Harris himself fell far short 
496 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
of doing so. Although he was not successful as a 
propagandist, for years nearly all the leaders in public 
education heard him gladly. They felt that here was 
something very profound and elemental which eman- 
cipated them from the tyranny of the old definition- 
philosophy and gave them appergus in advance even of 
academic teachers of the subject. It always seemed 
to me pathetic to see this group gaspingly striving to 
comprehend these world-bestriding pronouncements, 
and it certainly kept them in an attitude of docility 
for an experience with Hegelism was, like turnips, 
a good Vorfrucht to make new soil friable and fruit- 
ful for other crops, a function that it has so often 
performed for our professional philosophers. 
With this came the kindergarten, which Harris 
was the first to incorporate in our public school sys- 
tem and to which his disciple and coadjutor, Miss 
Susan Blow, did much to give an esoteric philosophy 
of its own, at the same time rigidifying its methods 
into a unique and intolerant orthodoxy from which 
it took long to break away. Elizabeth Peabody, who 
furnished the enthusiasm, and Mrs. Quincy Shaw, 
who for many years financed a comprehensive system 
in Boston, with both of whom I came into personal 
relations very helpful and stimulating to me, were 
centers of a large and growing group of enthusiastic 
women who saw in it a new power in the educational 
world, felt that its methods should pervade and trans- 
form the grades, and for a long time, partly owing 
to the independence of the system and its lack of 
harmonization with the public schools, made kinder- 
gartners almost a sect by themselves. Now that the 
scheme is adopted into so many of our public school 
systems and this isolation is being progressively over- 
come, and especially as methods have been trans- 
formed for the better and the old dogmatism and 
reverence for the ipsissima verba of Froebel are 
497 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
vanished, we can recognize in true perspective the 
permanent value of the contributions of principle, 
method, and matter that have come from this 
movement. 
Much later came the Montessori ideals and prac- 
tices. The founder of this cult gave it a very broad 
and fruitful anthropological background, was herself 
a pupil of Seguin, and realized that the methods that 
had been successful with subnormal minds were no 
less effective if applied to younger normal children. 
The appeal here was to spontaneity, and although the 
play element was insufficiently recognized the minds 
of all educators who really studied the system were 
materially broadened and enriched. It permanently 
affected in a salutary way not only the kindergarten 
but the grades. If its advocates at one time were 
also in danger of becoming another sect, and if it 
suffered in repute and effectiveness by the intense 
commercialism which entered with it and by a too 
ostensive propagandism, it nevertheless brought per- 
manent enrichment. 
Earlier than this came the Herbartian movement, 
led by a group of able men, most of whom had studied 
with Rein in Jena, who was himself a disciple of 
Ziller. Herbart’s educational system was presented 
in various texts, a National Herbart Society was 
founded and a year book published containing many 
monographs, and the influence and power of this sec- 
tion of the National Education Association grew 
rapidly for years. All teachers were thus made more 
or less familiar with classifications of interest, with 
the function of apperception, and especially with the 
culture stages. Herbartians in Germany had at- 
tempted to recurriculize the primary grades, begin- 
ning with focalization, one after another, on Grimm’s 
Marchen, always distinguishing the stages of prepara- 
tion of the mind, impartation of knowledge, and its 
498 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
integration into the mental complexes of children. 
The introduction of the philosophy of Herbart was 
most stimulating and beneficent and was far more 
intelligible and less metaphysical than Hegelism, from 
which it was, to a certain extent, a reaction and which 
it easily supplanted. It purported to be based upon 
an actual study of the nascent mind of childhood and 
was to a degree paidocentric. Its generalizations 
were all in the right direction but it fell far short of 
putting teachers into the sympathetic rapport with the 
juvenile psyche that child study did, which went far 
beyond it in appraising the native instincts and capac- 
ities of the growing mind and what it could do, and 
what best fitted its nature and needs. Of its claims 
and achievements I have written elsewhere. The 
attitude of intelligent leaders of American educa- 
tional opinion found a typical expression in the admi- 
rable survey of fifty years of American education by 
E. E. Brown2 who, after speaking of the more special 
work of F. W. Parker and John Dewey, says, “And 
with it all a veritable fire-mist which may be for the 
making of new worlds psychological and educational 
has spread abroad from that central glow at Clark 
University.” This all shows that while American 
educators are quite ready to “fall for” any practical 
application of this work in a single direction, of paid- 
ology as a comprehensive and transforming culture 
system which would make everything in the child’s 
environment plastic to his nature they have even yet 
an inadequate comprehension. 
The educational writings of John Dewey have in 
recent years had much vogue in this country and his 
influence has been highly stimulating and salutary. 
The average conservative teacher who reads Turn 
thinks himself progressive, but never to a degree that 
2 Fiftieth Anniversary Volume of the National Education Associa- 
tion, 1905, p. 327 et seq. 
499 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
makes him feel unsafe or even much unsettled. To 
those, however, versed in paidology Dewey not only 
has nothing new to offer but seems obvious if not 
platitudinous, and as if he anticipated the attitude 
of experts in this field toward him he severely criti- 
cizes them. It is to them, however, that he is chiefly 
indebted for the ideas which most teachers associate 
with his name. He is best described as a mediator 
between child study and the old philosophical ortho- 
doxies of Herbart, Hegel, Hamilton, or other more 
or less metaphysical thinkers, so that great and bene- 
ficent as his influence has been, it is transient because 
he lacks originality. I could never understand why 
he should attack the principle of recapitulation when 
his own school at Chicago was based on it; why to 
show the role of measurement in teaching number 
he deemed it necessary to disparage if not deny any 
place for counting and other processes; why his char- 
acterization of the Gary Idea as making the life of 
the community flow through the school should be 
thought novel; or, indeed, why his explanation of the 
system should so often be preferred to that of its 
author. 
Far and away the greatest of all the changes that 
have taken place in educational thought during the 
last half century has been the slow recognition of 
paidology in its larger sense and the ever clearer 
realization that in the nature of childhood itself and 
its different stages of development must be found the 
norm for all the method and matter of teaching, and 
the slow substitution everywhere of the genetic for 
the old logical method for the young. This has been 
indeed a slow Copernican revolution and almost 
every real advance in educational theory and practice 
has been due to this fundamental and revolutionary 
change. In all tests, in the development of all stand- 
ards, in the study of all processes of learning and 
500 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
teaching, in determining all topics and their order, 
in the very voluminous and fruitful investigations 
into the psyche of criminal, subnormal, or gifted 
children, the older general child study has developed 
in many special directions, and these have a great 
future, for the world is coming more and more to 
recognize that for the solution of all its problems a 
better study of the primal nature of man, his funda- 
mental instincts, desires, feelings, and appetencies is 
first of all to be considered. This has been more and 
more recognized by thinkers so diverse as Thorndike, 
McDougall, Kirkpatrick, Terman, Yerkes, and scores 
of others who are coming more and more clearly to 
understand the more vitalistic philosophy which 
Schopenhauer, Bergson, Samuel Johnson, and many 
others, especially the psychoanalysts, have taught the 
world, that the growth urge or impulse itself is even 
more all-determining than circumstantial evolution 
can ever be. 
A more specific and scientific study of educational 
problems with practical ends in view really began with 
Ebbinghaus’ studies of memory, and this tendency 
was greatly enlarged and unified by Meumann so that 
we now have scores of valuable investigations in re- 
gard to the various phases of the learning process, 
which has been analyzed in great detail for diverse 
mental types—visual, auditory, motor, and their com- 
binations, as well as for different subjects and for 
different material. Thus it seemed for a time that 
the didactic aspect of education was in danger of 
neglect but of late, especially by the project studies, 
this danger of one-sidedness has been more or less 
obviated so that educational psychology is now making 
commendable progress on the side of teaching as well 
as of learning. Both these trends, however, stress 
the impartation and acquisition of a definite body of 
knowledge by specific and always more or less con- 
501 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
scious methods so that the wide penumbra of un- 
conscious influences, of indirect suggestion, and the 
value of impressions given and received outside the 
always more or less limited range of examinable 
matter, seems momentarily lost sight of. 
On the other hand, the innumerable intelligence 
tests, many if not most of which go far outside the 
range of school work, have tended to give a more 
just evaluation to noncurriculized material and to 
make teachers realize that life itself is always giving 
a larger education than can be inculcated in the 
schoolroom. These tests, some of which have found 
wide currency, are all of great value provided those 
who use them realize that all are partial and many 
of the most essential human qualities are still un- 
touched by any of them, and that the range of in- 
dividual variation is so immense that a child may 
deploy a high degree of intelligence in certain direc- 
tions and remain very backward in others. Thus, 
the ideal of fixing upon any definite body of knowl- 
edge or skill which can be considered as normative 
and as really calibrating the minds of all is fatuous. 
One very pregnant moral of all this work is that 
school marks are not a very reliable test of intelli- 
gence or basis of predicting success in life. 
Manual training as a system was another impor- 
tation, having originated with the Swedish peasants 
in their long winter nights. It became more system- 
atized and methodized here than anything else ever 
attempted in this field, and in St. Louis its principles 
were long and persistently carried out above the 
grades by Dr. Woodward. True, not many of the 
things the children made were of use to them, 
although some were for the home. No devotee of 
Sloyd ever suggested that the process of making was 
most stimulated by the prospect of using things made, 
so that toys and things used in plays and games, and 
502 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
for high schools the making of crude scientific appa- 
ratus, would have been more stimulating. This was 
followed by more elaborated and Americanized 
methods of manual training until this ideal slowly 
merged into that of the trade school. The latter in- 
stitutions, however, failed to connect with the techni- 
cal school and so for a long time suffered from 
isolation and were the resort of boys and girls who 
did not do well in the public high school. 
Very slowly supervened the idea of a specific 
vocational training based upon some study of the 
aptitudes of the individual, on the one hand, and of 
the needs of various occupations open to children 
upon leaving school and later, on the other. The lack 
of harmony between child labor laws and the needs 
of the very large proportion of the young who upon 
leaving school drift into idleness or shift from one 
occupation to another, is at present by no means over- 
come, but commercial schools, the corporation school 
movement, the new demand for testing employees to 
determine their native fitness for special processes— 
a movement that contains in it vast possibilities—are 
slowly bringing education and industry into ever 
closer rapport and supplementing the relative absence 
of the apprentice system in this country, although 
there is often serious conflict with labor unions, whose 
attitude toward most kinds of vocational training has 
not been favorable to its further development. As 
I write, a number of the fundamental skilled occupa- 
tions have far too few apprentices in training to keep 
their numbers good. 
In the many advanced technical schools of aca- 
demic grade there was long a very prevalent sentiment 
that their courses were somewhat inferior in culture 
value to those given by colleges. But this sense of 
inferiority has happily passed and left almost no 
trace. We have come slowly to recognize that one 
503 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
of the first requisites of every educational system 
should be to prepare those who leave it at any stage 
for self-support and the self-respect which this gives. 
The Gary system seeks to have almost the entire life 
of the community flow through the school and to give 
the pupils not only an introduction to the business life 
about them but to develop the civic virtues and be a 
foreschool for citizenship. This movement has also 
left its permanent contribution both to educational 
ideals and practices. Like other innovations, it had 
certain marked excrescences and impracticalities that 
had to be lopped off or reduced to their proper pro- 
portions. But it was, nevertheless, a stimulus to 
broader educational thought and it has been more or 
less fitted to other environments than that in which 
it was developed. 
Agriculture has long knocked at the door of our 
public school system and slowly but surely has gained 
admission. The first essential step was the intro- 
duction of school gardens, each child having a plot 
with a count kept of his share in the money value of 
what he raised, and perhaps with prizes. But the 
school vacation interfered with this, although such 
school plants as could be cultivated in the schoolroom 
itself have often been made of educational value. 
Then came the Garden City, which gave each child 
a much larger plot and connected with which came 
a civic and economic organization well calculated to 
prepare for citizenship. Children often contributed 
to the extermination of pests and also learned the 
economic value of various species of birds, etc. All 
such activities were connected with natural history. 
As our school population has grown more and more 
urban, however, such work is increasingly difficult 
and limited. The great agricultural colleges, with 
their experimental farms, gardens, and stations, have 
made immense progress toward making the cultiva- 
504 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
tion of Mother Earth a profession and, it has often 
been claimed, even done something to check the drift 
of population from country to city. 
All this trend toward the more practical education 
has contributed to spread the conviction that all 
instruction in science should, if possible, be at first 
practical, and that pure science, which has the supreme 
place, should come later as a culmination and be based 
upon the broadest possible knowledge of technic and 
application. Even the philosophy of pragmatism, 
which teaches that every kind of knowledge is really 
for use, has done much to help us on toward this 
realization. 
Half a century ago almost no attention was paid 
to the education of deviates, subnormals, or defectives 
save in institutions specifically devoted to the training 
of the deaf and the blind. Not to speak here of the 
marked progress of the last few decades in the educa- 
tion of these latter, we must note the great gains 
effected by provisions by which bright children could 
either pass more rapidly up the grades or take a wider 
and more extensive training in each. Although the 
tyrannies and retardations inherent in the grading 
system have not thus been entirely overcome they 
have been mitigated, and in many places the school 
system is now relieved of the clog of subnormal chil- 
dren by having them taught in special classes or even 
schools, so that very many have thus attained the 
modest goal of self-support who would otherwise 
have been burdens upon the community. Very in- 
genious have been the many methods devised for the 
instruction of idiots and morons within institutions, 
so that it sometimes seems as though methods for 
these were really more adequately adjusted to their 
abilities than those for normal children. The study 
of the gangs which are found in every city has led to 
a far better understanding of the boy and even girl 
505 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
who drift into crime and vice, and the juvenile court 
with its system of individual investigation of each 
child brought to it and of its home and street environ- 
ment, has done a work of salvage the importance of 
which it is hardly possible to overestimate. Probation 
and detention houses, too, and the system of condi- 
tional sentence have contributed their quota to both 
the prevention and cure of juvenile crime. 
Many school systems have interested themselves 
in the condition of the very poor, sometimes establish- 
ing schemes of visitation, providing free or at least 
hygienic lunches, and utilizing more effectively the 
agencies for relief of poverty; while the placing-out 
system of orphans and the abandoned in the million 
childless homes of this country, with proper super- 
vision to prevent their exploitation, has also had a 
most benign influence. For illegitimate children two 
opposite policies are now contending for prevalence: 
one that the mother should abandon her child in some 
foundling home where it will be well provided for and 
take her chance in the social world afresh, and the 
other that she should openly wear the scarlet letter, 
adopt and care for her child, and live down the stigma. 
The latter policy seems to have been far more devel- 
oped in Germany than here, while the Catholic church 
seems to favor the former method. 
Outside the school, both connected with and inde- 
pendent of it are many agencies that have come in for 
the great benefit of children, directly or indirectly, in 
a sense beginning with the raising in nearly all the 
states of the age of consent, which has reduced 
bastardy. Besides this, there are various purity 
organizations, with their literature, and many boy and 
girl associations—Junior Endeavor, Knights of King 
Arthur, summer camps galore and camp-fire organiza- 
tions, playgrounds with sand piles and often with 
instruction, recreation parks of various kinds, the Big 
506 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
Brother movement, and best of all the Boy Scouts. 
Thus public sentiment is coming into a closer contact 
with child life and adjusting more to its needs. 
Our schools responded slowly at first and then 
very rapidly to the influences of the late war, and 
when we were well in it great attention was given to 
war work of many kinds, interest in and knowledge 
of geography and history being materially advanced. 
Even some of our colleges were half transformed into 
training camps. Patriotism, too, was taught, so far 
as this could be done, as never before. But it was no 
less remarkable how suddenly and completely all these 
adjustments to the conditions of the hour vanished 
when peace came, leaving almost no trace. 
The training of elementary teachers, which began 
with the second third of the last century, like so many 
other educational advances was greatly accelerated 
after our Civil War, so that now there are scores of 
training schools of very diverse kinds for kinder- 
gartners and primary teachers, while many of them 
offer to teach but are not especially attractive to those 
intending to teach in high schools. These institutions 
vary widely in organization, length of course, scope, 
and method. Some are supported by the city, others 
by the state, and a few by counties. Some have long 
tried to enforce high school graduation as an entrance 
requirement but most accept those who have com- 
pleted the legal requirements of school attendance, so 
that the actual attainments of the pupils in these 
schools differ very widely. In one of them which had 
great influence in the middle West it was for years 
insisted that any one could be trained to teach any sub- 
ject without much knowledge of it provided only the 
methods were right, so that content was grossly sacri- 
ficed to form. In others, much if not most of the time 
was spent in going over the elementary subjects of 
the grades and instructing just how to teach each, step 
507 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
by step, as if assuming that the pupil-teacher already 
had sufficient knowledge. One or more of these insti- 
tutions grew so strong as to compete, though always 
at a disadvantage, with the state university. 
Normal schools have never been adequately co- 
ordinated with other parts of our educational system. 
Although some of them claim to compete with colleges 
they never try to fit for them and their diplomas are 
rarely accepted as a guaranty of fitness even to enter 
college. In many of them some one individual has 
been for years the all-dominating factor and has 
given a unique and individual character to the institu- 
tion. Twenty years ago many of them sought uni- 
versity graduates for their staff, but these were 
generally found to be misfits and the custom ceased to 
prevail. In the many normal schools I have visited I 
have found some of the very best and most original 
educational work, but often along with this some of 
the very worst, most antiquated, and sometimes exe- 
crable teaching. They have suffered, too, in many 
places from an intrusion of politics. One often finds 
in them, however, some specialty that is very highly 
developed so that it is of late quite common for nor- 
mal school instructors to be transferred to collegiate 
chairs, something that very rarely happens in the 
case of the high school teacher, however successful 
he may be. Normal schools have thus preserved an 
individuality and a freedom not only to adapt to the 
environment but to give scope to whatever originality 
and initiative the corps of instructors might possess, 
and for a long time they contributed more than any 
other single agency to make teaching professional. 
So individual are these institutions that they have 
always found it difficult to organize, and there is not 
only no national but I know of very few state or other 
associations which bring the faculties of these institu- 
tions into sufficiently stimulating and sympathetic 
508 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
rapport with each other, which is so greatly needed 
at present. 
In this connection the various associations of 
parents, sometimes with teachers, should be men- 
tioned. In some communities parents of children in a 
single school have organized and contributed materi- 
ally to the beautifying of the grounds and the orna- 
mentation of the rooms and halls, have systematically 
visited the school, and invited teachers to participate 
in their own social life. In others, parents’ meetings 
have been held by teachers of certain grades and thus 
a new bond has been established, parents have come 
to know their children better and to take more interest 
in their school life, and have been given useful hints 
about dress, diet, etc. Other of these associations 
have attempted to resist political influence within 
school boards, have nominated nonpartisan tickets for 
these bodies, advocated their election on a ticket at 
large instead of by wards, and have sometimes con- 
ducted campaigns for different purposes and taken 
various attitudes, sympathetic or critical, with the 
general conduct of education in their community, 
occasionally providing courses of lectures, aiding in 
the conduct of school exhibits, sometimes offering 
prizes for competition, urging new courses, etc. Some 
of them have been effective in the very wholesome 
movement of reducing the numbers of the school board 
and thus centralizing responsibility. 
In nearly all these movements the influence of 
women, both in the school and community, has been 
of growing importance and, on the whole, has been 
very beneficent. In some states nine tenths of the 
entire teaching force are women so that this sex now 
almost monopolizes elementary teaching. This has 
been partly for economic reasons, and woman’s 
struggle for parity of salary with that of man has 
been a long and hard one. At one time it seemed 
509 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
almost as though, largely under her influence, teach- 
ers would adopt trade union methods to compel better 
pay and would even suspend their function if it was 
not forthcoming. This danger, however, passed. 
But her efforts to abolish all discriminations against 
married teachers have been less effective. 
We now have not only colleges for women doing 
practically the same work as in similar institutions for 
men but .women have free access upon equal terms to 
nearly all colleges and universities, where they have 
abundantly demonstrated their ability to keep pace 
with the male students. Their partial segregation, as 
at Radcliffe and Barnard, does not indicate the trend 
of general practice, although in coeducational institu- 
tions the differences between the sexes are always 
marked by the choice of electives and by more or less 
divergence of life outside the classroom. Although 
nearly all graduate institutions in the country are now 
open to women, they are found in far less numbers in 
universities because less inclined, both for economic 
and psychological reasons, to specialization. 
Teachers’ organizations, which really began to be 
effective under the influence of Horace Mann, have in 
the decades within my experience grown to be a great 
and beneficent power. They give not only esprit de 
corps but are a source of great stimulus, widening 
acquaintance with localities, personalities, and move- 
ments; and have social features that appeal very 
strongly to the gregarious instinct. The National 
Education Association, which was vastly increased by 
the epoch-making organization at the meeting at 
Madison in 1882 under the guidance of T. W. Bick- 
nell, has grown by leaps and bounds to be by far the 
largest of its kind in any land or age. Its work is 
divided into ever more departments, and the large 
cities of the country vie with each other in attracting 
it for its annual meeting in July. Its proceedings are 
510 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
the best single record of educational thought and 
achievement in the country. Here idealism has its 
innings and teachers are heartened by learning that 
there are always vast possibilities beyond present 
achievements. They learn to compare the educational 
advance in different sections of the country; a greater 
degree of practical uniformity in ideals, standards, 
and methods is enforced; and laggard states and sec- 
tions and those that are in a position of leadership 
come to know where they stand on the various scales 
of efficiency, as well as of literacy and all kinds of 
excellence and defect. The N. E. A. for a long time 
appealed chiefly to elementary teachers but later those 
of the high schools came in and at last, largely under 
the influence of the successive presidencies of Nicho- 
las Murray Butler, colleges and universities took part 
in the programme, although most of the latter have 
generally held more or less aloof. The Association 
has had many vicissitudes and several feuds, but with 
its large constituency and its now substantial funds 
its prospects for continued and augmented usefulness 
were never brighter. The Educational Council, with 
its session in February, brings together the practical 
leaders in educational thought and administration and 
perhaps is most representative of our national status 
in this field. 
There are, of course, many more local associations 
of teachers, while some are statewide and in some 
large states the association is divided into two more 
or less independent sections bringing together several 
thousand teachers at their stated meetings and often 
commanding the services of educational leaders from 
a distance. There are also county and town associa- 
tions, while teachers of many special topics fore- 
gather at least annually and some of them print pro- 
ceedings. Many of these meetings the teachers are 
required to attend and for some of them school is 
511 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
suspended, their pay continuing, that they may do so. 
One very important recent feature of American 
education is the utilization of the long summer vaca- 
tion. Chautauqua and its various imitators was a 
unique pioneer in this field. Then came summer ses- 
sions or schools at most of the larger colleges and 
universities and not a few of the normal schools. 
Here certain, often young, instructors are given an 
opportunity to increase their income and credits are 
given to pupil-teachers, the accumulation of which 
may enable them to enter college or to pass examina- 
tions for life certificates, etc. Most of these summer 
schools have two features: (i) special class work in 
particular’subjects, and (2) general social meetings, 
inspirational addresses, excursions, entertainments, 
etc. 
No other country or age has ever seen any devel- 
opment like the American correspondence schools. It 
is possible to give much very systematic and valuable 
instruction by mail, and Scranton was at one time the 
center of an organization that enrolled nearly a mil- 
lion students who took such courses in their homes, 
passed examinations, those receiving diplomas who 
attained a certain grade of excellence. Besides this 
we have various special correspondence schools in 
literature, art, electricity, etc., and in addition the uni- 
versity extension scheme has brought more or less 
systematic courses of personal instruction into a great 
many communities where the higher academic life 
would be otherwise entirely unknown. All this is a 
remarkable illustration of two things: (1) of the fact 
that a large number of young people here neglect 
opportunities for education in its season and (2) that 
they later feel the urge and attempt to make up their 
deficiencies and to better their condition by attaining 
a greater degree of expertness in their own calling. 
Despite the fact that this work often distracts the 
512 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
energy of the teacher from increasing his own effi- 
ciency in his department, the call for aid and the cry 
against cloistered knowledge is far too strong to be 
resisted. 
As to academic schools and departments of edu- 
cation under various names, while, as a teacher, I 
naturally sympathize with every aspiration in this di- 
rection it must yet be gravely doubted whether any of 
them have really succeeded in developing a body of 
instruction that does compare with that of the other 
learned professions, which have a longer history, a 
richer literature, and more established traditions. 
Much of the material in these courses is too mauso- 
lized and hypermethodical, so that the sugared-off 
facet of it all that remains in the mind years later 
comes to seem rather meager and the question is often 
asked by older teachers whether what they learned of 
school hygiene, the history of education, the methodol- 
ogy of teaching the different branches, might not, in 
all essentials, have been given far more succinctly. 
This work, however, is steadily improving in both 
richness of its specialties and in its scope, and cer- 
tainly one who is really well informed on the compli- 
cated details of school law and administration, the 
various tests, the methods and results of school sur- 
veys, elements of school architecture, physical culture 
and hygiene, the outlines of child study, the history 
of elementary, secondary, and academic education, 
and of learned societies, the organization of foreign 
systems, with as much knowledge of general psychol- 
ogy as can be put into daily practice, cannot be said 
to have an education inferior in culture value to that 
given in any professional school. 
One very general defect of our educational system 
may be noted here—that the teacher does not teach 
enough but gives too much attention to setting, hear- 
ing, and marking lessons. In this we have the great- 
513 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
est contrast between elementary and secondary educa- 
tion in this country and that in continental Europe, 
where the teacher seems often almost jealous of text- 
books, as if he wished himself to be almost the sole 
source of information on the subjects he teaches. 
Connected with this is the fact that while we have 
vastly more textbooks for pupils, we have far less 
good pedagogical literature designed for teachers, so 
that their minds are too often unenriched from year 
to year and there is a far less professional spirit. It 
is not hard work to hear lessons but it is hard to 
actively interest pupils in new knowledge and incul- 
cate it so that it will remain in their minds, take root, 
and grow. This, too, I believe is the cause of the 
paucity of illustrative apparatus here and of the fact 
that so many teachers do not learn to develop any real 
love for their work as such. 
In answer to the often asked question, just where 
is the weakest spot in our American system of educa- 
tion from kindergarten to university, to which so 
many and diverse answers have been given, mine 
would be that it is found from about the fourth to the 
ninth grades, both inclusive. This opinion is based 
not only on my studies of childhood and its capacities, 
which are, I believe, least understood and met here, 
but upon observations made in many visitations to 
schoolrooms in different parts of this and other coun- 
tries. The powers of memory, the possibilities of 
mechanization, and docility generally are at their 
height, and drill, authority, and even Dressur, which 
it is so hard to make effective in a democracy, can 
really do most just here; so that the greatest loss, 
which we have sought in every part of the system, is, 
I believe, found here. It is at this stage that greater 
didactic effectiveness is most of all needed. 
Now that the ship of state is everywhere taking a 
lurch to the left it is more clearly seen that democracy 
514 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
must educate the masses who are becoming the 
masters of the world. Much as our hearts warm to 
the programme of eugenics and needful and beneficent 
as it is for permanent stabilization, it is so slow that 
we must now give prime attention, according to the 
principle of “safety first,” to training. Let us look a 
few facts and figures squarely in the face. 
