“In me the caresser of life, wherever moving.”
For this psychologist and teacher, who was also for some time president of the New England Watch and Ward Society, a voluntary censorship which asserts itself chiefly over books and plays and in opposition to the social evil, always had “a love for glimpsing at first hand the raw side of life. I have never missed an opportunity to attend a prize fight if I could do so unknown and away from home. Thrice I have taken dancing lessons from experts sworn to secrecy, and tried to learn the steps of ancient and some of the tabooed modern dances—just enough to know the feel of them—up to some six years ago, although I have always been known as a non-dancer.” In Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, New York and San Francisco he found guides to take him through the underworld by night. In an institution for the blind, he blindfolded himself for an entire day; he learned the deaf mute alphabet; he had seen three executions, visited morgues, revival meetings, anarchist meetings. Paupers, criminals, wayward children, circus freaks were among his hobbies. “I believe that such zests and their indulgence are a necessary part of the preparation of a psychologist or moralist who seeks to understand human nature as it is.” And as, probably, it will continue to be for a while to come.
BOOKS BY G. STANLEY HALL
Note: An extended list of articles, some of them popularly-written, will be found in the bibliography appended to Life and Confessions of a Psychologist.
SOURCES ON G. STANLEY HALL
His autobiographical Life and Confessions of a Psychologist is of the first importance.
How You Can DO More and BE More, by Bruce Barton. An interview with G. Stanley Hall. In the American Magazine for November, 1923.
“Stanley Hall: A Memory,” by A. E. Hamilton in the American Mercury for July, 1924.
Article by Dr. Joseph Jastrow on Dr. Hall in the Literary Review of The Evening Post, New York, 28 June 1924.