Johns Hopkins University, toward which all ambitious young professors
were looking wistfully. He was then asked to teach a half year after
which he was appointed full professor for five years at a salary then
very generous. The seven fat years—for he remained until 1888—had begun.
The great Gilman was president of the university, Gildersleeve taught
Greek and Rowland taught physics; Simon Newcomb, astronomy; Spencer,
Huxley, Kelvin, Matthew Arnold, James Bryce, Freeman the historian, James
Russell Lowell, Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and William James were visitors
and, for the most part, lecturers. Among Dr. Hall’s pupils were John
Dewey, J. McKeen Cattell, Joseph Jastrow, James H. Hyslop and one young
man who took a long Sunday afternoon walk with the professor “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.” This was Woodrow
Wilson. “Had he chosen psychology,” comments Dr. Hall, “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.”
When he was just forty-two Dr. Hall’s lean years began—lean in the sense
that he gave up highly congenial work and surroundings and a maximum
salary which was offered him to embark on a new and untried enterprise,
in which he was to endure a degree of distress and anxiety and an amount
of difficulty and odium hard to describe. The history of his relations
with Clark University, first publicly told in Chapter VII of his _Life
and Confessions of a Psychologist_, is likely without a parallel.
Certainly it throws more light on human nature than any psychologist
could hope to do by a lifetime of experiment and reasoning. Briefly, this
was what happened:
Jonas Gilman Clark (1815-1900), a successful wagonmaker, had made a
fortune in California in 1849 by selling mining implements. He was one of
the active Vigilantes and a friend of Leland Stanford. After attaining
importance in San Francisco he moved to New York and increased his wealth
by dealing in real estate; but with the passage of years he returned to
his native county in Massachusetts. The example of Leland Stanford, his
own childlessness, and a desire to do something for his native county led
him to resolve to found Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Dr.
Hall was asked to be president and accepted the post.
Mr. Clark immediately gave a building and grounds and his note for
$600,000 for the university, with a note of $100,000 for a library. This,
a total value of something like $1,000,000, was the largest single gift
that had ever been made to education in New England. The outlook was of
unprecedented brilliance, for Mr. Clark’s expressed intention was to
leave all his wealth to the institution, and his fortune was variously
estimated at from $8,000,000 to $18,000,000 or even $20,000,000. The
founder readily agreed to Dr. Hall’s suggestion that he, Dr. Hall, spend
a year abroad studying the universities of the world.
Surely no one has ever had an opportunity equalling the year which
followed. Dr. Hall omitted to visit no university of importance in
Europe. The mere recital of the places he saw is impressive enough;
when the imagination tries to take in the educational panorama unrolled
before his eyes the task becomes impossible. One small cloud darkened the
horizon. Mr. Clark had instructed him to bring to this side several of
the best German professors. Dr. Hall was put in a painful situation by
engaging Von Holst of Freiburg and then having his act disowned. He did
not suspect that it was to be only the first of a series of bitter and
terrible disappointments.
Clark was opened as a university for graduate students only with few
pupils but high hopes and splendid prospects on 2 October 1889. A few
simple figures, as Dr. Hall remarks, give the key to the near-tragedy
that followed. “During the first year we spent for salaries and
equipment, $135,000; the second year, Mr. Clark contributed $50,000
above the income of the $600,000 that had actually been transferred to
the board of trustees, making a total income 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 subsisted upon the income of its funds,
namely, the $600,000 for the University and $100,000 for the library.”
What was wrong?
Mr. Clark couldn’t or wouldn’t say. He seems to have been a singularly
inarticulate individual. Whether he lost heavily in the misfortunes that
overtook the British firm of Baring Brothers, or on his own account,
remains uncertain. It may be that he had, all along, much less money
than was supposed; or it may be that a university cost more than he
expected. There was consternation over his dwindling annual gifts and
a deeper anxiety over his failure to add to the permanent endowment.
