Founders of Modern Psychology

“This book is an amplification of six lectures given early in 1912 at Columbia University to an audience composed of students and a wider public. They were not addressed to experts and were only designed to give those who heard them some general idea of the personality, standpoint, and achievements of each of the men described. The chapters are therefore for the most part light and untechnical.

Of the twelve years from 1870 to 1882, the author spent nearly six as a student in Germany. The first triennium, ending with the year 1873, was devoted to philosophy, and it was at this period that I came under the influence of those men characterized in the first four chapters. After coming home and teaching what I had learned from these masters and others for six years, during which my interest in more scientific methods and modes of approach grew, especially after the first edition of Wundt’s Psychologie in 1874 and as a pupil of James and Bowditch, I passed a second triennium in Germany, to which period Wundt and Helmholtz belong.

The diversity of the field of work of these six men suggests that the period of my stay abroad was one when academic traditions in Germany favored more general and less acutely special studies than now. Indeed, in these delightful years, there was almost no limit to the field over which a curious student, especially if he was not working for a degree, might roam. He could indulge his most desultory intellectual inclinations, taste at any spring and touch any topic in the most superficial way in his effort to orient himself. He could take the widest periscope, and, especially if an American, he was allowed to drop into almost anything to his heart’s content, so that there were others besides myself who yielded to the charm of spending much of each day in the lecture rooms, hearing often very elaborate experimental and demonstrational introductory courses, most of them five hours a week. Fresh from the narrow, formal, rather dry curriculum of a denominational American college, the stimulus and exhilaration of this liberty of hearing was great”. — Extract from the Author’s Introduction

CONTENTS
Eduard Zeller
Rudolph Hermann Lotze
Gustav Theodor Fechner
Eduard von Hartmann
Hermann L. F. von Helmholtz
Wilhelm Wundt

About the Author
G. Stanley Hall, psychologist who gave early impetus and direction to the development of psychology in the United States. Frequently regarded as the founder of child psychology and educational psychology, he also did much to direct into the psychological currents of his time the ideas of Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and others.

Hall in 1878 earned from Harvard University the first Ph.D. degree in psychology granted in America. He then gave special lectures on education at Harvard, and he used questionnaires from a study of Boston schools to write two significant papers: one dealing with children’s lies (1882) and the other with the contents of children’s minds (1883).

A lectureship in philosophy (1883) and a professorship in psychology and pedagogics (1884) at Johns Hopkins University followed. There Hall was given space for one of the first psychological laboratories in the United States. The philosopher-psychologist-educator John Dewey was one of the first to use it. In 1887 Hall founded the American Journal of Psychology, the first such American journal and the second of any significance outside Germany.

Hall’s theory that mental growth proceeds by evolutionary stages is best expressed in one of his largest and most important works, Adolescence (1904). Despite opposition, Hall, as an early proponent of psychoanalysis, invited Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to the conferences celebrating Clark University’s 20th anniversary (1909). Hall was a leading spirit in the founding of the American Psychological Association and served as its first president (1892). He published 489 works covering most of the major areas of psychology, including Senescence, the Last Half of Life (1922) and Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology (1917). Life and Confessions of a Psychologist (1923) was his autobiography.