At the end of my senior year I had two dominant intellectual interests, science and philosophy. They seemed to be combined in what I heard of the wonderful new science of experimental psychology. Learning of the psychological laboratory just established at Columbia by Dr. Cattell, who had come a year before from the fountain-head, the Leipzig laboratory, I determined to be his pupil, and my parents took a house in New York for the year. But Columbia had never admitted a woman graduate student: the most I could hope for was to be tolerated as a 'hearer,' and even that would not be possible until after Christmas when the trustees had met. I solaced myself by taking the School of Mines course in quantitative chemical analysis at the Barnard laboratory, the second floor of a brownstone house on Madison Avenue. President Butler was then the amazingly efficient young dean of the department of philosophy, and, at his suggestion, I read Wundt's long article on psychological methods in the first volume ofPhilosophische Studien; having had only a year of German, I began by writing out a translation of it, an excellent [p. 339] way of getting the vocabulary. After Christmas I was allowed to present myself to Dr. Cattell for admission as a hearer. The psychological laboratory was the top floor of the old President's House on Forty-ninth Street close to the New York Central tracks. "What do you think is done in psychological laboratories?" asked Dr. Cattell, who looked then just as he does now, barring the grey hair. I blessed the hours I had spent on W. Wundt's article: instead of speaking as I am sure I was expected to do, of hypnotism, telepathy, and spiritism, I referred to reaction-time, complication experiments, and work on the limens and Weber's Law, and was rewarded by the remark that I seemed to have some knowledge of the matter.
From that time Dr. Cattell treated me as a regular student and required of me all that he required of the men. A lifelong champion of freedom and equality of opportunity, it would never have occurred to him to reject a woman student on account of her sex. The four men students, seniors, and I listened to his lectures, prepared reports on experimental work, and at least one paper on a theoretical subject. He assigned to me the experimental problem of finding whether Weber's Law held for the two-point threshold on the skin. I improvised apparatus, used a metronome to keep the duration of the stimuli constant, and found observers among my Barnard associates. Incidentally, it may be mentioned that Weber's Law does not hold for the two-point threshold. I also exchanged hours of observation with Harold Griffing, the only graduate student, who was engaged on his thesis,On Sensations from Pressure and Impact. He was a man of great promise, heavily burdened with the support of his invalid mother and sisters; he died a year or two after taking the doctorate. He would have been a leader in American psychology.
Dr. Cattell raised me to the height of joy after I had read a paper on the relation of psychology to physiology by writing me a note to suggest that I send it to thePhilosophical Review. Nothing would have induced me to do anything so daring. At the end of the year, since there were no fellowships at Barnard, he advised me to apply for a graduate scholarship at the newly organized Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell. I feel an affectionate gratitude to him, as my first teacher, which in these later years I have courage to express; in earlier times I stood too much in awe of him.
While I was thus being initiated into Cattell's objective version of the Leipzig doctrine, the influence of William James'sPrincipleswas strong. His enthusiasm for the occult was unattractive; it [p. 340] seemed that in his zeal to keep an open mind he kept it open more widely to the abnormal than to the normal. But his description of the stream of consciousness, and the consistently analytic rather than synthetic point of view which he maintained in holding that simpler mental states are products of analysis, and in developing all spatial relations by analysis from a primitive space instead of compounding them like Wundt out of non-spatial elements, never lost their effect even though the prestige of the Leipzig school increased.
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One of the difficulties in writing these recollections has been that the present is so much more interesting than the past. It is hard to keep one's attention on reminiscence. Scientific psychology in America -- though not, alas! in Germany, its birthplace -- seems fuller of promise than ever before. The behaviorists have stimulated the development of objective methods, while configurationism is reasserting the importance of introspection; and, best of all, pure psychology is enlisting young men of excellent ability and a far sounder general scientific training than that possessed by any but a few of their predecessors.