Collectively and individually the trustees implored him to say what the
university might expect; at least, they would know where they stood;
but Mr. Clark remained silent. “He sanctioned every engagement and knew
exactly the liabilities we were incurring, and the optimistic view,”
says Dr. Hall, “was that he could not possibly bring men here or start
departments and then fail to sustain them.” It was too optimistic. Men
were let go because there was no money to keep them. After a personal
quarrel with a professor, Clark compelled the board to request the
man’s resignation, which they did. The founder would smilingly listen
to instructors who asked for supplies, refer them to Dr. Hall, and then
order Dr. Hall to deny the requests. A personal tragedy at the beginning
of this time befell Dr. Hall as he was convalescent from an attack of
diphtheria so severe that for weeks he could not speak, but had to write
on a slate. He had been sent to the country when, one night, through an
accident in a gas fixture, his wife and the younger of his two children,
aged six, were smothered to death.
“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 discontent 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 even to my conscience but the
situation demanded nothing less, for the entire future of the institution
seemed to hang upon this.” The foreseen result was a faculty revolt; a
majority of the staff offered their resignations because they had lost
confidence in Dr. Hall. The trustees left the affair in Dr. Hall’s hands,
but as those hands were tied by the necessity of keeping a close secret
the financial situation and by the necessity of “shielding” Clark from
censure, he could explain but lamely.
At this point President Harper of the new University of Chicago came to
Worcester, secretly engaged a majority of the faculty at double the Clark
salaries, and then tried to hire Dr. Hall for a salary larger than he
was receiving. Under Dr. Hall’s threat to make the facts public and to
appeal to John D. Rockefeller himself—Mr. Rockefeller being Chicago’s
backer—Harper receded a little. Dr. Hall managed to salvage a few of his
men from the raid. Clark University was now reduced to living on the
four per cent. income from its $600,000 and waiting for its founder to
die, “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.”
Andrew Carnegie promised $100,000 if an equal amount were raised; when
only $37,000 could be raised and Mr. Carnegie was told why he dropped
the condition and gave his $100,000 outright. Somehow, the next half
dozen years were got through. There was a continuous false position for
Dr. Hall and continuous and heavy censure to be borne. He had to suppose
that the end would justify the means; and the end, when it came, gave him
only partial satisfaction. Clark had got to spend a good deal of time in
Europe, perhaps as an aid to his disgusting reticence. He was at outs
with the trustees, all men of distinction and all sustaining Dr. Hall as
well as they could. The founder was also in disagreement with Dr. Hall
over a collegiate department, which he wanted and which Dr. Hall—one
would think, very naturally, in the acutely trying circumstances—didn’t
want. The tenth anniversary of Clark was celebrated with a brave spirit
in 1899. It was that darkest hour before the dawn. The perverse Clark
died the year following leaving a nasty will with five codicils and
expensive litigious possibilities, most of which were realized. In
the last of the codicils Clark revoked certain strictures upon Dr.
Hall contained in the will itself. However, a collegiate department
was provided and university and college came at once into possession
of nearly the whole estate, the rest to follow at Mrs. Clark’s death.
Dr. Hall, who had been teaching and lecturing and worrying, was free
at last from his scapegoat rôle. Four years later he was to publish in
two volumes his masterly study of _Adolescence_; and every few years
after that were to see an important book come from his hands. He was
in his fifties and at last comparatively free and unhampered. Not
only his interest in child study but his wide knowledge of methods of
teaching (pedagogy), of psychology and philosophy, of the vast amount of
experimental work in hand everywhere and his novel conceptions of the
soul’s progress were to bear fruit.
iv
He had always been interested in genetics—beginnings. His psychology,
as it matured in a long lifetime of study and reflection, is different
from the psychology of other men chiefly in this respect. The one word
of science which always had the power to fire Dr. Hall’s imagination
is “evolution.” Let not the fundamentalist rage, at this point of this
chapter, nor the reader imagine a vain thing. It is greatly doubtful
if, deep in his heart, G. Stanley Hall cared two sticks about Darwinian
evolution as such. But evolution as an idea was to him a psychic reality.
Let me explain, as well as I can, in the simplest terms.
A psychic reality is something in which one’s faith is so strong that one
neither needs nor wishes proofs. It is what you firmly believe; what you
believe in so firmly that, so far as you are concerned, it exists. The
thing may not exist, but if it did you would order your life just as you
do now. Those who live under the shadow of such a belief need no umbrella
of evidence spread over them.
To take an important and timely instance: One of the main points in Dr.
