HARVARD PSYCHOLOGICAL
STUDIES

EDITED BY

HUGO MÜNSTERBERG

Volume II

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

The Riverside Press, Cambridge

1906

COPYRIGHT 1906
BY THE PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published June 1906

CONTENTS

PLATES

EMERSON HALL

EMERSON HALL

BY HUGO MÜNSTERBERG

I. EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY IN HARVARD

On the 27th of December, 1905, Harvard University opened its new house of philosophy, Emerson Hall. The presence of the American Philosophical and Psychological Associations gave national significance to the completion of this building.

The psychologist will find quarters in all parts of Emerson Hall. The general courses in psychology will be held on the first floor in the large lecture-room, which has nearly four hundred seats; and close by are the psychological seminary-room and smaller lecture-rooms for the advanced psychological courses. On the second floor the psychologist finds his special library as a wing of the large library hall. But the exclusive domain of the psychologist is the third floor,—a psychological laboratory with twenty-five rooms. A large attic hall for laboratory purposes on the fourth floor completes the psychologist's allotment.

The work to be reported in future in the Harvard Psychological Studies will be work done in this new building, and while the researches reported in the following pages were completed in the smaller quarters of the old laboratory, it seems natural that this volume, which appears at this new epoch of our work, should give an account both of our psychological past and of the development and purpose of Emerson Hall.

The Harvard Psychological Laboratory was founded in 1891 by Professor William James, who had introduced some experimental features into his psychological lecture courses for some time before the formal opening of a regular workshop. Professor James started with two large rooms on the second floor of Dane Hall, and secured an excellent equipment, especially for the study of the psychology of the senses. He was assisted by Dr. Herbert Nichols, and at once gathered a number of graduate students for research.

In the following year Professor James withdrew from the experimental work, and the conduct of the laboratory was given over to me. In the years which followed, Dr. Arthur Pierce, Dr. J. E. Lough, and Dr. Robert MacDougall were the assistants until three years ago, when the development of the laboratory demanded a division of the assistant functions; since that time Dr. E. B. Holt has been the assistant for the work in human psychology, while Dr. R. M. Yerkes has had charge of the work in comparative psychology. Since from the first I laid special emphasis on research work, a greater number of small rooms was soon needed. In the year 1893, we divided a part of the adjacent lecture-room into four rooms for special investigations, and two years later the larger of the two original rooms was divided into five. As the lecture-room also was finally made part of the research laboratory, we had at last eleven rooms in Dane Hall. The activities of the laboratory, however, went far beyond the research work. We had regular training-courses in experimental practice, and the lecture courses in human and in comparative psychology drew largely on the resources of our instrument cases. Yet the original investigations absorbed the main energy of the laboratory, and demanded a steady expansion of its apparatus. An illustrated catalogue of the instruments has been published as part of the Harvard Exhibition at the Chicago World's Fair.

The participation of the students has been controlled by a principle which has characterized our Harvard work through all these years, and distinguished it from the methods of most other institutions. I insist that no student shall engage in one investigation only, but that every one who has charge of a special problem shall give to it only half of his working time, while in the other half he is to be subject in four, five, or more investigations by other members of the laboratory. In this way each research is provided with the desirable number of subjects, and all one-sidedness is avoided. Every experimenter thus comes in contact with a large range of problems and gets a fair training in manifold observations, besides the opportunity for concentration on a special research. It is true that this demands a complicated schedule and careful consideration of the special needs of every research, but it gives to the work a certain freshness and vividness, and banishes entirely the depression which is unavoidable whenever a student is for any length of time a passive subject in one psychological enquiry only. In both capacities, as experimenter and as observing subject, only graduate students have been acceptable. In this way about one hundred investigations on human psychology have been carried on, for most of which I have proposed the problems and the special lines of work, taking care that the research of succeeding years and of succeeding generations of graduate students should show a certain internal continuity. Whenever the results seemed fit for publication, the papers have been published under the names of the students who had the responsibility for the conduct of the experiments. Until three years ago the publication was scattered; most of the papers, however, appeared in the Psychological Review. The Harvard Psychological Studies, beginning in 1903, are to gather the bulk of our material, although not a few of the researches of recent years have been published in other places.

The laboratory has always sought to avoid one-sidedness, and this the more as it was my special aim to adjust the selection of topics to the personal equations of the students, many of whom came with the special interests of the physician, the zoölogist, the artist, the pedagogue, and so on. My own special interests may have emphasized those problems which refer to the motor functions and their relations to attention, apperception, space-sense, time-sense, feeling, etc. At the same time I have tried to develop the psychological-æsthetic work, which has become more and more a special branch of our laboratory, and there has been no year in which I have not insisted on some investigations in the fields of association, memory, and educational psychology. On the other hand, in a happy supplementation of interests, Dr. Holt has emphasized the physiological psychology of the senses, and Dr. Yerkes has quickly developed a most efficient experimental department of animal psychology.

As the work thus became more manifold, the old quarters in Dane Hall appeared less and less sufficient. And yet this laboratory development has been merely parallel to the growth of general philosophical studies in the whole University. The demand for a new hall, exclusively devoted to philosophy, was thus suggested from many sides. The idea of linking it with the name of Ralph Waldo Emerson has been for years a cherished plan of Professor Palmer.

An especially appropriate time for the realization of such a plan came in the approach of the hundredth anniversary of Emerson's birthday. Almost two years before this date the Department took the first steps in seeking to interest the members of the Visiting Committee for the collection of the necessary funds. This Committee, consisting of Mr. G. B. Dorr, chairman, Mr. R. H. Dana, Dr. R. Cabot, Mr. J. Lee, Mr. D. Ward, and Mr. R. C. Robbins, showed not only warm interest, but lent itself to the furtherance of the plans with such an energy and devotion that the Philosophical Department owes to these friends of philosophy in Harvard the most lasting gratitude. Various means were taken by the Committee and by the Department to stir the interest of the public, and soon the gifts began to come in, gifts of which some were clearly given from sympathy with the work of the Philosophical Department, some evidently in memory of Emerson. The original plans of the architect called for $150,000 for the building. When, on the 25th of May, 1903, the hundredth anniversary of Emerson's birthday was celebrated, the University had contributions amounting to more than this sum, and given by one hundred and seventy persons.