There are now nearly 750,000 persons engaged in 
the work of teaching in the United States and we are 
expending a little more than one billion per annum on 
education, to which the Sterling-Towner bill, if it 
passes, will add nearly a hundred million more. This 
sum, we are told, is larger than that which all Europe 
now expends for education. There are, in round 
numbers, 27,000,000 children and youths here of legal 
school age of which only some 21,000,000 are enrolled 
and only fifteen and a half million in average daily 
attendance. The average number of days the public 
schools are in session is 161 out of the 313 weekdays 
of the year. The number of days of actual attendance 
by enrolled pupils is about 120. Thus only some five 
ninths of the children of school age really attend 
school and these do so less than half the weekdays of 
the year. Thus our system of public education has 
something like one third of its maximal efficiency. 
Again, all states now compel attendance, although 
three states require only three months and but six 
require nine months. Thus it is, on the whole, sur- 
prising that the illiteracy percentage is not higher 
than seven per cent, as usually given out. On a 
slightly different basis, the cost of schools per capita 
has been reckoned at $7.26, and per pupil, $49.12. 
We have now, happily, reopened about all of the 
circa 50,000 schools closed during the war. We 
have 670 universities, colleges and professional 
schools, with some 350,000 pupils in the former, 
50,000 in the professional schools, and over 2,000,000 
515 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
pupils in the high schools. The average length of 
service of teachers in the public schools is between 
four and five years, so that the turnover requires that 
one fourth to one fifth of new teachers be employed 
each year and this need the 190,000 pupils in all our 
normal schools, with courses nearly all lasting two, 
some three and four years, cannot supply, while the 
small pay and meager pensions of teachers do not 
attract the best talent. This gives a certain youthful- 
ness to teachers and perhaps enables them to get into 
closer rapport with pupils because their own childhood 
is not so far behind them, but it necessitates far more 
direction from above. Those who enter teaching, too, 
as a stepping-stone to something else lack esprit de 
corps. Meanwhile it is doubtful whether the social 
status or the relative grade of average intelligence of 
public school teachers as a class, or their influence in 
the community, has increased. 
Due probably in part to the world-wide lapse from 
culture to Kultur there is also everywhere a growing 
tendency on the part of the rising toward revolt from 
the guidance of the older generation. This is also, 
though probably in small part, due to the fact that the 
latter brought on the world war and are thus in a sense 
held responsible for all the handicaps and disasters still 
following in its train, but it is psychologically con- 
nected with the rising tide of democracy which arro- 
gates leadership to itself, for it is said that even 
parental authority is greatest and most respected in 
autocracies. Young Frenchmen have formulated in 
two volumes plans for a new higher education involv- 
ing very radical new departures. In this country a 
number of college and university presidents, in answer 
to a questionnaire, report a new spirit of unrest and 
dissatisfaction, a demand for more liberties, represen- 
tation, and participation in the faculty and even in 
boards of trustees, petitions for new courses, chairs, 
516 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
etc. Not only in universities abroad, as we have 
already seen in Chapter VII, but in lower schools there 
is a new discontent culminating, although very rarely, 
in school strikes, of which I have tried to keep tab and 
which are generally successful. This spirit has its 
extreme illustration in the projected Osborne school 
in which pupils are to elect their own teachers, sub- 
jects, make all their own rules, etc. 
Shepherd found that nowhere in France, Ger- 
many, or England was the late war taught. Very 
many texts were produced and some were introduced, 
but some one of the half dozen parties objected to one 
after another, as did the parents, so that as the stand- 
point, method, and field covered could not be made 
satisfactory, all effort to teach the war to the young 
has been abandoned. The rising generation, thus, is 
nowhere learning the lessons or even the facts of the 
great conflict but is left to depend entirely upon “what 
father told,” which was the method of the troglodytes 
before history began. This favors just the prejudices 
and national and racial antagonisms out of which 
wars grow. The same is by far too large an extent 
true in this country. This omission kills instead of 
developing and feeding, as it should, the intense and 
vital new interests the war engendered. To teach and 
study what all now agree on is dull and zestless work, 
save in the physical sciences, and leaves youth with no 
inner defenses against red propaganda, which is dan- 
gerous only where teachers have failed of doing their 
duty. 
Again, it is bad enough that we cannot teach re- 
ligion in the schools, although its exclusion was a 
necessary device and a master stroke of policy at a 
time when denominationalism was most rabid and in- 
tolerant, but now that the acrimony of sectarian 
bigotry is abating it is time to remind ourselves again 
that childhood and youth need religion more than any- 
517 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
thing else and more than at any other time of life 
for the very formation of character, and that educa- 
tion without it lacks heart and soul. For this stage 
of life almost any faith or creed is better than none. 
The more we come to know what religion really is, 
means, and can do, the more disastrous do we see this 
omission to be. Protestant though I am, I would far 
rather a child of mine should be trained to be a good 
Catholic, Jew, or even Buddhist, Confucianist, or 
Mohammedan than allowed to grow up with no 
religion at all and made an early skeptic toward all 
faiths. In this pragmatic age why are we not able to 
see that not absolute truth but efficiency for the con- 
duct of life is the supreme criterion of all values here 
and that the highest interpretation of the most vital 
human experiences must always take the religious 
form? 
Once more, never in my day has a more calamitous 
pedagogical blunder been made than in the famous 
report of the Committee of Ten by which physics was 
made the entering wedge for giving science a per- 
manent recognized place in the high schools, to which 
the complacent professors of this subject responded 
by furnishing textbooks so hypermethodical and 
mathematical and so rigorously excluding practical 
applications that classes were depleted. Biology 
should have this place by every pedagogic right, not 
only because of its immediate applicability to economic 
uses, to personal and community hygiene, etc., but be- 
cause of its pervading humanistic interests culminat- 
ing in eugenics. It was barred because of the popular 
and sectarian phobia against evolution. In fact, noth- 
ing knits the very neurons of the brain into such a 
wholesome unity as evolution comprehensively taught. 
It gives to the cosmos itself a new and higher mean- 
ing. Insight into it is often nothing less than regen- 
erative, and ignorance or negation of it means mental 
518 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
arrest and obstupation, for those who know it not 
have not attained their intellectual majority. 
H. G. Wells says that if civilization is to be sal- 
vaged we must spend ten times as much on education 
as we do now. In my judgment we need a radically 
new dispensation for education, a new and higher 
pedagogy and statesmanship that sees all things from 
the educational (which is so largely identical with the 
evolutionary) point of view, for this is the highest of 
all standpoints. It is educational values that are su- 
preme over all others. We have not even learned to 
utilize the movies, which have more cultural possibili- 
ties than anything since the invention of Gutenberg, 
while the wireless and broadcasting should be watched 
as containing perhaps germs of great pedagogical 
possibilities. The educational value of our news- 
papers has greatly deteriorated because of the fren- 
zied efforts of advertisers to reanimate business, 
whose interests control and limit the freedom of even 
the editorial pages in so many directions. 
The paidocentric versus the scholiocentric view- 
point has come to stay as surely as its analogue, the 
Copernican revolution from the geocentric to the 
heliocentric view of the world, did. Freud claims that 
this latter, Darwinism, and his own discovery of the 
unconscious mark the three chief modern epochs or 
culture stages. “The unconscious is the childlike and 
the childlike is the unconscious,” and this has brought 
new insights into the nature and needs of the first 
very few years of life which are so basal for the for- 
mation of character. Psychoanalysis has also given 
us new insights and attached new importance to 
affectivity, thus enabling woman to both understand 
and to think more highly of herself, and that most 
opportunely just as she is achieving her economic and 
coming into her political freedom. All this augurs 
well for the future. 
519 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
Now most educators are like Bunyan’s man with 
the Muckrake who did not see the golden crown just 
above his head. Many of them are absorbed with 
petty details, for educational red tape and bureaucracy 
have grown enormously under progressive centraliza- 
tion. But there are better things—new tests of indi- 
vidual intelligence, new standards for the three r’s, 
grading and marking, surveys by professional ac- 
countants and other experts, better modes of visualiz- 
ing annual reports, project systems, examinations of 
pupils and of teachers, more vocational training, bet- 
ter teaching of dullards, defectives, and now of 
superior children; better school buildings and equip- 
ments, the progressive training of teachers while 
exercising their vocation, the education and preven- 
tion of criminal tendencies in the young, and best of 
all, better physical training and more effective instruc- 
tion in personal and public hygiene. No one can dis- 
parage and all must praise each and all of these and 
other agencies of improvement which altogether mark 
general and steady if not signal progress. But above 
and beyond them all there are larger problems now 
confronting post-bellum pedagogy which call for far 
greater breadth of view, more originality in devising 
and boldness in carrying out yet more radical reforms. 
The time is cryingly in need of a great leader and of 
educational statesmen with visions and with faith in 
them who shall look over all the manifold factors of 
our present-day civilization from the standpoint of 
the nature and needs of the rising generation in their 
stage of apprenticeship to life as broadly as Plato did 
in his ideal republic, which we now know was con- 
ceived to save a state smitten with the seeds of decay, 
just as the great scheme of Comenius was to re- 
generate Europe after the Thirty Years* War; or 
Rousseau, who now seems to us, though he did not 
realize it, to have been striving to anticipate and save 
520 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
France from the impending revolution. Unless the 
present extremity can produce such a man, not only 
shall we fail to realize the unique possibilities of the 
present era of opportunity but our very institutions 
themselves will suffer slow but sure decline, for never 
so much as now is education the one and chief hope of 
the world. 
Professional education in the period under review 
has also made great advances in the number of 
schools, chairs, method, and spirit. In these respects 
medicine leads. Half a century ago these schools had 
practically no endowment and many of them were 
private ventures chartered to give degrees, with no 
control from without. First the professors of anat- 
omy and then of physiology became purely profes- 
sional and gave all their time to their work. But 
around the small nucleus of professionals was a far 
larger body of local physicians who gave a little of 
their time to instruction in return for the prestige of 
being known as professors, and all expenses were met 
by student fees. It was a great step in advance when 
the sentiment of the profession decreed a survey of 
all these institutions with an intent to eliminate those 
that were unworthy, and the long series of Illinois re- 
ports on this subject marked more or less of an epoch. 
It was long very difficult to enforce academic stand- 
ards for admission so that classes were made up indis- 
criminately of graduates and those who had only a 
secondary training or even less. It was a great step 
when one of the leading schools in the country refused 
to admit any students who were not graduates, but 
this so depleted its ranks that standards had to be 
lowered. Meanwhile many of our leading institutions 
organized premedical courses before graduation 
which enabled the intending doctor to shorten his 
term of preparation, and the best institutions slowly 
521 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
developed, department by department, graduate work 
devoted chiefly to research. The greatest epoch in 
the history of medical education in this country was 
the foundation of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and 
School of Medicine which was the first installation of 
the kind with a large endowment, so that for a long 
time the apex of medical education in this country was 
at Baltimore. And this, in a general way, may be said 
to have lasted until the foundation of the Rockefeller 
Institute for research only. 
It is essential for medical education that there 
should be a large and central hospital for clinical 
study and demonstration. It was the fact that of all 
the cities in Europe Vienna had the most centralized 
hospital opportunities that made it the favorite resort 
of American physicians who wished to become more 
proficient in their specialty. No adequate history of 
medicine in this country has yet been written, but 
when it appears it will have a profound significance. 
Indeed, the whole history of medicine from its begin- 
ning to the present time, as its various standard texts 
show, has a rare culture value, though it would still 
be a far cry to demand that it have a place in every 
medical curriculum. In looking over the announce- 
ments of these institutions it is sad for a psychologist 
to find that even the morbid aspects of his subject so 
rarely have a place in the course of study. Most 
American physicians graduate without any systematic 
knowledge of psychiatry and at best have only a brief 
lecture course, and that perhaps not required. Actual 
clinics held in asylums for the insane, such as are 
usually given in Germany, are very rare. Consider- 
ing the great and growing importance of this subject 
we must believe that its inadequate representation in 
these institutions is a great defect, especially in view 
of the recent rapid developments in this field. The 
medical profession is, however, far better organized 
522 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
than any other, has its own ethical code, many associa- 
tions and meetings, a vast body of literature, and doc- 
tors read journals in their profession far more intently 
and are better up to date in all new discoveries than 
are members of the other learned professions, except- 
ing, of course, technologists. This is partly due to the 
fact that medical science has had an unprecedentedly 
rapid development in all its departments in recent 
decades. 
Legal education has also made progress, although 
this has had many obstacles to encounter. Colleges 
have developed historical and economic courses as a 
basis for professional studies in this field which are 
calculated to give it the broader basis it so much needs. 
Law schools have found it as difficult as those for 
medicine to prescribe graduation for admission and 
harder to enforce a four-years’ course. They have 
had the same difficulties in recruiting an academic 
staff of professors devoted solely to teaching because 
successful practice is so much more lucrative. En- 
dowments, too, have been few and limited so that 
short-cut courses have flourished and even the Y. M. 
C. A. has developed a professional school which turns 
out a large number of graduates each year, not a few 
of whom have already attained a high position in the 
profession. Apprenticeship in the office of a lawyer 
has practically ceased and the young graduate enter- 
ing a large firm often soon finds that his opportunities 
for securing independent practice have vanished be- 
fore he knows it. From the very nature of the case no 
such epoch-making progress in either the theory or 
practice of law has been made as in medicine, by far 
the most important single reform being the introduc- 
tion of the case system at Harvard which has trans- 
formed and vitalized legal education throughout the 
country. 
The training of Protestant clergymen has ad- 
523 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
vanced, but in the face of peculiar obstacles. Trus- 
tees who control these institutions are usually promi- 
nent clergymen, between whom and the faculty lack 
of harmony has often produced prolonged discord. 
While denominational lines are slowly but surely 
fading their influence is still far too prevalent. In no 
single institution, unless we haltingly except the two 
Unitarian schools, has the higher criticism been 
allowed to exercise its most stimulating and benign 
influences. Meanwhile the quality of students enter- 
ing this profession and their relative number have 
declined so that the question of demand and supply is 
so acute, and the ways of securing ministerial license 
to preach so devious, that the profession has no such 
unity or esprit de corps as the others. In very few 
theological schools has the history of the great reli- 
gions, each treated sympathetically, been introduced, 
and we are very far from having any adequate train- 
ing for missionaries such as that supplied with un- 
precedented fullness by the faculty of the Musee 
Guimet in Paris. 
It would seem a truism, too, that those whose busi- 
ness it is to save souls should know something of the 
human soul, but psychology has found very meager 
representation here. When one realizes what could 
and should be done to give the broader view that 
transcends the pernicious and wasteful opposition 
between science and religion and which gives evolu- 
tion its free course and admits the latest results of the 
most competent scholarship, we can understand that 
the inadequacy of religion in ministering to the moral 
and social needs of the community in the world to-day 
has a very definite and sufficient reason. Parliaments 
for religion have given us faint glimpses of what 
might be done in the great synthetic work so cryingly 
demanded in this field. There are countless young 
ministers who have turned their faces toward the 
524 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
light and quite outgrown the limitations which it is 
not possible for them to throw off, but it is note- 
worthy that this advanced religious consciousness, 
which has in it the promise and potency of such 
beneficence and saving influence in the world to-day, 
will never emanate from these seminaries of learn- 
ing, most of which insist upon the old doctrine of 
verbal inspiration, make it a heresy to doubt miracles, 
and even stress the ipsissima verba of the Apostles’ 
Creed literally understood. 
In the field of higher education the last half cen- 
tury has seen remarkable progress. The number of 
colleges and universities has much more than doubled 
° | 
and their size, wealth, and scope been vastly increased, 
so that we have lately been told that this country has 
more institutions bearing the above names than all the 
rest of the world combined. The larger of the old 
endowed institutions of the east still have a high 
prestige but are becoming more and more local. In 
the half hundred state universities, which since the 
first Land Grant act have grown so rapidly and now 
have their own organization, the courses differ from 
those of the old endowed schools by being somewhat 
more modern and practical, so that not only their 
influence but their drawing power seems to be pre- 
dominating over that of the private or endowed col- 
leges and universities. 
The leaders in this field have also found it advan- 
tageous to meet and organize. Some twenty-five of 
the universities doing the most advanced work have 
for a quarter of a century held annual meetings of 
several days discussing, with the utmost informality, 
topics of general interest but expressly refusing to 
formulate anything that can be promulgated as its 
official pronouncements or become in any degree 
mandatory upon any of its members. This associa- 
tion has done much during its existence to foster a 
525 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
real university spirit in the country, and the pamphlets 
of its annual proceedings give probably the best single 
picture of the progress of academic sentiment and 
practice anywhere to be found. Besides this are a 
number of associations where the president and one 
or more professors from each institution of a section 
of the country (New England, middle, southern, mid- 
western states) meet as guests of each other in turn 
to discuss any topic that may seem to them of vital 
interest. Sometimes, though rarely, distinguished 
scholars from abroad are visitors and guests at these 
meetings, but neither the public nor the reporters are 
admitted. The state universities, too, have an organ- 
ization of a similar kind where policies, details of 
administration, and any and all problems connected 
with their interests are discussed and ideas pooled, 
and where each is liable to be questioned upon any 
item of its practice. 
In my long experience with these meetings I have 
noticed, as have others with some regret, the growing 
preponderance of the practical problems of the Dean’s 
office and a certain reticence and reserve in regard to 
the most intimate policies which each institution 
would like most of all to know about the other. Here 
the control of athletics has been the most perennial of 
all problems. Most marked, however, has been the 
growth of a kind of democracy. Whereas a quarter 
century ago the leaders of all the smaller institutions 
held back and were inclined to take the attitude of 
“watchful waiting” for what the delegates of the few 
larger institutions would propound, sometimes hear- 
ing their own practices criticized, of late years the 
smaller institutions have come forward with their 
own problems. In place of the strong trend toward 
uniformity and the disposition to follow a few leaders, 
the individuality of all members of this group has 
been more and more in evidence, although it is notable 
526 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
that in these gatherings we never hear any attempt to 
characterize or laud the Harvard, Yale, or Chicago 
spirit in a way so characteristic of all occasions in 
which representatives of single institutions fore- 
gather. Thus these little assemblies have stimulated 
the broad comparative point of view and made some 
headway against the narrow individualism and pro- 
vincialism that formerly prevailed and made each 
institution a law to itself, and have also enabled insti- 
tutions between which the most active rivalry pre- 
vailed to see more clearly eye to eye and glimpse their 
own problems in a larger perspective. 
Meanwhile the Smithsonian Institute, the medical 
and national library, and the great Bureaus in Wash- 
ington have grown and their appropriations increased 
rapidly so that it was inevitable that the question of 
organizing a great national university there, especially 
as a sort of culmination of those of the states, should 
recur, as it has done several times in my experience. 
Several bills for the establishment of such an institu- 
tion have been drawn up for Congressional action. If 
these Bureaus with their vast resources of personnel 
and expenditure were organized it would make, we 
have often been told, the fitting capstone of our entire 
system of public education and be especially attractive 
to investigators. This, however, is decidedly against 
the interests of all our larger institutions and it is 
doubtful if it will ever be possible, especially as the 
sentiment and the methods of work in these depart- 
ments are more and more against any such form of 
centralization, as the Hadley survey so clearly 
showed. 
The attitude of academic leaders here is not en- 
tirely unlike that of our leading schoolmen against 
giving the Bureau of Education an administrative 
instead of a merely informing character. Although 
at times teachers have favored a ministry of educa- 
527 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
tion on lines more or less like those of the govern- 
ments of continental Europe, giving its head a seat in 
the cabinet, it is doubtful if the spirit of local auton- 
omy will ever actually permit such a step. Thus I 
fear that the Sterling-Towner bill has small chance 
of passing. Probably the country was never riper for 
it than under the wise and efficient administration of 
P. P. Claxton, when the policy of the Bureau was 
directed mainly toward the suppression of illiteracy 
and the improvement of rural schools and other ele- 
mentary matters. Nevertheless the jealousy against 
giving it increased power even in these fields, lest its 
influence might extend upward, has so far proved in- 
vincible. The Bureau itself has not escaped the 
influence of politics and has given only too much 
ground to the enemies of centralization to fear that 
partisanship could not be effectively safeguarded 
against if we had a great national university con- 
trolled by Congress as the state institutions are by 
their legislatures, which in their dependence upon 
annual appropriations have not been entirely exempt 
from this baleful influence. 
The National Academy of Sciences aims to bring 
together the most eminent and productive intellectual 
workers, and its ideals have been inspired by the far 
older but similar associations of savants in Europe. 
It was for a long time too much controlled by scien- 
tists in the service of the government at Washington 
but it has of late years become more truly national, 
and at the same time the leaders in physical sciences 
who controlled it have given ampler recognition to 
humanistic departments, even several of us psychol- 
ogists having in late years been elected to membership 
although we have had up to date almost no repre- 
sentation on its programmes. Its spirit and meetings 
have been most stimulating. The National Research 
Council has lately attempted to compile a conspectus 
528 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
of all agencies in the country devoted to the extending 
of the bounds of human knowledge in all departments 
and to inaugurate new, and facilitate old, lines of re- 
search which require wide cooperation. Membership 
in it is one of the highest distinctions of American 
scientists and it includes those devoted to applied as 
well as pure science. It now has a permanent and 
fitting architectural installation in Washington. Its 
annual meetings are held in different sections of the 
country. 
The American Association for the Advancement 
of Science is a more popular body with a far larger 
membership and with programmes of a less esoteric 
and special character, but it has been an agency of 
great significance, as have very many new scientific 
journals of various types and departments that have 
sprung up within the period here covered. 
Much as has been done, vastly more remains yet 
to do. Nothing can salvage the world but education. 
The masses must be far more intelligent in a democ- 
racy than in any other form of government but there 
must also always be very advanced training for 
leaders whose power will be no less great than that 
of monarchs, although it will be the power of knowl- 
edge. More important yet for the future of the world 
is a constant supply of new knowledge giving new 
power over both Nature and Mansoul. To urging 
the importance of fruitful research for the salvaging 
of civilization, belief in which has become so cardinal 
and profound as to be almost a religion with me, a 
faith that has dominated so large a part of my life, 
I shall venture to devote the closing paragraphs of 
this chapter. 
Thackeray wished he could have been Shake- 
speare’s bootblack, and many English men of letters 
rank the Elizabethan above the Victorian age. 
Classicists have often wished they had lived in the 
529 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
day of Plato or Caesar, as if their age were superior 
to our own. F. W. Robertson said he would give all 
his life in exchange for an hour’s talk with Jesus 
just after the Sermon on the Mount. Ruskin, William 
Morris and their group, since we cannot turn the 
wheels of time backward, would reconstruct our own 
industrial and social system on the pattern of the 
ancient guilds. For good Catholics, the apical blos- 
som of the Tree of Life was found in the apostolic, 
patristic, or scholastic period, and all that has hap- 
pened in the world since is of really far less import. 
For Max Muller, the life of the primitive Aryan; 
for Schliemann, that of the Homeric age; for Tacitus, 
the ancient Germans, were nearest the ideal, while 
for Plato the golden age was in the lost Atlantis and 
belonged to another era. 
Christianity first in its doctrine of a millennium 
began the new fashion of looking to the future for 
Utopias when we seek to escape the pressure of pres- 
ent reality, and to this tendency evolution has now 
given a great impulse, as seen in the writings of Bel- 
lamy, H. G. Wells, Pataud and Pouget, C. W. Wood- 
bridge, Chapman, Cramm, Howe, Tangent and many 
other portrayers of the great and glorious things that 
may yet come on earth. For those who abandon 
themselves to such reveries the present seems pre- 
paratory for something greater if not, again, a trifle 
mean compared with Altruria, Equitania, Sub- 
Coelum or even Meccania. During and since the war 
there has been a great revival of interest in what 
might, could, would, or should be, often in some vague 
or obscure place, perhaps at a time no less indeter- 
minate, and sometimes our El Dorados have been 
projected to the center of the earth or to another 
planet—Mars, Saturn, etc. 
Now, my thesis is that all such fugues from actu- 
ality and what Desjardin made supreme, namely, le 
530 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
devoir present, are now, as never before in history, 
weak and cowardly flights from the duty of the hour, 
wasteful of precious energy and, perhaps worst of all, 
they are a symptom of low morale, personal or civic, 
or both. True greatness consists solely in seeing 
everything, past, future or afar, in terms of the Here 
and Now, or in the power of “presentification.” 
The equivalent of everything that ever was, is, or 
can be made to happen is not far off or in some other 
life, age, or place, but within or about us. Creative 
processes take changing forms but the energy that im- 
pels them is identical with that which started cosmic 
evolution. All that the Hebrew prophets did and said 
we now know was inspired by the needs of the hour 
in which they lived, and they never strove to fore- 
tell the far future. Our time is just as ripe for a 
true Messiah as when the Star of Bethlehem ap- 
peared, and a new dispensation is just as needed and 
just as possible as when the Baptist heralded the ad- 
vent of the greatest of all “presentifiers.” Now when 
all human institutions so slowly and laboriously 
evolved are impugned, every consensus challenged, 
every creed flouted, as much as and perhaps even 
more than by the ancient Sophists, the call comes to 
us as it did to Plato (all of whose work was inspired 
by the need he felt of going back to first principles) to 
explore, test, and if necessary reconstruct the very 
bases of conviction, for all open questions are new 
opportunities. Old beacon lights have shifted or gone 
out. Some of the issues we lately thought to be minor 
have taken on cosmic dimensions. We are all “up 
against” questions too big for us so that there is 
everywhere a sense of insufficiency which is too deep 
to be fully deployed in the narrow field of conscious- 
ness. Hence there is a new discontent with old lead- 
ers, standards, criteria, methods and values, and a 
demand everywhere for new ones, a realization that 
531 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
mankind must now reorient itself and take its bear- 
ings from the eternal stars and sail no longer into 
the unknown future by the dead reckonings of the 
past. We must find or make and ascend a new out- 
look tower high enough to command the whole earth 
and its history, and become familiar with the per- 
spective and other phenomena of altitude, although 
this is perhaps the hardest of all things for our dis- 
tracted, analytic, and specialist-ridden stage of 
culture. 
In a word, the world is sick and needs again a great 
physician for its soul just as it does for its body 
(one third of our youth being unfit to fight). Its 
distempers, however, we hope may prove to be those 
of youth and not of old age, but even if the latter, 
they are ominous for the maturity of the race. Many 
specialists have diagnosed and prescribed but they all 
deal with symptoms, and the real nature and true 
cause of the disease still baffle us. It may well seem 
preposterous to the whole guild of doctors for a lay- 
man in everything, whose only advantage is his aloof- 
ness from all their works and ways, to suggest a 
deeper cause demanding a more radical therapy. In 
what follows, however, I shall venture to attempt 
nothing less than this. Underlying almost everything 
else is the fact that man has now filled the whole 
earth and that it will soon become even too full of 
his species. The human population has in nearly every 
nook of the globe been increasing in the last few gen- 
erations at a prodigious rate, and its pressure upon 
the means of subsistence is already in many regions 
more acute than even Malthus foresaw. In this 
country almost within the memory of men now living, 
not only the Pacific coast but even the great Missis- 
sippi valley has been filled with a teeming and enter- 
prising population. In 1890 some of the great powers 
doubted the advantage of extensive colonies in remote 
532 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
regions, but since the great land scramble in the de- 
cade that followed, about every part of the inhabitable 
earth has been appropriated, explored, and is now 
being exploited. All Africa is apportioned, and not 
only Australia but Madagascar, Borneo, New Guinea, 
and all the smallest of islands opened up so that there 
are not only no new continents but practically no new 
acres to be discovered. The great era of diffusion 
and tenancy is practically ended. Man has not only 
taken possession of every room but of every closet of 
his terrestrial habitation. 
