Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology

Gregory A. Kimble, Michael Wertheimer, Charlotte L. White, Gregory A. Kimble, Michael Wertheimer, Charlotte L. White

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317783947
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book presents a series of informal biographies about major figures in the history of psychology. A unique combination of expertise and human appeal, the volume places the contributions of each pioneer in a new and fascinating perspective. For instance, several of the authors use the novel approach of having the pioneers return to the present day to reflect back on their work as it relates to the here and now. Revisions of speeches given in a popular series of invited addresses at psychological conventions, the chapters offer appealing glimpses into the lives of individuals who made a difference in the early years of psychology as a field of study. Each of the five volumes in this series contains different profiles thereby bringing more than 100 of the pioneers in psychology more vividly to life.

*Photograph of Francis Galton courtesy of the Archives of the History of Psychology, Akron, Ohio

Chapter 1

A Trans-Time Visit with Francis Galton

as recorded by
G. E. McClearn

I recall how intrigued I was when H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine first was published. My first thought was that a man of science could have no greater boon than to be transported into the future and see to what advanced state his infant inquiries had developed. I am sure that you can imagine my astonishment when it happened–and I was plucked out of my present into this time, my future–by means of the marvelous time device of Dr. Kimble, Dr. Wertheimer, and Dr. White. The fare that I have been charged for this temporal journey is to tell you of my reactions.

This travel into the future is not an unmixed blessing. It satisfies the curiosity, but offers a near overwhelming frustration, as well. It is rather humiliating, for example, to discover that undergraduates of my future, your present, know more about so many things than did the most advanced scholars of my time. It disappoints me to learn that notions I fancied to be splendid and germinal have faded into obscure footnotes of scientific history. Worst of all, with the hindsight available from this future perspective, one sees how close one was at times to critical new insights–how very, very close–and yet failed to take the crucial steps.

However, let me say that to see these savant undergraduates assures that the scientific enterprise is cumulative and to learn that some of one’s contributions were useful and are remembered, is very gratifying indeed.

I’m told that it is 1992, and that your nation is just 16 years past its bicentennial. In that context it might be appropriate to note that I had a grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, whose reputation was sufficient that he was invited to become court physician to King George III. Abhorring London city life, he declined. I wonder, if he had been able to minister successfully to the King’s psychic ills, and if that monarch had therefore developed a somewhat more conciliatory attitude concerning taxation and representation, whether the whole unpleasantness of the Revolution might possibly have been avoided.

PERSONAL HISTORY

Perhaps a brief autobiographical statement will be an appropriate way to illustrate my life and times of science. My father, Samuel, was a successful banker, and was himself the son of a manufacturer. My mother, Violetta, was the eldest daughter of Erasmus Darwin. Their marriage resulted in nine children, of whom seven lived beyond infancy. I was the last born, in 1822 (and I note with some consternation the recent work on birth order), and being the baby of the family, I was very pampered by older sisters as well as by mother. It is not irrelevant, I believe, to note that my father was an amateur scientist, and from my very early years, I can remember various types of optical apparatus–microscopes, telescopes, and so on–about his study. Father published little, but I might note with some filial pride that some of his observations on colour vision anticipated the trichromatic theory later advanced by Young.

Education

My early education was of the classical sort–with much Latin, much Greek, much grammar and no mathematics, nor science worthy of note. My education was not, I later concluded, of very much value for a scientific career. When I was 16, I entered medical studies at Birmingham General Hospital. An empirical predilection revealed itself during my study of pharmaceuticals in a determination to administer them all to myself. I began alphabetically, but my enthusiasm for the experiment was dampened when I tried Croton oil, which is, as I discovered, a most remarkably effective purgative and emetic! I did not venture onward to the Ds! My training continued at Kings College, London, where I was particularly interested in anatomy and chemistry. Mathematics also appealed greatly to my mind, and I took time out for a degree in mathematics at Cambridge. At about this time, I may note, I had many lively and engaging conversations with my cousin, Charles Darwin, who had just published the Journal of the Voyage of the Beagle. Perhaps more than I realized, my cousin’s voyage contributed to my own wanderlust, which I was ultimately to satisfy quite thoroughly.

Freedom to Explore

My medical studies were interrupted by the death of my father. Upon coming into my inheritance I entered what I like to regard as a fallow period. Superficially, it was a leisurely and (I now quote myself) “very idle life, but it was not really so. I read a good deal all the time, and digested what I read by much thinking about it. It has always been my unwholesome way of work to brood much at irregular times.” I traveled widely in Syria and Egypt, and resolved upon a geographical expedition to Africa. This expedition in 1850–1852 provided some exciting encounters with lions and episodes of tribal warfare, but it provided also many opportunities for geographical observation. My report to the Royal Geographical Society was well received, and I acquired some small reputation amongst English men of scientific affairs.

