Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 2

by Unknown

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.