It was soon found, however, that this sum was inadequate; yet we never asked in vain. Additional gifts came in for the building fund, just as later the generosity of several friends furnished the building with a handsome equipment and the laboratory with new instruments. Mr. R. C. Robbins gave the books for a philosophical library to be placed in the new Hall.

The architect chosen was Mr. Guy Lowell, who has had to labor under the difficulties involved in the fact that the best and quietest available place was on Quincy Street opposite Robinson Hall. This spot demanded that the new building be harmonized with Robinson and Sever Halls, two structures most unlike in their architectural style. There was not even the possibility of making it a companion to Robinson Hall, since the latter has but two stories, while it was evident that Emerson Hall needed three stories. The plan finally accepted, a Greek, brick building with brick columns and rich limestone trimmings, provided for the work of the whole Philosophical Division with the exception of education. The Education Department, with its large library, will soon need a whole building of its own, and has thus had no interest in being housed under the roof of Emerson Hall. On the other hand, the building was to give full space to that part of our Philosophical Division which now forms, like education, an administrative unity,—the Department of Social Ethics. A special library, museum rooms, etc., for social ethics were planned for the second floor by the munificence of an anonymous benefactor. Altogether we have six large lecture-rooms, two library halls, two collection-rooms, a department-room, a seminary-room, two studies and conference-rooms, twenty-five laboratory-rooms, all connected by very spacious, well-lighted halls and broad, imposing stairways. Surely never before in the history of scholarship has such a stately house been built for philosophy. And while the nature of the work is certainly not determined by the luxury of stone and carved wood, teachers and students alike must feel these superb surroundings as a daily stimulus to their best efforts.

At Christmas, 1905, the building stood ready for use, and Duveneck's bronze statue of Emerson was unveiled in the entrance hall. At the opening meeting, after short dedicatory orations by President Eliot and Dr. Edward Emerson, a real exchange of ideas in a joint debate of the Philosophical and Psychological Associations was substituted for the usual formal exercises. The question debated was suggested by the fact that Emerson Hall was to house the psychological laboratory. Does psychology really belong to philosophy or rather to the natural sciences? As the representative of Harvard, it was my part to open the debate and to characterize the attitude of the Harvard laboratory.

My remarks on that occasion may thus serve as the most direct introduction to our work. They are printed here, together with a short sketch of the equipment of the laboratory. I venture to add also two other papers, one of which points to the administrative, the other and longer one to the philosophical background of Emerson Hall. Inasmuch as I was Chairman of the Philosophical Department throughout the five years in which the plan for Emerson Hall was growing and became finally realized, it has been my official duty repeatedly to express our hopes and ideals. Thus I had to formulate the wishes of the Department at the outset in a letter to the Visiting Committee, a letter which was used as a circular in asking the public for funds. Two years later when Harvard celebrated the Emerson anniversary, I delivered an address on Emerson as philosopher. This epistemological paper may seem far removed from the interests of the Harvard Psychological Studies, and yet I am glad to print it in this laboratory volume, and thus emphatically to indicate that I for one consider philosophy the true basis for the psychologist.

There follow thus, first, the letter to the Visiting Committee, with which the Emerson Hall movement took its official inception in 1901; secondly, the address delivered at Harvard on the celebration of the Emerson anniversary in May, 1903; thirdly, the paper contributed to the debate of the philosophers at the opening meeting in December, 1905; and, finally, a description of the present status of the laboratory in January, 1906.

II. THE NEED FOR EMERSON HALL

[The letter addressed to the Visiting Committee of the Overseers of Harvard University, in 1901, reads as follows:]

Gentlemen,—The philosophical work in Harvard has in the last twenty years gone through an inner development which has met with a hearty response alike on the part of the University and of the students. The students have attended the courses in constantly growing numbers, the Governing Boards have provided the Division amply with new teachers, steadily increasing the number of professors, instructors, and assistants. The outer growth of the Division has thus corresponded most fortunately to the internal development, by an harmonious coöperation of the administration, the teachers, and the students of the University. And yet there remains one other factor as an essential condition for the healthy life of the Department, a factor which cannot be provided by the University itself and for which the help must come from without. Our work needs a dignified home where under one roof all the varied philosophical work now carried on at Harvard may be united. The need has been urgently felt for many years, but only with the recent growth has the situation become intolerable. It is therefore the unanimous opinion of the Department that we must ask the public for the funds to build at Harvard a "School of Philosophy," in the interest of the students and of the teachers, in the interest of the Department and of the University, in the interest of culture and of scholarship.

The present work of the Division of Philosophy can be indicated by a few figures. We entered the current year with a teaching-staff of six full professors, two assistant professors, four instructors, two teaching-fellows, and six assistants. The instruction of these twenty men covers the ground of history of philosophy, metaphysics, theory of knowledge, psychology, logic, ethics, æsthetics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of science and sociology. Thirty-two courses have been offered. These courses are grouped in three classes: the introductory courses, intended primarily for Sophomores and Juniors; the systematic and historic courses, planned for Juniors, Seniors, and Graduates; and the research courses for Graduates only. But the students whom we try to reach differ not only with regard to their classes, their corresponding maturity, and their degree of philosophical preparation, but also with regard to the aims and interests for which they elect philosophical studies in the University. The one group seeks in our field liberal education. The fundamental problems of life and reality, and the historic solutions of them which the great thinkers developed, the values of truth and beauty and morality, the laws of the mental mechanism and of the social consciousness, all these promise and prove to be incomparable agencies for widening the soul and giving to our young men depth, strength, and ideals. Not a few of the students who belong to this group remain loyal to philosophy through three or four years. A second group of students need our courses as preparation for divers scholarly or practical aims. The future lawyer, teacher, physician, minister, scientist, or philanthropist knows that certain courses in ethics or psychology, in education or logic afford the most solid foundations for his later work; there is hardly a course in our Division which is not adjusted to some kind of professional study. The third group finally, naturally the smallest, but to the teachers the most important, consists of those to whom philosophy itself becomes a life's work. The Harvard Department believes that there is nowhere else in this country or abroad such an opportunity for systematic and all-round training for an advanced student of philosophy as is offered here, covering easily a man's full work for six years, advancing from the introductory courses of the Sophomore year to the six seminaries of the graduate years and finally reaching the doctor's thesis in the third year after graduation.