In this expansion he has been wasteful of material 
resources to a degree so prodigal that we can now 
approximately date the exhaustion of many of them. 
Prospecting has been so extensive and careful that 
there will probably be few more great new finds of 
gold, silver, diamonds, coal, natural gas, etc., like 
those of the past, and the lure and glamour of great 
new openings thus made is already abating; while 
the acreage that once yielded bumper crops without 
fertilization is losing its spontaneous fertility. 
The moral of all these trite facts is that hence- 
forth the progress of the world must depend upon 
quality, not quantity; trust more to nurture and less 
to nature; realize that it can reap only where and 
what it has sown; must row where it has hitherto 
drifted with the current. This country especially has 
grown to be the richest and greatest in the world by 
its natural resources, but it must henceforth not only 
conserve but laboriously cultivate. We have found 
that hereafter we must make and cannot expect to 
find our ways. And no less important is the devel- 
opment of our human quality. 
In the geologic history of the globe the great 
epochs have been marked by the alternation of two 
periods; first, that of the emergence of vast areas 
of land from the primeval sea and its tenancy by 
533 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
species which populated it from the ocean, adjusted 
themselves to terrestrial conditions, and found a table 
spread for them so rich that they multiplied, varied, 
and spread with great rapidity. Then the tides turned 
and there were long periods of submergence and re- 
duction of land areas during which many forms that 
had established themselves upon terra firma went 
back to their first love, the sea, like whales and dol- 
phins; dwindled to insignificant size; or became ex- 
tinct, like the great saurians, because they could not 
adapt to a new habitat. What makes our age great 
beyond all historic comparisons is that it has seen 
within the last few years the high tide of man’s great 
processional over the earth and also the beginning of 
the recessional ebb when the world must have a new 
type of both men and measures or else revert to a 
more primitive stage of civilization. Already we see 
about us many alarming signs of regression. The 
great war itself, which marked so signally the turn 
of this all-dominating tide in human affairs, was only 
the inauguration of the colossal conflict between the 
old forces that expanded and the new ones now in 
the ascendant that would redirect the progress of man 
by adjusting to the new turn of fate. 
If our planet had doubled in size while it has 
doubled in population; if a vast, rich, new continent 
had just been discovered, as in 1492, or emerged from 
the sea; if the population of Europe had remained 
what it was in the days of Napoleon; if man’s wants 
had not increased or the standards of living risen or 
surplus products and foreign markets had remained 
unknown, and there had been no surplus population 
anywhere, Germany would never have had her mad 
dream of subjecting Europe, for the world war 
marked the first impact and repercussion of the great 
current of expansion, which had behind it the whole 
momentum of cosmic evolution against material limi- 
534 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
tations. Thus man has in a sense outgrown his world, 
so that it is now too small for him. From now on 
development must be intensive rather than extensive, 
and inward as well as outward. 
When a ship is wrecked on a savage island, pas- 
sengers and crew are thrown back to primitive con- 
ditions and adapt to a new environment and adopt 
new leaders, often reversing all conventional discrimi- 
nations; and Bolshevism is only an ostensive para- 
digm of what the Zeitgeist is doing, only more slowly 
and comprehensively, for the world, which is being 
thrown back to first principles and finding these to 
be no longer political but chiefly economic and psy- 
chological so that even its past history has to be re- 
written with a new perspective. 
If the wealth of any land were equally divided, 
everybody would be poor, not rich, for there is not 
wealth enough in the world to satisfy one one-hun- 
dredth of the present demand for it. As civilization 
advances, it costs not only more money but more time 
and effort to keep people happy. Thus there is a 
rapidly growing excess of demand for pleasure over 
the supply, so that the volume of discontent is con- 
stantly mounting. This life, which is all man now 
really believes in or cares for, cannot begin to give 
what he asks of it. The average individual now never 
thinks of the far future of the world or even of his 
own posterity for more than a generation or two, but 
wants all that is coming to him now and here, and 
uses every means in his power (fair and sometimes 
foul) to get it. Thus he plunges on toward the 
bankruptcy of his hopes in their present form, and 
sagacious minds are now realizing that humanity can 
never be satisfied save by restricting its desires or 
by transforming and re-directing its aspirations to 
more attainable goals; or, in more technical language, 
by finding more internal surrogates for their gratifica- 
535 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
tion. Thus we are at the very cross-roads of destiny, and 
must either go on to disaster, or change our course. 
This means nothing less than that the world is now 
squarely up against the problem of getting a deeper 
knowledge of human nature and finding more effec- 
tive ways of guiding it. We must not forget that 
while our industrial system is less than two hundred 
years old and even our political institutions go back 
only a few thousand years, man is at least a hundred 
thousand years old, and that we must readjust to all 
better knowledge of him, just as we do to all the newly 
discovered laws of nature. Thus as man has reached 
and rebounded from his geographic and other limits, 
his ideals of material prosperity have also impinged 
upon adamantine limits, and the current of his psychic 
evolution must now finally make a new way in another 
direction. Just as there are now countless individuals 
who should never have been born and who could in no 
way so benefit the world as by taking themselves out 
of it (but who will never do it, so that society and 
industry must find ways of utilizing them as best they 
can, trusting the slow processes of evolution to better 
the human stock) so there are innumerable spurious 
hopes, ambitions and aspirations which should never 
have arisen, but which we must learn to utilize and 
sublimate, striving slowly to subject opportunity to 
social and human aims. 
Nature and Man—there is nothing else outside, 
above, or beyond these in the universe, and there never 
was or will be anywhere any item of creative or con- 
servative energy or influence, either in nature or man- 
soul, that is not just as effective and facultative here 
and now as it ever was or will be anywhere. 
The way down the long scale from cortex to cord 
or even from man to mollusc is as broad as the way 
up is strait and narrow, and many there be that 
walk therein. The lowest sixth of the population of 
536 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
England, we are told, produce one half of the rising 
generation, and infra-men breed a hundred times as 
fast as really eugenic supermen. The forces that 
make for human degeneration were never so many, 
so active, or so ominous, and nothing less than civi- 
lization itself is at stake. It has never entered into 
the heart of even pessimists to conceive what might 
happen if anarchy should prevail. But as Chris- 
tianity came in to save the world when Rome and the 
ancient order fell, by proclaiming immortality, so now 
the idea of plasmal, which comes by better breeding, 
and of influential immortality, that saves by contrib- 
uting new knowledge and power—these constitute our 
only hope of salvation. The promise is to those who 
seek, knock, ask, and it is still open to the investigator, 
who is its true heir. 
Man had a most insignificant origin—a finger- 
long worm with a withy spine; then a timid, tiny 
frugivorous creature for whom there was no safety 
save in trees. Then there was a long and doubtful 
struggle whether he or the great carnivora should be 
lords of creation for he was few and his enemies 
many. But during all this time he was acquiring 
unprecedented power of docility and adaptation, and 
the evolutionary urge focused on his species as its own 
chosen son. For ages, too, he quailed before crea- 
tures of his own imagination which he fancied real 
and potent, and only now is he beginning to realize 
that he is truly supreme in all the universe we know 
and that there is nothing above or beyond him. Thus, 
progress consists solely in the subjection of nature to 
man and of his own instincts to reason and his selfish 
interests to the common good, and man sees his des- 
tiny, which is to rule the world within and without by 
the power that comes from knowledge. He must go on 
learning to control where he has been controlled. This 
is his vocation as man. As the development of erect- 
537 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
ness and of the hand, which could grasp the club and 
impel the point of flint, first made him man, so now 
science is both his organ of apprehension and his tool 
by which he must make his sovereignty complete, 
come fully into his kingdom, and make his reign 
supreme. Thus, again, we see that research is his 
highest function. He is and always has been the in- 
vestigator par excellence, and now he sees his calling 
and election more clearly and in the new era which 
is upon us he has new and unprecedented motivation 
for mobilizing all his energies to make his title of 
conquisitor clear. 
If the spirit of research be the Paraclete, the 
native breath and vital air of all true leaders in the 
world now being born, we ought to know more about 
it. What, then, is it? It is not sufficient to say it 
is creation in its most modern active stage, impelled 
by the same primal impulse by which worlds evolved 
out of chaos, nebulae, or any other mother-lye. This 
is true but trite. If any kind of superman is ever 
evolved, and the man of the present day is destined 
to become a missing link like the Java man, nurture 
must come to the aid of nature with every hebamic 
art that eugenics and education can supply, even 
though our remote posterity be as ashamed of having 
sprung from us as some still are of our simian an- 
cestry. Curiosity, seen in all the higher forms of 
animal life, so strong in apes and so favored by their 
safe arboreal life and which harks back to the original 
fiat lux, is surely one factor in the psychogenesis of 
the research urge. Strong as this noetic urge is, 
ambition, emulation, and the desire to excel is surely 
another factor. Perhaps the hunting and collecting 
instinct made their contributions to it. Philanthropy 
or the desire to better the estate of man and to give 
him command of new resources is yet another element, 
and this has countless lower though always beneficent 
538 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
expressions in the impulse to alleviate suffering and 
in the amelioration of the tragedy in the grim struggle 
for survival. But the ultimate motivation of the in- 
vestigator, often deeper than his consciousness, is the 
will for power to dominate nature and to make man 
ever more completely ruler and master of the world 
within and without. As man is the highest and best 
and as mind is the best thing in him, so research is 
the supreme function of mind, the true heir of the 
kingdom and of all the promises. Research special- 
izes because it must divide in order to conquer. It 
makes such conditions for its experiments as can be 
controlled and excludes all others. We refine our 
methods and apparatus only in order to make such 
answers as we can extract from the memnonian lips 
of the sphinx more definite and explicit. Despite its 
baffling technic, science is, as Vahinger long ago so 
convincingly showed us, the quickest and easiest way 
of grasping the universe. 
In view of all this we must regard nothing as quite 
so opportune or so true an expression of the Zeitgeist 
as the efforts to perfect the organization of the 
National Research Council in this country, the British 
Privy Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, 
and the international reorganization at Brussels to 
the same end. There are countless new problems in 
astronomy, geography, geology, archaeology, anthro- 
pology, economics, and in many other fields that can 
be solved only by wide cooperative methods, which 
often also require large funds, wise administration, 
systematic publication of results, and the spur, which 
pure science in a measure always lacks, of immediate 
utility, for every new discovery possible must be made 
known and serviceable. 
It is inspiring to be authoritatively told that 
whereas fifteen years ago there were only four thou- 
sand individuals in this country who could be called 
539 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
investigators, there are now more than ten thousand 
who would be called such, and also that there are 
yet possible “finds/’ sometimes of great value, that 
can still be made even by amateurs and nonexperts 
whom chance or locality favor, and that more can 
be recruited for this army of advance by questionnaire 
or correspondence methods. The prospector, placer- 
miner, still has his place in any comprehensive survey 
of research planning, and this work needs a consis- 
torium of its own. 
But we must not forget that the true spirit of 
research at its best can never be organized or admin- 
istered and that to do so suggests simony, the sin of 
seeking to purchase the gift of the Spirit with money. 
Its very essence is freedom, and we can no more 
organize it than we can organize love, art, literature, 
or piety. The investigator is a law unto himself, and 
he must often shatter old tables of value and pro- 
pound new ones. “The spirit bloweth wherever it 
listeth and we can not tell whence it cometh or 
whither it goeth, such are they who are bom of the 
spirit.” 
Now, universities are to-day, or should be, true 
shrines of this spirit and nurseries of these supermen. 
Are they? Over two hundred of them have lately 
made “drives” that have brought generous and 
greatly needed increases of salary to their professors. 
Labor, too, has doubled its wage, but the complaint is 
universal that along with increased pay has very com- 
monly gone a decrease in the quality and quantity of 
efficient work or service rendered. The worker 
“sojers” more on his job, and not only the hours but 
the amount of work per hour have decreased; as has 
also the quality of many kinds of goods along with 
the rise in their price. The bricklayer is now penal- 
ized by his union if he lays more than one fourth 
the number of bricks perday that he did when his wage 
540 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
was half its present amount. The same progressive in- 
efficiency with increased wage is widely prevalent. 
Are our faculties to illustrate the same tendency ? 
In a number of presidential reports I have lately 
looked over I find no word of warning against this 
danger, no hint that to whom more is given will more 
be required, no exhortation to investigation, but 
usually the old cry for more, ever more gifts. Not 
content to stand hat in hand on the street corner, 
academic agents and presidents appeal to every 
graduate, poor as well as rich, to give, until they are 
made to feel that they are ingrates or disloyal if they 
are unable to do so. These reports often complain 
of a great influx of students, and all our larger in- 
stitutions are already too full for efficiency so that 
some have even forsworn new departments or set a 
limit to the rush of students. Two reports express 
the fear that the average quality of the latter is declin- 
ing, and one deplores the increase of mechanism, 
bookkeeping, and deans’ functions generally, which 
are necessary for the regimentation of the mob of 
new applicants. One very competent expert has 
studied the programmes of the meetings of various 
scientific societies during Christmas week, 1921, with 
the result that several show in recent years a very 
marked increase in the percentage of papers read by 
nonacademic men (80% now in one of the largest 
and oldest of them), which is not surprising when 
we consider the great number of professors now 
being lured away from colleges and universities by 
larger salaries offered them to become experts in in- 
dustry, which has apparently just now awakened to 
the need of specialists. 
Now, if there is any one general lesson of these 
tumultuous times, any conclusion that underlies and 
conditions all others—as I insist there is—it may be 
stated very simply as follows. Henceforth, as never 
541 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
before, progress is committed to the hands of the in- 
tellectuals and they must think harder, realizing to 
the full the responsibilities of their new leadership. 
Science in its largest sense is from this time forth 
to rule the world. The age of laissez faire is ended 
and research, discovery, investigation, and invention, 
which have done much already, must now take the 
helm and be our pioneers in this new era. In every- 
thing it is the expert who must say the final word. 
Thus our prime duty is to inventory and especially 
to develop and devise every possible new way of 
fostering the spirit of original research in this new 
day that is now dawning upon the world, and in which 
it is the inestimable privilege of this generation to 
live. We cannot too clearly realize or too often repeat 
that research is in the very center of the current of 
creative evolution and has the momentum of all the 
developmental urge behind it. Its spirit is to the new 
era what the Holy Ghost was to the early church. 
Once it made prophets and apostles, inspired visions, 
sent men to waste places to meditate as hermits, 
anchorites, ascetics crucifying the flesh, or impelled 
them to challenge rulers or to become martyrs. Now 
it inspires men to seclude themselves in laboratories, 
museums, studies, libraries; sends them to remote 
and perhaps hostile and dangerous corners of the 
earth to observe, collect, excavate, decipher, recon- 
struct extinct animals from fossils or fragments of 
bones and teeth, or to restore prehistoric life from 
vestiges and utensils in caves, cromlechs, relics of pile- 
dwellers ; or to reconstruct temples, palaces, dwellings, 
and even huts from their buried foundations; per- 
haps to explore the sources of mineral, agricultural, 
and industrial wealth; or to study and control the 
ways of and antidotes for new microbes, insect pests 
and toxins. Human culture began with the attempt 
of man to understand his own soul, its nature and 
542 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
destiny; and to this was soon added interest in his 
body and its diseases. Now we are studying his re- 
lations to his home and his mother nature and his 
social, industrial, and family life. 
When I lately asked my dentist why he hurt me 
so cruelly now when the same operation on the other 
side eight years ago was painless, he replied that now 
he had to use American instead of German novocain 
and we have not learned to make the pure article. 
In looking over Kahlbaum’s catalogue of hundreds of 
chemical compounds necessary for every research 
laboratory, I was told that only a very few of them 
can even yet be produced outside of Germany and that 
our chemical industries have focused upon nitrates, 
dyes, and other large-scale products that bring great 
profits, and have neglected most of the others. 
Turning to other departments, ever since the Ref- 
ormation German scholarship has led in all Biblical 
studies, giving us the higher criticism, and its pre- 
eminence has been no less in the study of classical 
texts and history. Our professors of philosophy have 
largely concerned themselves with problems of Ger- 
man origin from Kant to Schopenhauer and 
Nietzsche. Biological work has for two decades fo- 
cused on the theories of Weismann and Mendel, both 
Teutonic. In every psychological laboratory the 
name of Wundt outranks all others, while Freud has 
more lately given us another group of great ideas 
which are working as leaven not only in the studies 
of mind, normal and abnormal, but in our conceptions 
of art, literature, daily life, history, and religion. 
Students of the exact sciences are agog over the 
theories of relativity as represented by Einstein and 
the even more revolutionary concept of quanta, also 
of German origin. For decades our best graduates 
who desired to specialize studied there and a large 
part of our professors have been trained there, so 
543 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
that the apex of our educational system was long 
found beyond the Rhine. 
All this preeminence was in accordance with the 
policy laid down by Fichte only a little more than 
a century ago in his famous address to the German 
nation when Napoleon had annihilated the Teutonic 
armies, crushed the German spirit, and his spies were 
scattered through the very hall. Fichte’s thesis was 
that Germany must become the educational leader of 
the world and must thus rehabilitate herself from 
bottom to top and understand that her only possible 
way of escaping obscurity, if not annihilation, was 
research, her only asset was in the truth to be dis- 
covered and new powers to be utilized. In a word, 
her soil was poor, her armies gone, her finances 
ruined, her spirit near despair, she was without 
natural or even racial frontiers, and the gospel of 
Fichte, the “presentifier” of his day, was that all the 
power she could ever expect in the future must come 
from knowledge—that her specialty must be in its 
creation and diffusion. And the world knows the 
result of this policy, which in a century made his 
country the strongest in all history, which never saw 
so sudden and great a national regeneration in the 
same short span of years. 
To-day this leadership is gravely impaired and 
possibly forever shattered, and it is craven and im- 
becile not to see that the situation brings a new call 
to this country, now the richest and most prosperous 
in the world—spending more money for education 
than all Europe combined—to aspire to this succes- 
sion, to pay back our intellectual debt, and possibly 
to bring the keystone of the educational arch to this 
country. Of course we must not forget, as Kuno 
Francke and Walther Rathenau remind us, that Ger- 
many in her present distress may again hark back to 
the gospel of Fichte and seek to renew her strength 
544 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
by a yet more intensive development of culture, and 
hope to sometime achieve a new intellectual conquest 
of the world, such as she was so far on the way 
toward achieving when she turned from culture to 
Kultur and, at length, not content with this, made 
her supreme error of appealing to the sword. Of 
course science is universal and knows no national 
boundaries, but our nationality, whatever it is and is 
worth, has here a new opportunity undreamed of 
before. 
Not only does democracy, if it is to be made safe 
for the world, require education of its citizenry much 
above the mental age of thirteen and a half, which 
was the average of our soldiers tested (and we have 
even been called a nation of sixth-graders) but every 
land—and this most of all—is now crying out for new 
leaders in every department. Our statesmen need 
broader training in international relations for they 
show every symptom which alienists find in all minds 
grappling with problems too large for their powers. 
Our captains of industry need to look farther afield 
and farther ahead. The waste of incompetency and the 
curse of mediocrity are upon us. We have utterly lost 
all power of discriminating between the best men, 
things, ideas, books, and the second or even the tenth 
best. 
The psychology of the whole matter is that we 
love knowledge because we love power. As man has 
domesticated some scores of animals and some two 
hundred species of vegetable life, using for his own 
benefit the resources derived from all these fauna and 
flora, so he now strives to command the powers of na- 
ture and to really become the captain of his own soul. 
Competent engineers tell us that the average individual 
to-day commands some thirty-three man-power be- 
sides his own, whereas a century ago all inventions 
gave him command over only two and a half times 
545 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
his own strength. But ever more is and will be 
needed although waste also increases, and all we have 
known and controlled is only the beginning. Man is 
really only just starting on his career as an investi- 
gator so that research is not only the apex of creative 
evolution and the highest vocation of man but is the 
greatest joy that life affords to mortals. He who 
reveals and teaches us to command more of the world 
without and within is the chief benefactor of the race, 
the true prophet, priest, and king in our day. 
Now, the university should be the chief shrine 
and also the power house of this spirit, where 
the higher powers of man have their chief deploy- 
ment. There is a final lesson from the church that 
we ought to lay to heart. Beside and above all its 
elaborate medieval organization, even when it was at 
the height of its power and aspired to universal do- 
minion, its greatest leaders always felt that above and 
beyond it was the larger Church Invisible, eternal, 
not made with hands, the membership of which con- 
sisted of everybody, everywhere, who strove su- 
premely for righteousness and truth. To-day we 
should give a similar place in our scheme of things 
to the University Invisible, composed of all those 
everywhere who with the passion of 
adding something to the sum of the world’s knowl- 
edge, even ever so tiny a brick to the splendid temple 
of science which is the supreme creation of man, but 
who also realize that of this temple only the founda- 
tions are yet actually laid and that the most imposing 
part of the structure is not only not built but cannot 
even be completely planned. The members of this 
new church of science are those who feel the call to 
make some original contribution of their own toward 
either its plan or its further structure, for the true 
university is, after all, only found in the investigator’s 
state of mind. All through the history of the church, 
546 SOME EDUCATIONAL CHANGES 
as Renan has shown, ran a faith generally submerged 
but wrhich had many timid outcrops that in the full- 
ness of time there was to come a new, third dispen- 
sation superseding the old, namely, the dispensation 
of the Spirit. It is that into which we are now 
summoned to enter. Have we the virtue to hear and 
heed the call ? 3 
3 These last pages are reprinted from the Scientific Monthly, 
August, 1921. CHAPTER X 
LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD 
Difficulty of combining esoteric academic science with its popular- 
ization so needed in a democracy—Differences in the recep- 
tivity of students from the South, the East, New York, and 
the West—Teacher audiences in Canada and Great Britain— 
Effects of the war upon pedagogy—School legislation—The 
characteristics of students from institutions of different types, 
Catholics, Jews, Japanese, Norwegians, Germans, from the 
Y. M. C. A. College and Vineland Training School, etc.—Girl 
students at the University—The difficulties of religious read- 
justment—Mobilizing the minds of the orthodox and pietistic, 
the mystic and dogmatic—Older students out of a job—Li- 
brary meetings and the demonstration of books—The seminary 
again—Research versus teaching—The University Invisible— 
The rapture of discovery—Attaining mental majority and 
getting the mind into independent action—Second-breath—Cir- 
culation of theses—How to really read—Dangers of over- 
education—My Teutonophilism cured by the war—The great 
mistake of Germany—Our duty to try to fill the now vacant 
throne of research—My too critical attitude—Severe criticisms 
to which I have been subjected—Alternations between activity 
and passivity—Seeing the under-world and the seamy side 
of life—The stages of life considered as boxing the compass 
—Disappointments and obstacles—Interest of the different 
stages of life in the time factors, present, past, and future— 
Taste for the simple life and dread of the open—Limitations 
as a “mixer”—Influence of poverty and of wealth—Estimate 
of the latter—Influences that made for isolation. 
During all of my more than forty years of active 
academic life I have had to work with two very dif- 
ferent classes: first, graduate students specializing 
in psychology (for I have never done much work 
with undergraduates) and, secondly, popular audi- 
ences, most often teachers of all kinds. The needs 
of these two classes have very little in common, and 
548 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD 
any presentation that would satisfy the one would 
fail to appeal to if not actually repel the other. This 
it took me long to learn, although I have always in- 
sisted that there was something the matter with any 
specialist in any department whatever who could not, 
if called upon to do so, make his topic more or less 
interesting and intelligible to laymen and even to 
bright children and youth, and that he would himself 
gain something in perspective and the humanistic 
touch by occasionally taking his own greater interest 
thus into the open—indeed, that something of this 
was the duty of every expert, particularly in a 
democracy. 
(i) In my vacation peregrinations and colpor- 
teuring I have been struck by the great difference in 
spirit and temper between representative teachers 
(individually and groups of them) in different parts 
of the country. In the south they belong, on the 
whole, to a higher social class than in the northern 
and especially the northeastern part of the country, 
the women particularly often representing the best 
old southern families. They are charming people to 
meet, with often many of the social graces that char- 
acterized the best of the white race in the south in 
the old ante-bellum days. They are less prone to 
regard teaching as a trade or a life vocation, take 
less to specialization, are less likely to overestimate 
the relative though always subordinate importance of 
organization, method, uniformity, etc., and often con- 
tribute to their pupils rich gifts of personality which 
are both more infectious and more supercharged with 
morale than with erudition. They are, perhaps, on 
the whole, more efficient in primary than in high 
school grades, and in the latter college domination 
in the south, if less, is, on the whole, more beneficent. 
The east, especially New England, is the strong- 
hold of educational conservatism. True, there have 
549 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
been many fads which have run riot and even spread 
throughout the country from this center, and many 
beneficent influences long made this section a leader 
and a light. But all new ideas must here generally 
pass through a rather long probationary period, and 
there is such a sense of achievement and attainment 
that it often blocks the wheels of progress. Here 
specialization is most advanced. Teaching is a more 
permanent occupation and the average age of those 
engaged in it is greater—I have personally known 
several who have been thus occupied for more than 
forty years. Change is hard and, as I have often 
realized to my chagrin, new ideas that were welcomed 
in other parts of the country were somewhat dis- 
counted here. Discipline is more strict. The per- 
centage of female teachers in this region of super- 
fluous women is greater than in most parts of the 
country. There is stronger aversion to criticism, and 
even minor changes involve more discussion. New 
York state and city is the stronghold of mechanism. 
Organization here has done and, in my judgment, 
overdone its work. In lecturing, as I have done in 
most of the large cities of that state, one is prone 
to hear everywhere the click of the pedagogic ma- 
chinery. Excellent work is done, but there is far 
too little recognition of spontaneity, too much pre- 
scription, too great insistence upon units, uniformity, 
and time requirements (everything being measured 
by hours, years, and averages) incessant and exas- 
perating marking, etc. New departures are instituted 
from above. The high school has been, by a most 
elaborate scheme of entrance examinations, kept more 
completely under the thumb of the college, and special 
talent on the part of the pupil or initiative on the 
part of the teacher finds the way to adequate recog- 
nition hard. 
In the middle and far west the spirit is very dif- 
550 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD 
ferent. Here the teachers are young, or at least have 
more of the enthusiasm of youth, are eager and re- 
ceptive. The chasm between ideals and practice is 
greatly narrowed. Even negative criticism, if at all 
judicious, is always listened to and welcomed. One 
meets everywhere those who have new and original 
ideas who have often been allowed to carry them into 
effect. They travel farther to teachers’ meetings and 
take with them a greater enthusiasm. The machinery 
is less in evidence and less tyrannical. The female 
element is everywhere more recognizable and potent, 
even if male teachers are more numerous than in the 
east. The chief academic influence is from the newer 
state institutions and not, as in the east, from the 
older, more conservative, endowed foundations. One 
hears less of culture for its own sake in the west and 
much more of practical preparation for life. Western 
universities have very few students who are intent 
chiefly upon their own personal culture or who are 
sent rather than go to college, and hence there is less 
energy spent upon the agencies which enforce attend- 
ance and application to work. The higher institutions 
respect and accord far more liberty and autonomy to 
the secondary, and a strong individuality marked by 
original ideas has a better chance for deployment and 
recognition. The future weighs relatively more than 
the past, the precedents of which are less firmly in 
the saddle. The life of the community flows more 
richly through educational institutions of every grade. 
