Mabel F. Martin
Northampton State Hospital
Best known for her work in animal psychology, Professor Washburn made original contributions in an incredible variety of other fields that might have seemed unrelated to a mind of less encyclopedic scope. If Spearman is right in identifying general intelligence with the capacity to discover relationships, Miss Washburn had it to a remarkable degree. She found relationships between such diverse phenomena as organic sensations and social consciousness.
Her originality early attracted attention, her keen critical ability commanded respect, and her warm personality won lasting friends. Students and younger psychologists found Miss Washburn always approachable and encouraging. In meetings of the American Psychological Association, it was her, custom to speak to any younger member who appeared lonely or shy and to help the newcomer to become acquainted. While the world mourns the scientist, those who knew her personally mourn a gracious, charming woman of wide sympathy and unfailing tact.
Miss Washburn's strenuous teaching and administrative duties never interfered with her own research. Productive scholarship was her vocation from her student days to the very end of her busy professorship. Her earliest publication reported experiments on the perception of distance in the inverted landscape.[1] A year later came an article on the influence of visual associations on the-space perceptions of the skin.[2] Next came a study of the process of recognition[3] and shortly thereafter a discussion of the psychology of deductive logic.[4]
Trained by Titchener, Miss Washburn was always interested in the subjective side of experience, including images. In 1899, she published the first of her many investigations of after-images.[5] Her article in the Hall Festschrift, in 1903,[6] foreshadowed four areas of interest in which she was to make significant contributions to psychology—the problems of
( 8) social consciousness, the problems of revived and ideated emotions, the r le of movement in the development of mental life, and the field of animal psychology. It is impossible to label them first, second, third, and fourth, because they are so intimately intertwined in this one short, pregnant article.
As early as 1900 she had begun to doubt the validity of the extreme structuralist position. In 1903, she wrote,
"It is impossible, assuming only the mental structures discoverable by our present introspection, to give a continuous and coherent explanation of individual mental growth. There are breaks; the effect is more than the causes; the whole is greater than the structural parts we thought went to compose it. A striking example is to be found in the rise of social consciousness in the individual. By social consciousness, it is generally agreed, is meant 'ejective' consciousness, the reference of a certain mental process to another mind. Clear, fully realized social consciousness is a" late product both in individual development and in the history of the animal mind; its existence in lower animals is more than doubtful and its defects in the human child are responsible for the cruelty 'often displayed by children. . . . How does the child come to have any power at all of thinking of experience as belonging to other minds? Nothing that we can find in our own conscious life at the present time will bridge the gap."[7]
At the time that these words were written, social consciousness was so generally taken for granted that it required Miss Washburn to call attention to the problem of its origin. Baldwin had sought to explain its rise in the individual child on the basis of imitation. Miss Washburn conceded that imitation and association may explain the particular social interpretation of a bit of behavior but not social interpretation in generally.[8] To account for this, she proposed the interesting hypothesis that in the social animals certain motor reactions of coming to the rescue of a comrade in danger preceded the development of ejective consciousness,[9] and that the latter developed from the former. The cries of their comrade serve as stimuli, arousing other members of the herd to attack whatever other animal is threatening him. Thus instinctive, unreflective helpfulness forms the primitive substratum from which both the desire and the possibility of mutual understanding develop. She explains,
"It is through the social action stimulated by the behavior of others that conscious creatures have been led to social interpretation of that behavior. Let us go back to our animal capable of forming representations on the one hand of its own past alarm, suggested perhaps by revisiting the scene of it; and on the other hand, of another animal's alarm, suggested by the sound of cries. The whole motor attitude is different in the two cases. These two ideas, necessarily similar in their internal
(9) constitution, would differ in the escort of organic and movement sensations accompanying them. ... From the dawn of the power to form ideas, the consciousness produced by manifestations of mental processes in another animal would contain different elements from those going to make up other representative consciousness; and these elements, the genetic elements of which we were in search, are the movements and organic sensations produced by motor reactions of social utility, already on the field before social consciousness develops."[10]
Thus, during the ascendency of extreme introspectionism, it was Miss Washburn who pointed out that social activity precedes social consciousness and that the animal responds to the behavior of its fellows rather than to any idea of their mental states. Later, during the ascendency of extreme behaviorism, psychologists began to conceive of the social behavior of man as a reaction to the behavior of others. It was then Miss Washburn who pointed out the one-sidedness of this conception. She showed that man reacts not so much to the overt behavior of his fellow men as to what he conceives their mental states to be.[11]
At the outset, her motor theory of consciousness was merely a brilliant hypothesis; but in later years, numerous experimental studies, undertaken primarily for other purposes, furnished evidence in support of it. In 1916, the theory was fully elaborated in her book entitled Movement and Mental Imagery.
In this book she gave evidence for the view that an internally anticipated movement is always present when in human consciousness we have a memory idea, and also that this internal anticipation of movements means actual slight contractions of the muscles involved in performing the movements.
Miss Washburn's original and fruitful theories were so numerous and varied that she could not possibly have elaborated all of them into books.
Many are tucked away in short articles or mere brief notes in scientific and philosophical journals.
In 1904, two years before Sherrington published The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, in which he expounded the r le of distance receptors in the development of mind, Miss Washburn had already pointed out that one essential condition for the development of higher mental processes is the possession of sense-organs for the reception of stimuli at a distance.[12] She showed that an important difference exists between stimuli from objects directly in contact with an organism's body and those which proceed from objects at a distance. Reaction must be almost instantaneous, if an
( 10) organism is to escape an enemy in actual contact with its body. When the stimulus is at a distance, the danger is not so imminent. The full motor response may be delayed for a short interval without imperiling the life-interests of the animal. The possibility of delay brings in the further possibility of anticipation, and ultimately, the possibility of choice, learning, etc.
As we have seen, Miss Washburn's earliest contributions to the field of animal psychology were theoretical; she sought to bridge the gap in our understanding of the human consciousness by a speculative excursion into the probable beginnings of such consciousness in animals antedating man; but her scientific habit of mind could not let her rest content with hypothesis unsupplemented by experiment. Beginning in 1906, [13] she published a large number of experimental studies of the mental life of animals. In 1908, she published The Animal Mind. The book met with wide and lasting popularity. The second edition appeared in 1917, the third in 1926, and the fourth in 1936.
From the beginning, her interest was in seeking to learn (indirectly of course) something about the subjective experience of animals, their sensations, their capacity for sensory discrimination, their power to form associations. Because the animals could not report their experience in words, it was necessary to observe their behavior and to infer their subjective experience from the way they behaved. Miss Washburn, always a keen logician, was aware of the inferential character of all knowledge about the mental life of animals, but she held that a large part of scientific knowledge is similarly inferential. The solipsistic dilemma was perfectly familiar to her. She wrote:
"That the mind of each human being forms a region inaccessible to all save its possessor, is one of the commonplaces of reflection.... Each of us can judge his fellow-men only on the basis of his own thoughts and feelings in similar circumstances.... The science of human psychology has to reckon with this unbridgeable gap between minds as its chief difficulty. [14]
Her clear recognition of the fact that all psychology suffers from essentially the same difficulty kept her from despairing of insight into the animal mind and from becoming content with the superficiality of behavior-ism. Some of the most delightful passages in her writings consist of efforts to bridge by imagination the gap between human consciousness and that of animals whose differing anatomical structure would prevent them from having the same sensations as people. She says,
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"A bodily structure entirely unlike our own must create a background of organic sensation which renders the whole mental life of an animal foreign and unfamiliar to us. We speak, for example, of an 'angry' wasp. Anger, in our own experience, is largely composed of sensations of quickened heart beat, of altered breathing, of muscular tension, of increased blood pressure in the head and face. The circulation of a wasp is fundamentally different from that of any vertebrate. The wasp does not breathe through lungs, it wears its skeleton on the outside, and it has the muscles attached to the inside of the skeleton. What is anger like in the wasp's consciousness? We can form no adequate idea of it."[15]
This unfailing recognition of the difference between overt activity and the consciousness behind it made her a keen critic of those who ignored consciousness.
Miss Washburn was much interested in methodology. She never forgot that the task of the psychologist is twofold: first to obtain the facts; and secondly to interpret them. Her emphasis shifted slightly from time to time to counterbalance the changing fashions in contemporary practice. At the beginning of her career, it was necessary to stress the importance of obtaining the facts. Nearly all the textbooks then available still relied too largely on the anecdotal method. Even Wundt lapsed into anecdote when it came to animal psychology. Miss Washburn pointed out the fallacy of relying on casual observers, who are not trained to distinguish what they see from what they infer. She showed the importance of knowing the habits of the species and even the past experience of the particular animal concerned. She also showed the need of precautions to avoid such complicating factors as hunger, fright, bewilderment, and loneliness. It was years before any large proportion of animal experimenters approximated her ideals for reliable experimental work; but at least a beginning had been made. In 1898, Thorndike's monograph on animal intelligence's (based on rigorous experimentation) had appeared and in the intervening ten years an increasing number of experimental studies had been published in a wide variety of journals. Miss Washburn felt the need of making this material more accessible to the ordinary student. She limited her book to the facts that had been determined by experiment, resisting the temptation to round ou+ by anecdote those aspects of the animal mind not yet explored experimentally. In successive editions she was able to enlarge the scope of the book, because the steady advance of the science made more facts available. Never, however, did she fall into the error of substituting hearsay for fact. She always drew a clear-cut line between observation, and inference.
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On the other hand, she never forgot that observation is only the first part of the psychologist's task. His ultimate goal is an understanding of consciousness. The rise of behaviorism did not alter Miss Washburn's orientation. Instead, it sharpened her critical faculties. In the preface to the last edition, she wrote,
"The principle change in the attitude of investigators of animal behavior since the third edition of this work appeared is the decay of behaviorism as an interpretation and the revival of animal psychology. The conclusions drawn from experiments are now expressed in subjective terms. Undoubtedly one cause of this change is the rise of the configurational school. But extreme behaviorism, which ignored the existence of all qualitative differences in sensations, would not have long endured."[17]
In this last edition of The Animal Mind, she added a chapter on higher mental processes. With characteristic fairness she reviewed a vast amount of experimental evidence which had been held to cast doubt on the existence of memory ideas in the lower animals. Her scientific impartiality in giving full weight to this evidence is the more remarkable when we re-member that the postulate that such memory ideas do exist in at least some animals below man underlay several of her original theoretical contributions. It would have been easy to slight some of the negative evidence in view of the sheer bulk of experimental literature to be summarized within the one chapter. But Miss Washburn was now as always an impartial searcher after truth. She gave the negative evidence full weight at the outset. Fortunately for her original theories, the years intervening between the third and fourth editions of The Animal Mind brought forth a flood of experimental evidence for the position that she had held in the beginning. After reviewing one of D. K. Adams's experiments, she made the comment,
"The decay of extreme behaviorism is illustrated by the experimenter's statement that the basis of these reactions 'was visual recognition, such as humans are accustomed to, with whatever identifying imaginal constituents that implies. [18]
Climaxing a vast accumulation of experimental evidence in favor of higher mental processes in certain animals, Professor Washburn described Krechevsky's rats and their hypotheses.