The extent to which the Harvard students make use of these opportunities is to be inferred from the figures which the last Annual Report of the President offers. These refer to the year 1899-1900; the current year will show somewhat the same proportions, perhaps even an increase of graduate work. The figures are necessarily too low, inasmuch as they refer merely to those students who take examinations in the courses and omit those who merely attend the lectures. The attendance in the philosophical courses was last year over one thousand students. They belonged to all parts of the University, 188 Graduates, 210 Seniors, 218 Juniors, 175 Sophomores, 59 Specials, 57 Scientifics, 55 Divinity students, and the rest from the Freshman class, the Law School, and the Medical School. The introductory courses were attended by almost four hundred students, that is, by a number corresponding to the size of the Junior class. As, in spite of natural fluctuations, this figure is pretty constant,—in 1897 reaching its maximum with 427,—it can be said that in Harvard under the system of absolutely free election practically every student who passes through Harvard required of himself at least a year of solid philosophical study.

An even higher interest, however, belongs to the figures which refer to the most advanced courses offered, especially to the courses of research. It has always been the most characteristic feature of the Harvard Philosophical Department to consider the advancement of knowledge as its noblest function. The productive scholarship of the Department is shown by the fact that the last two years alone brought before the public eight compendious scholarly works from members of our Department, besides a large number of smaller contributions to science. To train also in the students this highest scholarly attitude, that of the critical investigator as contrasted with that of the merely receptive hearer of lectures, is thus the natural aim of our most advanced work; it is this spirit which has given to the Department its position in the University and in the whole country. This prevalence of the spirit of research is the reason why, as the Report of the Dean of the Graduate School points out, the Philosophical Department has a larger number of graduate students who have carried on graduate studies elsewhere than any other Department of the University. The table of the Dean which records these migrating graduate students who come to us for advanced work after graduate studies at other universities, is as follows: Mathematics 6, Natural History 7, Political Science 7, Modern Languages 11, Classics 14, History 15, English Literature 16, Philosophy 20. If we consider the whole advanced work of the University, that is the totality of those courses which are announced as "primarily for Graduates," we find that the following number of graduate students, including the graduate members of the professional schools, have taken part: Classics 103, Philosophy 96, English 75, German 61, History and Government 52, Romance Languages 45, Mathematics 39, Economics 23, Chemistry 21, in the other departments less than twenty. But this situation turns still more strongly in favor of philosophy as soon as we consider the technical research courses, those which in the language of the catalogue are known as the 20-courses, and omit those graduate courses which are essentially lecture courses. In these research courses the number of Graduate Students is: Philosophy 71, History and Government 34, Chemistry 13, Zoölogy 12, Geology 10, and in the other departments less than ten.

These few figures may be sufficient to indicate not only the extent of the Department and its influence, but above all the harmonious character of this development. The most elementary courses, the solid routine courses, and the most advanced courses, show equal signs of growth and progress, and the whole work with its many side branches remains a well-connected unity with a clear systematic plan. All this must be understood before one can appreciate the striking contrast between the work and the workshop. It is of course easy to say at once that the truth of a metaphysical thought does not depend upon the room in which it is taught, and that the philosopher is not, like a physicist or chemist, dependent upon outer equipments. Yet, this is but half true, and the half of the statement which is false is of great importance.

The dependence upon outer conditions is perhaps clearest in the case of psychology, which has been for the last twenty-five years an objective science with all the paraphernalia of an experimental study: the psychologist of to-day needs a well-equipped laboratory no less than the physicist. Harvard has given the fullest acknowledgment to this modern demand and has spent large sums to provide the University with the instruments of an excellent psychological laboratory; the one thing which we miss is room, simply elbow-room. Our apparatus is crowded in the upper story of Dane Hall, and even that small story must give its largest room for the lectures of other departments and another room to a philosophical reading-room. The space which remains for the psychological work is so absolutely out of proportion to the amount of work going on that the problem how to bring all the men into those few rooms has become the most difficult of all our laboratory problems. During the current year, besides the training-courses, twenty-three men are engaged there in original research, each one with a special investigation and each one anxious to devote as much time as possible to his research; only the most complicated adjustment makes it possible at all, and yet the mutual disturbance, the necessity of passing through rooms in which other men are working, and of stopping the work when other men need the place interfere every day with the success of the instruction. A mechanical workshop is an urgent need of our laboratory, and yet we cannot afford the room; and while the only desirable arrangement would be to have the psychological lectures in the same building where the apparatus is stored,—as the instruments are necessary for the experimental demonstrations,—there is no room for the lectures under the roof of Dane Hall, which houses the Bursar's Office and Coöperative Stores. The result is that the instruments must be carried through the yard in rain or shine, an effective way to damage our valuable equipment. But the evils connected with the present locality of the psychological laboratory are not only such as result from its narrowness. Its position on Harvard Square, with the continuous noise and the vibration of the ground, is perfectly prohibitory for large groups of psychological studies and disturbing for every kind of work for which concentration of attention is a fundamental condition. Finally a psychological laboratory, perhaps still more than a physical one, needs in its whole construction a perfect adaptation to its special purpose; the walls, the shape, and the connection of the rooms, everything must be built, as has been done in other universities, for the special end. We have merely the rooms of the old Law School with thin partitions dividing them. In short everything is in a state which was tolerable during the last few years only because it was felt as provisional, but the time when the psychological laboratory must have really adequate quarters cannot be postponed much longer.

