Watson, Sr., R.I. (1978). The great psychologists. (4th
edition). New York: J.B. Lippincott Co.
CHAPTER 17
G. STANLEY HALL
G. Stanley Hall was much more important as the first organizer
and administrator in American psychology than for his contribution
to psychological research or theory. But these functions for which
he is noted, too, must have its pioneer, and his effect on psychology
in the United States cannot be ignored.
Life of Hall
Granville Stanley Hall was born of Puritan ancestry in 1844 at
Ashfield, a rural hamlet in Massachusetts. The Halls were substantial,
hardworking, pious farmers. His parents were unusual only in the
extent of their
education. His mother had attended the Albany Female Seminary,
then almost the only institution in the East for higher education
of women; and his father had saved his money from some years of
farm labor to return to school. Both parents had taught school
for several years. Hall's boyhood was spent on the farm, working
hard out-of-doors, except in the winter, when the long evenings
were filled with reading aloud by his mother.
After doing well in the local rural school, Hall "kept school"
for a while and, on the whole, enjoyed it. His mother had always
wanted him to go to college, and they finally won his father over.
Hall, himself, was more than willing. A year's work in a seminary
prepared him for Williams, where he enrolled in 1863. It was not
until after the Civil War that Hall discovered his father had
bribed a physician into certifying him "exempt" from
military service.
At Williams, Hall studied with Mark Hopkins and found interests
in diversified fields-associationism, the Scottish school, John
Stuart Mill, and the theory of evolution. Without too much in
the way of a "call," he was preparing for the ministry.
Consequently, on graduation in 1867, he enrolled in the Union
Theological Seminary in New York City. During his year in New
York, he explored the city with zest, roaming the streets, visiting
police courts, attending churches of all denominations. He joined
a discussion club interested in the study of positivism, visited
the theater for plays and musicals, tutored young ladies from
the "elite" of New York, visited a phrenologist, and,
generally, had an exciting year. He was not noted for his religious
orthodoxy. After preaching his trial sermon before the faculty
and students, he went to the office of the president for criticism.
Instead of discussing his sermon, the president knelt and prayed
that Hall would be shown the errors of his ways!
One member of the faculty, a foreign-trained scholar who tutored
him in philosophy, advised him to seek foreign study. Through
the intercession of Henry Ward Beecher, the famous preacher, he
received a loan of $500 for this purpose.
In the early summer of 1868 Hall sailed for Europe and made his
way to Bonn. After a period studying theology and philosophy there,
he moved on to Berlin, where he not only continued with theological
and philosophical studies, particularly Aristotle, but also worked
under Du Bois Reymond in physiology, studied physics, and attended
a clinic for mental diseases as well as satisfying a very wide
array of other interests. Beer gardens, theaters, and some lighthearted
romantic episodes helped to round out his German education.
It was not until 1871 that he returned home, heavily in debt
and with
out a degree. He expected to take up an appointment at a midwestern
university but its administration cancelled the appointment, fearing
that his proposal to teach the history of philosophy would be
unsettling. Through a friend he received an appointment as a tutor
to the five children of Jesse Seligman, the banker. He remained
over a year with the family, in New York City and at their country
places.
Antioch College, a "western outpost" of Unitarianism,
in Ohio, had need of someone to teach English Literature. To this
post Hall was appointed. Later he shifted to French and German
language and literature and, finally, to philosophy. As was not
unusual in small colleges he had many extra-curricular duties-serving
as librarian, leading the choir, and taking his turn at preaching.
In his second and third year he managed to spend most of his time
teaching philosophical subjects. He read the first volume of Wundt's
Physiological Psychology immediately after its publication and
decided to return to Germany to study psychology. In the spring
of 1876 he started out but got only as far as Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Here he was met with an offer of an instructorship in English
at Harvard. He took it, hoping for a chance to transfer to philosophy
and psychology. His work in required sophomore English was monotonous
and time-consuming, but he found time to work with H. P. Bowditch
at the Harvard Medical School and to carry out in his laboratory
a study on "The Muscular Perception of Space," which
he presented as a thesis for the doctorate in philosophy at Harvard
in 1878. He also did work with James, whom he got to know quite
well. Hall received his degree in psychology upon recommendation
of the Department of Philosophy. After his degree he immediately
left for Europe.