This was strikingly seen in the influence of war 
activities upon the school, as I tried to set forth in 
my Morale and as Gary well illustrates, though not 
perhaps, on the whole, quite so well as Hampton or, 
best of all, Atlanta. The lofty and very abstract 
philosophy of William G. Harris and the reorganiza- 
tion of the St. Louis schools that it led to, and the 
Dewey school and its philosophy, could never have 
551 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
acquired their vogue without the elan given them by 
the vital west. Perhaps nowhere in the world, not 
even in Germany, is legislation in such close and vital 
touch with education as there, where everything, from 
the state university to the kindergarten, depends upon 
annual appropriations; and in nearly every state 
scores of new regulations and provisions, or modifica- 
tions of old ones, are annually made, although the 
regimentation is very rarely detrimental. In the west 
the idea that success in life depends upon schooling is, 
on the whole I think, more developed than in eastern 
institutions; at any rate, it seems to be more effective 
and incessantly active. 
Canada, on the other hand, where I have made 
several educational tours, is, like Great Britain (in 
various parts of which I have also met and addressed 
teachers) the most conservative of all. Here much 
progress has been made in late years, but with great 
difficulty and sometimes supplemented and accelerated 
by the private endowment of special institutions rep- 
resenting new ideas, to which Canadian, like English, 
teachers do not, on the whole, seem to me to be very 
accessible. Everything at least must be interpreted 
according to their own norms, traditions, and prec- 
edents, and conservatism is even more in the saddle 
there than in present-day England. The universities, 
at the chief of which I have spoken, are doing ex- 
cellent work, but fashions are set according to English 
standards and not a few chairs are filled by savants 
imported from the mother country, the best of whom 
long to and often do go back, so that one cannot escape 
the sense of educational provincialism. Education 
here is vastly indebted to a few beneficent and very 
wise founders and the work of federating various 
higher institutions, which began more than a quarter 
of a century ago at Toronto, has been very helpful 
from the standpoint of both economy and education. 
552 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD 
(2) With all my psychological students, particu- 
larly those majoring for either of the higher degrees 
with me, I have come into the very closest personal 
and sometimes almost daily relations, and during all 
these years I have noted certain very marked differ- 
ences, not only in individuals but in groups. Those 
who have gone into university work directly after 
college graduation have most mental plasticity, be- 
sides the advantage of having their undergraduate 
studies fresher in mind. The other class of post- 
graduates, probably larger, is composed of those who 
have been out of college for one or sometimes a num- 
ber of years actually engaged in some vocation— 
teaching, preaching, occasionally practicing medicine, 
and more rarely in social, business, and other fields. 
These, who have generally resigned or obtained leave 
of absence from salaried positions in addition to 
incurring expenses of added years of study and 
often married, know more exactly what they want, 
besides having the advantage of added maturity and 
experience of life. Their very presence at such sacri- 
fice testifies to their earnestness and ambition. Occa- 
sionally, though not very often, these students have 
acquired a certain rigidity that interferes with docil- 
ity, and they sometimes find it hard to get their minds 
into independent activity. In one or two cases the 
incommensurability between the desire to obtain new 
standpoints and to be up-to-date in their lines, on the 
one hand, and their receptive and assimilative 
capacity, on the other, has been almost pathetic. On 
the whole, however, I am inclined to think that in 
the field I represent the advantage lies with the ma- 
turer class, although in the exact physical sciences 
the reverse may be true. 
There is often a very marked difference due to 
the college in which the previous training was re- 
ceived. Two or three institutions of very high rank 
553 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
have for years sent us choice graduates who in all 
departments had been so accustomed to learning and 
appropriating what was given them that they were 
almost phased by the lecture system which prevailed 
here, and often craved definite assignments of read- 
ing and sometimes even invited us to test them on 
it. The idea of a thesis which aspired to really con- 
tribute something seemed so far above and beyond 
them that it was difficult for them to believe that our 
assumption that all could make at least some slight 
contribution to the sum of human knowledge was 
anything more than a delusion which we fostered as 
a pedagogic device. Such students rarely brought 
facility in reporting on digests of reading but more 
easily acquired it. This ability to command library 
resources in running down subjects wherever they 
lead is, of course, a marked step in advance of the 
old method of getting up single textbooks. But the 
thought of making any original contribution, or a 
realization of how the frontier of knowledge really 
looked, was quite beyond them. Thus we have always 
had those who were more or less paralyzed by their 
very acquisitions, meager though these might be. At 
the other extreme are students, more often from 
smaller and perhaps western institutions with a 
meager curriculum, who, unembarrassed by the con- 
stant envisagement of things they did not know, 
threw themselves into research with abandon, actually 
favored by the limitations of their knowledge, and 
these sometimes succeeded, in the end, in doing far 
better than they knew. 
Students from Catholic institutions particularly 
have many and often long readjustments to make 
when they enter universities. Their type of menta- 
tion was very commonly patterned on formal logic, 
and their adjustment to the intellectual freedom they 
found here was sometimes particularly hard. Their 
554 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD 
studies in the history of philosophy had generally 
stopped with or ceased to stress, save very negatively, 
all systems since St. Thomas. I never required them 
to attend my courses on evolution and some availed 
themselves of this dispensation, and those relatively 
few in number who went beyond the Master’s degree 
have in some cases developed a very high proficiency 
in laboratory and analytic psychology. They gener- 
ally come to us with more respect for the authority 
of the professor’s utterances than the Protestant stu- 
dents. For both, but especially for the Master’s dis- 
sertation, I have often advised Catholic subjects, and 
we have had from this source very illuminating ex- 
positions of the profound psychology that underlies 
not only the confessional, which has so many unde- 
veloped points of contact with psychoanalysis, but 
many forms of the church ritual and ceremonies, 
which are such a rich mine of symbolism, etc. 
Of the Jewish students, always keen and alert, it 
has seemed to me that those of the orthodox are, on 
the whole, more docile than the liberal type. Both, 
however, have the keenest instinct for all that is new 
as well as unusual powers of adaptation to it. Japa- 
nese students are generally remarkable for their 
patience, perseverance, their deftness in manipulation 
of laboratory apparatus, quickness to catch sug- 
gestions, etc. Some of them have a very marked 
originality, besides a marvelous power of adaptation 
to western ways and assimilation of western ideals, 
despite the serious handicap of language, which they 
show very diverse degrees of ability to overcome. 
It is doubtful whether, on the whole, their average 
quality has improved in recent decades, during which 
so many have come of their own initiative as com- 
pared with those of an earlier day when the best were 
carefully selected and sent by the government. The 
Japanese policy of sending students to all the ad- 
555 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
vanced western countries was unprecedentedly broad, 
and their exclusion from Germany during the war, 
which has sent more to us, has given this country a 
new opportunity to connect the east with the west 
by doing the best we can for them. The few Chinese 
students I have had have been very picked men of 
rare quality. 
Scandinavian students are marked perhaps by the 
greatest persistence of all. They are able and well- 
trained but prone to rather excessive independence, 
with a disposition to take their own themes and treat 
them in their own way, so that they need to be given 
a little more leeway in this respect than others. My 
own German students have been excelled by no other 
class. In preparatory training, in insight, power to 
think coherently and to carry out studies to their 
practical conclusion, they are not surpassed. Of stu- 
dents from India, Italy, South America, Russia, and 
France I have had several, but too few to afford a 
basis for any racial characterization. 
I should not fail to mention here the graduates 
we have received from the Y M. C. A. training college 
and from Vineland, the training of the one being 
exceedingly general and that of the other, specific, 
so that they have little in common; but the best 
products of both have always stood high in my own 
estimation. 
Girls, of whom we have always had a few in the 
department, have acquitted themselves quite as well 
as if not, on the whole, a trifle better than the young 
men, even in research. They are extremely consci- 
entious, open-minded to suggestions, assiduous work- 
ers, good critics, perhaps a trifle more influenced by 
personalities but always able to hold their own in 
seminary discussions and, as years go by, increasingly 
free to face delicate social and moral problems, and 
perhaps, on the whole, a little less likely to lose the 
556 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD 
firm anchorage of common sense in the troubled sea 
of technicalities and methods, although always ex- 
tremely loyal, sometimes excessively so, to the latter. 
In my own field of work in education, and es- 
pecially in psychology, the religious standpoint of the 
student has always been an important factor. 
Although there is neutral ground unaffected by these 
predispositions, both extreme orthodoxy and pietism 
have generally proved somewhat of a bar to those who 
would penetrate to the additum of psychology. The 
pietist finds it hard to intellectualize sentiment or 
emotion into what these really mean, and certain pet 
phrases, often scriptural, come to be supercharged 
with meaning in such a way that in their affective life 
there are ruts which it is hard for them to escape; 
while with the ultra-orthodox there is generally a 
lack of the intuitive insight which is more and more 
essential for the up-to-date psychologist. Thus, 
mysticism and dogmatism both have their limitations, 
and the problem of mobilizing such minds often taxes 
the sagacity of the teacher to its uttermost. But 
where this is successfully accomplished, as it often 
can be, there is a great and glorious sense of emanci- 
pation and gratitude. Thus, those who attempt to 
guide studies of the human soul face problems of 
which other departments know nothing, and there 
must at first be an unparalleled knowledge of and 
adaptation to the most diverse individualities. But 
if this work is uniquely difficult, its rewards are no 
less unique because they are seen in forms of enlarged 
personality and new attitudes toward life, together 
with new motives and new means and fields in which 
it can be effective. 
Every year I have had one or more post- 
graduates, often the most advanced of my students, 
who have come to the University because they had 
lost their positions elsewhere or perhaps were dis- 
557 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
couraged about getting the proper start or advance- 
ment. A few of these have stayed on year after year, 
growing more and more anxious every May and June, 
when most academic openings occur, because the right 
thing did not come to them. Only a very few, gen- 
erally those of the most mature class, have become 
discouraged and left to enter business or other 
careers. One actually committed suicide, and I saw 
another slowly lapse, by gradual stages, into chronic 
melancholia. The task of heartening such men to 
make the very best use of the enforced prolongation 
of their apprenticeship to learning has been one that 
has sometimes not only taxed my ingenuity to the 
uttermost but even beclouded my own mind with an 
oppressive sense of peculiar responsibility. Most of 
them have been able in the end to make a virtue of 
necessity and to struggle on and win their way to 
ultimate success, and some of my most delightful 
memories are of those who have faced down their 
worries, kept hard at work, and in the end been able 
to write me that they were filling positions with far 
more satisfaction to themselves and others than would 
have been possible but for this long delay. My own 
experience with hope deferred has, I think, made me 
more sympathetic with and helpful to such men. 
I have occasionally held library meetings in my 
study, where after some preparation I simply demon- 
strated books, a little as if they were specimens in 
natural history. Standing before a case I would go 
through it shelf by shelf, taking out the important 
books that had influenced me, perhaps reading choice 
sentences or epitomizing, passing the volume around, 
always with some special thought of the personal or 
thesis needs of each student. I have occasionally 
done this, too, in the library alcoves of the University. 
This encheiridion or actual handling of books, ar- 
ticles, or chapters has a certain stimulus, and I have 
558 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD 
always allowed students to take books and papers 
from my own library, sometimes to my inconvenience; 
and often, to my sadness, I have discovered a certain 
laxness of the biblic conscience that returns books. 
But the effort always has been to put the student on 
my shoulders and in a sense to enable him to begin 
where I left off. 
Into a well-conducted seminary have gone the 
hereditary influences of all the council campfires and 
story-telling of our forbears and a little of the esoteric 
spirit of the secret organizations of savage life from 
the immemorial past, from which the medieval acad- 
emies sprang when they had to be secret; and in this 
new-old and complex pedagogic instrument we have 
one of the highest expressions of culture in modern 
life. There is the interplay of personalities, tempera- 
ment, age, sex, and general philosophic and religious 
standpoints, and that just at the stage when inner dis- 
position is most fluid and plastic. There should be no 
reserve and the talk should be not only of mind to 
mind but, on occasion, of heart to heart and conscience 
to conscience. There is a vagueness and mysticism 
about youth which is inevitable at the time when senti- 
ment is ripening into thought and reason, which has 
nothing in common with the settled creed of mystics; 
just as there is honest doubt and questioning which 
have nothing to do with skepticism. To mistake these 
two is a serious error. The rabulist, the sophist, the de- 
bater, the man of saturated orthodoxy, the literalist, 
and the dullard will all be held in check if the semi- 
nary is rightly pervaded with the “phenomena of 
altitude.” 
But it should never be forgotten that the spirit of 
research is the native breath and vital air of the uni- 
versity invisible, that those who can really create are 
a class just as distinct from teachers, students, and 
all dealers in second-hand knowledge as manufactur- 
559 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
ing is distinct from the distribution of goods. The 
investigator feels the pristine sense of freshness and 
newness in the world which we often postulate for the 
primitive Aryan, the ideal Arcadian, and Andalusian, 
which are suggested by springtide and by youth. The 
sensation of discovery brings this all back and gilds 
the world again with an old and forgotten glory, for 
it is the most intense pleasure of which noble souls 
are capable. This is the mandate of the university 
as distinct from the college or every other institution. 
Indeed, the true university is or ought to be the chief 
and fittest organ for the evolution of the true super- 
man, and without this at the top an educational sys- 
tem is a truncated and arrested thing. In these semi- 
naries of the soul humanity blossoms and yields its 
choicest fruitage. Here youth learns to scorn the 
luxury and selfishness of mere knowing and attains 
the higher maturity of doing, which is the real organ 
of knowing in our pragmatic age. He learns the 
vanity of merely remembered attainments that have 
to be carried and do not ripen into the power that 
carries. To accomplish this result is the highest of 
all pedagogic problems. It may be helped but can 
never be insured by research councils or any other 
external devices. 
I even hold that a young man who has made and 
published a real contribution should give some special 
attention to finding his own audience by selecting far 
and near in his own land and abroad a list to whom he 
should send his reprints and be given certain sugges- 
tions about creating a constituency by exchanges and 
correspondence, getting into touch also with academic 
officials liable to be of service in forwarding his career 
and of journals likely to pass judgment upon his en- 
deavor. Thus the printed thesis sometimes serves a 
young man like a modern toga virilis. In it he first 
steps forth into the arena, throws down his gauntlet, 
560 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD 
has attained his majority in the mental republic of 
learning, and even though the rest of his life be spent 
on the lower plane of teaching he has felt what real 
achievement means. To have once felt that he had 
been where no one else ever was before, had done what 
had not been done before or done better what had, the 
experience of piloting oneself in unknown seas, a 
glimpse at the frontier, gives a taste of the rapture of 
intellectual procreation so that the whole culture 
world is invested with a charm which it would other- 
wise not have had, which will always beckon and will 
make the dull world of prosaic commonplaces seem 
stale and unsatisfactory in a high Platonic sense. It 
is not enough tojaccumulate, in the old Baconian 
trope, data like the ant or spin theories from within 
like the spider, but the activity of the bee that works 
over its collections with the aid of inner secretions is 
the better symbol. To merely multiply slides or tests 
mechanically is no better than the work of a day- 
laborer or at best a bookkeeper, and alas for the young 
investigator who does not show signs of thinking or 
intuiting beyond the data which his method or ap- 
paratus supply, for laziness often hides under the 
guise of scientific reserve. Speculation means merely 
looking about and instructors should never forget 
that there are two needs: one, that of science, which 
needs discipline and cold reason, while the other is 
found in the fact that the very nature of youth needs 
to be somewhat viewy and interested in ulterior 
problems. 
Thus there is a sense in which the very guesses of 
elite youth are more precious for them than the triply 
distilled products of the laboratory, and not to utilize 
this power of divination is for youth to renounce its 
heritage. It must submit to the severe logic of sci- 
ence, but this is a servant and should not mutiny and 
subdue its master. To falter because a broader basis 
561 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
of fact is desirable or with the fool’s hope of more 
leisure, of more incentive later, or to defer coming to 
terms with problems hoping that greater maturity will 
bring insight, is sometimes a mortal sin against the 
scientific imagination, sterilizing the buds of original- 
ity. Studies of mere enumeration or tabulation are 
often of little more value than the reports of isolated 
medical cases that abound in the literature of that 
profession, for the writer seems to live in the hope of 
a coming redeemer who will build all his material into 
a larger system and see its wider meanings and clothe 
all its defects. 
It has long been known that in many kinds of skill, 
as telegraphy, shorthand, etc., the learner may reach 
a kind of saturation point on a level below that re- 
quired of operatives and above which he thinks no 
amount of humdrum practice can raise him. But in 
such hidebound cases a long intense cram with extra 
hours and exceptional conative energy breaks the 
charm and brings him suddenly a great increment of 
maximal speed so that his entire efficiency is per- 
manently increased. This is the analogue of what 
ought to occur in some late stage of every attempted 
investigation on the part of the student. He must 
throw himself upon his theme with all the momentum 
of which he is capable and with no reserves till he 
feels the fever of the second breath which will in- 
augurate a higher and perhaps epoch-making intel- 
lectual experience, for it is in such forge and heat 
that very many of the great discoveries have been 
wrought out; and those whose psychophysic organism 
is such that they cannot sometimes scud for a time in 
a mild brainstorm, with all sails set and every cord 
tense yet without danger, must resign themselves to 
the career of those who may be good but can never 
hope to be very good. 
The same is true, in a sense, of reading. It is a 
562 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD 
great power to be able to really read and take in 
others’ thoughts from the large human environment 
unchanged, even though in the best of us what comes 
from this source may not be as completely assimilated 
as that which comes from our own lives and from 
inner spontaneity. He who can truly read does not 
have to learn everything for himself. He can feed 
and fire his soul because he has the urge of philosophy 
or wisdom of life behind him. To do this one needs 
a kind of exquisite mental olfaction that finds its way 
to the best things. Many read merely to accumulate 
or to etch or veneer the soul with learned citations or 
pedantries such as, in the days of superficial scholar- 
ship, were the earmarks of learning. Complete read- 
ing involves perfect digestion and assimilation. The 
powers of higher apperception are chiefly taxed, and 
the objects apprehended are speedily made over into 
the power that apprehends. Here men differ im- 
mensely—masters of knowledge from the servants, 
those who truly know from those whose minds are 
mere memory pouches. The masses only gather at 
the foot of the mountain; some ascend a little way; 
but only the few elite can scale the summit above the 
clouds and bring down the tables of the law. On the 
other hand, we have every type of mental dyspepsia 
and some of the most omnivorous maws digest very 
imperfectly and on a low plane, while mental eupeptics 
distill the perfect culture that refines and, it would 
almost seem, becomes so much a part of the soul and 
even the body that it must afifect posterity by the 
primal method of heredity. If so, there is a true 
aristocracy of mind above all the peddling knowledge 
of the schools that examinations can never give or 
test. 
Diplomas, notes, high marks, and degrees desig- 
nate only a knowledge that is superficial and perhaps 
vulgar and which may be attained by the upstart 
563 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
nouveaux riches who are not used to it and who are 
only made conscious, conceited, and unpractical by it, 
who have perhaps sacrificed the best thing in them, 
namely, naive and intuitive wisdom and some com- 
mon sense, which is the muse of American manhood 
and womanhood, to get it. This psychic wastage 
illustrates the dangers of great ideas and facts in little 
minds, and there are many students at all stages, in 
my humble opinion, in every community who would 
be better morally, healthier in body, and more wise 
in all the higher meanings of sapience if their souls 
had not been made roily at the bottom or frothy at the 
top by overeducation. Blasphemous though it may 
seem to the pedagogic guild, I have long been con- 
vinced that there were many children in every com- 
munity who would be healthier, happier, and more 
useful citizens had they never been to school at all; 
that many others are injured more than they are 
benefited by the high school; and that there are many 
boys who never ought to go to college and many 
Bachelors who should never enter the professions or 
the university, both for their own good and that of 
the institution as well as for that of the professions. 
Indeed, I am tempted to go farther and query whether 
the ideal of the scholar as a man who merely knows 
a large body of any kind of knowledge is a normal 
type of man; whether he is worthy of being held up 
as a model to the young; and whether he should not 
rather be considered as a miser or a mere antiquary 
unless he uses the material with which his mind is 
stored as apparatus for additions to the sum of human 
knowledge, or at least unless he puts his intellectual 
possessions to work. Perhaps we might go even far- 
ther yet and ask whether, as we now understand the 
psychology of knowing, useless knowledge is not an 
encumbrance from which the mind should be freed 
as far as possible and especially when action impends, 
564 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD 
and whether mere bookishness is not always patho- 
logical. The characterization of a scholar as “widely 
read,” if that is his chief characteristic, is a compli- 
ment of doubtful value.1 
(3) Owing to my six years in Germany and my 
perhaps excessive deference to German authorities I 
used often to be called a Teutonophile (and I certainly 
owe an incalculable debt to that country) so that the 
outbreak of the war, and perhaps especially the Mani- 
festo of the nearly one hundred German professors, 
came to me as a great shock. It seemed incredible 
that these men, some of whom I had known personally 
and for most of whom I felt the greatest respect, 
should be swept so far from their moorings by 
patriotic fanaticism as to sanction the monstrous 
aggressions if not the atrocities of their military 
leaders. It appeared incredible, too, that a country 
which by its science and its marvelous technical skill 
was so slowly and surely attaining the intellectual and 
even the industrial leadership of the world, should not 
be content with this but should cast the sword into the 
balance and attempt the material subjugation of its 
rivals. The calm assumption, too, of superiority and 
superhumanity justifying the policy of ruthlessness 
seemed to me to indicate that Germany had given a 
most fallacious and one-sided interpretation to the 
doctrine of the survival of the fittest and had not only 
entirely ignored nature’s other lesson of cooperation, 
which made Kropotkin quite as true a disciple of 
Darwin as Nietzsche, but that the crime of plunging 
the world into the war would jeopardize and even 
destroy all the higher intellectual influences which 
were slowly leavening the world from that country. 
The triumph of egoism in the crass Max-Stirner 
sense seemed to me to show that Kultur had become 
1 See my “Confessions of a Psychologist,” Part I, Fed. Sem., 
8 : 92-143- 
565 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
the enemy and the nemesis of true culture, that there 
was something fundamentally wrong with the Teu- 
tonic soul, and that since the Franco-Prussian War of 
1870 the Teutons had turned their back upon the tra- 
ditions of their own golden age of philosophy as 
represented by Fichte, and of humanism as repre- 
sented by Goethe, and become possessed with a malign 
demon of destruction.2 
Thus, as with so many others, my proclivity to 
perhaps overemphasize the beneficence of the influ- 
ence of the German mind in the world was more or 
less reversed, and as the war closed I came to feel 
more and more that this country was the hope of the 
world and that the period of sitting at Germany’s feet 
should end; that we now had a new call to leadership 
in the world’s higher culture; and that if we realized 
the larger lessons of the postbellum period we should 
awake to the fact that the world now called us not 
only to the moral and spiritual leadership (which is 
best illustrated by Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” and 
which made him at first acclaimed throughout Europe 
as the leader of a new dispensation for the world) but 
that our institutions of learning and our leaders of 
thought must take up and carry on the work of cul- 
ture to which Germany had brought discredit if not 
bankruptcy. This new opportunity and incentive it has 
been increasingly hard for even our academic leaders 
to see or feel the full force of. They have realized 
the necessity of larger material equipment but have 
not understood that the throne of true culture is now 
in a sense vacant and that if our democracy cannot 
qualify to fill it we shall sooner or later see the mene, 
tekel, upharsin written on our walls. Culturally the 
king is dead, and the all-important question now is 
2 See a remarkable confirmation of this view by one of the most 
sagacious leaders of post-bellum opinion in Europe—The New Society 
by the late Walther Rathenau (1921), especially section 9 et seq. 
566 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD 
who shall succeed him. American science has per- 
haps too long sat at the feet of Germany and has 
become a little too used to its tutelage. Perhaps we 
have not sufficiently realized how the spirit of pure 
science which once animated the Teutons has been 
superseded by technical expertness in its applications. 
It would be sad, indeed, if instead of renewing devo- 
tion to it we, too, followed the trend, never so strong 
in the world as now, of mistaking Kultur for culture 
and exalting technology above humanism. 
Never was there such a need and opportunity for 
developing the higher powers of man as now and in 
this land; never such need to go back to first principles 
and ask again what human nature, so vastly older 
than all its institutions, really is, means, and needs— 
in a word, to realize the hegemony to which the 
Anglo-Saxon race, and particularly our own beloved 
land, is called to assume. Although there are many 
discouraging tendencies already apparent, there is still 
hope that when the starving children and adults in 
central Europe and China are fed; when peace, indus- 
try, and exchange are organized; when we have be- 
come more accustomed to think and act in terms of 
world-wide interests; and when patriotism sees its 
true relations to the cosmic order, we shall view things 
in a truer perspective and find our real mission in 
guiding the world to a more active quest for truth, 
more devotion to it, more appreciation of the role that 
pure science plays in modern civilization, and above 
all the new conceptions of what man really is and of 
the environment which he needs in order to resume 
the progress so tragically arrested by the world war. 
(4) As I read Morse’s Life of my classmate and 
long-time friend, Hamilton Wright Mabie, I am 
struck with the contrast between us in the fact that he 
was always making friends while I made perhaps 
567 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
almost as many enemies as friends in my more limited 
and special sphere. For some forty years Mabie 
spent a large portion of his time and energy as a 
literary critic. Hundreds and probably thousands of 
books passed under his hand, and yet so appreciative 
was he that I doubt if he ever incurred anything more 
than regret, and almost certainly never enmity, by 
negative criticism. Thus in his later life he was 
known and loved by nearly every litterateur in the 
country. 
For nearly two-score years I, too, have been a 
critic in a more restricted field and characterized hun- 
dreds of books and memoirs connected with my 
specialty, particularly since my Journals were estab- 
lished. In the exercise of this function I have not 
been able to resist the instinct to criticize negatively 
where I thought this due, and before my first serious 
book was published, in 1904, I had often heard of 
people who were sharpening their knives for me and 
praying “Would that my enemy would write a book.” 
I think this had much to do with the fact that every 
book I have published has been criticized with a bitter- 
ness that, after making all allowances for my imper- 
fections, I believe to be excessive, although I ought to 
add that even the virulence of some of these attacks 
has not been without influence, by way of compensa- 
tion, in evoking, perhaps in some cases no less ex- 
travagant, praise by my friends. I have often had a 
very deep and strong conviction that some authors 
were superficial, partisan or doctrinaire, published 
needless details and useless tables, were hyper- 
methodic, prone to use others’ material with inade- 
quate recognition, were illogical, too discursive, lack- 
ing in perspective and losing themselves in details, 
etc., and the damning thing is that in many cases I 
have said so in print, perhaps too frankly and even 
without adequate justification. On the other hand, I 
568 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD 
do believe that I have encouraged many, especially 
young writers and investigators, and possibly some- 
times shown undue appreciation of really rather crude 
productions, especially if I thought they gave promise 
of better things. 