The needs of the psychological work can thus be easily demonstrated to every beholder; but while perhaps less offensive on the surface, the outer conditions of the other branches of the Philosophical Department are not therefore less unsatisfactory. The advanced student of logic or ethics does not need a laboratory, but he needs seminary-rooms with a working library where his work may have a local centre, where he can meet his instructors and his fellow students engaged in related researches, where he may leave his books and papers. To-day all this theoretical work has no home at all; the seminaries seek refuge in an empty room of the laboratory at a late evening hour, in a chance lecture-room, or in private homes; there is nowhere continuity, no place to collect or to deposit, no opportunity to meet beyond official hours, no feeling of coherence suggested by surroundings. The most advanced research work of the country is thus done under external conditions which suggest the spirit of a schoolroom, conditions which deprive students and instructors equally of the chance to make our seminaries the fitting forms for their rich content. But if all this is most deeply felt by the advanced students, it is not less true and not less deplorable for the undergraduate courses. There is nowhere fixity of association between the work and the room. The philosophy courses are scattered over the whole yard, wandering each year from one quarter to the other, creeping in wherever a vacant room can be found, not even the instructors knowing where their nearest colleagues are meeting students. The dignity and the unity of the work are equally threatened by such a state of affairs. There remains not even a possibility for the instructor to meet his students before or after the lecture; his room is filled up to the time when he begins and a new class rushes in before he has answered questions. A business-like restlessness intrudes into the instruction, and yet philosophy above all needs a certain repose and dignity.

Thus what we need is clear. We need a worthy monumental building at a quiet central spot of the Harvard yard, a building which shall contain large and small lecture-rooms, seminary-rooms, a reading-room, and one whose upper story shall be built for a psychological laboratory, so that under one roof all the philosophical work, metaphysical and ethical, psychological and logical, may be combined. Here the elementary and the advanced work, the lecture courses and the researches, the seminaries and the experiments, the private studies in the reading-room and the conferences and meetings of the assistants would go on side by side. Here would be a real school of philosophy where all Harvard men interested in philosophy might find each other and where the students might meet the instructors.

Such a home would give us first, of course, the room and the external opportunities for work on every plane; it would give us also the dignity and the repose, the unity and the comradeship of a philosophical academy. It would give us the inspiration resulting from the mutual assistance of the different parts of philosophy, which in spite of their apparent separation are still to-day parts of one philosophy only. All this would benefit the students of philosophy themselves, but not less good would come to the University as a whole. The specialization of our age has brought it about that in the organization of a university, even philosophy, or rather each of the philosophical branches, has become an isolated study coördinated with others. The average student looks to psychology as to physics or botany; he thinks of ethics as he thinks of economics or history; he hears about logic as coördinated with mathematics, and so on. The University has somewhat lost sight of the unity of all philosophical subjects and has above all forgotten that this united philosophy is more than one science among other sciences, that it is indeed the central science which alone has the power to give inner unity to the whole university work. Every year our universities reward our most advanced young scholars of philology and history, of literature and economics, of physics and chemistry, of mathematics and biology with the degree of Ph.D., that is of Doctor Philosophiae, thus symbolically expressing that all the special sciences are ultimately only branches of philosophy; but the truth of this symbol has faded away from the consciousness of the academic community. All knowledge appears there as a multitude of scattered sciences and the fact that they all have once been parts of philosophy, till one after the other has been dismissed from the mother arms, has been forgotten. A school of philosophy as a visible unity in the midst of the yard will renew this truth and thus give once more to the overwhelming manifoldness of intellectual efforts of our University a real unity and interconnection; the external connection of administration will be reënforced by the inner unity of logical interdependence.

The time is ripe for a school of philosophy to play this rôle and to fulfil again its old historical mission, to be the unifying principle of human knowledge and life. The second half of the nineteenth century was essentially controlled by realistic energies, by the spirit of analysis, by the triumph of natural science and technique. But a long time before the century came to an end a reaction started throughout the whole intellectual globe; the synthetic energies again came to the foreground, the idealistic interests were emphasized in the most different quarters; the historical and social sciences make to-day the same rapid progress which fifty years ago characterized the natural sciences, and everywhere in the midst of the empirical sciences there is awakening again the interest in philosophy. In the days of anti-philosophical naturalism scientists believed that philosophy had come to an end and that an unphilosophical positivism might be substituted for real philosophy; to-day the mathematicians and physicists, the chemists and biologists, the historians and economists eagerly turn again and again to philosophy, and on the borderland between philosophy and the empirical sciences they seek their most important problems and discussions. The world begins to feel once more that all knowledge is empty if it has no inner unity, and that the inner unity can be brought about only by that science which enquires into the fundamental conceptions and methods of thought with which the special sciences work, into the presuppositions and ultimate axioms with which they begin, into the laws of mental life which lie at the basis of every experience, into the ways of teaching the truth, and above all into the value of human knowledge, its absolute meaning and its relation to all the other human values—those of morality, beauty, and religion. The most advanced thinkers of our time are working to-day in all fields of knowledge to restore such a unity of human life through philosophy. To foster this spirit of the twentieth century in the life of our University there is no more direct way possible than to give a dignified home to the philosophical work. Such a building ought to be a Harvard Union for scholarly life.

