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.
iii
Luck was with him. In 1881 he was invited to lecture on psychology at the Johns Hopkins University, toward which all ambitious young professors were looking wistfully. He was then asked to teach a half year after which he was appointed full professor for five years at a salary then very generous. The seven fat years—for he remained until 1888—had begun. The great Gilman was president of the university, Gildersleeve taught Greek and Rowland taught physics; Simon Newcomb, astronomy; Spencer, Huxley, Kelvin, Matthew Arnold, James Bryce, Freeman the historian, James Russell Lowell, Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and William James were visitors and, for the most part, lecturers. Among Dr. Hall’s pupils were John Dewey, J. McKeen Cattell, Joseph Jastrow, James H. Hyslop and one young man who took a long Sunday afternoon walk with the professor “in which he debated with me the question of majoring in psychology, although I felt that his mind was already made up not to do so, for his previous studies and his Southern instincts and family traditions already inclined him too strongly toward the historical and political field.” This was Woodrow Wilson. “Had he chosen psychology,” comments Dr. Hall, “he might never have been President; but, on the other hand, if he had, he might have learned to do better teamwork and have been more ready to compromise and concede.”
When he was just forty-two Dr. Hall’s lean years began—lean in the sense that he gave up highly congenial work and surroundings and a maximum salary which was offered him to embark on a new and untried enterprise, in which he was to endure a degree of distress and anxiety and an amount of difficulty and odium hard to describe. The history of his relations with Clark University, first publicly told in Chapter VII of his Life and Confessions of a Psychologist, is likely without a parallel. Certainly it throws more light on human nature than any psychologist could hope to do by a lifetime of experiment and reasoning. Briefly, this was what happened:
Jonas Gilman Clark (1815-1900), a successful wagonmaker, had made a fortune in California in 1849 by selling mining implements. He was one of the active Vigilantes and a friend of Leland Stanford. After attaining importance in San Francisco he moved to New York and increased his wealth by dealing in real estate; but with the passage of years he returned to his native county in Massachusetts. The example of Leland Stanford, his own childlessness, and a desire to do something for his native county led him to resolve to found Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Dr. Hall was asked to be president and accepted the post.
Mr. Clark immediately gave a building and grounds and his note for $600,000 for the university, with a note of $100,000 for a library. This, a total value of something like $1,000,000, was the largest single gift that had ever been made to education in New England. The outlook was of unprecedented brilliance, for Mr. Clark’s expressed intention was to leave all his wealth to the institution, and his fortune was variously estimated at from $8,000,000 to $18,000,000 or even $20,000,000. The founder readily agreed to Dr. Hall’s suggestion that he, Dr. Hall, spend a year abroad studying the universities of the world.
Surely no one has ever had an opportunity equalling the year which followed. Dr. Hall omitted to visit no university of importance in Europe. The mere recital of the places he saw is impressive enough; when the imagination tries to take in the educational panorama unrolled before his eyes the task becomes impossible. One small cloud darkened the horizon. Mr. Clark had instructed him to bring to this side several of the best German professors. Dr. Hall was put in a painful situation by engaging Von Holst of Freiburg and then having his act disowned. He did not suspect that it was to be only the first of a series of bitter and terrible disappointments.