Beginning perhaps with the “slam” at the then 
very popular Joseph Cook in several articles in The 
Nation, my severe strictures of the psychic research- 
ers and telepathy, of the old-school philosophers of 
the McCosh type who insisted on injecting meta- 
physics into psychology at every point and condemn- 
ing it as materialistic, and of others who in my early 
period opposed the history of philosophy as danger- 
ously unsettling, my attitude has been perhaps some- 
times too antagonistic, at least from the standpoint of 
my own interest and that of my Journals, subscriptions 
to which have sometimes been canceled in high dudg- 
eon by those who thus took offense. Nor is this the 
worst. My geneticism or advocacy of the view that 
the soul of man is no less a product of evolution than 
his body, which seems to me a so fundamental scien- 
tific postulate, has from some quarters brought severe 
strictures and even ridicule because, as I have pointed 
out elsewhere, our science has been but little influ- 
enced by evolution. It is this that contributed its 
quota to the persistent misrepresentations of child 
study which, especially in its early days, had enough 
imperfections of method to justify a good deal of 
criticism. 
Again, so far as life is measured by progressive 
religious eclaircissements, my own development here 
has gone far beyond what most of my contemporaries 
who have paid any attention to it believe justifiable. 
I long since ceased to believe that the problem of the 
existence of the soul independently of the body was a 
legitimate scientific question and have never been able 
to understand how so many thinkers like James, 
569 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
Howison, Royce, Calkins, etc., could be so profoundly 
influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by the desire 
to attain convictions that give them rest and peace 
as to the essence and fate of the soul. I long ago 
accepted and became reconciled to the conclusion, 
which it seems to me an unbiased orientation should 
bring home to every candid and disinterested thinker 
on these themes, that the animal and the human 
psyche have a similar origin and destiny. So, too, 
such psychological insight as I have been able to gain 
from the Christian Scriptures seems to me to show 
that all supernatural elements and belief in all forms 
of discarnate spiritual beings, and even the conception 
and belief in Deity itself, are to-day entirely expli- 
cable on a natural basis by the newer psychology. 
This, instead of being the justification of a higher 
theism, as I hold it to be, has been interpreted by my 
critics as atheism and worthy of the objurgations 
meted out to that supreme heresy. This very topic, 
the psychology of religion, has, in fact, rarely found 
entrance into our academic curricula. 
Worst of all, my very radically qualified but en- 
thusiastic attitude toward psychoanalysis, which in no 
American institution has been given so much atten- 
tion as by me here, has seemed to many to be quite 
without the pale, and sex psychology is still in most 
places under the severe ban of prudery while not a 
few of our most eminent psychologists in this country 
have condemned it, often in the most holophrastic 
terms and with only the most superficial knowledge of 
it. Thus for most of my work there has been perhaps 
quite as much criticism as commendation, and in a 
few cases I have had to recognize the fact that the 
bitter antagonisms engendered by the old troubles at 
Clark that culminated in the hegira of 1893, had lent 
some animus to and accentuated the personal note in 
such criticisms, not mitigated by the fact that the Uni- 
570 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD 
versity itself was thought in some quarters to have 
failed to realize the great expectations with which it 
was inaugurated, which is only too true. At any rate, 
all things considered, it must, I think, be admitted that 
much if not most of my work, such as it is, has been 
done under a heavy handicap, so that I have not been 
entirely able to discard all traces of an apologetic atti- 
tude and I feel that, on the whole, I have not had quite 
a fair, impartial, fighting chance. Part of this is 
doubtless due to my own inherent imperfections. 
Perhaps the vicissitudes of my life from boyhood up 
have tended to make me unduly self-conscious; per- 
haps I have been too tactless or lacking in some ele- 
ments of both Gemiit and esprit; perhaps I have been 
too narrowly focused upon my themes and my stu- 
dents. I certainly never have formed the habit, as 
James and Mabie did, of wide correspondence with 
sympathetic minds at a distance and have never 
yielded to the impulse I have often felt toward authors 
that have helped me most, of writing and telling them 
so, or to enter into epistolary relations with those to 
whom I feel intellectually most akin, much as this 
would have added to my joy of life and given me the 
wider personal rapports I should have so profited by. 
I think I do not lack the moods of exuberant effer- 
vescence and abandon so delightfully shown in many 
of James’ letters, although this in me has its outcrop 
only in social and personal relations with my closest 
intimates. At least I have felt intensely that I was 
never able to quite do justice to the spirit of camera- 
derie and good fellowship that I really feel. 
Perhaps my oscillations up and down another 
scale which psychoanalysis has lately brought into 
prominence for characterology have also been un- 
usual, namely, that of activity and aggressiveness on 
the one hand and passivity and even flaccidity on the 
other. The first is the mode of attack. One rushes 
571 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
on the street, upstairs, up hills. The child has spells 
when it wants to tease, nag, hit, break, provoke, fight, 
not so much from malice as from sheer exuberance 
of vitality. He breaks out, disobeys, defies, perhaps 
runs away, yielding to the primeval lure of the sea, 
the steppes, the mountains, which drew our forbears; 
and loves mischief, outrages convention, says bad 
words, courts danger, doing things he generally fears 
to do, or indulges in every conceivable eccentricity; 
grimaces, mocks, flouts authority with a true kuro- 
phobia; lets himself go without restraint in the riotous 
ways of extravagance and abandon—all because the 
stress and urge of life are so strong. Anon the same 
child is demure, quiet, docile, passive, receptive, per- 
haps even flaccid and inert or dull and apathetic to the 
point of stupidity for hours, days, weeks and, some 
think in certain cases, for years, by way of reaction. 
Near the dawn of puberty (the age of the hobble- 
dehoy in boys and of the “flapper,” 3 Backfisch, or 
tendron in girls) the oscillations on this scale are 
greatly accentuated. The human fledgling now 
crudely and grotesquely affects all the ways of adults 
and again is a child, as if reluctant to take the further 
strides on toward maturity to which nature impels. 
Thus character and conduct are as unsteady as the 
voice at the age of mutation easily breaking into 
childish treble. Ambition and discouragement, the 
sense of superiority and of inferiority, progress and 
regression, succeed each other, and childhood is 
molted only by a series of perhaps almost convulsive 
struggles. In the one mood to think or have an im- 
pulse is to act, while in the other the receptive traits 
or faculties seem to have lost their connection with the 
effective. Now, both these impulsions have their 
place and their right relation is fateful for life, and it 
3 See my “Flapper Americana Novissima,” Atlantic Monthly, 
June, 1922. 
572 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD 
is here that normal differences, not only between the 
sexes but between temperaments, are widest and most 
apparent. 
The application of this distinction to myself is 
very satisfying to my self-knowledge but not very 
flattering to my estimate of that deeper self that un- 
derlies all such perturbations. I think, thus, that all 
my life has been marked by alternating periods of 
activity and passivity (extro and introvertive: Jung). 
During the later Ashfield period there was a pre- 
dominance of the former. At Easthampton and in 
the early college years I was receptive and wrote very 
little and read much. But in the latter part of the 
academic course I attempted many kinds of literary 
productiveness, crude as it was. This aggressive 
mood was little in evidence in the seminary, in the first 
German period, and the four years at Antioch, but 
was resumed in the second triennium abroad and be- 
came dominant at Baltimore, weakening again during 
the first years at Clark and then coming to the fore 
once more. This is how I should plot the larger curve. 
But there is another oscillation of less amplitude 
superposed upon this. All my books and even more 
serious articles have been written with a certain fer- 
vor in which I am very prone to overwork and, as the 
task proceeds, I am pushed by an interest that takes 
possession of me and which I have to restrain. And 
after each is done there is always a feeling of im- 
potence and exhaustion in which I lie fallow and 
abandon myself to the luxury of reading, which at 
first tends to be desultory until slowly another center 
of interest is constellated which may culminate in a 
new urge to write in order to express my personal 
reaction upon the material that has been accumulated. 
It may be a delusion but I believe that I have always 
written primarily to clear up and organize my own 
mind, with a kind of housecleaning motive rather 
573 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
than to meet a demand or find a market for my intel- 
lectual wares. Publishers have often tempted me, in 
a few cases with alluring financial inducements, to 
write textbooks or to join others in some series, and 
topics are often proposed for addresses. But most 
such suggestions I simply cannot respond to and when 
I do the result is commonplace and gives me no inner 
satisfaction. 
Of course I always want my “cause” to prevail 
but I do not readily enlist in organizations that come 
to me ready-made by others. This to a fanatic 
Freudian may suggest a certain autoerotic or even 
narcissistic trend and such an inference may not be 
without a certain partial justification according to the 
psychoanalytic scheme of things. But it is not be- 
cause I cannot work with others or want to be or 
think of myself as unique but I justify this kind and 
degree of self-indulgence on the ground of self- 
expression. The fields of both psychology and educa- 
tion are new and largely unexplored, and all my own 
efforts in these fields have been pervaded by a strong 
sense that a great synthesis is ahead into which all 
that is now doing will ultimately be incorporated as 
data, and some place in this science of the future is 
all that the most ambitious of us can at present hope 
for. Also, perhaps some one sometime may be able 
to resolve what little I have done back into symptoms 
of my underlying diathesis and here may later be 
found the only real value of our life work. 
So, while I hope this autobiography may be of 
some such use in some more advanced stage of our 
science, I have really written it primarily, as stated in 
the Introduction, that I might understand myself 
more fully and realize how every item of my psychol- 
ogy and philosophy, whether acquired or original, 
grew out of my life and my basal and innate traits. 
How I have wished that I might find aid in this at- 
574 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD 
tempt at self-analysis from those who were more com- 
petent and could treat the data more impersonally so 
that I might profit by their study of me, for this would 
be the consummation of self-knowledge. But I am 
too ambitious in hoping for anything of this kind. 
Emerson says in substance that the supreme success 
in literature or philosophy is to have others explain 
you. Would that the autobiographies of those most 
famous in these fields afforded the data now neces- 
sary for such an explanation of theories by their 
authors’ lives! 
Would, too, that I had achieved more and better 
self-expression and had the courage to note even more 
frankly than I have done certain intimate aspects of 
my own life, although I have gone farther than most 
in this direction. But this is perhaps the point where 
I should record a confession—that I have suppressed 
considerable material of this kind which has been 
carefully written out. Should any reader criticize 
what is here set down he should not forget that these 
questionable points are only aspects or episodes of an 
autobiography which, despite its frankness, has cer- 
tain reservations due perhaps to a cowardice which 
has caused me to fall below my own ideals and stand- 
ards of unreservedness, and that certain passages are 
only keys to rooms in my house of life that I cannot 
open to the general reader, at least during my life. 
The years preceding the lateness of my first marriage, 
in the early thirties, and the ten years after the tragic 
death of my first wife before my second venture into 
matrimony were years of most intense activity and of 
sublimation. The same is true since the unhappy 
separation after another decade. In these intervals 
I ought to acknowledge the stimulus I owe to the 
friendship of two other noble minds. 
Perhaps the most basal trait of my own diathesis 
is a dread of every form of conflict or disharmony. 
575 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
Any marked disagreement with those nearest me 
is often almost paralyzing. If I am not assured of 
sympathy in my social environment it is hard for me 
to speak or to assert myself, and there is also a crust 
of diffidence that has to be broken before I can come 
out of my shell. Thus there is an inveterate dislike 
of the open, a dread of being conspicuous, a love of 
obscurity, of the simple private life, of homely com- 
monplace people, that has kept me in touch with the 
rural friends of my boyhood. It is this that has im- 
pelled me all these years to revert so many summers, 
if I could, to the old life of the farm, to revive and 
cherish its associations and memories, and thus to find 
peace, rest, and renewal. If my career had been 
wrecked at any point—and this is increasingly true of 
my later decades—I believe I could have found un- 
wonted compensations in leading the plainest sort of 
rustic life and associating with the plainest people. 
This to me would have been the apogee of psychic 
flaccidity, which psychoanalysis would correlate with 
the almost masochistic subjection of my mother (as 
shown in the above diary) to the will of God. 
But, on the other hand, in conflict with this 
quietistic trend has always been a very virile Aggres- 
sionstrieb, first against early surroundings—physical, 
social, intellectual, religious—and then against educa- 
tional, psychological, and other prevalent culture cur- 
rents, so that many of my own scientific interests have 
grown somewhat apart from those most cultivated in 
the American Psychological Association; and this 
prompted a protestant and sometimes polemic attitude 
on my part. Thus despite the initial dread not only 
of every degree of hostility but even of the publicity 
in which everything of this sort is so prone to result, 
it always brings a certain exhilaration that relieves 
life for the time being of tameness and adds a gamey 
flavor to it. It is in this “I-can” mood that I have 
576 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD 
overestimated my powers and drawn too heavily upon 
the future by beginning many more things than I can 
ever hope to finish, which will certainly leave me in 
at least partial bankruptcy in the end. The prepos- 
terous childish reveries of being a great musician, 
orator, etc., in which I still sometimes catch myself in 
vacant hours, are unreduced vestiges or rudiments of 
this elan and would very likely be the inception point 
of megalomania or delusions of greatness if I ever 
fell a victim to this; while the dread of discord would 
make a rich soil for delusions of persecution. Mag- 
nan’s two attitudes toward the world which, he 
thinks, in their extreme form would have their crux 
at the moment when the patient who has long felt 
himself a victim of persecution turns upon his ene- 
mies and becomes a persecutor, illustrates this ambi- 
valence between activity and passivity. In my own 
inner experience I know all about the rising tide of 
confidence that I have done and said a good thing and 
how it feels to defy and even taunt opponents, on the 
one hand, and also, on the other, how this tide ebbs 
and brings a feeling of the uselessness and worthless- 
ness of everything one has tried to do, and even agree- 
ment with and actual joy in the castigations by one’s 
bitterest critics, with sometimes a feeling that they 
would have been justified in going much farther and 
a wish that they had actually done so. 
As to narcissism, which has now come to be one of 
the most important categories of characterology, I 
believe I have never had much trace of it. As a 
psychologist I have applied myself much to self-study, 
but its results have diminished and not augmented my 
self-complacency. True, there was a decade or two in 
middle life when I did give unusual attention to per- 
sonal appearance, for example, having all my clothes 
made by one of the best London tailors, whose ad- 
dress I often had to give to friends who had a highly 
577 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
developed clothes consciousness; nor can I deny a high 
degree of pleasure at judicious compliments from the 
competent. But public commendation confuses and 
sometimes paralyzes. The custom, too common 
among gushing women, of telling a speaker to his face 
that he has said wonderful things, stirred their souls 
to the depths, etc., is a dangerous thing and has given 
many a clergyman and platform and matinee idol a 
kind of complacency that means nothing but arrest; 
and I believe I have a healthy horror of such experi- 
ences as I have had with this as a public speaker. I 
know many, too, who when their articles or books are 
finished find great satisfaction in reading and reread- 
ing them, which is another form of self-worship in 
which I never indulged. On the contrary, I have 
almost always found reading my own productions to 
be hard and sometimes—when I have had to do it to 
answer criticisms—almost repulsive. 
I can sharply distinguish, thus, between two very 
distinct attitudes as I have said above. The first is 
marked by effort, attention, aims at achievement and 
accomplishment, and upon this (for example, when an 
article or book that has kept me keen and tonic for 
months or perhaps years is finished) there always 
supervenes a period of drifting, lassitude, receptivity, 
and sometimes utter inability to produce or attempt 
any kind of constructive creative work; and then 
slowly, after perhaps months and generally with some 
newer and wider orientation, the demon of work 
again asserts itself. 
And now I must confess, if I am to maintain the 
frankness with which I entered upon this life-survey, 
to a trait of which even my intimates never knew the 
strength or manifold expressions, namely, a love for 
glimpsing at first hand the raw side of human life. I 
have never missed an opportunity to attend a prize 
fight if I could do so unknown and away from home, 
578 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD 
so that I have seen most of the noted pugilists of my 
generation in action and felt the unique thrill at these 
encounters. Thrice I have taken privatissime dancing 
lessons from experts sworn to secrecy, and tried to 
learn the steps of ancient and some of the tabooed 
modern terpsichorean performances—just enough to 
know the feel of them—up to some six years ago, 
although I have always been known as a nondancer. 
In many American and especially in foreign cities 
(Paris, where vice was most sophisticated; London, 
where it was coarsest; Vienna, which I thought the 
worst of all; Berlin, New York, San Francisco) I 
found, generally through hotel clerks, a guide to take 
me through the underworld by night to catch its 
psychological flavor, and once in a den of Apaches in 
Paris we were assaulted and had, I fancy, a rather 
narrow escape. In some of these resorts even police 
escorts dared not go without removing their badge 
of office, while in other dens no outsider would ven- 
ture without an escort ostentatiously official. In these 
excursions I have seen some of the most bestial traits 
of which morbid and depraved human nature is 
capable, and heard of even worse. 
In the two weeks I once spent at an asylum for the 
blind I blindfolded myself for an entire day to realize 
how it seemed to be without sight. Again, I learned 
the deaf mute alphabet to get closer to the inmates of 
an institution for these defectives; have seen three 
executions; attended countless police courts; visited 
many reform schools, poorhouses and pauper lodg- 
ings, jails, prisons, houses of correction and refuge 
for vagrant girls from the street, and many institu- 
tions for the insane; have collected photographs and 
sometimes made the superficial acquaintance of scores 
of freaks of circus side shows, a topic on which I had 
planned a memoir; visited morgues and listened to the 
gruesome tales of their keepers; examined the scores 
579 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
of charred remains of the bodies of those burned in a 
New York excursion boat and also of those drowned 
a few years ago in the Chicago river; have had spells 
of attending the meetings of fanatic religious sects 
and of revivalists, from Billy Sunday down; have 
found admission to secret meetings of radicals and 
revolutionists of various types; and saw much of the 
social evil in many cities, especially during the period 
when I was president of the Watch and Ward 
Society. In all these excursions to learn how the 
other half lived I have been far less interested in insti- 
tutions or organizations and methods than in person- 
alities, and while I have not sought or attained expert 
knowledge or even attempted to be an authority in 
any of these domains, I believe that such zests and 
their indulgence are a necessary part of the prepara- 
tion of a psychologist or moralist who seeks to under- 
stand human nature as it is. 
Life is, in a sense, boxing the compass. Its early 
years are normally spent in an atmosphere of senti- 
ment which envelops it like a warm breeze from the 
south suggestive of the humanities, of the freedom of 
out-of-doors, of life close to nature and the religious 
feelings it inspires, with a strong proclivity to credu- 
lity, which is only excessive belief, and represents in 
a sense the lush, rank growth of the summer of the 
soul. Youth is akin to a western orientation, for the 
Occident has always beckoned the course of empire 
and in it have often been located the El Dorados of 
hope and unfulfilled wishes. It is a perpetual symbol 
of the direction of ambition and progress and is full 
of the beckonings of the future. Here expectation 
and desire deploy, and youth and enterprise look and 
perhaps go westward. The north stands for the clear 
cold light of reason, the frontage of maturity, and is 
preferred by science. If the westering sun invites 
580 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD 
man to follow its course, so the clear northern sunless 
sky invites to cool, dispassionate ratiocination and 
criticism, often cruel to our inclinations but where 
the muse of truth at any price and for its own sweet 
sake has her eternal abode. Men absorbed in the 
quest of laws and verities fixed as the eternal pole 
star need a good northern light as much as a micros- 
copist does. The orient stands for history and remi- 
niscence. It is rich with the accumulated wisdom of 
the past. It opens the widest fields for archaeology 
and in this direction man retraces the stages of his 
development. Old age in a sense fronts it and loves 
to dwell on what has been, so that autobiographies, 
like archaeology, turn toward the rising sun of life and 
follow its ascent in the eastern horizon. Thus, life 
completes its course in four stages or has four faces 
instead of two like Janus, and we do not know it until 
we have viewed it from all these points of the com- 
pass. 
From the standpoint of facilitizations and repres- 
sions, the former start with the initial impulsion of 
the elan vital and push the individual and the race 
ever onward and upward to be, do, get, enjoy every- 
thing possible to man’s estate. The latter represent 
the checks, inhibitions, periods of arrest and regres- 
sion which make it not a triumph but perhaps a 
tragedy. If we could eliminate the latter and depict 
only the former, the field of history would be greatly 
reduced, as H. G. Wells has sought to show by his 
treatment of it all in two volumes; and so the life- 
story of the individual might be greatly abridged if 
only achievements and successes were noted and all 
failures left unrecorded. We can never do this, how- 
ever, because the record of success can never be com- 
plete without taking careful stock of the obstacles 
within and without that have to be overcome, and 
the great part of the energy of every life is devoted 
581 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
to the overcoming of difficulties, so that the life of 
no one, even the most favored or prolonged, ever 
succeeded in realizing all its ideals and in looking 
back with unalloyed satisfaction. 
For myself, I wish to repeat that in writing this 
sketch of my own life and in making it so frank and 
intimate I have been influenced most of all, not by 
any motive of apology or justification, save in Chapter 
VII, but rather by the wish to take the eastward se- 
nescent view in order to gain a truer and more com- 
prehensive self-knowledge. As a result I realize that 
the writing of it has given me a deeper insight into 
and a better understanding of myself than I should 
ever otherwise have attained, and it will thus have for 
me a very important significance as a directive of the 
future work which I so earnestly hope to be able yet 
to do in the world. It has certainly given me courage 
and hope to believe that I may yet, with the aid of 
what has already been begun, do something of more 
real service than anything I have so far accomplished. 
A second motive has been to enable such close and 
intimate friends and relatives as may read this sketch 
after I am gone, not so much to think better of me 
as to know me better and to draw some lessons from 
my life, the moral of which may really prove more 
valuable than my writings and be helpful to their own. 
So far failures and disappointments seem to have 
played a somewhat preponderating role. My boyish 
dreameries of fame, as above noted, were early 
aborted but left little pain because they were super- 
seded by others. The long and trying period of 
waiting and hoping in vain for a fit teaching position, 
with the atmosphere of despondency with which it 
enveloped me for years, left, I think, some pre- 
disposition to somber views. Then came the wreck- 
age of my early expectations for Clark University 
and hardest of all to bear the widespread impression, 
582 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD 
by a very few individuals assiduously cultivated, that 
I had been at first fatuously and uncritically extrav- 
agant in my hopes for the institution and later some- 
how false to those I had attracted here. The silence 
that circumstances enforced upon me was taken to 
mean that I had no excuse or justification. As a 
result I constantly met misrepresentations and dis- 
paragements from this source of which three decades 
have not entirely made an end. 
Again, I was sanguine enough to work for years, 
as above described, in the hope of establishing an 
institution that should be devoted to the study and 
welfare of children and in 1910 felt justified in not 
only making definite plans but in beginning the de- 
velopment of such an institution, only to see all 
these efforts come to naught. When I turned to 
psychoanalysis it was with the ardent hope and belief 
that we had in it the promise and potency of a new 
dispensation in normal psychology, and for the more 
than a decade that I wrought and taught it here I 
was, so far as these hopes were concerned, little more 
than a vox clamantis in deserto, for up to the present 
it has found but little academic recognition among 
psychologists, although I still believe it contains a 
leaven that will sooner or later pervade the entire 
lump. Yet again I realize that I have begun and 
spent much time and effort in domains in which if 
I do no more (at least unless I should achieve the 
forlorn hope of finding a fit literary executor) a great 
body of lecture notes, products of years of diligence, 
will have to be burned ultimately, so that if I do not 
sugar off my data as best I can in the form of one 
or more volumes upon the feelings, and early child- 
hood, at the very least, to say nothing of another on 
psychogenesis with special reference to the animal 
soul, psychoanalysis, and the psychological aspects of 
nutrition, my life will end without a well-rounded 
583 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
period and, as it were, in the middle of its sentence. 
Of course I realize that here I may be and probably 
am living in a fool’s paradise because from the re- 
ception of most of my so far published volumes I 
have no reason to expect that those now unfinished 
would do any great good in the world, so that my 
desire to round them out is very likely in large part 
a form of self-indulgence, the negation of which will 
be no loss to the world but only a check to my own 
egoism. This ambition very likely has come to 
vicariate, by processes now well known, for my 
earlier belief in a personal immortality of the soul, 
which but for my early orthodoxy would have been 
less. Thus this latter made stronger and more ex- 
travagant its present surrogate. 
In view of all these failures, however, I am sur- 
prised to find that I am not, after all, overwhelmingly 
pessimistic but, on the whole, inclined to find hope at 
the bottom of the Pandora casket. I certainly have 
been manifoldly blessed in my friends, some of whom 
have stood by me in every vicissitude and of whom 
so many have lately expressed their appreciation of 
what I have succeeded in doing. I surely have helped 
my students far more than I have the readers of my 
books. The publication of most of these books has 
given me, however, great inner satisfaction and all 
of them have found appreciative readers and every 
one of them bitter critics. It is certainly one of the 
great satisfactions of life to be able to register in 
published form one’s own most mature views upon 
any subject, although the sense of having come to 
terms with that subject and of having done one’s best 
for it is never unalloyed by the deeper and later 
realization that far better things might have been and 
are sure to be said upon it. Well-matured books or 
memoirs do organize our very neurons and make 
mentation more unitary and more economic. I have 
584 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD 
never understood how any one in a field so rapidly 
growing and changing as psychology could ever use 
his own textbook year after year, and the fact that 
I have never been willing to make such use of any of 
my own volumes but try to forget them and turn to 
other things as soon as they are done has probably 
saved me from the mortification of a progressive 
realization of their shortcomings and allowed the 
secret and comforting hope to linger that if they lack 
appreciation now they may find it later. 
The philosopher Herbart said there was no joy 
like that of eternally working over ideas. Lotze’s 
conception of heaven was of wise men of all ages 
perpetually conversing seminary-wise on the highest 
themes, and Lessing ranked the pursuit of truth 
higher than its possession. It is in this sense that I 
count my own life as happiest. It has been my su- 
preme good fortune to love teaching advanced stu- 
dents, and above all other things it is this that I would 
have chosen to do had I been a multimillionaire and 
free from the necessity of self-support. There have 
been few griefs and calamities that have beset my 
way from which I could not find diversion and poise 
in the field of study then uppermost in my interests; 
and interests really constitute life, the success or fail- 
ure of which may be measured by the number and 
strength of these, provided of course they are legiti- 
mate. Thus I have known not only what love is but 
felt all the zest of the love and pursuit of truth, and 
the feeling that I have really added ever so little to 
the sum of human knowledge and affected ever so 
little the current of thought in education and in the 
study of human nature, is a satisfaction that com- 
pensates and atones for all disappointments and leaves 
some surplus to the good, so that I believe that while 
there have been in my life unusually wide oscillations 
up and down the pleasure-pain scale, the former have, 
585 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
on the whole, predominated. This at least is my 
dominant mood. 
If the above four dimensional orientations in 
space are only symbols of human stages and types 
(which always interdigitate) time proclivities are 
more really significant of both and suggest other lines 
on which we may sometime measure the later stages 
of psychological age. 
1. The young live in exquisite rapport with the 
present under the influence of the pleasure-pain prin- 
ciple. They are improvident and victims of the Now 
as well as of the Here and hence are carefree and 
happy-go-lucky. They think not often or much of 
consequences or futurities, and the past concerns them 
very little. Hence they may drift and become oppor- 
tunists, waiting for something to turn up. Their 
instinct is to make the most and best out of each 
passing hour and day, and they are incapable of far- 
ranged plans. They enjoy to the uttermost each pass- 
ing moment and cannot profit by experience and its 
proverbs, while remote results to health or even career 
make but slight appeal to them. 