The beautiful building which we see in our minds should not be devoted to a single system of philosophy. In its hall we hope to see as greeting for every student the busts of Plato the Idealist and Aristotle the Realist, of Descartes and Spinoza, of Bacon and Hobbes, of Locke and Hume and Berkeley, of Kant and Fichte and Hegel, of Comte and Spencer, of Helmholtz and Darwin. The School of Philosophy will be wide open to all serious thought, as indeed the members of the Department to-day represent the most various opinions and convictions. This ought never to be changed; it is the life-condition of true philosophy. Yet there is one keynote in all our work: a serious, critical, lofty idealism which forms the background of the whole Department and colors our teaching from the elementary introductions to the researches of our candidates for the doctor's degree. All the public utterances which have come from the Department in recent years are filled with this idealism, in spite of the greatest possible variety of special subjects and special modes of treatment. Here belong The Will to Believe and the Talks to Teachers, by William James, the Noble Lectures and the Glory of the Imperfect, by George Herbert Palmer, Poetry and Religion, by George Santayana, The Principles of Psychology, and Psychology and Life, by Hugo Münsterberg, Jesus Christ and the Social Question, by Francis Peabody, Educational Aims and Educational Values, by Paul Hanus, Shaftesbury, by Benjamin Rand, the Conception of God, and The World and the Individual, by Josiah Royce.

We have sought a name which might give symbolic expression to this underlying sentiment of idealism and might thus properly be connected with the whole building. It cannot be that of a technical philosopher. Such a name would indicate a prejudice for a special system of philosophy, while we want above all freedom of thought. It ought to be an American, to remind the young generation that they do not live up to the hopes of the School of Philosophy if they simply learn thoughts imported from other parts of the world, but that they themselves as young Americans ought to help the growth of philosophical thought. It ought to be a Harvard man—a man whose memory deserves that his name be daily on the lips of our students, and whose character and whose writing will remain a fountain of inspiration. Only one man fulfils all these demands perfectly: Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is our wish and hope that the new, dignified, beautiful home of philosophy may soon rise as the moral and intellectual centre of Harvard University and that over its doors we shall see the name: Emerson Hall—School of Philosophy.

III. EMERSON AS PHILOSOPHER

[The following address was delivered at Harvard University, May, 1903, as part of the Emerson Celebration:]

At the hundredth anniversary of Emerson's birthday, Harvard University is to take a noble share in the celebration. For years it has been one of the deepest desires of the Harvard community to erect in the college yard a building devoted to philosophy only. To-day this building is secured. To be sure, the good-will of the community must still do much before the funds allow the erection of a building spacious enough to fulfil our hopes; but whether the hall shall be small or large, we know to-day that it will soon stand under the Harvard elms and that over its door will be inscribed the name: Ralph Waldo Emerson. No worthier memorial could have been selected. Orations may be helpful, but the living word flows away; a statue may be lasting, but it does not awaken new thought. We shall have orations and we shall have a statue, but we shall have now, above all, a memorial which will last longer than a monument and speak louder than an oration: Emerson Hall will be a fountain of inspiration forever. The philosophical work of Harvard has been too long scattered in scores of places; there was no unity, philosophy had no real home. But Emerson Hall will be not only the workshop of the professional students of philosophy, will be not only the background for all that manifold activity in ethics and psychology, in logic and metaphysics, in æsthetics and sociology, it will become a new centre for the whole University, embodying in outer form the mission of philosophy to connect the scattered specialistic knowledge of the sciences. Harvard could not have offered a more glorious gift to Emerson's memorial.

But the spirit of such a memorial hour demands, more than all, sincerity. Can we sincerely say that the choice was wise, when we look at it from the point of view of the philosophical interests? It was beautiful to devote the building to Emerson. Was it wise, yes, was it morally right to devote Emerson's name to the Philosophy Building? Again and again has such a doubt found expression. Your building, we have heard from some of the best, belongs to scientific philosophy; the men who are to teach under its roof are known in the world as serious scholars, who have no sympathy with the vague pseudo-philosophy of popular sentimentalists; between the walls of your hall you will have the apparatus of experimental psychology, and you will be expected to do there the most critical and most consistent work in methodology and epistemology. Is it not irony to put over the door, through which daily hundreds of students are to enter, the name of a man who may be a poet and a prophet, a leader in literature and a leader in life, but who certainly was a mystic and not a thinker, an enthusiast but not a philosopher? Not only those who belittle him to-day and who short-sightedly deny even his immense religious influence, but even many of Emerson's warmest admirers hold such an opinion. They love him, they are inspired by the superb beauty of his intuitions, but they cannot respect the content of his ideas, if they do not wish to deny all their modern knowledge and scientific insight. Yes, for the most part they deny that his ideas form at all a connected whole; they are aphorisms, beautiful sparks. Did he not himself say: "With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall." And yet how can there be philosophy without consistency; how can we interpret reality if we contradict ourselves? If Emerson's views of the world did really not aim at consistency and did really ignore our modern knowledge, then it would be better to go on with our philosophical work in Harvard without shelter and roof than to have a hall whose name symbolizes both the greatest foe of philosophy, the spirit of inconsistency, and the greatest danger for philosophy, the mystic vagueness which ignores real science.

But Emerson stands smiling behind this group of admirers and says, "To be great is to be misunderstood." Yes, he did say, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines;" but he soon adds, "Of one will the actions will be harmonious however unlike they seem." Emerson despises the consistency of the surface because he holds to the consistency of the depths, and every sentence he speaks is an action of the one will, and however unlike they seem they are harmonious, and, we can add, they are philosophical; and, what may seem to these anxious friends more daring, they are not only in harmony with each other, they are in deepest harmony with the spirit of modern philosophy, with a creed which ought to be taught by the most critical scholars of Harvard's Philosophy Hall.

What is the essence of Emerson's doctrine in the realm of philosophy? It seems like sacrilege to formulate anything he said in the dry terms of technical philosophy. We must tear from it all the richness and splendor of his style, we must throw off the glory of his metaphor, and we must leave out his practical wisdom and his religious emotion. It seems as if we must lose all we love. It is as if we were to take a painting of Raphael and abstract not only from the richly colored gowns of the persons in it, but from their flesh and blood, till only the skeletons of the figures remained. All beauty would be gone, and yet we know that Raphael himself drew at first the skeletons of his figures, knowing too well that no pose and no gesture is convincing, and no drapery beautiful if the bones and joints fit not correctly together. And such a skeleton of theoretical ideas appears not only without charm, it appears necessarily also uninteresting, without originality, commonplace. All the philosophies, from Plato to Hegel, brought down to their technical formulas, sound merely like new combinations of trivial elements, and yet they have made the world, have made revolutions and wars, have led to freedom and peace, have been mightier than traditions and customs; and it is true for every one of them that, as Emerson said, "A philosopher must be more than a philosopher."

