ii
Granville Stanley Hall, who died on 24 April 1924, was born 1 February 1846 in Ashfield, Massachusetts. His father was of impetuous temperament, his mother a rather submissive and devoutly pious woman. There were three children, all brought up on a farm. From the first, Stanley Hall was keenly interested in animals. But he was also one of those boys whose imagination is strongly exercised by the figures of frost on a windowpane, the broken march of clouds across the sky, the shapes and images seen in dancing firelight and the visions excited by musical sounds. He was sensitive and both brave and timid; pacifistic by temper, he could persist in a course once taken. He was essentially a lonely child, as such children often are, and this loneliness was to become more pronounced as he grew older, developing a habit of isolation which was to be his salvation in the greatest crisis in his career.
His schooling culminated in Williams College, which gave him his A. B. in 1867. He was a classmate of Hamilton Wright Mabie. Mark Hopkins—he of whom it was said that “a university was Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other”—was president of the college and also “professor of moral and intellectual philosophy.” An important friendship of this time was with Charles Eliot Norton.
A single year in New York followed. Young Hall was a student at the Union Theological Seminary, but he was also twenty-one, in New York for the first time, full of a healthy curiosity and bound to satisfy it. He went to the theatre as well as all manner of churches and was one of a number employed by the City Missionary Society to invite women of the street to attend the midnight mission. Through the friendly act of Henry Ward Beecher money was provided for Hall to go abroad and study, the lender being Henry Sage, the benefactor of Cornell University. It was already apparent that Hall had no vocation to the ministry. He dreamed of becoming a professor. Darwin, Spencer and Tyndall, Renan, Strauss, Emerson and Carlyle had profoundly influenced him. In the summer of 1868 he went to Germany, first to the University of Bonn and then to that of Berlin. Here he dabbled in all manner of subjects, from theology to surgery and mental clinics. On his return to America he wished to teach the history of philosophy but was unable to lest he should, in the opinion of a college president, “unsettle men and teach them to hold no opinions.”
Private tutoring was followed by a spell of teaching at Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio. It was at this time that the first volume of Wundt’s Physiological Psychology was published. In a sense, psychology as we know it began with this work, so definite in its experiments and conclusions. Here was something one could lay hold of! Hall read it, was amply fascinated, and left Antioch, resolved to go to Leipzig and study under Wundt. But at Cambridge he was met by the offer of an instructorship at Harvard and stopped to teach for a year, going on to Leipzig in 1876. He spent a year in Berlin, some time in Paris and England, and came home to resume his friendship with William James and others, to lecture on education under Harvard auspices, and to cast about. He was much in debt and had no prospects. He had married. Having spent three years in Germany between the ages of 22 and 25, and three more from 32 to 35, “the narrow, inflexible orthodoxy, the Puritan eviction of the joy that comes from amusements, from life, the provincialism of our interests, our prejudice against continental ways of living and thinking, the crudeness of our school system, the elementary character of the education imparted in our higher institutions of learning—all these seemed to me depressing, almost exasperating. I fairly loathed and hated so much that I saw about me that I now realize more clearly than ever how possible it would have been for me to have drifted into some, perhaps almost any, camp of radicals and to have come into such open rupture with the scheme of things as they were that I should have been stigmatized as dangerous, at least for any academic career, where the motto was Safety First.” But he must teach or go back to the farm.