My time was well filled with various projects. Inspired by paternal example (and, as I believe, inheriting his proclivity) I undertook several inventions. I had already done some small things with respect to locks, and a rotary steam engine; I now turned my attention to the invention and development of a printing telegraph, underwater spectacles to be used by divers, hyperscopes (I believe you would call them periscopes) for seeing over women’s bonnets at lectures and other uses.

I also became interested in meteorology and had the honour to originate weather maps. I was also able to discover the direction of flow around high and low pressure areas–a routine feature now on TV weather news.

A Turning Point

In 1859 there occurred an event that shaped my thoughts and channeled my energies for the rest of my life: the publication of my cousin Darwin’s book, On The Origin of Species. I can illustrate the importance of this work by an excerpt from a letter that I wrote to Charles:

[I] always think of you in the same way as converts from barbarism think of the teacher who first relieved them from the intolerable burden of their superstition. I used to be wretched under the weight of the old-fashioned arguments from design; of which I felt though I was unable to prove to myself, the worthlessness. Consequently, the appearance of your Origin of Species formed a real crisis in my life; your book drove away the constraint of my old superstition as if it had been a nightmare and was the first to give me freedom of thought. (Pearson, 1924, Vol. 1, Plate II)

HEREDITARY GENIUS

From my first reading of this monumental book, my interest never wavered from what might best be described as the natural history of human faculty. In 1865, I made my first venture into this field by writing two articles, jointly entitled “Hereditary Talent and Character,” which were published in Macmillan’s Magazine. Four years later, a greatly expanded discussion was published with the title Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences.

The general argument presented in this work was that amongst the relatives of persons endowed with high mental ability are to be found a greater number of other extremely able individuals than would be expected by chance; furthermore, the closer the family relationship, the higher the incidence of such superior individuals. Applying Quetelet’s “law of deviation from an average,” which at the time was a fairly recent development, but which is familiar to all of you as the normal curve, I distinguished 14 levels of human ability, ranging from idiocy through mediocrity to genius.

No satisfactory way of quantifying natural ability was then available, so I had to rely upon reputation as an index. By reputation, I did not mean notoriety from a single act, nor mere social or official position, but “the reputation of a leader of opinion, of an originator, of a man to whom the world deliberately acknowledges itself largely indebted.” The designation “eminent” I applied to those individuals who comprised the upper 250 millionths of the population (i.e., one in 4,000 persons would attain such a rank), and it was with such men that the discussion was concerned. Indeed, the majority of individuals presented in evidence were, in my estimation, the cream of this elite group, and were termed “illustrious.” These were men whose talents ranked them one in a million.

By reading biographies, published accounts, and by direct inquiry, when possible and convenient, I evaluated the accomplishments of eminent judges, statesmen, peers, military commanders, literary men, scientists, poets, musicians, painters, Protestant religious leaders and Cambridge scholars, and their relatives. As a matter of fact, I also examined oarsmen and wrestlers of note in order to extend the range of inquiry from brain to brawn. In all, I found nearly 1,000 eminent men in the 300 families examined. With the overall incidence of eminence only 1 in 4,000, this result clearly illustrated the tendency for eminence to be a family trait; but more of this later.

This application of the normal curve gave me much satisfaction, showing, as it seemed to me to do, that psychical (you would say psychological) properties are susceptible to assessment and measurement just as are physical ones such as height or weight, and that they are also subject to the laws of inheritance.

STUDY OF ASSOCIATION

In an attempt to study the functioning of the mind in a more detailed way, I began investigations of my own processes of associating ideas. In my first such effort, I made an attempt to examine all of the associations that came to mind in a walk along Pall Mall. I was at once impressed that (again quoting myself)

[t]he brain was vastly more active than I had previously believed it to be, and I was perfectly amazed at the unexpected width of the field of its everyday operations. After an interval of some days, during which I kept my mind from dwelling on my first experiences, in order that it might retain as much freshness as possible for a second experiment, I repeated the walk, and was struck just as much as before by the variety of ideas that presented themselves, and the number of events to which they referred, about which I had never consciously occupied myself of late years. But my admiration at the activity of the mind was seriously diminished by another observation which I then made, namely that there had been a very great deal of repetition of thought. The actors in my mental stage were indeed very numerous, but by no means so numerous as I had imagined. They now seemed to be something like the actors in theaters where large processions are represented, who march off one side of the stage, and, going round by the back, come on again at the other. I accordingly cast about for means of laying hold of these fleeting thoughts, and submitting them to statistical analysis, to find out more about their tendency to repetition and other matters.

I approached this problem by choosing 100 words, all beginning with the letter A, exposing them to view for 4 seconds, and recording all ideas that came to mind. My principal object was to show that a large class of mental phenomena, that have hitherto been too vague to lay hold of, admit of being caught by the firm grip of genuine statistical inquiry. Several salient points emerged from my analysis.

First, the average rate of production of association was about 50 per minute, which struck me as being a surprisingly slow rate.