Hall first studied at Berlin doing a considerable amount of work
in physiology. In his second year he moved on to Leipzig and Wundt,
as the German's first American student. Despite the enthusiasm
with which he had looked forward to working with Wundt, the reality
does not seem to have been to his liking. Hall attended Wundt's
lectures and served as a subject in experiments but was silent
about any research of his own in the laboratory. Instead he undertook
a considerable amount of work in physiology, particularly in the
physiology of muscles, and then he went on to Berlin to work with
Helmholtz, only to find him immersed in work in physics. Nevertheless,
he wrote James that he was disappointed in Wundt and got much
more out of Helmholtz. Travel to educational centers followed,
since he had decided that the way to make a living was to apply
psychology to education. He then returned to the United States,
without a job or indeed any prospects of one.
Meanwhile he had married a girl whom he had known from his days
at
Antioch and whom he had met again in Berlin, where she had been
studying art. They took a small flat in a suburb of Boston in
September, 1880. Things appeared bleak until a good fairy in the
unlikely guise of President Eliot appeared at their house with
the request that Hall give a series of Saturday talks on education
in Boston under the auspices of Harvard University. These talks,
which were well attended, brought him considerable favorable publicity.
Upon the strength of reports of his Saturday morning lectures,
President Gilman of Johns Hopkins University asked Hall to Baltimore
for a series of public lectures. In 1882 Hall arrived at Johns
Hopkins, already celebrated for the beginning in 1876 of its bold
experiment in higher education on the German plan. President Gilman
had been having trouble finding just the right philosopher for
his school, one that would be both "modern" and a scientist,
yet not such as to offend orthodox religious sensibility. For
a while there was considerable academic "in fighting"
involving Hall and the two other part-time appointments in a department
for which one professorship was planned. Both the other contestants,
Charles S. Peirce and George Morris, were very eminent men in
philosophy. Hall was a scientist which Gilman wanted, but the
scales tipped more in his favor from his accommodating attitude
toward religious orthodoxy. Hall, as one might imagine, wanted
nothing more than to dissociate psychology from religion, but
he held no animosity toward his former field. He remained discreetly
silent. In 1884 he was appointed Professor of Psychology and Pedagogics,
thus settling the matter.
After his professorial appointment Hall immediately took steps
to separate his work from that in philosophy, for example, arranging
it so that the Metaphysics Club, which had flourished before his
time, died for lack of appropriate material for presentation.
In 1883 while still a lecturer, Hall set up laboratory equipment
in a private house adjacent to the campus .4 The next year he
was given rooms on the campus. Hall's laboratory at Johns Hopkins,
opening in 1884, is often said to be the first formally accepted
psychological laboratory in the United States, but the claim is
obscured somewhat because the university did not officially list
it as a laboratory and its equipment was treated as private property;
Hall later took it with him to Clark University. A rather plausible
cases has been made that the laboratory at the University of Wisconsin,
under Jastrow, founded in 1888, was the first laboratory in the
United States that received formal recognition from university
authorities; yet Cattell speaks of founding a laboratory in 1887
at the University of Pennsylvania. Jastrow, himself, acknowledged
the
priority of Cattell. James' laboratory did not have formal university
recognition, merely the money to run it and a place to work.
Among Hall's students were James McKeen Cattell, John Dewey,
Joseph Jastrow, William H. Burnham, and Edmund C. Sanford-all
destined to be prominent psychologists. However, Cattell and Dewey
were only incidentally his students. Cattell was at Hopkins when
Hall arrived and left shortly thereafter for Leipzig. Dewey's
degree, although taken during Hall's professorship, was for work
done under Morris. However, Dewey did work in the laboratory and
appreciated the significance of the "new psychology."
The first Ph.D. in psychology at Hopkins went to Joseph Jastrow.
Hall's own degree at Harvard had been awarded in psychology but
this was in one sense an afterthought decided by the Philosophy
Department apparently only at the time of completion of the work.
Jastrow had enrolled for a degree in psychology, so his was the
first Ph.D. in psychology in the United States.