There are, it seems, three principles of a philosophical character without which Emerson's life-work cannot be conceived. To bring them to the shortest expression we might say, Nature speaks to us; Freedom speaks in us; the Oversoul speaks through us. There is no word in Emerson's twelve volumes which is inconsistent with this threefold conviction, and everything else in his system either follows immediately from this belief or is a non-essential supplement. But that threefold faith is a courageous creed indeed. The first, we said, refers to Nature; he knew Nature in its intimacy, he knew Nature in its glory; "Give me health and a day and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous." And this Nature, that is the assertion, is not what natural sciences teach it to be. The Nature of the physicist, the dead world of atoms controlled by the laws of a dead causality, is not really the Nature we live in; the reality of Nature cannot be expressed by the record of its phenomena, but merely by the understanding of its meaning. Natural science leads us away from Nature as it really is. We must try to understand the thoughts of Nature. "Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man; only let his thoughts be of equal greatness;" and again Emerson says, "All the facts of natural history taken by themselves have no value, but are barren like a single sex; but marry it to human history and it is full of life;" and finally, "The philosopher postpones the apparent order of things to the empire of Thought."

And in the midst of Nature, of the living Nature, we breathe in freedom; man is free. Take that away and Emerson is not. Man is free. He does not mean the freedom of the Declaration of Independence, a document so anti-Emersonian in its conception of man; and he does not mean the liberty after which, as he says, the slaves are crowing while most men are slaves. No, we are free as responsible agents of our morality. We are free with that freedom which annuls fate; and if there is fate, then freedom is its most necessary part. "Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in the soul." "So far as man thinks he is free." "Before the revelations of the soul, time, space, and nature shrink away." "Events are grown on the same stem with the personality; they are sub-personalities." "We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand." This freedom alone gives meaning to our life with its duties, and puts the accent of the world's history on the individual, on the personality: "All history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons," and "An institution is the lengthened shadow of a man."

Nature speaks to us, Freedom speaks in us, but through us speaks a Soul that is more than individual, an over-individual soul, an "Oversoul, within which every man is contained and made one with all others." Now even "Nature is a great shadow, pointing always to the sun behind her." Every one of us belongs to an absolute consciousness which in us and through us wills its will; "Men descend to meet" and "Jove nods to Jove from behind each of us." Yes, "Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein as in a firmament justice, truth, love, freedom arise and shine." The ideals, the duties, the obligations, are not man's will but the will of an Absolute.

Does not all this sound like a wilful denial of all that has been fixed by the sciences of our time? Does not every Sophomore who has had his courses in Physics, Psychology, and Sociology know better? He knows, we all know, that the processes of Nature stand under physical laws, that the will of man is the necessary outcome of psychological laws, that the ideals of man are the products of human civilization and sociological laws. And if every atom in the universe moves according to the laws which physics and chemistry, astronomy and geology, have discovered, is it not anti-scientific sentimentality to seek a meaning and thoughts in the mechanical motions of the dead world of substance? So the poet may speak, but we ought not to say that his fanciful dreams have value for scholarly philosophers. The philosophy of the scientist ought to be the acknowledgment that matter and energy, and space and time are eternal, and that the smallest grain of sand and the largest solar system move meaningless by blind causality.

And emptier still is the naïve belief that man is free. Do we not profit from decades of psychological labor, whereby the finest structure of the brain has been discovered, wherein the psychological laws have been studied with the exactitude of a natural science, wherein we have studied the mental life of animals and children, and have observed the illusions of freedom in the hypnotized man and in the insane? Yes, we know to-day that every mental act, that every psychological process is the absolutely necessary outcome of the given circumstances; that the functions of the cells in the cortex of the brain determine every decision and volition, and that man's deed is as necessary as the falling of the stone when its support is taken away. Yes, modern psychology does not even allow the will as an experience of its own kind; it has shown with all the means of its subtle analysis that all which we feel as our will is only a special combination of sensations which accompany certain movement-impulses in our body. Can we still take it seriously, when the philosopher steps in and pushes sovereignly aside all the exact knowledge of mankind, and declares simply "Man's will is free!"

Finally, the claim for the over-personal, absolute consciousness in man. It is a triumph of modern science to understand how the duties and ideals have grown up in the history of civilization. What one nation calls moral is perhaps indifferent or immoral for another people or for another time; what the one calls beautiful is ugly for the other; what one period admires as truth is absurdity for another; there is no absolute truth, no absolute beauty, no absolute religion, no absolute morality; and sociology shows how it was necessary that just these ideals and just these obligations should have grown up under a given climate and soil, a given temperament of the race, a given set of economical conditions, a given accumulation of technical achievements. Man has made his Absolute, not the Absolute made man, and whatever hopes and fears make men believe, the scholarly mind cannot doubt that these beliefs and idealizations are merely the products of the feelings and emotions of individuals bound together by equal conditions of life. Leave it to the raptures of the mystic to ignore all scientific truth, to get over-soul connection beyond all experience. In short, to accept Emerson's philosophy, the scientist would say, means to be a poet where Nature is concerned, means to be ignorant where man is concerned, and means to be a mystic where moral and religious, aesthetic and logical ideals are concerned. Can such be the herald of modern philosophy?