2. Youth begins to dream of the future and is 
the time for life plans and the selection of callings. 
These foregleams are first only ideals and perhaps 
reveries but they often preform destinies. Youth 
thus slowly learns to subordinate the present to the 
future, to forego an immediate for a more ultimate 
satisfaction. Some can deny themselves all temporal 
in the interest of future joys, like ascetics who culti- 
vate misery hoping for postmortem compensation, 
an attitude which priestcraft has always developed and 
profited by but which is now being challenged as never 
before by the principle “One world at a time and this 
one now.” This bankruptcy of hope often has a most 
tragic aspect. Plans may be extravagant, as they are 
586 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD 
in this country where every youth realizes that he 
may possibly become president or a millionaire, but 
they are all of this life and generally limited to ma- 
turity, with little forethought of old age. The future 
is a great muse and has inspired all great prophets 
and given the world many interpretations of a golden 
age, utopias, and ideal states and societies. It is free 
to all to construe according to their temperament. 
But with the decay and utter ineffectiveness to-day 
of all hope and belief in a life beyond the grave, man 
has become myopic when he looks ahead. Even the 
future of this world and of his later posterity has 
ceased to seriously affect him. The influence of the 
future for some is at first limited to their own mature 
lives and later to their children, and very rarely con- 
siders their remote posterity and still less the future 
of the world centuries hence, so that they become 
careless not only of natural resources and even pile 
up national debts for their children’s children to pay 
but in every way overdraw their account at the great 
bank of futurity. 
3. But there is no way of interpreting the future 
except by the past, and this is always sobering and 
inevitably brings a critical attitude toward ideals. 
Myth tends to glorify the past, history to conserve 
it, and antiquarianism to revel in it, sometimes to the 
neglect and even disparagement of both the present 
and future. One type of old age turns to it, while 
another type tends to visions of what is to be here- 
after. The past is the stronghold of conservatism 
and gives its chief authority to precedent, tradition, 
and the mores, and tends to habituation. It tones 
down extravagant expectations by the very insistence 
of its admonition to judge the future by the past. 
Measured by these standards, I think in my own 
life the present was rather prematurely and perhaps 
too much subordinated to the future. In youth I 
587 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
loathed nearly all of my environment and its duties 
and prospects, and was almost gaspingly interested 
in the possibilities of the future; and this trait, 
favored by my early puritanical training (if, as I 
hope, it did not make me in later life neglect my 
family for its very urgent Present and the ever beck- 
oning Future) brought me to maturer years with less 
resources of present enjoyment and recreation than 
many of those whom I best know and most respect. 
It is true I have always had favorite modes of recre- 
ation and even self-indulgence, but the spirit of work, 
which has sometimes been almost an obsession, has 
made me not infrequently oblivious even to holidays 
and the social enjoyments which others find with their 
friends and perhaps the yet larger one of correspond- 
ence. For many years I have been a member of two 
very active societies, the one devoted to antiquarian 
and the other to historical studies, to both of which 
I have offered modest contributions. But I realize 
that all my interest in the past is connected with evo- 
lution, and where studies in these fields show no 
scintilla of this my interest fades. The most common 
criticism of my perhaps too kindly and best friends 
is that my views are ahead of the times and may meet 
more favorable consideration later. Even if this be 
so, I cannot forget that to be really ahead of the times 
is often as fatal to real success and as much a sin 
against the Zeitgeist as to be behind the times. 
I have often wished I were a better “mixer” with 
my equals, that I enjoyed more the social functions 
so prominent in all our academic meetings and the 
convivial hours and banquets of learned societies, that 
I had more intimate personal friends along the lines 
of my chief interests, that I was a better letter-writer 
instead of abridging and being generally rather averse 
to this function, and that I could respond more 
heartily, when I really have the impulse to do so, to 
588 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD 
the advances of those who have been my most intimate 
and cherished friends instead of giving the impres- 
sion, as I often do to my great regret, of being some- 
what unresponsive sentimentally. I believe my whole 
affective life is as strong and deep, and perhaps more 
so, than that of most I know, but I have never been 
able to entirely escape the early atmosphere of re- 
pression of sentiment. Only my students know that 
I am at heart truly the “good fellow” that I really 
want to be with both my equals and my superiors. 
With both these, especially the latter, I have never 
been able to entirely overcome a certain feeling of 
inferiority, which began to be somewhat acute at the 
Easthampton period and to compensate for which has 
sometimes been a spur to do my best things and even 
to criticize too severely those to whom I should have 
looked up as authorities. 
Here, again, I realize limitations due largely to 
my early life and perhaps accentuated by the vocation 
of a teacher, who falling into the habit of speaking 
de haut en bas to those less advanced finds it a little 
hard to take the right attitude of appreciation and 
docility to his peers and perhaps becomes resentful 
of criticism that is not only just but wholesome. At 
any rate, as I advance in years there are few things 
I crave more and feel more keenly the lack of than 
companionship. The almost inevitable isolation of 
old age is hard to bear, and I think I now have no 
greater enjoyment than in occasional visitations by 
friends, sometimes with prolonged converse and even 
discussion upon topics of vital interest to both, es- 
pecially now that I have time for it. Perhaps it is 
partly to fill this need that since my retirement, how- 
ever hard I work, I find a marked increase in a habit 
I have always had more or less, of having an interest- 
ing novel, perhaps of a very exciting and even lurid 
type, to which I can turn at the close of the day's 
589 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
work, and I certainly never frequented places of 
amusement as much or accepted so many invitations 
to dinners and other social gatherings, or enjoyed 
them more than at the present time. 
I realize as never before that what little I have 
accomplished has been despite unusual resistances, 
and I find some satisfaction in believing that if I have 
sometimes been too aggressive, I have been, in heart 
at least, a good soldier in the battle of life. I have 
certainly been sincere, with a strong inner conviction 
and a sense, which I cannot believe entirely illusory, 
that I had a call in the large field of the higher vo- 
cation of man as a real raison d'etre. I love my work 
and the simple life, I revere simple justice between 
man and man, have made friends whose loyalty and 
companionship is beyond all price, and have learned 
to take ever greater satisfaction in the primal joys 
of existence; and in these I find growing compen- 
sation for all that I have failed in. Nevertheless, I feel 
more and more deeply that if my life ends or if work- 
ing power abates before I have finished some of the 
most advanced things I have begun, which, if I can 
do justice to them, I feel a deep assurance will be 
better than anything so far accomplished, it will be 
like a story without the last culminating chapter. 
Thus, I have tried in the preceding pages to survey 
and take stock of my life thus far in order that I 
may be more likely to be guided to the right orienta- 
tion for what remains of it, and my hope and even 
prayer to nature, fortune, or all the gods that control 
human destiny, is that I may have the strength and 
years to realize these ambitions that mark the youth 
of my old age. At any rate I record these senile as- 
pirations as a part of the psychological phenomena 
perhaps characteristic of my time of life. 
The straitened circumstances of my childhood, 
youth, and early manhood should, it would seem, have 
590 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD 
tended to make me overprize wealth but they have not 
done so. Not only have I not hoarded but I have 
repeatedly refused opportunities I was convinced 
would have greatly increased my income. It is a 
genuine satisfaction to me now in the retrospect stage 
of life to realize that I have not and never did have 
(excepting a very small parental legacy) a cent which 
I did not earn or get in return for what I deemed 
its full equivalent in work or service. I have never 
sold my name, as I have been urged to do first and 
last perhaps a dozen times, such propositions in their 
more usual form being to appear on the title page 
as coworker or editor of texts and other books or 
series of them which I should have little or no hand 
in making. The largest of these schemes dangled the 
prospect of at least a hundred thousand dollars as my 
eventual share for a series of school books and appa- 
ratus. All schemes of such a nature, although sanc- 
tioned by certain eminent precedents and examples, 
seem to me not only unethical but, what was yet more 
effective in keeping me aloof from them, essentially 
uninteresting; at least there were other activities 
which had a vastly stronger appeal. 
For this I frankly praise myself although my 
fancy that I could do more good in the world by 
following my own inclinations may have been a de- 
lusion. I felt this at the time but yet never hesitated 
to take the risk of following this inner lead, although 
I also realized that it might be a form of self-indul- 
gence. I do not think, however, that it involves any 
overestimation of my own abilities along the lines 
I preferred and it saved me from the really dreadful 
fate, the curse of the industrial world to-day, of 
having to do things I hated for pay. Had my father 
held on to his Wisconsin three hundred and twenty 
acres only a little longer he would have been on the 
way to becoming a multimillionaire. There were also 
591 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
several other facts and events in my life which I will 
not here take the time or space to enumerate that 
lead me to think that I may have had, not one but 
several rather narrow escapes from being rich. If 
this be so, I am very far from having any regrets. 
In youth I had just the temperament to be ruined by 
wealth. I should have probably run through it, dis- 
graced, and very likely killed myself long ago. Pov- 
erty was my salvation. 
Again, I would not sell at any price the knowl- 
edge my course of life has enabled me to gather. 
Nor, finally, would I give so large a portion of my 
time and energy to safeguarding and nursing a large 
property. I know no class of men quite so hard- 
boiled and uninteresting and, indeed, unintelligent 
outside the hard and fast and often narrow limits of 
their own interests as the American millionaires, with 
several of whom it has been my fortune to come into 
more or less intimate relations. Great material pos- 
sessions are, to be sure, great educators and give un- 
usual sagacity and insight where any kind of financial 
values is concerned. But only when the very rich 
reach the stage that few of them do, when they are 
anxious to expropriate their wealth and seriously 
study where it can do most good, does education from 
this source culminate. For myself, nothing would 
tempt me to be enrolled on the list of the ten or twelve 
thousand American millionaires if I had to retain 
the wealth and devote the time and energy necessary 
to safeguarding my properties, investing and rein- 
vesting where necessary, insuring, looking after taxes, 
rents, worrying about risks, etc., and instead of 
owning my property slowly becoming its slave. 
Each man has a normal amount of wealth as he 
has a normal weight of body on which he can best 
thrive and if this is exceeded he is like fat men handi- 
capped in all their movements by superfluity. Like 
592 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD 
weight, too, wealth should decline as old age comes. 
No one can spend the energy of his best years in any 
phase of the all-absorbing money hunt without be- 
coming arrested and perverted in his development as 
man, which is our real vocation. “Money Bags” is 
as grotesque in soul as comic skits make him in body 
and circumstance. Not only do the interests of the 
rich very rarely coincide with those of the community 
as a whole but nowadays (probably more than before 
the war) capitalists must compromise between con- 
science, insight and honor on the one hand, and the 
petty and even grave meannesses of practice that are 
ever arising and becoming current, on the other; or 
between corporate and individual standards in the 
conduct of big business. If I were sentenced to be 
rich now I should grow neurotic over insurance risks, 
problems of competition, fluctuation of prices and 
markets, labor problems, anxieties about special legis- 
lation, tariff rates, new fields of fruitful investment, 
and perhaps efforts to reform our present industrial 
system. The business man of to-day should be an 
economic philosopher primarily intent upon a larger 
service, and he is dwarfed if he forgets or sacrifices 
these to the lust of personal advantage. Hence if 
I were rich I should find too little assurance in the 
light of what self-knowledge I have been able to 
acquire that I should succeed where so many have 
failed, in maintaining my own integrity and self- 
respect, and get through the “needle’s eye” without 
promptly unburdening myself of all possessions not 
actually needed. So I am better, healthier, and 
happier as I am—thank you, Fortune—with just 
enough to give me an assured sense of freedom, 
leisure, comfort, and safety from want to the end, 
along with a deep feeling that I have earned these 
by a life of hard work for the improvement of at 
least a small section of the human race. 
593 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
The dominantly sad note of my life may be desig- 
nated by one word, isolation. A country farm far 
from the village; ambition shared by no boys of my 
age; misunderstood by my father; the fitting school 
with classmates too advanced and mature for com- 
panionship; college, with only a few choice intimates 
and congenials; the seminary, where I was suspected 
of heresy, which thus hindered associations or even 
broke those I had come to prize, as had also happened 
in my later college course; the years in Europe, where 
my only friends were foreigners speaking an alien 
tongue and with no one to advise or counsel; my 
interest in studies slowly shaping along lines which 
very few in this country cared for; nearly a score 
of years after college graduation before permanent 
and final settlement in the kind of academic chair I 
wanted; the tragic death of my first wife and six- 
year-old daughter just after reaching Worcester; 
the ten years of living alone that followed; 
the debacle of my great hopes and plans for Clark 
University during its third year; the long period of 
misunderstandings that followed; the uniqueness of 
our plan which set us more or less apart; some odium 
sexicum, which began with the publication of my 
Adolescence and was intensified by my introduction 
of Freudianism into this country and by my teach- 
ing some of its essentials, although with great reser- 
vations (a topic still practically taboo by the 
American Psychological Association, which wras or- 
ganized in my house and of which I was the first 
president); some acute experiences with the odium 
theologicum which followed the publication of my 
Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology; my 
genetic conception of the human soul as a product of 
evolution like the body; the crust of diffidence that 
always had to be broken through at every public ap- 
pearance; the incessant danger that if this is broken 
594 LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD 
I be negative and give offense by somewhat excessive 
antagonisms; the disappointments about the Chil- 
dren’s Institute—all these handicaps gave me a deep 
feeling that I had never quite done justice to myself. 
This, too, may account in some degree for my yet 
very strong youthful ambition, despite the handicap 
of age, to finish before I die the work along not one 
but several of the above lines I have already given so 
much time and labor to, and thus round out my life 
by doing a few things which shall be better than I 
have ever yet been able to do. I never so ardently 
longed to accomplish something really worth while 
in the world as now and never saw so clearly just what 
I want to do or felt so strongly that I can do it if 
I only have the time and strength. Yet all the time I 
know that the Supreme Queller may at any time now 
intervene and cut down all these aspirations as the 
mower does the last lush crop of rowen before the 
snow and ice of winter kill it to its very roots. Thus 
lust for mental increases after that of physical fecun- 
dity fails, a phenomenon characteristic of my stage 
of life and which I have tried in my Senescence to 
come to terms with and understand, knowing all the 
while that this feeling of a new inspiration is some- 
what falsetto and probably only a symptom. All the 
while I welcome, cherish it, and will not put it by. 
On the other hand, despite all the above, I must 
count my life as, on the whole, a happy and fortunate 
one, and that chiefly because I have been very excep- 
tionally able to follow my own inner interests and 
inclinations. I love my work and have always been 
able to find solace in it, not only for all the disap- 
pointments that I have met but for all the severer 
blows of fate. This has been almost literally a life 
preserver. I wonder if any other line of study could 
have done this as well as psychology, which is in its 
larger aspects only the study of human nature. Cer- 
595 LIFE AND CONFESSIONS 
tainly not for me, with my diathesis and life history. 
From this point of view I am far older than my years 
for I have laid aside more of the illusions and tran- 
scended more of the limitations with which I started 
than most. In the views I have attained of man, 
his place in nature, his origin and destiny, I believe 
I have become a riper product of the present stage 
of civilization than most of my contemporaries, have 
outgrown more superstitions, attained clearer in- 
sights, and have a deeper sense of peace with myself. 
I love but perhaps still more pity mankind, groping 
and stumbling, often slipping backward along the up- 
ward Path, which I believe I see just as clearly as 
Jesus or Buddha did, the two greatest souls that ever 
walked this earth and whom I supremely revere. If 
my intellectual interests have been in the past and 
present, my heart lives in the future and in this sense 
I am younger than youth itself, the nature of which I 
would chiefly understand and appeal to. Thus I find 
even a kind of second childhood in age more charming 
than the first ever began to be. Hence I believe I 
have achieved another new birth superimposed on 
that of adolescence. APPENDIX 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
Books 
1874. Hegel as the National Philosopher of Germany. Trans- 
lated from the German of Dr. Karl Rosenkrans 
(Rep. fr. Journal of Speculative Philosophy). St. 
Louis, Gray, Baker and Co., 1874. 159 pp. 
1881. Aspects of German Culture. Boston, James R. Osgood 
and Co., 1881, 320 pp. 
1883. Methods of Teaching History, Boston, D. C. Heath 
and Co., 1883. 391 pp. 
1886. Hints Towards a Select and Descriptive Bibliography 
of Education. Arranged by topics and indexed by 
authors. (With John M. Mansfield.) Boston, D. C. 
Heath and Co., 1886. 309 pp. 
1904. Adolescence: Its Psychology, and Its Relations to 
Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, 
Religion and Education. New York, D. Appleton 
and Co., 1904. 2 vols., 1373 pp. 
1906. Youth, Its Education, Regimen and Hygiene. N. Y., 
D. Appleton and Co., 1906. 379 pp. 
1907. Aspects of Child Life and Education. Boston, Ginn 
and Co., 1907. 326 pp. 
1911. Educational Problems. N. Y., D. Appleton and Co., 
1911. 2 vols., 1425 pp. 
1912. Founders of Modern Psychology. N. Y., D. Appleton 
and Co., 1912. 470 pp. 
1917. Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology. N. Y., 
Doubleday Page Co., 1917. 2 vols., 733 pp. 
1920. Morale: The Supreme Standard of Life and Conduct. 
N. Y., D. Appleton and Co., 1920. 380 pp. 
1920. Recreations of a Psychologist. N. Y., D. Appleton and 
Co., 1920. 336 pp. 
1922. Senescence: The Last Half of Life. N. Y., D. Apple- 
ton and Co., 1922. 518 pp. 
597 APPENDIX 
Translations 
Ausgewahlte Beitrdge zur Kinder psychologie und 
Paedagogik. (Thirteen papers translated into Ger- 
man by Dr. Joseph Stimpfl.) Internationale Bibli- 
othek f. Paedagogik. Band 4. Altenburg, O. Bonde, 
1902. 454 pp. 
Adolescence. Translated in part into Japanese by Y. 
Motora and others. Tokyo, Dubumkan, 1910. 
Urbrane Stati Pedopsychologicke a Pedagogicke. Praze, 
1906. 199 pp. 
Journals 
Commemorative Number of the American Journal of 
Psychology (on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Dr. 
Hall’s receiving the doctorate). Twenty-five contri- 
butions. 1903. Vol. 14, Nos. 3 and 4. 430 pp. 
The American Journal of Psychology. Founded 1889. 
Now in its thirty-fourth volume. (Sold to Professor 
E. B. Titchener in 1920.) 
The Pedagogical Seminary. Founded 1893. Now in 
its thirtieth volume. 
The Journal of Religious Psychology. Founded 1904. 
Publication discontinued, 1915. 
The Journal of Applied Psychology. Founded 1917. 
Now in its sixth volume. At first edited by Pro- 
fessor L. R. Geissler and now edited by Professor 
J. P. Porter of Ohio State University and W. F. 
Book of Indiana University. 
Addresses, Articles, and Memoirs in Chronological 
Order 1 
i873- Outlines of Dr. J. A. Dorner’s System of Theology. 
Presbyterian Quarterly Reznew, Oct., 1872, Jan., 
Apr., 1873; N. S., Vol. 1, pp. 720-747; Vol. 2, 
pp. 60-93; 261-273. 
1878. Notes on Hegel and His Critics. The Journal of 
Speculative Philosophy, Jan., 1878. Vol. 12, pp. 
93-103. 
1 Selected from a far larger and practically complete list of all 
the author’s papers which were collected and bound in twenty-three 
volumes by Librarian L. N. Wilson of Clark University. 
598 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
Color Perception. Proc. Am. Acad, of Arts and 
Sciences. Presented Mar. 14, 1878. N. S. Vol. 5, 
pp. 402-413- 
The Muscular Perception of Space. Mind, Oct., 
1878. Vol. 3, pp. 433-450. 
1879. Philosophy in the United States. Mind, Jan., 
1879. Vol. 4, pp. 89-105. 
Ueber die Abhangigkeit der Reactionszeiten vom 
Ort des Reizes. (With J. von Kries.) Archiv fur 
Anatomie und Physiologie (His u. Braune) Physiolo- 
gische Abtheilung, 1879. Supp. Band, pp. 1-10. 
Die willkurliche Muskelaction (With Hugo 
Kronecker.) Archiv fiir Anatomie und Physiologie 
(His u. Braune) Physiologische Abtheilung, Supp. 
Band, 1879, pp. 11-47. 
Laura Bridgman. Mind, April, 1879. Vol. 4, pp. 149- 
172. 
1881. Recent Researches on Hypnotism. Mind, Jan., 
1881. Vol. 6, pp. 98-104. 
1882. The Moral and Religious Training of Children. 
Princeton Review, Jan., 1882. Vol. 10, pp. 26-48. 
Chairs of Pedagogy in Our Higher Institutions of 
Learning. Bur. of Ed. Circulars of Information 
No. 2, 1882, pp. 35-44. 
The Education of the Will. Princeton Review, 
Nov., 1882. Vol. 10, pp. 306-325. 
Optical Illusions of Motion. (With H. P. Bow- 
ditch.) Journal of Physiology, Aug., 1882. Vol. 3, 
pp. 297-307. 
1883. Educational Needs. North American Review, March, 
1883. Vol. 136, pp. 284-290. 
Reaction-Time and Attention in the Hypnotic 
State. Mind, April, 1883. Vol. 8, pp. 170-182. 
The Contents of Children’s Minds. Princeton Re- 
view, May, 1883. Vol. 11, pp. 249-272. Reprinted 
by E. L. Kellogg & Co., N. Y., 1893, pp. 56. Trans, 
into Bulgarian by Em. Anastassoff (Pedagogical 
Library, Year 5, No. 24, Philipopolis, 1908). 
The Study of Children. Privately printed. N. 
Somerville, Mass., 1883, 13 pp. 
1884. Report of the Visiting Committee of the Alumni 
of Williams College. Presented July 1, 1884. 
Printed for Distribution, Williamstown, Mass., 1884, 
11 pp. (Drawn up by Dr. Hall.) 
599 APPENDIX 
Bilateral Asymmetry of Function. (With E. M. 
Hartwell.) Mind, Jan., 1884. Vol. 9, pp. 93-109. 
1885. New Departures in Education. No. Am. Review, 
Feb., 1885. Vol. 140, pp. 144-152. 
The New Psychology. Andover Review, Feb. and 
March, 1885. Vol. 3, pp. 120-135; 239-248. (In- 
augural address at John Hopkins University, Oct. 
6, 1882.) 
Experimental Psychology. Mind, April, 1885. Vol. 
10, pp. 245-249. 
A Study of Children’s Collections. The Nation, 
Sept. 3, 1885. Vol. 41, p. 190. Also in Ped. Sem., 
June, 1891. Vol. 1, pp. 234-237. 
Motor Sensations of the Skin. (With H. H. Don- 
aldson.) Mind, Oct., 1885. Vol. 10, pp. 557-572. 
1886. Studies of Rhythm. (With Joseph Jastrow.) Mind, 
Jan., 1886. Vol. 11, pp. 55-62. 
How to Teach Reading and What to Read in 
School. Boston, D. C. Heath & Co., 1886, 40 pp. 
1887. Dermal Sensitiveness to Gradual Pressure 
Changes. (With Y. Motora.) Am. Jour, of Psy., 
Nov., 1887. Vol. 1, pp. 72-98. 
Psychical Research. (A review of the Proc. of the 
English Soc. for Psychical Research from July, 1882, 
to May, 1887, and Gurney’s Phantasms of the Liv- 
ing.) Am. Jour, of Psychology, Nov., 1887. Vol. 1, 
pp. 128-146. 
Psychology. (Review of the books on Psychology by 
McCosh, Bowne, Dewey and Ladd.) Am. Jour, of 
Psychology, Nov., 1887. Vol. 1, pp. 146-164. 
1888. The Story of a Sand Pile. Scribner’s, June, 1888. 
Vol. 3, pp. 690-696. Reprinted by E. L. Kellogg & 
Co., N. Y., 1897. 
1889. Address Delivered at the Opening of Clark Uni- 
versity, Worcester, Mass., Oct. 2, 1889. Clark 
University Opening Exercises, Worcester, Mass., 
Oct. 2, 1889, pp. 9-32. 
1890. Children’s Lies. Am. Jour, of Psy., Jan., 1890. Vol. 
3, PP- 59-70- 
A Sketch of the History of Reflex Action. Am. 
Jour, of Psy., Jan., 1890. Vol. 3, pp. 71-86. 
A Plea for Studying Foreign Educational Insti- 
tutions. Am. Inst, of Instruction, Boston, 1890, 
PP- 27-35- 
600 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
The Training of Teachers. Forum, Sept., 1890. 
Vol. 10, pp. 11-22. 
First Annual Report to the Board of Trustees. 
Clark University, Worcester, Mass., Oct. 4, 1890. 
(Printed Nov., 1890), pp. 2-24. Translation in 
Revue Scientifique, April 4, 1891. Vol. 47, pp. 430- 
433- 
1891. Boy Life in a Massachusetts Country Town 
Thirty Years Ago. Proc. of the Am. Antiq. Soc., 
1891, N. S. Vol. 7, pp. 107-128. 
Educational Reforms. Ped. Sem., Jan., 1891. Vol. 
1, pp. 1-12. 
Recent Literature of Higher Education. Ped. 
Sem., Jan., 1891. Vol. 1, pp. 19-24 France; 24-29 
Germany; 30-34 Other European Countries; 34-44 
America; 44-53 Medical Education. 
Recent Literature on Intermediate Education. 
Ped. Sem., Jan., 1891. Vol. 1, pp. 53-62. 
Elementary Education. The Reconstructed Primary 
School System of France. (Reviews largely.) Ped. 
Sem., Jan., 1891. Vol. 1, pp. 62-101. 
Book Reviews (Pedagogical). Ped. Sem., Jan., 1891. 
Vol. 1, pp. 102-118. 
Review of William James’ Principles of Psychol- 
ogy. Am. Jour, of Psy., Feb., 1891. Vol. 3, pp. 
578-59I- 
Contemporary Psychologists. I. Professor Eduard 
Zeller. Am. Jour, of Psy., April, 1891. Vol. 4, pp. 
156-1 75- 
Phi Beta Kappa Oration, at Brown Univ., Provi- 
dence, R. I., June, 1891. The Brunonian, June 17, 
1891. 
Notes on the Study of Infants. Ped. Sem., June, 
1891. Vol. 1, pp. 127-138. 
University Study of Philosophy. (Discussion at 
Univ. Convocation of the State of N. Y., July 8, 
1891.) Regents’ Bulletin No. 8, Jan., 1893, pp. 335- 
338. 
Second Annual Report of the President to the 
Board of Trustees of Clark University, Sept. 29, 
1891. Pub. for the Univ., Worcester, Mass., pp. 
3-15- 
The New Movement in Education. An Address 
delivered before the School of Pedagogy of the Univ. 
601 APPENDIX 
of the City of New York, Dec. 29, 1891. Printed by 
the University, pp. 20. 
Editorial. (Deals with recent educational tendencies.) 
Ped. Sem., Dec., 1891. Vol. 1, pp. 311-326. 
Recent Literature of Higher Education. I. 
France; II. Germany; III. England; IV. United 
States; V. Miscellaneous; VI. University Buildings. 