Besides the laboratories of Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Pennsylvania,
and Wisconsin, research laboratories were soon started at Columbia,
Clark, Cornell, Indiana, Brown, Stanford, Yale, and Chicago. As
mentioned before, at least twenty-four laboratories were founded
before 1894, although some were small affairs designed only for
undergraduate instruction. This was an impressive number, bringing
out clearly the rapid spread of the new psychology.
In 1887, while still at Hopkins, Hall established the American
Journal
of Psychology. Its founding was entirely unexpected, although
Hall had
hoped to found a journal one day. A total stranger walked into
his office,
suggested he found a journal, and, then and there, gave him a
check for
$500. Later, it turned out that his benefactor had confused experimental
psychology with psychical research and cancelled his subscription
in the
second year of its publication. This mistake is by no means as
foolish as
it sounds. The designation, "committee on experimental psychology"
was
used by psychical research organizations as the name for their
investigatory bodies.
By then, Hall was preparing to leave Hopkins for the presidency
of the about-to-be-established Clark University in Worcester,
Massachusetts. The wealthy merchant, Jonas Gilman Clark, had decided
to endow an institution of higher learning in his home town. Before
the school actually opened its doors, Hall had high aspirations
for it, higher than could be realized later. He embarked on a
tour of the European educational centers. Hall's letters9 from
Europe addressed to Clark are filled with the ideas suggested
to him by these encounters, discussion of the chance of
persuading a distinguished scholar to come to Worcester, and the
like. He planned to make Clark University a graduate scientific
institute, modeled after the German universities and surpassing
Johns Hopkins. Research was to be its task; education a necessary
accompaniment. Clark University, founded in 1889, began with a
faculty organized into a small number of departments with no pretence
of covering the remaining fields.
Hall was soon to find that Mr. Clark had ideas different from
his own about the nature of the school he was endowing. Naturally
reticent, Clark could not or would not commit himself on money
matters, and the amount of money advanced was much smaller than
Hall had been led to expect. Instead of confiding his troubles
to the faculty, Hall chose to keep silent at the time, so he was
blamed by them for the tight budget, but years later he was to
say his strongest motive for publishing his autobiography, the
Life and Confessions o f a Psychologist," was his desire
to tell the full story of Clark University.
By 1892 faculty dissatisfaction had reached the point where resignations
of a majority of the faculty seemed about to take place. Unknown
to Hall at the time, the situation was aggravated by the appearance
of President Harper of the newly founded University of Chicago,
who desperately needed to build a faculty to fulfill plans to
utilize the Rockefeller millions. A raid of the faculty of monumental
proportions took place, with Harper offering to double salaries.
Three Clark men were made department heads of chemistry, physics,
and biology at the University of Chicago. At the end of the expedition
Harper even offered an appointment to Hall, who, on hearing from
him what he had done, told him he thought, "his act comparable
to that of a housekeeper who would steal in at the back door to
engage servants at a higher price.""
Clark University continued its work, although with a vastly reduced
staff. Those faculty members who remained were intensely loyal.
Of the twelve men who started the academic year of 1892, there
were no resignations for twenty-one years thereafter! Some other
money came in, and Hall and the Clark faculty adjusted to this
economic level. Finally, near the turn of the century, the bulk
of the Clark estate came to the university, divided between the
library, the graduate school, and a new undergraduate institution
which Hall had opposed but Mr. Clark had long advocated. The terms
of his will stipulated that Hall was to have no connection with
the college as such; although he continued as head of the graduate
school.
Fortunately for psychology, President Hall had also made himself
Professor of Psychology and continued to teach in the graduate
school all
during these years and afterward. He also had brought along Edmund
C. Sanford from Baltimore to head the laboratory. William H. Burnham,
another Hopkins student, was put in charge of pedagogics, which
in this setting meant educational psychology and mental hygiene.
Adolph Meyer, later the leading psychiatrist of his time, who
was then at Worcester State Hospital, also gave lectures.
Hall's last publication within the conventional limits of experimental
psychology (on touch sensitivity) occurred in 1887. His own work
thereafter was non-experimental in nature, but this limitation
does not indicate his attitude toward the field and his faith
in the advantage of scientific rigor. He unequivocally and eloquently
defended laboratory work. Moreover, his students saw him as the
leader of the forces which would make psychology a science. True,
there are many indications that the laboratory was too far removed
from life to meet his own personal interests. Also, he was occasionally
impatient with the slow plodding of the laboratory. Nevertheless,
experimental psychology was still his vision of psychology, even
though he saw it was for others to carry on the work.
