Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 2

by Unknown

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.