James Mark Baldwin
Autobiography of James Mark Baldwin
First published in Murchison, Carl. (Ed.) (1930). History of Psychology in
Autobiography (Vol. 1, pp. 1-30).
INTRODUCTION
It is a natural thing for a man who is approaching the end of his active career
to cast an eye backward over the course he has run and assess the whole. It is
interesting to any man to attempt to trace out the spiritual factors -- the
changing motives, interests, problems -- of his life-work. To the psychologist
this would appear to be a particularly spontaneous and natural thing to do,
seeing that his own soul, like those of his subjects in the laboratory and in
the world, is the sort of object he has spent his life teasing, analyzing, and
estimating. So, when he is asked to set down the results, he finds his pages
already prepared in reminiscence.
The account asked of me is the more easily checked up, seeing that such an
account is in my case strewed along the course; the way has been littered with
publications. The series of the writer's books and papers, beginning with a
translation from the French in 1885, and probably not yet entirely finished,
gives the line of the spiritual trajectory by a method more accurate than any
other he might now devise.[l]
The writer's interest was directed towards psychology both through his early
intention to go into the ministry and, more especially, by the undergraduate
courses given in Princeton College in the eighties. President McCosh taught his
Natural Realism vigorously, and the nucleus of all his instruction was empirical
psychology. [p. 2] This was at that date -- in contrast with the "rational"
psychology -- a sort of propadeutic to metaphysics and theology, taught in most
of the American Colleges. McCosh, further, in two other points, had insight
which was for that time prophetic, points which were to become leading motives
later on in my own work: he had seized upon the project of scientific psychology
as announced in Wundt's Physiologische Psychologie, then just out, and had also
pronounced in favor of the theory of biological evolution, holding it to be
consistent with the "divine government of the world," as explained in his work
of that title. Furthermore, I was brought into the circle of interest in
physiological psychology through the tradition of a course of readings in Wundt,
arranged by McCosh, with the demonstrations given by W. B. Scott and H. F.
Osborn, young members of the Princeton faculty. Under these influences, on
graduating in 1884 and taking the "Mental Science Fellowship" offered to the
class, I went to Germany for two semesters' study. Coming back to Princeton as
instructor in 1886, I pursued courses in apologetics and theology in the
Princeton Theological Seminary, all the while growing more and more disposed to
accept a position in philosophy and psychology such as that which was soon
(1887) offered me at Lake Forest University, Illinois.[2]
I. GENERAL, CHILD, AND EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
In Leipzig, Wundt was the rage. His laboratory and lectures were crowded, and it
seemed that he, along with Fechner and Lotze, whose works were hardly mentioned
by him, however, was laying the foundation of a really scientific and
experimental "discipline." I was caught in the movement; and, while a brief stay
in Berlin opened to me the high thought of Spinoza (studied in the seminar of
Paulsen), the principle result of the German visit was a sort of apostolic call
to the "new psychology." Finding in the literature the book of Ribot,
Psychologie allemande contemporaine, which gave a resumé of the movement, I got
the rights and made the English translation which appeared in 1880 as German
Psychology of Today.
The interest in experimental psychology was not subordinate to that in
philosophy and theology; but, on the contrary, it increased in [p. 3] force as I
took up academic teaching. The exigencies of classroom work required the
exposition of general psychology, for which proper textbooks were not in
circulation. Sully's Outlines was the only available text in English (with
Bain's two volumes for collateral reading). This pedagogical need motived the
first volume of my Handbook of Psychology, Senses and Intellect, but the
essential novelty and attractiveness of the problems of the second volume,
Feeling and Will, carried me into less conventional and more personal
research.[3] Certain positions taken up in the second volume, published while I
was at Toronto (1900-1903), set the direction of later work. The principles of
dynamogenesis, kinaesthesis, and those of active or motor interpretation of many
of the mental functions were worked out. In this, I was led to abandon the older
association and structural psychology in favor of functional and developmental
views. The theory of synthesis (in such problems as those of apperception,
conception, and volition) was based on motor synergy and adaptation. The motor
theory of attention was developed a little later on.[4]
These tendencies were reinforced also by the sensational discovery about that
time of the principal facts of hypnotism and suggestion. I went to France and
got full information from both the Paris (Charcot, Janet) and Nancy (Bernheim)
schools. This experience, supplemented a little later on by acquaintance with
the work of the French school in the realm of the subconscious, was utilized in
my books on Mental Development.
At this time I was given the means to found the laboratory of psychology in the
University of Toronto -- the first anywhere on British soil. A similar
opportunity presented itself at Princeton in 1893. There, also, a laboratory was
founded and regular courses instituted in experimental psychology. Of my own
researches conducted at Princeton, the most important, I think, were on the
"type theory of reaction" (establishing that the reaction-time varies with the
type, as sensory, motor, etc., of the subjects; each type reacting most
effectively through its preferred sense; a theory established at about the same
time also by the experimental work of Flournoy of Geneva); and the optical
illusion known by my name, viz., the displacement of the observed mid-point
between two areas of different [p. 4] sizes -- the mid-point being displaced
toward the larger of the two areas. This latter has important bearings in the
appreciation of architecture, the arrangement of the units of flat surfaces,
decoration, etc.
The experimental vein was worked, though with lessening interest, for the ten
years of my stay at Princeton. It flared up a bit when, on going to The Johns
Hopkins in 1903, I was called on to set up another laboratory, my third; but the
later development of this laboratory was due to a colleague, Stratton. Already
at Princeton the new interest in genetic psychology and general biology had
become absorbing, and the meagerness of the results of the psychological
laboratories (apart from direct work on sensation and movement) was becoming
evident everywhere. I began to feel that there was truth in what James was
already proclaiming as to the barrenness of the tables and curves coming from
many laboratories.
II. GENETIC AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY: CIRCULAR REACTION, THE SOCIUS, SOCIAL
HEREDITY
It was with the birth of the first child, Helen (the "H" of the books on mental
development), that interest in the problems of genesis -- origin, development,
evolution -- became prominent; the interest which was to show itself in all the
subsequent years. "H" became (with, later on, her sister "E"), from her extreme
infancy the focus through which all the problems of general biology and
psychology presented themselves. The series of experiments recorded in the book
Mental Development in the Child and the Race opened the way to the study of the
correlation of data with those of biology: experiments on right- and
left-handedness, on color-perception, on suggestion, on imitation, on speech,
etc. Such correlations were found in the theories of recapitulation,
accommodation, and growth in biology. In the field of folk psychology, theories
of conscious imitation, learning, social response and organization were worked
out -- these latter recorded in the second volume, entitled Social and Ethical
Interpretations.
The outcome on the psycho-biological side was embodied in the principle of
circular reaction, found to be the fundamental method of fruitful organic
reaction to the environment of things and persons. On variations of this
original act of life arise the main adaptations: conscious and social
accommodation, imitation, invention, and volition (through the experience of
"try, try again");[5] and on [p. 5] it organic evolution and social progress
alike rest. This is the broad conclusion reached; it involved a radical
modification of the current Spencer-Bain theory of the action of pleasure and
pain in the economy of organic and psychological adjustment.
On the psycho-sociological side the same principle operates without break or
discontinuity, revealing itself in the various phases of suggestion and
imitation. Through conscious imitation and its variations and oppositions,
vistas open up along the great highways of individual and social progress. It is
through intercourse with ...
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