His own teaching struck sparks in all directions. He was at his
best in his weekly seminar, held at his home, where students and
faculty presented papers. L. M. Terman, who originated the Stanford-Binet
Scales of Intelligence and became the leading student of intelligence
in the United States for some decades, expressed a representative
opinion. "For me, Clark University meant briefly three things:
freedom to work as I pleased, unlimited library facilities, and
Hall's Monday evening seminar." Hall was the great graduate
teacher of American psychology. By 1893 eleven of the fourteen
Ph.D. degrees from American universities had been given by him,
by 1898 this had increased to thirty awarded out of fifty-four.
It was Hall's idea to institute the first scientific organization
of psychologists, the American Psychological Association, which
was founded in July 1892. He issued the invitations, arranged
for it to be held in Worcester, and in general dominated the meeting.
Almost as a matter of course, he was elected the first president.
It was at this first meeting that the scientific character of
the organization was established firmly. Through the haze of the
years it is impossible to determine who was present, but it seems
as if ten to eighteen psychologists were there. James was in Switzerland,
but was included in the twenty-six charter members who received
invitations. The first annual meeting was held later the same
year. From these small beginnings has come an organization now
having
a membership of 20,000. After considerable controversy over the
years, it has broadened its functions so as to be concerned with
the application of psychology and the advancement of its professional
status as well as with maintaining its original scientific goal.
A guiding intellectual theme for Hall was evolutionary theory,
which had fascinated him since his student days at Williams. Hall's
thinking concerning a whole host of psychological topics was guided
by the conviction that the normal growth of the mind is to be
seen as a series of evolutionary stages. Pursuing this aim, he
turned to the psychological study of the child through the use
of questionnaires, a procedure he had learned in Germany. In fact,
in 1881, before leaving Boston for Baltimore, Hall had had a chance
at research in the Boston school system. In this study, entitled
"The contents of children's minds,""' and in subsequent
studies, he unearthed a considerable body of miscellaneous information
about children's thinking on a variety of subjects. By the end
of 1915 at least, 194 questionnaires had been developed and applied
by Hall and his students. The topics included anger, dolls, crying,
the early sense of self, fears, foods, religious experience, death,
conventionality, mathematics, superstitions, dreams, and, of course,
many more.
Although in present perspective these studies are seen to be
naive and poorly executed, they created great public enthusiasm
and led to the founding of the so-called child-study movement.
Large numbers of parents and teachers were recruited to the task
of applying questionnaires. All over the world they uncritically
and dogmatically stated their superficial excursions into child
development. The sentimentality and general wooliness of the movement
led to a reaction against it, both within psychology and from
various sections of the public, and in a few more years it disappeared.
Nonetheless, the concept of psychological development had been
firmly established through this work. The child-study movement
served to bring home forcefully the importance of the empirical
study of the child, while through its very excesses it made for
an increased critical evaluation of research.
In 1891, Hall, at his own expense, had founded the Pedagogical
Seminary (now the Journal o f Genetic Psychology), to which he
and his students contributed a large share of the articles. This
journal was the chief outlet for research in child study, as well
as that in educational psychology.
It was in his huge work entitled Adolescence"' in 1904 that
Hall stated most completely his particular recapitulation theory
of development. He offered the conjecture that in his individual
development, the child
repeats the life history of the race. For instance, the level
of the primitive man is repeated when the child plays at cowboys
and Indians.
Hall continued his interest in religion, expressed in speculation
and research on the psychology of religion. During the latter
years of the last century, he offered a course in the psychology
of Christianity and encouraged studies by his students. In 1917
he published his own major contribution, Jesus, the Christ, in
the light o f psychology. To view Christ as the title implies
did not sit well with his former brethren of the cloth.
Hall had been one of the first Americans to become interested
in psychoanalysis. The twentieth anniversary of Clark University
in 1909 was celebrated with a series of conferences, including
the famous visit of Freud and Jung to the United States at Hall's
invitation. This invitation was a courageous step in view of the
suspicion and dislike which Hall knew to be associated with the
whole psychoanalytic movement.