Hall’s work, _Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology_ (1917) bears
directly on the controversy now active between the fundamentalists and
the liberals. That dispute has been hottest on two points: the virgin
birth of Christ and the Resurrection. Dr. Hall holds that both sides
are living and disputing in a pre-psychological age; that they are both
right in all that they affirm, wish and mean, and are both wrong in all
that they deny. He says that both the virgin birth and the Resurrection
are psychic realities to great numbers of people. He believed in both
himself. As a scientist familiar with physiology, the issues offered as
many obstacles to his mind as they can possibly offer to any human mind.
Nevertheless, he believed; to him the virgin birth and the Resurrection
are both psychic realities. “There are psychic realities that are truer
than fact, and I wonder if it would not degrade rather than spiritualize
faith if we were to discover a motion picture of the Resurrection.”
Now whether Darwin was right or not, whether the law of natural selection
is true, false or meaningless, “evolution” is the word to cover Dr.
Hall’s idea of what has happened and what is happening to the spirit of
man. Although he studied under Wundt, he thought it unfortunate that
one whose influence has been so farreaching was trained in physics and
physiology chiefly. Biology, says Dr. Hall, would have given Wundt
and his disciples less positiveness; they would have been less set on
explaining all things of the spirit by occurrences in and to the body;
and the idea of growth and change would have been more elastic and more
hopeful. Again, Dr. Hall was one of the few American psychologists
of standing who had gone deeply and impartially into the discoveries
of Freud and the whole field of modern psychoanalysis. What are his
conclusions on this fascinating development of science?
Freud has himself said that there are three great culture epochs
marked for us, so far, by what we call science. The first dawned with
Copernicus’s discovery that the sun, not the earth, was the center of
our universe. The second was initiated by Darwin. The third is Freud’s
own work. Dr. Hall was by no means an extreme or convinced Freudian, but
seemed inclined to believe that Freud’s estimate of his work may not
be much out of the way. Copernicus revolutionized our ideas of space;
Darwin transformed the concept of time; Freud is dealing with our idea of
eternity. For the world that Freud may be said to have discovered, the
world of the unconscious, is a piece of eternity and the only piece that
science can lay claim to having captured. If it exists at all, it exists
and has existed forever.
In the main the Freudian theories seemed to Dr. Hall “genetic and vital.”
They put beginnings farther back than we have been used to put them; many
of the explanations really do explain, and Dr. Hall was convinced that
they saved several of the most gifted of his pupils from mental wreck.
“If the Freudian claims of the all-dominance 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, the
conclusions here drawn were from a solid and wide basis of clinical facts
which no one could dispute, however much they might criticize the methods
and interpretations.” There was, however, always the danger of measuring
the normal mind and spirit by standards got from studying abnormal minds.
And Dr. Hall did not believe in the methods of healing practised by
Freudian physicians. Such psychoanalytic treatment, he thought, leaves
the patient often unduly sexually-minded. Where a cure or real benefit
results, he believed, it is not the result of a confession of dreams,
etc., tortured into this or that meaning. It is because the patient has
come to the conclusion that he is a dead giveaway, that everybody sees
in him what the psychoanalyst sees; shame, dread, and modesty assert
themselves and make him do better.
But the emphasis of Freud’s teachings is on feeling. It is not a
psychology of muscular twitchings as that of Wundt and his followers
tended to be. There is a theory, brilliantly expounded by William James
and called the Lange-James theory, which explained that we feel sorry
because we cry. There is also what is called the psychophysic law, which
says that a sensation is increased by a constant amount when the stimulus
is increased by a constant multiplication. But the psychophysic law broke
down at extremes. For example, a very slight increase in tickling doubles
and redoubles the sensation felt; it almost seems as if the law were
then the other way about. And the sorry-because-we-cry theory cannot be
proved where thoughts only are in question. A. murders B. Very likely
he murders him in thought before he does so in fact. Now possibly the
murder-in-thought is preceded by some microscopic or passing changes in
A.’s brain. But it is yet to prove, and it is very likely unprovable. In
the same way, men are now engrossed with their dawning discoveries about
the glands of the human body. As Dr. Hall pointed out, the attempt is
now well under way to make psychology a mere matter of secretions. The
thyroid gland does this, the pituitary gland controls that. The thing
will be carried too far and we shall have to retrace many of our steps
and, to some extent, start all over again toward fresh conclusions.