Ped. Sem., Dec., 1891. Vol. 1, pp. 327-389. 
Literature and Notes. (Educational.) Ped. Sem., 
Dec., 1891, Vol. 1, pp. 425-502. 
1892. The Outlook in Higher Education. The Academy, 
Boston, Mass., Jan., 1892. Vol. 6, pp. 543-562. 
Health of School Children as Affected by School 
Buildings. Proc. N. E. A., 1892, pp. 163-172. 
Child Study as a Basis for Psychology and Psycho- 
logical Teaching. Report of the Com. of Education 
for the Year 1892-1893, pp. 357-370. 
1893. Report to the Board of Trustees of Clark Uni- 
versity, Worcester, Mass., April, 1893, pp. 3-16. 
Psychological Progress. The Liberal Club, Buffalo, 
1893-94, pp. 13-47. 
Child Study: The Basis of Exact Education. 
Forum, Dec., 1893. Vol. 16, pp. 429-441. 
1894. On the History of American College Text-Books 
and Teaching in Logic, Ethics, Psychology and 
Allied Subjects. With Bibliography. Proc. of the 
Am. Antiq. Soc., 1894. N. S., Vol. 9, pp. 137-174. 
American Universities and the Training of 
Teachers. Forum, April, 1894. Vol. 17, pp. 148- 
159- 
Some Relations Between Physical and Mental 
Training. Amer. Assoc, for Advancement of Phys- 
ical Education, New Haven, Conn., April, 1894. 
Annual Report, pp. 30-37. 
Universities and the Training of Professors. 
Forum, May, 1894. Vol. 17, pp. 297-309. 
Scholarships, Fellowships, and the Training of 
Professors. Forum, June, 1894. Vol. 17, pp. 443- 
454- 
Research the Vital Spirit of Teaching. Forum, 
July, 1894. Vol. 17, pp. 558-570- 
The New Psychology as a Basis of Education. 
Forum, Aug., 1894. Vol. 17, pp. 710-720. 
Address at the Bryant Centennial, Cummington, 
602 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
Mass., Aug. 16, 1894. Clark W. Bryan Co., Spring- 
field, Mass. 
Address at the Dedication of the Haston Free 
Public Library Building, North Brookfield, 
Mass., Sept. 20, 1894. H. J. Lawrence, Printer, No. 
Brookfield, Mass., pp. 11-21. 
1S95. Laboratory of the McLean Hospital, Somerville, 
Mass. Am. Jour, of Insanity, Jan., 1895. Vol. 51, 
pp. 358-364. 
On Specialization. Address at the One Hundredth 
Anniversary of the Founding of Union College, June, 
1895. Printed by the College, N. Y., 1897. pp. 230- 
244. 
Editorial on Experimental Psychology in Amer- 
ica. Am. Jour, of Psy., Oct., 1895. Vol. 7, pp. 3-8. 
Letters on above from James, Ladd, Baldwin, Cattell. 
Science, Nov. 8, 1895. Vol. 2. (N. S.), pp. 626-628. 
Reply by Dr. Hall, Science, Nov. 29, 1895. Vol. 2 
(N. S.), pp. 734-735- 
Psychical Research. Am. Jour, of Psy., Oct., 1895. 
Vol. 7, pp. 135-142. 
Results of Child Study Applied to Education. 
Trans. III. Soc. for Child Study, 1895. Vol. 1, No. 4, 
PP- 13- 
1896. The Case of the Public Schools: I. The Witness of 
the Teacher. Atlantic Monthly, March, 1896. Vol. 
77, pp. 402-413- 
Psychological Education. Am. Jour, of Insanity, 
Oct., 1896. Vol. 53, pp. 228-241. 
The Methods, Status, and Prospects of the Child 
Study of To-Day. Trans. III. Soc. for Child Study, 
May, 1896. Vol. 2, pp. 178-191. 
Address on Founder’s Day at Mount Holyoke 
College, Nov. 5, 1896. The Mount Holyoke, Nov., 
1896. Vol. 6, pp. 64-72. 
A Study of Dolls. (With A. Caswell Ellis.) Ped. 
Sem., Dec., 1896. Vol. 4, pp. 129-175. Reprinted by 
E. L. Kellogg & Co., N. Y., 1897. 
1897. A Study of Fears. Am. Jour, of Psy., Jan., 1897. 
Vol. 8, pp. 147-249. 
Some Practical Results of Child Study. National 
Congress of Mothers, Wash., D. C., (Feb. 18, 1897). 
First Annual Session, 1897, pp. 165-171. (D. 
Appleton & Co., N. Y., 1897.) 
603 APPENDIX 
The Psychology of Tickling, Laughing, and the 
Comic. (With Arthur Allin.) Am. Jour, of Psy., 
Oct., 1897. Vol. 9, pp. 1-41. 
1898. Some Aspects of the Early Sense of Self. Am. 
Jour, of Psy., April, 1898. Vol. 9, pp. 351-395- 
Initiations into Adolescence. Proc. Am. Antiq. 
Soc., 1898, N. S., Vol. 12, pp. 367-400. 
The Love and Study of Nature, A Part of Educa- 
tion. Report of the State Board of Agriculture of 
Mass., 1898, pp. 134-154. 
1899. Address. Proceedings at the Dedication of the Thayer 
Library and Art Building in Keene, N. H., Feb. 28, 
1899. Sentinel Printing Co., Keene, 1899, pp. 17-40. 
Heirs of the Ages. Proceedings of the New Jersey 
Association for the Study of Children and Youth, 
Newark, N. J., Mar. 11, 1899. The Brotherhood 
Press, Bloomfield, N. J., 1899, pp. 5-14. 
The Education of the Heart. From fundamental to 
accessory in education. Needed modifications in the 
theory and practice of the kindergarten. Kinder- 
garten Mag., May, 1899. Vol. n, pp. 592-595; 599- 
600; 604-607. 
The Kindergarten. School and Home Education, 
June, 1899. Vol. 18, p. 507. 
Decennial Address. Decennial Celebration, Clark 
University, 1889-1899. Published by the University, 
Worcester, Mass., 1899, pp. 45-59. 
Philosophy. Decennial Celebration, Clark University, 
1889-1899. Published by the University, Worcester, 
Mass., 1899, PP- 177-185. 
A Study of Anger. Am. Jour, of Psy., July, 1899. 
Vol. 10, pp. 516-591. 
Note on Early Memories. Ped. Sem., Dec., 1899. 
Vol. 6, pp. 485-512- 
1900. Some Defects of the Kindergarten in America. 
Forum, Jan., 1900. Vol. 28, pp. 579-591. 
College Philosophy. Forum, June, 1900. Vol. 29, 
pp. 409-422. 
Pity. (With F. H. Saunders.) Am. Jour, of Psy., 
July, 1900. Vol. 11, pp. 534-591- 
Child Study and Its Relation to Education. 
Forum, Aug., 1900. Vol. 29, pp. 688-702. Tr. into 
Bulgarian by Em. Anastassoff. Pedagogical Library, 
Year 5, No. 23, Philipopolis, 1907. 
604 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
Student Customs. Proc. Am. Antiq. Soc., N. S. 
Vol. 14, PP- 83-124. 
The Religious Content of the Child Mind. (Chap. 
7, Principles of Religious Education, pp. 161-189.) 
Longmans, Green & Co., N. Y., 1900. 
1901. Foreign and Home Boards of Trade. The Worcester 
Magazine, Worcester, Mass., Jan., 1901, pp. 34-36. 
Confessions of a Psychologist. (Part I.) Ped. 
Sem., March, 1901. Vol. 8, pp. 92-143. 
Present Tendencies in Higher Education. Regents? 
Bulletin, Univ. of the State of New York, No. 55, 
Sept., 1901, pp. 372-385. 
The Ideal School as Based on Child Study. Forum, 
Sept., 1901. Vol. 32, pp. 24-39. 
The New Psychology. Harpers’, Oct., 1901. Vol. 
103, pp. 727-732. 
How Far is the Present High School and Early 
College Training Adapted to the Nature and 
Needs of Adolescents? (Read before the N. E. 
Ass’n of Colleges and Secondary Schools, Boston, 
Oct. 19, 1901.) Official Report of the 16th Annual 
Meeting, pp. 72-104. 
Clark University: What it Has Accomplished in 
12 Years: Its Needs. Pamphlet Pub. by the Univ., 
Nov. 5, 1901, 10 pp. 
Comparison of American and Foreign Systems of 
Popular Education. (Lecture before the Twen- 
tieth Century Club., Boston, Dec. 18, 1901.) 
Some Fundamental Principles of Sunday School 
and Bible Teaching. Ped. Sem., Dec., 1901. Vol. 
8, PP- 439-468. 
1902. The High School as the People’s College. Proc. 
of the Department of Superintendence, N. E. A., 
Chicago, Feb. 27, 1902. Also the High School as the 
People’s College Versus the Fitting School. Ped. 
Sem., March, 1902. Vol. 9, pp. 63-73. 
What is Research in a University Sense and How 
May it Best be Promoted? Ped Sem., March, 
1902. Vol. 9, pp. 74-80. 
Some Social Aspects of Education. Ped. Sem., 
March, 1902. Vol. 9, pp. 81-91. 
Adolescents and High School English, Latin and 
Algebra. Ped. Sem., March, 1902. Vol. 9, pp. 92- 
105. 
605 APPENDIX 
Some Criticisms of High School Physics and Man- 
ual Training and Mechanic Arts High Schools, 
With Suggested Correlations. Ped. Sem., June, 
1902. Vol. 9, pp. 193-204. 
Normal Schools, Especially in Massachusetts. 
Ped. Sent., June, 1902. Vol. 9, pp. 180-192. 
Report of the President to the Board of Trustees 
of Clark University, Worcester, Mass., Oct., 
1902, pp. 11-30. 
How Children and Youth Think and Feel About 
Clouds. (With J. E. W. Wallin.) Ped. Sem., Dec., 
1902. Vol. 9, pp. 460-506. 
1903. Reactions to Light and Darkness. (With Theodate 
L. Smith.) Am. Jour, of Psy., Jan., 1903. Vol. 14, 
pp. 21-83. 
Note on Moon Fancies. Am. Jour, of Psy., Jan., 
1903. Vol. 14, pp. 88-91. 
Child Study at Clark University: An Impending 
New Step. Am. Jour, of Psy., Jan., 1903. Vol. 14, 
pp. 96-106. Gives a full list of the topical syllabi 
published under Dr. Hall’s direction since Oct., 1894, 
and the published work based thereon. 
The Relations Between Lower and Higher Races. 
Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc., Jan., 1903. 2nd Ser., Vol. 17, 
pp. 4-13. 
Children’s Ideas of Fire, Heat, Frost and Cold. 
(With C. E. Browne.) Ped. Sem., March, 1903. 
Vol. 10, pp. 27-85. 
Note on Cloud Fancies. Ped. Sem., March, 1903. 
Vol. 10, pp. 96-100. 
Showing Off and Bashfulness as Phases of Self- 
Consciousness. (With Theodate L. Smith.) Ped. 
Sem., June, 1903. Vol. 10, pp. 159-199. 
Marriage and Fecundity of College Men and 
Women. (With Theodate L. Smith.) Ped. Sem., 
Sept., 1903. Vol. 10, pp. 275-314. 
Curiosity and Interest. (With Theodate L. Smith.) 
Ped. Sem., Sept., 1903. Vol. 10, pp. 315-358. 
Co-Education in the High School. July, 1903. 
Proc. N. E. A., 1903, pp. 446-460. 
1904. The Cat and the Child. (With C. E. Browne.) 
Ped. Sem., March, 1904. Vol. 11, pp. 3-29. 
Address, “The Library and the University,” and 
Remarks as Presiding Officer at the Public 
606 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
Opening of the Library Building of Clark Uni- 
versity. January 14, 1904. Publications of the 
Clark University Library, April, 1904. Vol. 1, pp. 
44, 46, 51, 66, 67-70. 
Editorial. First Issue of the American Journal of 
Religious Psychology and Education, May, 1904. 
Vol. 1, pp. 1-6. 
The Jesus of History and of the Passion versus 
The Jesus of the Resurrection. Am. Jour, of 
Rel. Psy. and Ed., May, 1904. Vol. 1, pp. 30-64. 
Reviews of Religious Literature. Am. Jour, of Rel. 
Psy. and Ed., May, 1904. Vol. 1, pp. 98-111. 
The Natural Activities of Children as Deter- 
mining the Industries in Early Education. St. 
Louis, Mo., June 30, 1904. Proc. N. E. A., 1904. 
pp. 443-447- 
In How Far May Child Psychology Take the 
Place of Adult Psychology or Rational Psy- 
chology in the Training of Teachers? Proc. 
N. E. A., St. Louis, June 30, 1904, pp. 568-571. 
Mental Science. Address before the Division of 
Mental Science, Cong, of Arts and Science. St. 
Louis, Mo., Oct., 1904. Science, Oct. 14, 1904. 
N. S. Vol. 20, pp. 481-490. Also appears as “Unity 
of Mental Science,” Congress of Arts and Sciences, 
Boston, Houghton, Mifflin, 1905-1907. 8 Vols. Vol. 
5, 1906, pp. 577-589- 
Reviews of Religious Literature. Am. Jour, of Rel. 
Psy. and Ed., Nov., 1904. Vol. 1, pp. 187-213. 
1905. Co-Instruction in Graduate Schools. Ass’n Am. 
Universities, Balt., Md., Jan. 13, 1905. Journal of 
Proceedings, 1905, pp. 42-46. 
The Negro Question. Proc. Mass. Historical Soc., 
1905. 2nd Ser., Vol. 19, pp. 95-107. 
New Ideals of Motherhood Suggested by Child 
Study. Address at National Congress of Mothers, 
Washington, D. C., March 10, 1905. Report of the 
National Cong, of Mothers, Wash., D. C., 1905. 
pp. 14-27. 
Citizen’s Initiative as a Factor in Educational 
Progress. Address before Public Ed. Ass’n of Wor- 
cester, June 13, 1905. Wore. Mag., Oct., 1905. 
Vol. 8, pp. 209-213. 
A Central Pedagogical Library and Museum for 
607 APPENDIX 
Massachusetts. Ped. Sem., Dec., 1905. Vol, 12, 
pp. 464-470- 
Psychology of Jesus. Child Study in the Kinder- 
garten. Chautauqua and its Work. Lectures at 
Chautauqua, N. Y., July 24-Aug. 3, 1905. Chau. 
Assembly Herald, July 25-Aug. 4, 1905. 
Reviews of Religious Literature. Am. Jour, of Rel. 
Psy. and Ed., Aug., 1905. Vol. 1, pp. 319-334. 
What Children Do Read and What They Ought 
to Read. Jour, of Ped., Sept., 1905. Vol. 18, pp. 
40-51. 
The Pedagogy of History. Ped. Sem., Sept., 1905. 
Vol. 12, pp. 339-349- 
The Negro in Africa and America. Address at 
University of Virginia, July, 1905. Ped. Sem., Sept., 
1905. Vol. 12, pp. 350-368. 
Recent Observations in Pathological Psychology. 
Jour, of Soc. Sci., Sept., 1905, pp. 139-151. The 
same as “Certain Degenerative Tendencies Among 
Teachers.” Ped. Sem., Dec., 1905. Vol. 12, pp. 
454-463- 
What is Pedagogy? Ped. Sem., Dec., 1905. Vol 12, 
PP- 375-383. 
Remarks at the Public Opening of the Art De- 
partment, Clark University Library, Dec. 5, 
1905. Pubs, of the C. U. Library, Dec., 1905. 
Place of Formal Instruction in Religious and 
Moral Education in the Home. Proc. of the 3rd 
Annual Convention of the Religious Educ. Assoc., 
Boston, Feb. 12-16, 1905. pp. 67-72. 
1906. What Changes Should be Made in Public High 
Schools to Make Them More Efficient in 
Moral Training? Proc. of the 3rd Annual Con- 
vention of the Religious Educ. Assoc., Boston, Feb. 
12, 1906, pp. 219-223. 
On Feeling. Psy. Bull., Feb. 15, 1906. Vol. 3, No. 2, 
p. 53, et seq. 
The Affiliation of Psychology with Philosophy 
and with the Natural Sciences. Science, Feb. 
23, 1906. N. S. Vol. 23, pp. 297-301. 
Undeveloped Races in Contact with Civilization. 
Wash. Univ. Assoc. Bulletin, 1906. Vol. 4, pp. 
145-150- 
608 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
Co-Education. Amer. Acad, of Medicine, Bulletin, 
Oct., 1906. Vol. 7, pp. 653-656. 
Three Duties of the American Scholar; Bac- 
calaureate Address. Clark College Record, Oct., 
1906. Vol 1, pp. 138-152. 
The Appointment and Obligations of Graduate 
Fellows. Jour, of Proc. and Addresses at the 8th 
Annual Con. of the Assoc, of Amer. Univ., 1906. 
Cambridge, Mass., Nov. 23-24, 1906, pp. 38. 
1907. Some Dangers in Our Educational System and 
How to Meet Them. New Eng. Mag., Feb., 1907. 
Vol. 35, pp. 667-675. 
The German Teacher Teaches. New Eng., Mag., 
May, 1907. Vol. 36, pp. 282-287. 
Should Modern Be Substituted for Ancient Lan- 
guages for Culture and Training? Address, May 
11, 1907. Pubs, of the N. E. Mod. Lang. Assoc., 
Boston, 1907. Vol. 1, pp. 45-57. 
Address at the Annual Commencement of the 
University of Maryland, May 30, 1907. Hospital 
Bulletin (Baltimore), June 15, 1907. 
Criticism of Teaching the Classics. Jour, of Ed., 
Boston, July 4, 1907. 
How and When to be Frank With Boys. Ladies’ 
Home Jour., Phila., Sept., 1907. 
The Culture-Value of Modern as Contrasted 
With That of Ancient Languages. New Eng. 
Mag., Oct., 1907. Vol. 37, pp. 167-173. 
The Relation of the Church to Education. 
Address at 13th Triennial session of Cong’l Churches 
at Cleveland, O., Oct., 1907. Addresses, Reports, etc. 
The National Council of the Cong’l Churches, Bos- 
ton, 1907. pp. 33-44. Also newspaper comment on 
same. Also in Ped. Sem., June, 1908. Vol. 15, pp. 
186-196. 
The Function of Music in the College Curricu- 
lum. Address at Columbia University, Dec. 27, 1907. 
Papers and Proc. Music Teachers’ Nat’l Assoc., Ser. 
2, 1907. Pub. by the Assoc., 1908. pp. 13-24. Also 
in Ped. Sem., March, 1908. Vol. 15, pp. 117-126. 
1908. Conscience, Health and Honor. The Social Educa- 
tion Quarterly, Jan., 1908. Vol. 2, pp. 66-71. 
Some General Defects in Our School System and 
How to Meet Them. The Connecticut Assoc, of 
609 APPENDIX 
Classical and High School Teachers. Report of 1908 
meeting, Hartford, Conn. pp. 10-16. Feb. 15. 1908. 
The Needs and Methods of Educating Young 
People in the Hygiene of Sex. Ped. Sent., March, 
1908. Vol. 15, pp. 82-91. Also in American Society 
for Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, Transactions, 
1908. Vol. 2, pp. 195-205. 
The University Idea. Ped. Sent., March, 1908. Vol. 
15, pp. 92-104. 
Psychology of Childhood as Related to Reading 
and the Public Library. Ped. Sem., March, 1908. 
Vol. 15, pp. 105-116. 
The Function of Music in the College Curricu- 
lum. Ped. Sem., March, 1908. Vol. 15, pp. 117- 
126. Also in Music Teachers’ National Assoc., 
Studies in Musical Education, 1907, Ser. 2, pp. 13-24. 
A Glance at the Phyletic Background of Genetic 
Psychology. Am. Jour, of Psy., April, 1908. Vol. 
19, pp. 149-212. 
Feminization in School and Home. World’s Work, 
May, 1908. Vol. 16, pp. 10237-10244. 
Must Your Child Lie? Appleton’s Mag., May, 1908. 
Vol. 11, pp. 543-549- 
Relation of the Church to Education. Ped Sem., 
June, 1908. Vol. 15, pp. 186-196. 
Pedagogy—Its True Value in Education. Ped. 
Sem., June, 1908. Vol. 15, pp. 197-206. 
The Medical Profession and Children. Ped. Sem., 
June, 1908. Vol. 15, pp. 207-216. 
Sunday Observance. Ped. Sem., June, 1908. Vol. 15, 
pp. 217-229. 
From Generation to Generation: With Some 
Plain Language About Race Suicide and the 
Instruction of Children During Adolescence. 
Amer. Mag., July, 1908. Vol. 66, pp. 247-254. 
The Boy That Your Boy Plays With. The Circle, 
July, 1908. Vol. 4, pp. 24-60. 
Remarks at Meeting of the Story-Tellers’ 
League. World’s Work, July, 1908. Vol. 16, p 
10414. 
New Work in Education. To Raise Our Standard. 
World’s Work, July, 1908. Vol. 16, p. 10454. 
The Awkward Age. Appleton’s, Aug, 1908. Vol. 12, 
pp. 149-156- 
610 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
Elements of Strength and Weakness in Physical 
Education as Taught in Colleges. Ped. Sent., 
Sept., 1908. Vol. 15, pp. 347-352. 
Recent Advances in Child Study. Ped Sem., Sept., 
1908. Vol. 15, pp. 353-357* 
The Psychology of Music and the Light it 
Throws Upon Musical Education. Ped Sem., 
Sept., 1908. Vol. 15, pp. 358-364. 
How Far Are the Principles of Education Along 
Indigenous Lines Applicable to American In- 
dians? Ped. Sem., Sept., 1918. Vol. 15, pp. 
365-369- 
The Culture-Value of Modern as Contrasted 
With That of Ancient Languages. Ped Sem., 
Sept., 1908. Vol. 15, pp. 370-379. 
Spooks and Telepathy. Appleton's, Dec., 1908. Vol. 
12, pp. 677-683. 
Education of the Heart. Southern Calif. Teachers’ 
Assoc., Dec. 21-24, 1908. Redlands Review Press, 
1909. pp. 31-38. 
Mystic or Borderline Phenomena. Southern Calif. 
Teachers’ Assoc., Dec. 21-24, 1908. Redlands Re- 
view Press, 1909, pp. 103-107. 
1909. The Budding Girl. Appleton’s Mag., Jan., 1909. 
Vol. 13, pp. 47-54. Also Southern Calif. Teachers’ 
Assoc., Dec. 21-24, 1908. 
Modern Aspects of Evolution. Centennial Address 
in Honor of Charles Darwin before the American 
Assoc, for the Advancement of Science, Baltimore, 
Jan., 1909. (In Fifty Years of Darwinism.) N. Y., 
Henry Holt & Co., 1909. 274 p. 
The Press and the Professors. Appleton’s, March, 
1909. Vol. 13, pp. 273-279. 
A Man’s Adventure in Domestic Industries. 
Appleton’s, June, 1909. Vol. 13, pp. 677-683. 
Twentieth Anniversary of Clark University. 
Nation (N. Y.), Sept. 23, 1909. Vol. 89, pp. 284- 
285. 
Address at Memorial Service to President Wright 
in Art Room, Clark University Library, June 14, 
1909. Clark College Record, Oct. 1909. Vol. 4, pp. 
146-151. 
Address at the Fiftieth Anniversary of the 
Founding of the Worcester Free Public Li- 
611 APPENDIX 
brary, Dec. 23, 1909. pp. 30-36. F. S. Blanchard 
& Co., Worcester, Mass., 1910, 40 p. 
1910. Education in Sex Hygiene. Eugenics Review, Jan., 
1910. Vol. 1, pp. 242-253. 
A Children’s Institute. Harper’s, March, 1910. 
Vol. 120, pp. 620-624. 
What is to Become of Your Baby? Cosmopolitan, 
April, 1910. Vol. 47, pp. 661-668. 
The Children’s Institute of Clark University, 
Worcester, Mass. Prospectus of the Children’s 
Institute, Clark University, Worcester, Mass. April 
30, 1910. 
“The Chief End of Man.” Current Literature, May, 
1910. Vol. 48, pp. 528-531. 
General Outline of the New Child Study Work 
at Clark University. Ped Sem., June, 1910. Vol. 
17, pp. 160-165. 
The Point of View Toward Primitive Races. Jour. 
of Race Development, July, 1910. Vol. 1, pp. 5-11. 
Mission Pedagogy (With Comments by Others). 
Journal of Race Development, Oct., 1910. Vol. 1, 
pp. 127-146; April, 1911, Vol. 1, pp. 503-518. 
Physical Training. Ped Sem., Dec., 1910. Vol. 17, 
pp. 491-496. 
The National Child Welfare Conference: Its 
Work and Its Relations to Child Study. Ped. 
Sem., Dec., 1910. Vol. 17, pp. 497-504. Also in 
Proc. N. E. A., 1910, pp. 893-899. 
The Co-Ordination of the School With the 
Three Score Other Child Welfare Agencies. 
Annual Report of the 56th Annual Meeting of the 
New Jersey State Teachers’ Association, Atlantic 
City, N. J., Dec. 27, 28, 29, 1910, pp. 63-79. 
Improvements Needed in the Teaching of Certain 
High School Subjects. Annual Report of the 
56th Annual Meeting of the New Jersey State 
Teachers’ Association, Atlantic City, N. J., Dec. 27, 
28, 29, 1910, pp. 125-135. 
1911. In Life’s Drama Sex Plays the Leading Part. 
Sagamore Sociological Conference, June 28-30, 1911; 
pp. 27-31. 
Eugenics: Its Ideals and What It Is Going to 
Do. Religious Education, June, 1911. Vol. 6, pp. 
I52-I59- 
612 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
The Problem of Dependent Races. Report of the 
29th Annual Lake Mohonk Conference, Lake Mo- 
honk, N. Y., Oct. 18-20, 1911; pp. 225-232. 
The Efficiency of Humanity. Commencement 
Address, Clark College, June 15, 1911. Clark 
College Record, Oct., 1911. Vol. 6, pp. 161-175. 
The Teaching of Sex in Schools and Colleges. 
Social Diseases (Amer. Soc. for Sanitary and Moral 
Prophylaxis, N. Y.), 1911. Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 1-19. 
1912. The Genetic View of Berkeley’s Religious Motiva- 
tion. Journal of Religious Psychology, April, 1912. 
Vol. 5, pp. 137-162. 
Children’s Rights. The Kansas School Magazine, 
May, 1912. Vol. 1, pp. 183-187; p. 213. 
Why Kant is Passing. Amer. Jour of Psy., July, 
1912. Vol. 23, pp. 370-426. 
Keeping Children Well. The Necessity of Proper 
Sanitation in Home and School. Delineator, 
Nov., 1912. Vol. 80, p. 368. 
Social Phases of Psychology. Address delivered be- 
fore the American Sociological Society, Dec., 1912. 
Amer. Jour, of Sociology, March, 1913. Vol. 18, 
pp. 613-621. 
1914. A Synthetic Genetic Study of Fear. Amer. Jourt 
of Psy., April and July, 1914. Vol. 25, pp. 149-200; 
321-392. 
Contemporary University Problems. Address at the 
Exercises Celebrating the Twenty-fifth anniversary 
of the opening of Clark University, March 28, 1914. 