He also showed his interest in psychoanalysis through teaching
of the subject. A report of his teaching for the academic year
1916 included this description of a course he offered:
Much stress is laid upon the score or two of so-called mechanisms
of the Freudian school, its history and development, and epitomes
of the works of the chief representatives, along with an account
of the two divergent groups of workers represented by Jung and
Adler. The work was correlated to some extent with matter derived
from the history of marriage and of the family, and the history
of monogamy. The view taken by these lectures is that the methods
of psychoanalysis open up, as nothing has yet done, the more or
less unconscious domains of the psyche, and enable us to explain
some hitherto insoluble problems and far more yet of the emotional
or affective life of man. The chief trend of this course, however,
is to show that many of the mechanisms apply not only to ordinary
life, but to all the other great emotions besides love, so that
not so much the psychology of sex as that of the deeper nature
of man is considered.
This last sentence captured his attitude. He was an eclectic,
cheerfully borrowing from Freud what he saw as useful and equally
without malice accepting work which was contradictory to his teachings
. He could admire Freud, but wanted to go beyond the "psychology
of sex." As his letters show, he could never understand why
Freud was so intolerant of eclectic borrowing. Freud, of course,
saw this behavior as unforgivably inconsistent. Hall maintained
his interest in psychoanalysis throughout his life. In the last
conversation that Cattell had with him, Hall expressed himself
as puzzled why academic psychology so vehemently rejected psychoanalysis.
In another perspective this advocacy of a hearing for psychoanalysis
was but one of Hall's contributions to what later was to emerge
as clinical psychology. Even before arriving at Clark, Hall had
been interested in
abnormal psychology, having taken his students to Bayview Hospital
for the Insane for demonstrations, and for a time he had even
functioned as its superintendent. The presence of Adolph Meyer,
as a lecturer in abnormal psychology, at Clark University has
already been mentioned. Although commonplace in France, in the
United States the teaching of psychopathology to psychologists
was most unusual. It was Hall's student, H. H. Goddard, who did
the pioneer important work on feeblemindedness, and another student,
L. M. Terman, with his Stanford-Binet, who supplied the indispensable
tool for the measurement of intelligence. Arnold Gesell, still
another student, was responsible for tremendous amount of painstaking
research on the physical and mental growth of children. Moreover,
Hall lent his encouragement to this kind of work by giving it
access to publication sources in his journals.
After resigning the presidency of Clark in 1920, Hall continued
writing, including his autobiography. Characteristically enough,
he became interested in the problems of aging and published a
volume on Senescence in 1922. In 1924, four years after his retirement
he died at his home in Worcester, Massachusetts, just a few months
after being elected president of the American Psychological Association
for a second time. With his death, a romantic and heroic- era
closed.
Overview
Some clues as to Hall's stature can be gleaned from the opinions
of a large sample of psychologists who were solicited in connection
with a commemorative statement about him. Despite the veil of
adulation that clouds such ceremonies, it is clear that he was
primarily a source of stimulation for others, opening up for them
areas of study and research. As Titchener put it at about the
same time, "He sought to inspire and I tried to train,"
but they shared the goal of research; their difference, therefore,
was in the means, not in the end sought. A psychologist who worked
with Hall at Clark spoke of Hall's conviction that psychology
should not set limits for itself and of his desire, "to build
the top of the mountain first." This psychologist pointed
out that he, himself, would have them start at the bottom.
Hall was versatile and broad in his interests, a pioneer in many
areas of psychological endeavor. A considerable number of the
psychologists polled considered him to be the pioneer in studies
of childhood, adolescence, senescence, and human genetics. Of
these, the stimulation he gave child psychology is most important.
In a sense Hall made a gospel
of childhood. He lifted the child to a new plane of importance,
focusing on a child as a child, to study him for his own sake.
Hall remained throughout his life intensely agile in his thinking
with boundless enthusiasm and with many and contradictory views
on everything. He was a founder so intent on his pioneering that
he almost always moved immediately on to his next adventure, leaving
for others the task of tidying up. He himself wondered if his
life had not been a series of fads or crazes. He said that Wundt
would rather have been commonplace than brilliantly wrong. One
suspects that Hall would have reversed the statement for himself.