We make these mistakes, said Dr. Hall, because we are too eager to find
a solution for the mystery of the soul. We want to believe that the mind
can be understood from the body. But the explanation of the mind must
be sought in the things of the mind. It is likely that history, for
example, with its record of human institutions, throws at least as much
light on the human mind that made the institutions as anything we can get
in a dissecting room. Like James Harvey Robinson, Dr. Hall was unhappy
over the increasing tendency of psychologists and other students to go
off in a corner and never thereafter to relate what they are doing to
the rest of knowledge. The genetic nature of everything bearing on the
mind is constantly overlooked. Why? Well, men have fallen into a habit
of thinking that psychology must be handled as fossil bones are handled.
From a thigh bone found in the ground we can reconstruct, perhaps, the
entire skeleton of some prehistoric animal. It is not possible, however,
from this experiment or that to reconstruct, infer or measure the mind.
This is because the mind is creative, or, at least, reproductive. It can
only be studied from what it begets. The child’s revolt from the parent
both explains and is explained by the historic revolutions and revolts
against authority. Hysteria is an escape from some intolerable reality.
Certain men have a dread of being shut in by beliefs and opinions because
earliest man had a dread of being shut in his cave in the rocks. But
every man must have something to believe in, though it change from time
to time, because his remote ancestor, when challenged, sought a wall at
his back. What, then, is the hope of being exact or final in psychology?
None. Would it be desirable to be exact or final? No.
The reader may inquire: What about the tests that are increasingly
popular for everything from marriage to hunting the proper job? Dr. Hall
refrained from using the short and ugly word. I will use it for him: they
are bunk. But I will quote his own recorded experience with them.
“Some fifty years ago as an impecunious student I paid $5 to have my
bumps charted at the Fowler and Wells phrenological institute, then on
lower Broadway. Mr. Sizer, who did the job, told me that he would rather
feel for five minutes through a cat-hole the skull of a girl he thought
of marrying than court her five years. His findings were so pleasing to
my self-esteem 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,’ 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[59] and my character was a complex
of incongruities. In a word, my hand gave the flat lie to what my bumps
had said.
“Lombroso has several score of physical and psychic traits which he deems
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. Later yet a Blackfordist tested me on
all the, I think, twenty-one points in that system and at the close asked
me if it was worth $10. It was. In Portland, Oregon, I found an expert
who had worked years with the MacAuliffe-Sorel group of anthropologists.
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 intelligence quotient indicated a mental age of at least
100.
“In Harman’s test of the higher mental processes and the Bonser reasoning
test, for example, I was surpassed by a girl of eleven. The results of
all seem, thus, so confusing that I recall the chameleon which, when
placed on a 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.”
Time-limit tests are not only the hardest but tend to discredit the
slow-but-sure type of person who really does so much of the world’s best
work. The tests merely test a kind of superficial mental quickness.
They do not, and cannot be made to, exclude accidental advantages due
to special experience or special knowledge. We have no way of testing
the testers, some of whom have only enough brains to ask questions and
write down other people’s answers. There is no way of testing native
ability. Persons old enough to take the tests have acquired much of their
abilities from experience; and there is no way of separating what they
were born with from what they have learned or acquired.
Dr. Hall says, on the other hand, that the tests he found trustworthy in
estimating a young man’s chances for success are these:
1. Health. It is true that Darwin fought neurasthenia all his life, that
Nietzsche was always fighting megalomania, that Spencer was everlastingly
coddling himself, that Stevenson contended with tuberculosis. But
health was required to make the fight—great, excessive vital force—and
particularly was the psychic health exceptional and the psychic force
strong so to have held off the bodily enemy while great work was done.
“The study of 200 biographies shows that the list of great original minds
who were supernormal in health is about fourteen times as large as the
list of great invalids.”
2. Second breath. Corresponds to “second wind” in athletics. A state of
mental exaltation, inspiration or ease, often coming after we have worked
long and hard and past our usual hour of sleep at night. No one is likely
to succeed who does not learn while young to tap this mental reservoir.
3. The ability to pass quickly and easily from one extreme of feeling
to the other. What is called the “pleasure-pain scale” extends all the
way from despair and suicide up to the most transcendent happiness.
Settled moods of long duration are bad. If the soul cannot run up
and down the scale frequently, swiftly and flexibly it will have its
pressures relieved in some other way, usually by setting up a dual
personality—jekyll-hydeism, insanity, etc.