Ped. Sem., June, 1914. Vol. 21, pp. 242-255. 
Some Psychological Aspects of Teaching Modern 
Languages. Ped. Sem., June, 1914. Vol. 21, pp. 
256-263. 
Remarks at the Banquet, Twenty-fifth An- 
niversary of Clark University. Publications of 
the Clark University Library, July, 1914. Vol. 3, 
No. 7, pp. 48-53. 
Remarks at the Dedicatory Ceremony of the 
Memorial Library, Ashfield, Mass., August 29, 
1914- 
Education and the Social Hygiene Movement. 
Social Hygiene, Dec., 1914. Vol. 1, pp. 29-35. 
Nietzsche. Mass. Hist. Soc., Dec., 1914, Jan., 1915, 
pp. 176-184. 
613 APPENDIX 
Teaching the War. School and Society, Vol. i, pp. 
8-13- 
1915. The Mediaeval Universities and Some of Their 
Lessons for Us. Address at the twenty-fifth an- 
niversary of the founding of the Catholic University 
of America. Catholic Univ. Bui., April, 1915. Vol. 
2i, pp. 83-96. Ped. Sem., June, 1915. Vol 22, pp. 
275-289. 
Address at Induction of H. C. Bumpus as President 
of Tufts College. Tufts College Graduate, Autumn, 
1915. Vol. 14, pp. 76-84. 
Anger as a Primary Emotion, and the Application 
of Freudian Mechanisms to its Phenomena. 
Jour. Abn. Psychol., June, 1915. Vol. 10, pp. Si- 
87- Also Amer. Jour, of Psy., July, 1915. Vol. 26, 
pp. 438-443- 
Thanatophobia and Immortality. Amer. Jour, of 
Psy., Oct., 1915. Vol. 26, pp. 550-613. 
Recreation and Reversion. Ped. Sem., Dec., 1915. 
Vol. 22, pp. 510-520. 
Beginnings of the Supreme Pedagogy. Ped. Sem., 
Dec., 1915. Vol. 22, pp. 552-588. 
The Psychology of the Nativity. Jour of Rel. Psy., 
Dec., 1915. Vol. 7, pp. 421-465- 
Teaching the War. School and Society, Jan. 2, 1915. 
Vol. 1, No. 1. 
Yankee and Jew. Menorah Jour., 1915. Vol. 1, 
No. 2. 
1916. What We Owe to the Tree-life of Our Ape-like 
Ancestors. Ped. Sem., March, 1916. Vol. 23, pp. 
94-119. 
Psychological Notes on the War. Jour. Race De- 
velopment, April, 1916. Vol. 6, pp. 357-369. 
The War and Some of Its Relations to Education. 
School and Society, July 22, 1916. Vol. 4, pp. 
115-120. 
The War and Education. Jour, of the N. E. A., 
Sept., 1916. Vol. 1, pp. 85-91. 
Letter to German University League. Annual Re- 
port and Anniversary Speeches, N. Y., Oct. 28, 1916, 
pp. 22-23. 
How Can Universities be so Organized as to Stimu- 
late More Work for the Advancement of 
614 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
Science? Ass’n. Amer. Univ., 18th annual con- 
ference, Nov. io, ii, 1916, pp. 25-38. 
1917. Practical Relations between Psychology and the 
War. Jour, of Applied Psychol., March, 1917. Vol. 
1, pp. 9-16. 
University Research. Fed. Sent., March, 1917. Vol. 
24, PP- 97-113. 
A Reminiscence. Read at the 25th meeting of the 
American Psychological Ass’n, New York, Decem- 
ber, 1916. Amer. Jour of Psy., April, 1917. Vol. 
28, pp. 297-300. 
A Suggestion for a Jewish University. Menorah 
Jour., April, 1917. Vol. 3, pp. 98-101. 
Some Aspects of the War. Address at the seventy- 
fifth anniversary of the founding of Williston Semi- 
nary, June 16, 1917. Pub. by Trustees of Williston 
Seminary, Easthampton, Mass., 1917. 12 pp. 
1918. A Medium in the Bud. Amer. Jour, of Psy., April, 
1918. Vol. 29, pp. 144-158. 
Some Educational Values of War. Fed. Sem., 
Sept., 1918. Vol. 28, pp. 303-307. Also in Jour. 
N. E. A., October, 1918, Vol. 3, pp. 96-100. 
A General Survey of Child Study. Fed. Sem., 
Sept., 1918. Vol. 25, pp. 308-318. Also in Jour. 
N. E. A., Nov., 1918. Vol. 3, pp. 216-219. 
Morale in War and After. Psy. Bui., Nov., 1918, 
Vol. 15, pp. 361-426. 
1919. Practical Applications of Psychology as De- 
veloped by the War. Fed. Sem., March, 1919. 
Vol. 26, pp. 76-89. 
The Veiw-point of the Psychologist as to Courses 
of Study Which Will Meet the Future De- 
mands of a Democracy. Ped. Sem., March, 1919. 
Vol. 26, pp. 90-99. 
Spiel, Erholung and Ruckschlag. Zeits. f. Sexual- 
wiss. 1919, vol. 6, pp. 52-61. 
Some Relations Between the War and Psychol- 
ogy. Amer. Jour, of Psy., April, 1919, Vol. 30, pp. 
211-223. 
1920. Psychology and Industry. Ped. Sem., Sept., 1920. 
Vol. 27, pp. 281-293. 
1921. Old Age, Atlantic, Jan., 1921. 
Gesture, Mimesis, Types of Temperament, and 
Movie Pedagogy. Ped. Sem., June, 1921. 
615 APPENDIX 
The Message of the Zeitgeist. Set. Mo., Aug., 1921. 
1922. Notes on the Psychology of Recreation. Ped. Sent., 
March, 1922. 
Flapper Americana Novissima. Atlantic Monthly, 
June, 1922. 
“Salvaging Civilization.” Century, Oct., 1922. 
More Important Addresses 
Jhe New Psychology. Inaugural at Baltimore. 
Andover Review, Feb. and March., 1885. 
Inaugural at Clark, 1889. Clark University Open- 
ing Exercises, 9-32 pp. 
Contemporary University Problems. Address at the 
celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Clark, 
1914. Ped. Sem., vol. 21, 242 pp. 
The Medieval Universities and Some of Their 
Lessons for Us. Address at the twenty-fifth anni- 
versary of the founding of the Catholic University 
of America, 1915. Ped. Sem., vol. 22, 275 pp. INDEX 
Activity versus passivity as test, 
468 et seq. 
Agricultural education, 504. 
Albums of my parents, 77. 
Alden, John, an ancestor, 22 
et seq. 
Aldrich, P. Emory, 60. 
Alpha Delta Phi, 165. 
America, chance of leadership, 
for, 543 et seq. 
American Journal of Psychol- 
ogy founded, 227. 
Animal psychology, teaching, 
368. 
Animals, domestic, 89. 
Animism of childhood, 374 
et seq. 
Anniversary, decennial, at 
Clark, 304, 321 et seq. 
Antioch College, 198 et seq. 
Apology for this book, 2 et seq. 
Ashfield Farm, the, 63. 
dinners, 179. 
traits and love of, 172 et seq. 
Association of universities, 526. 
Associations of teachers, 510. 
Athens, visited, 275. 
Attitudes, four, toward life, 
580 et seq. 
Autobiography, motives of, 1 
et seq. 
Barnard, Henry, 495. 
Barns, 54. 
Bascom, John, 157. 
Beals, pedigree of, 23. 
Joseph, 29. 
Mrs. A. W., 64. 
Beecher, Henry Ward, 181. 
“Bees,” for work, 55. 
Behaviorism, 432 et seq. 
Belding, Milo, 175. 
Berkeley, my study of, 405. 
Berlin, revisited, 272. 
Bible Class at Williams, 163. 
Bibliography, 597-616 
Bilroth, 271. 
Birth, my, 87. 
Blakeslee, Professor, 324. 
Blow, Susan, 497. 
Boarding around, 139. 
Bonn, life in, 188. 
Books, my list of, 597-616. 
Boston lectures, 216 et seq. 
Brewster, Elder William, 25. 
Bryant, William Cullen, 31. 
Burnham, Dr. W. H., 403. 
Call, the, to Baltimore, 262. 
Canadian teachers, 552. 
Carnegie’s gift, 392. 
Carter, Franklin, 164. 
Catholic students, 554. 
Chadbourne, P. A., 157. 
Change to larger enviroment 
and study, 147. 
Chicago, hegira to, 293 et seq. 
Child study organizations, 392. 
story of, 397 et seq. 
texts, 399. 
Childhood in autobiography, 
394 et seq. 
Children's Institute, the, 401 
et seq. 
Children’s organizations, 393. 
Chores, 91. 
Clark, Jonas C., 153. 
his life, 260 et seq. 
his reticence, 298-299. 
his will, 305 et seq. 
617 INDEX 
Clark University, 5, 258 et seq. 
college, first steps toward, 
306. 
distinctions of, 353. 
faculty, depleted for Chicago, 
293 et seq. 
faculty, the first, 288. 
finances, 290, 296. 
ideals of, 326 et seq. 
opening exercises, 290. 
prospects darkening, 293 etseq. 
trustees, 280. 
Classical study, 153. 
Clergymen, training of, 523. 
Coasting, 99. 
Collections, 99. 
Comparative psychology, 368. 
Composition, my chef d’oeuvre. 
I24-129. 
Conditioned reflex, the, 415 et 
seq. 
Conservatism of old New 
England, 56. 
Contents of children’s minds, 
381- 
Conversion, my, 163. 
Cook, Joseph, 218. 
Correspondence schools, 512. 
Coudersport, 172. 
Country life, value of, 374 et 
seq. 
Course of study at Albany 
Female Academy, 32, 33. 
Courses, my, at the Hopkins, 
254- 
Cowles, Dr. Edward, 234, 314. 
Cram, benefits of, 562. 
Craze, history, 123. 
Crazes, 100. 
and fads, my, 367 et seq. 
Criticisms, my, 568. 
Cross, story of, as test, 458. 
Crown Prince Friedrich, 209. 
Curtis, H. S., 400. 
Dancing, clog, 116. 
Death, my first acquaintances 
with, 135 et seq. 
Declamation, 117. 
Devens, Charles, 280. 
Dewey, John, 499 et seq. 
Discipline of school, my trouble 
in, 141. 
Discouragement on return from 
Europe, 220. 
District, the school, 109. 
Docent system, 319. 
Dole, G. B., 161. 
Dorner, 190. 
Drawing, 488. 
Drawings of children, 396. 
Drinking habits, 220. 
Drives for education, 540. 
Du Bois-Reymond, 193. 
Duncan, R. K., 316. 
Easthampton, 152 et seq. 
ficlaircissement, my, 423. 
ftcole Normale, 276. 
Ecole pratique des hautes 
etudes, 276. 
Education, industrial, 20. 
in Europe, 215. 
legal, 523. 
medical, 521. 
the higher, 525. 
world’s chief need, 21. 
Educational survey, 16. 
awakening needed, 19. 
changes in my day, 479 et 
seq. 
defects, 515 et seq. 
departments in colleges, 17- 
19. 
Ego, the nature of, 438. 
Emerson at Williams, 162, 163. 
Epistemology and food, 419. 
Erethism, mental, my first, 
129. 
Europe, for Clark, 265. 
going to, 182. 
Evolution, charm and first 
courses in, 357 et seq. 
first love of, 184. 
“Exempt,” my painful ex- 
perience as an, 148 et seq. 
618 INDEX 
Faculty, representation on the 
Board, 351. 
resignation and trustees re- 
sponse, 294. 
Fads, in school, 143. 
my, 367 et seq. 
Failures, my, 582, et seq. 
Farm life, 62. 
(No. 1, 88. 
Father, my, 47. 
as a teacher, 60. 
family traits of, 48 et seq. 
going west, 61. 
his early life, 59. 
his only speech, 65-72. 
his temper, 74. 
his traits, 64. 
my consciousness of, 75. 
Fechner, T., 207. 
Fellowships at the Hopkins, 
230. 
Fichte, 544. 
Fire imagery, 101. 
First laboratory of psychology, 
7- 
Flax, 54. 
Floody, Dr., 316. 
Flowers, 101. 
Fortunate, my life, 595. 
Freudianism, my attitude 
towards, 410 et seq. 
Freud’s therapy criticized, 12. 
Frost images, 101. 
Function and structure, 431. 
Gage, Dr. T. H., 285-6. 
Games, old school, in. 
Geissler, Dr. L. R., 399. 
German student customs, 191. 
Germany, arrival and first ex- 
periences, 186. 
Gildersleeve, Professor, 238. 
Gilman, D. C., his policies 
characterized, 246 et seq. 
Girl graduates, 556. 
Girls, 220 et seq. 
Golding, F. P., 286. 
Gossip and psychology, 105. 
Grandfather Hall, 52. 
Gregory, C. R., 239. 
Griffin, E. H., 254. 
Group soul, the, 439 et seq. 
Gun, the first, 91. 
Hall, uncles and aunts char- 
acterized, 47 et seq. 
Grandfather, 52. 
Orville, 50. 
traits, 53 et seq. 
Halleck, William, his famous 
tract, 29. 
Handicaps, my, 590 et seq. 
Harper, President, 295. 
Harris, W. T., 200, 496. 
Harvard, instructor in, 203 et 
seq. 
Haying, 54. 
Health test, the, 451 et seq. 
Heart, my fears of its failure, 
137- 
Helmholtz, work with, 208. 
Herbart, 498. 
High School, 492 et seq. 
Hill, D. J., 275. 
History craze, 123. 
beginnings of, 439. 
in school, 487. 
Hoar, Senator, G. F., 281 et 
seq. 
Hodge, C. F., Professor, 325. 
Holland, visit to, 265. 
Home industries, 53 et seq., 
103 et seq. 
leaving, 151. 
return to, 278. 
Hopkins, Albert, 157. 
Hopkins, Mark, his system, 166 
et seq. 
Johns Hopkins University, 225. 
famous lecturers at, 242. 
my leaving, 229. 
the founder, 229. 
Human nature, knowledge of 
most needed, 536. 
Hunger, 414 et seq. 
Hurlbert, 315. 
619 INDEX 
Idiosyncrasy, a psychic, 138. 
Industries, home, 103 et seq. 
Intensive versus extensive 
work, 532 et seq. 
Introspection, 10. 
Introspections, 574 et seq. 
Isolation, my, 594. 
Jesus, death of, 428 et seq. 
psychology of, 423 et seq. 
resurrection of, 428 et seq. 
Jewish students, 555. 
Journal of Religious Psychol- 
ogy. 3I7- 
Jowett, 277. 
Junto, the, at Williams, 160. 
Kaiser Wilhelm I, 192. 
Kant, philosopher, my study of, 
405. 
Kellogg, Paul, 402. 
Klein, Felix, 273. 
Kline, V. P., 160. 
Lange-James, 430. 
Languages, modern, 494. 
Law, education in, 523. 
Lecture methods in Germany, 
211 et seq. 
Lecture tours, my, 304. 
Lecturing at Williams, 168. 
Lefthandedness, my, its results, 
122. 
Library, Clark, 309. 
Life, my early, complacency 
with, 144 et seq. 
Life on farm, 62. 
Locating stories, 102. 
Longheadedness, my, its results, 
122. 
Loves, my first, 134 et seq. 
Loyalty as a test, 470 et seq. 
Ludwig, Carl, 205. 
Lyon, Mary, 32. 
Mabie, H. W., 160, 567. 
MacAuliffe system, 449. 
Malthus, justified, 532 et seq. 
Mann, Horace, 495. 
Manual training, 502. 
Martin, H. N., 238. 
Mason, O. T., 243. 
Medical education, 521. 
Mellon Institute, 316. 
Menageries, 95. 
Meyer, Dr. Adolph, 314. 
Meyer, Victor, 274. 
Mill of the mountain miller, 30. 
Mission work in New York, 
178. 
Montessori, 498. 
Morris, G. S., 196. 
Mosso, 275. 
Mother, my, as a teacher, 33- 
35- 
characterization of, 41-45, 81. 
her compositions, 31. 
her education, 32-33. 
her relations, 27 et seq. 
her religious diary, 35 et seq. 
Motives of this book, 1, 2. 
Motor-mindedness, 376. 
Mountain day at Williams, 164. 
Mountain miller, the, character- 
ized, 29. 
Moving to Ashfield, 88. 
Musee Guimet, 276. 
Music, my early efforts in, 114 
et seq. 
reveries, my, 116, 489. 
Myth, 108. 
N. E. A., the, 511. 
Narcissism, 577. 
Nation, the, working for, 210. 
National Academy of Sciences, 
the, 528. 
Nature, love of, as test, 463 et 
seq. 
objects in, rapport with, 374 
et seq. 
Newcomb, Simon, 235. 
New York preachers, 179. 
New York theater, 180. 
Normal schools, 508. 
620 INDEX 
Norton, C. E., 170. 
Number work in school, 484. 
Orations, 117 et seq. 
Oratorical devices, 213 et seq. 
Oscillations, my, 571 et seq. 
Over education, dangers of, 
564- 
Oxford, 277. 
Paidocentric view, 519. 
Paper, the school, 119 et seq. 
Parallelism and interaction, 
431- 
Parenthood at different stages 
of life, 75 et seq. 
Parents, my, 7, 73 et seq., 77, 
79, 81 et seq., 83-85, 253. 
Parker, F. W., 481. 
Parsing, 123. 
Passion of Jesus, 427 et seq. 
Passivity, 573. 
Passivity versus activity, 468 
et seq. 
Paul, John, founder of the 
family in America, 24. 
Pavlovism, 414 et seq. 
Peabody Institute, 243. 
Pedagogical tour in this coun- 
try, 264. 
courses, 513. 
museums, 485. 
Pedagogy at Johns Hopkins, 
226. 
Pedigree of the author, 22 et 
seq. 
Periods of life, four, 586. 
Perry, A. L., 157. 
Ph.D. at Harvard, 217. 
Philosophy, history of, in this 
country, 233. 
Physics, mistake of, its place, 
518. 
Pierce, Charles, 226. 
Pigeons, passenger, 94. 
Placement of graduates, 556 et 
seq. 
Play, 396. 
Pleasure-pain, scale test, 457. 
Plimpton, Edith Hall, 81. 
Pobedonostsev, interview with, 
270. 
Points of compass, boxing the, 
580. 
Preaching, 182. 
Presentification, 531. 
Psychoanalysis and autobiogra- 
phy, 4, 11. 
my attitude toward, 410 et 
seq. 
Psychological Association, the, 
8. 
decline, causes of, 9 et seq. 
surds, 430. 
Psychologist, the, born, not 
made, 434 et seq. 
Psychology, future of, 437. 
most promising line now, 15. 
of religion, 422 et seq. 
progress in, Ch. VIII, 354 et 
seq. 
Psychophysic law, 430. 
Puritan Sunday, the, 219. 
Quakers and the Hopkins Uni- 
versity, 250. 
Questionnaire, method, the, 389, 
392- 
Rats, 91. 
Reading, for children, 483. 
in school, 480 et seq. 
intensive, 562 et seq. 
Reality, the nature of, 419. 
Reflex, conditioned, 416 et seq. 
Reforms in education, classes 
of, 19 et seq. 
Religious problems of the Hop- 
kins, 245. 
education, 517. 
psychology, 422. 
Research, at Clark, ideals of, 
328 et seq., 529 et seq. 
at Hopkins, 255 et seq. 
psychology of, 538 et seq. 
621 INDEX 
Retrospect on life, 548. 
Revolt, my spirit of, 223. 
Rhetoricals in school, 119. 
Rice, W. W., 285. 
“Rotten,” school, a, 133. 
Rowland, Professor, 237. 
Rural school of old, the, 490 
et seq. 
Russell, E. H., 307. 
Russia, visit to, 267 et seq. 
Sage, Henry, 182. 
Salisbury, Steven, 283. 
Sanford, E. C., 311. 
School, day’s program in, 112. 
School district, the, 109. 
School house, the old, no. 
School, my first teaching, 138 
et seq. 
Science in Washington, 527. 
Scrapbooks, 99. 
Sears, 26. 
Second breath, test, 454 et seq. 
first experience of, 129. 
Seeing life, 578 et seq. 
Seeley, Clark, 154. 
Self-knowledge and autobiogra- 
phy, 3, 447 et seq. 
Self, views of, 438. 
Seligmanns, 197. 
Seminary, my, at Clark, 326 et 
seq. 
Seminary, origin of, 559. 
Sex, study of, 406-408 et seq. 
Shaw, Mrs. Quincy, 381. 
Shed talk, 104. 
Skunks, 93. 
Smith, Henry B., 178. 
Smith, Theodate L., 393. 
Sociability, my, 588 et seq. 
Song, at home, 114. 
Soul of cities, etc., 442. 
Space, infinite, child’s feeling 
toward, 374 et seq. 
Squirrel hunts, 94. 
Statistics of our education sys- 
tem, 515. 
Stetson, F. L., 161. 
Stories, homely, 104 et seq. 
located, 102. 
my early working of, 120 et 
seq. 
Students, my, at the Hopkins, 
232. 
Students in psychology, differ- 
ent classes of, 553 et seq. 
Sublimation as a test, 465 et 
seq. 
Subnormals and education, 505. 
Successes, my, 584 et seq. 
Sunday-school methods, 33. 
Sweden, visit to, 266. 
Syllabi, topical, 382-388. 
Sylvester, Professor, 236. 
Symbolism, wild, 12-13. 
Sympathy as test, 460 et seq. 
System of Mark Hopkins esti- 
mated, I68 et seq. 
Tanner, A. E., history of Clark, 
279, 404. 
Teachers’ associations, 510. 
Teachers, local differences in, 
549 et seq. 
Teacher training, 507. 
Teaching, my first, 138 et seq. 
Tenth anniversary, 304. 
Testers, the, 13. 
Tests, for races and periods, 
472. 
my experience with, 447. 
new ones proposed, 13-14. 
of abilities, 451. 
of intelligence, 502. 
Teutonophilism, 565. 
Theological schools, 523. 
Theses, 321 et seq. 
Thesis work, 560 et seq. 
Throwing and ballistics, 97. 
Tillie, 25. 
Traits of Ashfield Halls, 57. 
Treitschke, 193. 
Trendelenberg, 190. 
Turro, 419. 
Union Theological Seminary, 
177- 
622 INDEX 
Universities’, association of, 
526. 
University, abuses of, 333 et 
seq. 
the invisible, 545 et seq. 
Vienna, revisited, 271. 
Village versus farm, 58. 
Vinings, 23. 
Vita sexualis, my early, 131 et 
seq. 
Vivisection, 292. 
Vocabularies, 124. 
Vocational studies, 398. 
Von Holst, 273. 
Walker, Francis, 155. 
Walking tour to Switzerland, 
195- 
War of 1870, 194. 
and education, 337 et seq. 
prejudices at Baltimore, 
231. 
the teaching of, 517. 
Washburn, John D., 284. 
Washington, science at, 527. 
Water, its temptations, 96. 
Weakness of our education sys- 
tem, 514. 
Wealth, attitude toward, 591 et 
seq. 
Weather-vanes, 98. 
Wells, H. G., 519. 
Wilberforce College, 201. 
Wild electives, 189. 
Will of Mr. Clark, 305 et seq., 
309- 
Williams, Lillie A., 389. 
Williams College, 155 et seq. 
quarterly, 161. 
standards in my day, 158. 
Wilson, Woodrow, 240. 
Wind, psychic response to, 375. 
Women in Clark, 318. 
Woodbury, C. E., 162. 
Worcester Hospital, 314. 
Antiquarian Society, 315. 
Board of Trade, 316. 
library, 314. 
Wright, Carroll D., 307. 
Writing in school, 480 et seq. 
Wundt, 9, 204, 206. 
Youth, academic, some traits of, 
17- Books by G. STANLEY HALL,ll.d. 
THE LIFE AND CONFESSIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST. 
Dr. Hall’s own objective account of his long and distin- 
guished life. 
ADOLESCENCE: Its Psychology and its Relation to Physi- 
ology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Edu- 
cation. The authoritative study of this critical period of life. 
In it are gathered together all the known facts of the subject. 
2 vols. 
YOUTH: Its Education, Regimen and Hygiene. An abridg- 
ment of the author’s monumental “Adolescence.” The psycho- 
logical and physical truths that teachers and parents need to 
know. 
MORALE; The Supreme Standard of Life and Conduct. 
A notable book in which Dr. Hall shows in Morale a supreme 
standard of living. 
RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST. This delightful 
collection of stories, reminiscences and sketches reveals the 
distinguished psychologistTnTus lighter moments. 
EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS. The problems of education 
treated of by an educator of broad views and experience. 
ASPECTS OF CHILD LIFE AND EDUCATION. Studies 
of the child mind that are valuable additions to our knowl- 
edge of child psychology. 
FOUNDERS OF MODERN PSYCHOLOGY. The men who 
are regarded as the founders of modern psychology. This 
volume shows the personality, career, characteristics and 
writings of each man. 
JESUS, THE CHRIST, IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOLOGY. 
A unique contribution to the modern understanding of Jesus. 
A psychological scholar’s interpretation of what we kno«v of 
Christ, 
New York 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 
London “Adolescence” by G. Stanley Hall 
Reviews and Opinions 
“This is the most instructive book that we have ever 
read. The appearance of a book like this appals us 
by the painfulness of the contrast it suggests almost 
to a feeling of despair with regard to education in 
Britain. If America can produce so monumental a 
work, why cannot our country?”—School, London, 
England. 
“To the student of education the work is altogether 
the most important that has appeared in a quarter 
of a century or more; and to the teacher in the 
secondary school and the college who wishes to study 
the pedagogical problems with which he has to deal 
it is indispensable.”—Thomas M. Balliet, Dean of 
the Faculty of Pedagogy, New York University. 
“The work is a monument of industry, a mine of 
information, an inspiration to many classes of 
workers and thinkers, and a guide to the profounder 
aspects of many pedagogical problems.”—The Baptist 
Standard. 
“The work of Dr. Hall is, it may be said without 
exaggeration, a great one throughout. Dr. Hall has 
the rare gift of enlivening the dry bones of scien- 
tific lore with the charm of eloquent diction and 
pleasing style.”—Medical Record. 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 
New York London “Senescence” by G. Stanley Hall 
Reviews and Opinions 
“It is the first complete and scientific survey ever 
made of the last half of human life and is encyclo- 
pedic in its range and scope.—A great book/'— 
Evening Sun, Baltimore. 
"Packed with facts and illustrations, reasonings 
and sentiments that are of fascinating interest.”— 
Presbyterian Magazine. 
“Dr. Hall has written a book of real importance, a 
book which is likely to hold a permanent place.”— 
Hartford Courant. 
"To any phase of the question: ‘What is it to grow 
old?’ this volume is the answer.”—Louisville Courier 
Journal. 
"Much for personal guidance in one’s habits and 
more for one’s sober reflection is to be found in 
this most excellent book.”—Richmond News Leader. 
"A marvellous human document.”—Los Angeles 
Record. 
"A very strong book. It contains a mass of ii\for- 
mation, and most enlightening and discriminating 
suggestions.”—Cleveland Topics. 
“The author has collected about all that is worth 
while to know about growing old.”—Pittsburgh 
Despatch. 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 
New York London