But those who are so proud and so quick are not aware that the times have changed and that their speech is the wisdom of yesterday. In the history of human knowledge the periods alternate. Great waves follow each other, and while one tendency of scientific thought is ebbing, another is rising; and there is no greater alternation than that between positivism and idealism. The positivistic period of natural science has ebbed for ten or fifteen years; an idealistic one is rising. Emerson once said here in Harvard that the Church has periods when it has wooden chalices and golden priests, and others when it has golden chalices and wooden priests. That is true for the churches of human knowledge too, and for knowledge of all denominations. Forty, fifty years ago, in the great period when Helmholtz discovered the conservation of energy and Darwin the origin of species, one naturalistic triumph followed the other, golden high priests of natural science were working with wooden chalices in narrow, awkward laboratories; to-day natural science has golden chalices provided in luxurious institutions, but there are too many wooden priests. The fullest energies of our time are pressing on to an idealistic revival, are bringing about a new idealistic view of the world, and turning in sympathy to that last foregoing period of idealism of which Ralph Waldo Emerson was perhaps the last original exponent. But also with his period idealism was not new. When he came to speak on the Transcendentalist, he began, "The first thing we have to say respecting the new views here in New England is that they are not new." Yes, indeed; since the beginnings of Greek philosophy, more than two thousand years ago, the two great tendencies have constantly followed each other. Each one must have its time of development, must reach its climax, must go over into undue exaggeration, and thus destroy itself to make room for the other, which then begins in its turn to grow, to win, to overdo, and to be defeated.

Glorious had been the triumph of Positivism in the middle of the eighteenth century when the French encyclopædists were at work, those men who wrote the decrees for the French Revolution. But before the last consequences of the Positivism of the eighteenth century were drawn, the idealistic counter-movement had started. Immanuel Kant gave the signal, he fired the shot heard round the world; and Fichte followed, whose ethical Idealism changed the map of Europe, and his spirit went over the Channel to Carlyle, and finally over the ocean to these shores of New England and spoke with the lips of Emerson. It is unimportant whether Emerson studied the great transcendental systems in the original; he knew Kant and Schelling probably at first through Coleridge, and Fichte through Carlyle. But in the mean time Idealism too had exaggerated its claims, it had gone forward to Hegel, and while Hegelian thought, about 1830, held in an iron grasp the deepest knowledge of his time, his neglect of positive experience demanded reaction, a counter-movement became necessary, and in the midst of the nineteenth century the great idealistic movement with all its philosophical and historical energies went down, and a new Positivism, full of enthusiasm for natural science and technique and full of contempt for philosophy, gained the day. With logical consistency, the spirit of empiricism went from realm to realm. It began with the inorganic world, passed into physics, then forward to chemistry, became more ambitious and conquered the world of organisms, and when biology had said its positivistic say, turned from the outer nature of being to the inner nature. The mind of man was scrutinized with positivistic methods; we came to experimental psychology, and finally, as the highest possible aim of naturalism, to the positivistic treatment of society as a whole, to sociology. But naturalism again has overdone its mission, the world has begun to feel that all the technique and all the naturalistic knowledge makes life not more worth living, that comfort and bigness do not really mean progress, that naturalism cannot give us an ultimate view of the world. And above all, the reaction has come from the midst of the sciences themselves. Twenty years ago scientific work received its fullest applause for the neglect of philosophical demands. Ten years ago the feeling came up that there are after all problems which need philosophy, and to-day philosophers, with good or bad philosophy, are at work everywhere. The physicists, the chemists and the biologists, the astronomers and the mathematicians, the psychologists and the sociologists, the historians and the economists, the linguists and the jurists, all are to-day busily engaged in philosophical enquiries, in enquiries into the conditions of their knowledge, into the presuppositions and methods of their sciences, into their ultimate principles and conceptions; in short, without a word of sudden command, the front has changed its direction. We are moving again towards philosophy, towards Idealism, towards Emerson.

Does all this mean that we are to forget the achievements of natural science, and ignore the results of empirical labor, of labor which has given us an invincible mastery of stubborn nature and an undreamed-of power to calculate all processes of the physical and of the psychical world? No sane man can entertain such a notion. Yes, such ideas would contradict the laws which have controlled the alternation of Idealism and Positivism through the ages of the past. Whenever Positivism returned, it always showed a new face, and the teaching of the intervening period of Idealism was never lost. The naturalism of the middle of the nineteenth century was not at all identical with the naturalism of the middle of the eighteenth; and so Idealism too, as often as it returned to mankind after periods of neglect and contempt, had every time gained in meaning, had every time found increased responsibilities, had every time to do justice to the new problems which the preceding period of Positivism had raised. If Idealism to-day wants to gain new strength, nothing must be lost of all that the last fifty years have brought us, no step must be taken backward, the careful scientific work of the specialists must be encouraged and strengthened, and yet the totality of this work must be brought under new aspects which allow a higher synthesis; yes, a higher synthesis is the problem of the philosopher of to-day. He does not want to be ignorant of natural science and simply to substitute idealistic demands in the place of solid, substantial facts; and he should feel ashamed of the foul compromise with which half-thinkers are easily satisfied, a compromise which allows science its own way till it comes over the boundaries of human emotions, a compromise which accepts rigid causality but pierces little holes in the causal world, making little exceptions here and there that human freedom may be saved in the midst of a world-machinery; a compromise which accepts the social origin of ideals, but claims a mystic knowledge that just our own private pattern will remain in fashion for eternity. No philosophy can live by compromises. If natural science is to be accepted and Idealism is to hold its own, they must be combined, they must form a synthesis in which the one no longer contradicts the other. Just such synthetic harmonization, and not at all a stubborn ignorance of the other side or a compromise with cheap concessions, was the aim of the period from Kant to Emerson. It is merely the naturalistic period which ignores its idealistic counterpart, which delights in its one-sidedness, which is afraid of harmony because it is suspicious of demands for concessions. It is naturalism only which thinks that mankind can walk on one leg.