Second, there were many repetitions of association upon repeated exposure. As I had concluded from my Pall Mall walk, the mind “is apparently always engaged in mumbling over its old stores and if any one of these is wholly neglected for a while, it is apt to be forgotten, perhaps irrecoverably.”

Third, upon inspection, it appeared that most of the associations derived from early rather than recent experiences.

In 1879, I reported these results in the journal Brain and concluded: Perhaps the strongest impression left by these experiments regards the multifariousness of the work done by the mind in a state of half-consciousness, and the valid reason they afford for believing in the existence of still deeper strata of mental operations, sunk wholly below the level of consciousness, which may account for such mental phenomena as cannot otherwise be explained.

Now, it is known that Sigmund Freud was a reader of this journal, and I may perhaps be excused the speculation that my observation may have contributed in some modest way to the theorizing that he accomplished with respect to unconscious mental processes.

IMAGERY AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

Many of my scientific colleagues were perplexed by that part of my results which pertained to associations that were visual images, having apparently no experience with any such subjective phenomenon themselves. In order to explore the difference amongst people in imaging ability or proclivity implied by these comments, I devised a questionnaire that inquired concerning the respondent’s ability to recollect the breakfast table that morning, and about the definition, clarity and brightness of the image, about the presence or absence of colour, and so forth.

A detailed account of the conclusions would be out of place at this time; I was principally impressed by the wide array of individual differences, ranging from those who reported no imagery whatsoever to those who claimed to see in imagery as much detail as if seeing the reality.

MEASUREMENT OF TALENT

In spite of my being engrossed in the development of these various approaches to a meaningful analysis of human faculty, I remained concerned about the element of subjectivity, and desired psychical measures as objective and rigorous as those that could be used in physics or chemistry or geology.

I did some small work on the ability to repeat numbers serially presented, comparing normal persons to idiots. I understand that Binet included a variant of this procedure called “digit span” in his later test, which had some considerable success and which has had some very successful descendants.

Being of mechanical inclination, I turned my attention to the design of instruments that might give reliable results with respect to what I then called keenness of sight, colour-sense, judgement of eye, hearing, highest audible note, breathing power, strength of pull and squeeze, and swiftness of blow.

A major problem arose in the gathering of information utilizing these instruments. Reputation I could assess from reading of documents; association I could investigate essentially by consulting myself (introspection), and imagery could be examined from questionnaires despatched by mail, and attended to at leisure by the respondent.

However, these new instruments required administration. A rather different order of logistical demands was made by this type of investigation, and you should remember that all expenses were borne by myself. I was, of course, quite comfortably established, but there were limits!

The solution to the problem was to set up a booth at the International Health Exhibition in 1884. A plentiful supply of potential subjects was assured by the great popularity of this Exhibition. More than 9,000 persons were attracted by the opportunity to be measured by my devices. Given your current frenetic system of grant seeking, you may be envious to learn that they each paid threepence for the privilege of being so measured.

STATISTICS

As will have become apparent, my career was dominated by consuming interest in applying mathematical and statistical manipulations to the measurement and analysis of data on human faculty. Now with the results from my Anthropometric Laboratory available, I possessed the necessary body of data, and I was able to indulge myself freely. I had already puzzled long over a phenomenon that appeared in my researches on heredity (about which more later). Inheritance seemed to involve partial determination, not the simple linear causality of simple physical systems. In the latter case, statement...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Portraits of the Authors and Editors
• 1 A Trans-Time Visit with Francis Galton
• 2 William James: Spoiled Child of American Psychology
• 3 The Spirit of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov
• 4 Freud: 3 Contributions
• 5 From “Paired Associates” to a Psychology of Self: The Intellectual Odyssey of Mary Whiton Calkins
• 6 The Intrepid Joseph Jastrow
• 7 E. B. Titchener on Scientific Psychology and Technology
• 8 Continuity for Women: Ethel Puffer’s Struggle
• 9 Harvey Carr and Chicago Functionalism: A Simulated Interview
• 10 Edward L. Thorndike: A Professional and Personal Appreciation
• 11 C. G. Jung: The Man and His Work, Then and Now
• 12 Perspectives on John B. Watson
• 13 Max Wertheimer: Modern Cognitive Psychology and the Gestalt Problem
• 14 Psychology from the Standpoint of a Mechanist: An Appreciation of Clark L. Hull
• 15 Edward Chace Tolman: A Life of Scientific and Social Purpose
• 16 Leta Stetter Hollingworth: “Literature of Opinion” and the Study of Individual Differences
• 17 Natural Wholes: Wolfgang Köhler and Gestalt Theory
• 18 General Anthroponomy and Its Systematic Problems: A Tribute to Walter S. Hunter
• 19 Systems as Reconceptualizations: The Work of Edna Heidbreder
• 20 Integrations of Lashley
• 21 Harry Stack Sullivan: The Clinician and the Man
• 22 Robert Choate Tryon: Pioneer in Differential Psychology
• Index