I went in the fall of 1892 to Cornell, where Titchener had just arrived from Oxford and Leipzig. He was twenty-five, but seemed older at first sight because of his square-cut beard; the illusion of age vanished on acquaintance. There was nothing about him at that time to suggest either his two greatest gifts or his chief failing in later life. The gifts, in my opinion, were his comprehensive scholarship, shown conspicuously in hisInstructor's Manuals of Experimental Psychology; and his genius as a lecturer. In his first two years at Cornell his lectures were read, and were frankly after the German fashion: we regarded him as a brilliant young man who would give us the latest news from Leipzig, rather than as one to be heard for his own sake. The failing that later grew upon him was that of remaining isolated so far as his immediate surroundings were concerned from all but subordinates. In these first years he was entirely human. He once asked me to look over some proof; finding a sentence whose meaning was obviously inverted, I asked, "Didn't you mean" so-and-so? "Of course I did, ass that I am!" was the hearty response, a response that I fancy would have come far less heartily a few years later.
I was his only major graduate student, and experimental psychology was so young that he did not quite know what to do with me. Appointments for planning laboratory work would be made which often ended in his telling stories of Oxford life for an hour or two. He finally suggested that since I had some experience in work on tactual space perception, I should make an experimental study of the method of equivalents. I wrote up the results in a paper which was accepted in June at Vassar for an M. A.in absentia, Titchener having given me a written examination lasting three hours, of which I do not recall a single question. The paper was next year incorporated into my doctor's thesis, and was resurrected a few years ago by Gemelli in his study of the method.
The Sage School of Philosophy was an inspiring place to work, for [p. 341] the members of its faculty were nearly all young. I chose as my minor subjects philosophy and ethics. President Schurman taught the advanced course in ethics. He had visited Vassar in my senior year and given several lectures on Herbert Spencer, which it was my privilege to report as a college editor. They were models of clearness and force. I have always greatly admired him, and it is a keen pleasure to read of his diplomatic triumphs at an age when most men are resting on earlier laurels. To be his pupil was a privilege. I had also a course with Ernest Albee in Leibnitz, Hume, and Kant, and with William Hammond in Greek and mediaeval philosophy, and read Kuno Fischer with Frank Thilly one hour a week for drill in philosophical German. Among my fellow-students were Joseph Leighton, now of Ohio State University, Edgar Hinman of the University of Nebraska, Albert Ross Hill, later President of the University of Missouri, Melbourne S. Read of Colgate, and Louise Hannum, a remarkably able woman who afterwards taught in Colorado.
At the end of this year I was asked to take the Chair of Psychology at the Woman's College of Western Reserve University, and went to Cleveland to look it over. The opportunity was a good one, but I think I was wise in deciding to finish my work for the doctorate at Cornell, although Dr. Schurman disapproved of the decision. In my second year at Cornell I was no longer Titchener's only major student, being joined by Walter Pillsbury from Nebraska; this is an association of which I have always been proud. I had, during my work with the method of equivalents, thought of a subject for a doctor's thesis: the influence of visual imagery on judgments of tactual distance and direction. Much of my time this year went to the thesis. I had also a course in Lotze's metaphysics with F. C. S. Schiller, who had come from Oxford for a year's stay in the wilderness and was even then a very distinguished man. The thesis was finished by the spring vacation, and Dr. Titchener sent it to Wundt, who had it translated into German and published inPhilosophische Studien, where the Leipzig theses appeared. On this occasion my translator enriched the German language with a new verb:visualisiren.
Examinations for the doctorate at that time were wholly oral. Some of the questions at mine I can recall. Dr. Schurman quizzed me on Spencer'sData of Ethics, which was a piece of luck for me, since in my senior year I had mildly annoyed Dr. Taylor and secured [p. 342] intervals of repose for my classmates by quoting it extensively. Dr. Titchener asked me something about Müller and Schumann's work on lifted weights, and also a question which I could not answer: the correct answer would have been, "The cornea," but why the cornea I have no recollection. Dr. Creighton asked me to name the Kantian categories, and what the relation of the third one in each group was to the other two; also about Berkeley's theory of causation. Dr. Hammond wished to hear about philosophy in the ninth century. The occasion was a pleasant one. I received the doctor's degree in June, 1894.
No position was waiting for me, and I even considered teaching psychology in a New York finishing school. The elderly gentleman at its head impressed me with its high standards: all the members of his senior class in astronomy the last year had attained the mark of 100 per cent. Before I committed myself to this institution a telegram asked me to come to Wells College. Its new president, Dr. William E. Waters, being a classical scholar, preferred to teach Greek instead of the psychology and ethics required of a college president; in this emergency they could offer me little money, but I gladly accepted the Chair of Psychology, Philosophy, and Ethics (not to mention logic), at a salary of three hundred dollars and home. (The arrangement with my family was that when I visited them they paid the expenses of importation, but I must pay my own way back). Wells was, and I hear still is, though much grown, a delightful place; I spent six years there that left not a single unpleasant memory. The salary, by the way, had by the last two years reached the maximum for women professors, seven hundred dollars and home; the men were paid fifteen hundred. What money meant in those days is shown by the fact that at the end of the six years I had saved five hundred dollars without any effort at all. During several of these years I spent one day a week at Cornell. Titchener was already withdrawing from contact on equal terms with his colleagues in the Sage School, who went their own way, and, as they were my especial friends, I saw little of the Director of the Laboratory, though he was always kind and helpful when we met. I published during this time some observations on afterimages and two or three articles on other subjects which may remain forgotten. Late in the summer of 1897 I fell ill with typhoid during a visit in Vermont, and could not return to work until the first of December. Without my knowledge, Professors Creighton [p. 343] and James Seth had taken charge of my courses, coming down twice a week from Ithaca; thus my misfortune was great gain for my students.
During this period I accepted the general point of view of what Titchener called structural psychology. To a person with a liking for chemistry the idea of introspectively analyzing mental states into irreducible elements had attraction, yet one could not forget James's conception of consciousness as a stream and the impossibility that it should be at once a stream and a mosaic. I never followed Titchener when he developed his elaborate, highly refined introspective analysis, and not one of the doctor's theses produced at Cornell and later at Clark (under Baird) by the use of this method had any real appeal for me. It is worth while to describe conscious states, but not, in describing them, to turn them into something unrecognizable. Münsterberg's work was attracting attention. I liked the theory of knowledge which he developed in hisGrundzüge, that brilliant book which he never finished, preferring to waste his great powers in writing articles for American popular magazines. He was a dualist but not an interactionist, a position which perfectly suited my own skepticism with regard to monism. He restricted causality to the series of physical events, and regarded psychic processes as epiphenomena; this still seems to me the only defensible position. His own method of structural analysis, however, which sought a psychic Ur-element as the accompaniment of the activity of a single cortical neuron, was indefensible psychologically, physiologically, and psychophysically; that is, his introspective analysis was fallacious; his physiological hypothesis that single cortical neurons act alone was highly improbable, and there was not the slightest evidence that his mental Ur-element was the accompaniment of such a physiological Ur-element! But his emphasis on movement as an explanatory concept seemed to me highly promising. Structural psychology was weak on the explanatory side: motor processes could help it out.
In my sixth year at Wells I became restless, and felt that a year at the Harvard laboratory would be a refreshing change. I was granted leave of absence for this purpose in the spring of 1900, but a telegram from President Schurman changed my plan. He asked me to come to Cornell as Warden of Sage College, with plenty of opportunity for my own psychological work and what then seemed the enormous salary of fifteen hundred dollars and home. So I returned to Cornell for two years. In the first, I tried to work out [p. 344] in the physics laboratory the problem of the flight of colors, but did not succeed in obtaining good results from any controllable source of light. I had to spend too much time and energy at social functions, which, however, gave much profitable experience in other directions. In the physics laboratory I served as an observer for Frank Allen's research on the fusion rate of retinal impressions from different regions of the spectrum, and got a further glimpse of the futility of elaborate introspection. As I observed and reported on the visual phenomena, I accompanied my judgments of fusion by introspective accounts of variations in my general state of mind which would undoubtedly make the curves in one experiment quite different from those in another. I mentally congratulated Mr. Allen in having for the first time an observer skilled in introspecting sources of error. Much surprise resulted when the curves proved highly uniform; the sources of error had not influenced the sensory judgments at all.www.psychspace.com心理学空间网
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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.