If we ask where such harmonization can be found, where the great Idealists of the beginning of the last century have sought it, and where our modern philosophy is seeking it again, well aware that by the progress of science in the mean time the difficulties have been multiplied, the logical responsibilities have become gigantic, we cannot do more here than to point out the direction; we cannot go the way. And it is clear, of course, too, that such an answer has its individual shape, and that no one can promise to give a bird's-eye view of the marching movement while he is himself marching among his comrades. But the individual differences are non-essential. The one great tendency, the Emersonian spirit, if it is rightly understood, is common to them all. What has modern philosophy all over the world to say about that threefold claim concerning Nature, Freedom, and Oversoul? What has it to say when natural science has fully said its say and had its fair hearing, and has been approved as sound and welcome?

A philosopher might answer, perhaps, as follows: You Positivists have done wonderfully with your microscopes and your telescopes, with your chronoscopes and spectroscopes; you have measured and weighed and analyzed and described, and finally explained the whole world which you perceive, and there is nothing in space and time and causality which can escape your search. But did not all that work of yours involve certain presuppositions which you had accepted and which it was not your business to look on critically, but which, nevertheless, may be open to enquiry? Your first claims granted, all may follow; but how is it with the first claims? You examine all that is in space and time, but what are space and time? You examine the material substances and the contents of consciousness, but what is consciousness, and what is matter? You seek the special applications of causality, but what is causality? Well, you reply, you give the facts just as you find them; but do you do that really? And what do you mean by saying that you find the facts? Let us look, at least for a moment, at the very simplest facts with which your work begins. You say there are physical objects made up of atoms, and you describe them as a physicist; and there are mental ideas in consciousness made up of sensations, and you describe them as a psychologist; and both, you say, you are finding. But what does it mean, that you find the physical object outside there and the mental idea of the object inside in you; is that really a statement of your immediate experience? The physicist speaks of this table here before me, outside of me; and the psychologist speaks of my idea of this table, enclosed in my consciousness. Both may do well to speak so; but will you make me believe that I find that doubleness in my experience? If I see this table and want to use it, I am not aware of one table of wooden stuff and another in me of mental stuff. I am not aware of a two-ness at all, and if the physicist says that this wooden table is made up of molecules and has in itself no color and no continuity, and that the mental idea in me furnishes all those qualities of color and smoothness, but has no solidity, then they speak of two interesting worlds about which I am anxious to know, but certainly neither of them is the world I live in. If I lean on this table I am not aware of a table in my mind at all. I know the one table only, and this one table has its color and its smoothness.

I know what you will answer. You will say, in your immediate experience there are indeed not two worlds of objects, a physical and a psychical; the real thing to which our interests in life refer is not differentiated into a molecular object outside of us and a sensational object in us, but it is clear that every real thing allows a kind of double aspect; we can consider this table in so far as it is common to all of us, in so far as it is a possible object for every one of us, and in so far as it becomes an object for the individual, and we can then call the objects, in so far as they are common property, physical; and in so far as we take the aspect of individual relations, psychical; and as it must be of the highest importance for our practical purposes to discriminate between those two aspects, we have clearly the right to consider the world from the point of view of both the physicist and the psychologist. It is, of course, an abstraction if we leave out in the one case the one side, in the other case the other side of our objective experience; but we gain by that the possibility of constructing two closed causal systems of which each one must have its special conditions of existence, inasmuch as the one is conceived as related to individuals and the other as independent of individuals.

Very true, we should answer. Something like that saves you completely, justifies fully your claim to separate the physical and the psychical worlds of objects, the world of matter and the world of ideas; but can you deny that you have lost your case, are you not now yourself in the midst of philosophical, methodological discussions, which your physics and psychology themselves cannot settle, yet which must be settled before they can enter into their rights; and above all, do you not yourself see now that your whole physics, for instance, is not at all an account of reality, but merely a certain logical transformation of reality; that you do not find the world of physics at all, just as little as you find the psychical ideas, but that you can merely work over and reshape the reality which you find till you construct out of it your world of matter and your world of consciousness? What you believed you would find you have never found, while your construction of physical things may have been most necessary for your purposes; but do not deny that you have left reality far behind you.

And so it is with all your doings. You tell us proudly, for instance, that you show us the deepest nature of the world by showing us the elements which the object contains, and that you thus bring us at least nearer to the essence of things; and yet if we begin to look into your real achievements, we are disappointed again to find that you are far away from even attempting anything of the kind. You tell us that water is hydrogen and oxygen, and if we say "Prove it," you show us simply that you can transform the water into hydrogen and oxygen, and that you can transform these two elements again into water. Is that really what you promise? We want to know what the thing is, and you show us simply how the one thing can be transformed into another thing; and whenever we turn to your wisdom, it is always the same story. You show us always, and most nicely, how the one goes over into the other, but you never show us what the one or the other really is in itself. For your practical purposes the first may be the most important aspect, but do not make us believe, therefore, that it is the only possible aspect. In short, whether science describes or explains, it never gives us what we find in reality, but makes out of reality a new ideal construction in the service of certain purposes, and never gives us the things as they are, but merely the effects and changes which they produce. Are we still, then, to be deeply impressed with the claim of the naturalist that he alone has the monopoly of knowing reality, while we see now that every step of his leads us away from reality? And have we still to be afraid to raise the voice as philosophers with the claim that reality itself must find its expression, that there must be a science which shall give account of reality as we really find it, of nature before it is made up and repolished for the purposes of the physicist? Only if we have such other account of nature, then only do we speak of that nature in which we live and in which we act, and compared with such an account of the fuller reality, the constructed schematism of the physicist must appear, indeed, as Emerson said, "barren like a single sex." Not the slightest result of natural science is depreciated, not the slightest discovery ignored, if we insist that all these so-called facts have a meaning only under certain artificial conditions which set them apart from the reality of our life; and in this reality lies the interest of the philosopher. We have thus no reason to reproach the scientist so long as the scientist does not fancy that his science gives an account of nature as it really is. Both kinds of work are necessary, and the scientist may well speak, as the squirrel in Emerson's poem: