Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [90]
Ebbinghaus and not Wundt… had the flash of genius about how to investigate learning. So too with the other great problems of emotion, thought, will, intelligence, and personality, which were to be successfully attacked sometime and for which the Wundtian laboratory was not yet ready. We need not, however, despise our heritage because, with its help, we have in time advanced far beyond it.42
* I use “his” and “him” here because for many years Wundt had no female graduate students. —M.H.
SIX
The Psychologist Malgré Lui:
William James
“This Is No Science”
What is one to make of a distinguished professor of the new science of psychology who denies that it is a science? Who praises the findings of experimental psychologists but loathes performing experiments and does as few as possible? Who is said to be the greatest American psychologist of his time (the late nineteenth century) but never took a course in psychology and sometimes even disavows the label of psychologist?
Listen to this maverick, William James:
To a poet friend he writes, in sarcastic allusion to the New Psychology of the German mechanists, “The only Psyche now recognized by science is a decapitated frog whose writhings express deeper truths than your weak-minded poets ever dreamed.”1 In a letter to his brother, the novelist Henry James, he refers to psychology as a “nasty little subject” that excludes everything one would want to know.2 Only two years after completing his huge and magisterial Principles of Psychology he writes:
It is indeed strange to hear people talk triumphantly of “the New Psychology,” and write “Histories of Psychology,” when into the real elements and forces which the word covers not the first glimpse of clear insight exists. A string of raw facts; a little gossip and wrangle about opinions; a little classification and generalization on the mere descriptive level; a strong prejudice that we have states of mind, and that our brain conditions them: but not a single law in the sense in which physics shows us laws, not a single proposition from which any consequence can causally be deduced. This is no science, it is only the hope of a science.3
Yet this outspoken recusant is not scornful of psychology but has great expectations of it. He sees its goal as the discovery of the connection between each physiological “brain state” and the corresponding state of mind; a genuine understanding of that connection would be “the scientific achievement, before which all past achievements would pale.”4 But he says psychology is not ready for that; its state is like that of physics before Galileo enunciated the laws of motion, chemistry before Lavoisier stated the law of the preservation of mass. The best it can do until its Galileo and Lavoisier come is to explain the laws of conscious mental life, but “come they some day surely will.”
Adorable Genius
The informality and unpretentiousness of James’s remarks tell us that we are in the presence of a man very unlike Wundt; no wonder they did not appreciate each other’s work. James, a short, slender man, lightly bearded and blue-eyed, with fine features and a noble forehead, chose to dress in what was, for that time, informal garb for a professor—Norfolk jacket, bright shirt, flowing tie. Friendly, charming, and outgoing, he often walked across Harvard Yard with students, animatedly talking to them, a spectacle to make a Herr Professor’s flesh creep. As a lecturer, he was so vivacious and humorous that one day a student interrupted and asked him to be serious for a moment.
Despite his ready smile and boyish, even impish, manner, he was a complex personality: strong yet intermittently frail, hardworking yet sociable, joyous but given to spells of melancholy, frivolous but profoundly serious, kind to students and loving to his family but easily bored and exasperated, especially by nitpicking chores like proofreading (about which he once wrote, “Send me no proofs! I will return them unopened and never speak to you